Introduction

Taubes’s use of Paul within intellectual debates produced new layers in the reception history of Paul. Readings of Paul cannot but lead to new layers, which is what recent theoretical developments of reception history of the Bible have demonstrated. There are no objective historical readings of the Pauline epistles that the philosophers’ readings might by measured with. Reception is, in a sense, all we are left with, as a never-ending deconstruction, negotiation and overlapping between historical and philosophical approaches to texts. The crucial question to be raised in the encounter with Taubes’s readings of Paul is not what is correct and incorrect in Taubes’s interpretations, but rather how we can acquire new understandings of apostle’s texts on the background of the philosophers’ readings of them. Through exegetical as well as genealogical perspectives on Taubes’s readings of Paul, a deeper historicity of the contemporary turn to Paul within philosophy can be attained.