HomeThe Many Faces of Paul

The Many Faces of Paul

Pauline Exegesis in Pre-modern Times

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Published on Friday, March 08, 2024

Abstract

The conference on the Many Faces of Paul is the opening workshop of the research project “Exegesis of Paul in the 16th Century”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Other than the project itself which will mainly focus on Reformation theology, our interest for this conference is to focus on other intellectual traditions, be they late antique, medieval, or early modern, that will help us later to contextualize Protestant perspectives. We are therefore deliberately interested in presentations on a broad spectrum of possible figures and sources, and we welcome contributions on the whole corpus that was historically associated with the Apostle, including the Epistle to the Hebrews and apocryphal material such as the Acta Pauli.

Announcement

Argument

In the history of Western exegesis, the Pauline Epistles have always played an important role. It is true that the Protestant reformations claimed to be particularly inspired by the Apostle’s authority, but the Corpus Paulinum shaped Latin theologians ever since the teachings of the Church Fathers and throughout the medieval period, and that in many different ways. For example, almost one third of the ca. 700 biblical allusions in Peter Lombard’s Sentences refer to the Corpus Paulinum, underlining its authoritative status, and in the prologue to his Commentary on Romans Thomas Aquinas famously stated that «just as the Church uses most frequently the Psalms among the writings of the Old Testament, so it most frequently uses in the New Testament the Epistles of Paul, since in both writings almost the whole doctrine of theology is contained.»1 At the dawn of the Reformation era, humanists such as Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus gave their ethical projects an explicitly Pauline shape, but they differed from both the scholastics’ and the protestants’ approaches. Similarly, the theological controversies of the 16th century provoked an impressive number of doctrinal commentaries to the Pauline epistles not only among the proponents of Reformation theologies, but also among the defenders of traditional beliefs. In other domains, historians in the 12th century explored no less than those of the 16th century the Corpus Paulinum in order to recount the events of the 1st century BC, and teachers of rhetoric as well as predicants of both the mendicant orders and of more heterodox movements used the example of Paul as a model to imitate. These various, and often opposing uses and interpretations of Paul make apparent that, in the Western exegetical tradition, the Apostle had many different faces. To put it with Karlfried Froehlich: «There was never just one Paul».

Program

Thursday, March 21

14:15  Conference Opening and Introduction

14:30 Panel 1

(auditoire A.F. Muller)

  • Christian Thomas Leitmeir (Oxford) Cantare in corde: St Paul’s Musical Legacy in the Middle Ages
  • Martin Roch (Geneva) Salvien de Marseille, ou Timothée dans la Gaule du Ve siècle

15:30    Coffee break

16:00 Panel 2

(room: auditoire A.F. Muller | zoom room 1)

  • Lorenzo Pompeo (Trieste) Ruta currus iustitiae. A Theological Reflection on the Interpretation of Pauline Experience in Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber Divinorum Operum
  • Floriane Goy (Geneva) Petrus Riga's Aurora: Reading Paul's Life in a 12th-century Biblical Versification
  • Delphine Naomi Conzelmann (Basel) Intellectual Humility as Pauline Virtue in the Works of William of St. Thierry and Thomas à Kempis

17:30 Break

18:15 Evening Lecture (auditoire A.F. Muller | zom room 1)

  • Ian Christopher Levy (Rhode Island) The Soteriology of the Medieval Paul

Friday, March 22

9:00  Panel 3

(auditoire J.L. Reverdin | zoom room 1)

  • Benjamin Manig (Zurich) In Conversation with the Masters: The Postille of Hugo von Saint-Cher
  • Martin Mayerhofer (St. Pölten) The Image of Paul in the Prologues to the Corpus Paulinum from Late Antiquity to the mid-14th Century.
  • Volker Leppin (New Haven) The Jews in God’s Plan of Salvation. Paul of Burgos’ Annotations to Nicholas of Lyra’s Commentary on Romans

11:00 Guided visit of the Musée International de la Réforme (participants only)

12:30 Lunch (individual)

14:30 Panels 4(auditoire J.L. Reverdin | zoom room 1) and 5 (salle Microscope | zoom room 2)

Panel 4

  • Eliza Litak (Warsaw) The Figure of Paul in Thomas Aquinas’s Commentaries on the Corpus Paulinum
  • Piotr Roszak (Torun) Looking at Paul through an Aristotelian Lens? The Philosophical Face of St. Paul in Thomas Aquinas’s Writings
  • Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr (Jena) The Epistle of James in Late medieval interpretation: A context for Martin Luther’s reading of Paul?

Panel 5

  • Noemi Schürmann (Zurich) On the forma ecclesiae of Nicholas of Cusa: Interpreting Paul at the Council of Basel
  • Ueli Zahnd (Geneva) Discussing Divine Reprobation in the Long 15th Century: the Role of Romans 9-11
  • Matteo Colombo (Geneva) Patristic Readers and Humanistic Preachers: Paul through Origen

16:00 Coffee Break

16.30 Panel 6

(auditoire J.L. Reverdin | zoom room 1)

  • Christopher Ocker (Redlands) – on Zoom Juan de Segovia (d. 1458) and the Apostle Paul
  • Ulrike Treusch (Giessen) A New Image of Paul in Italian Humanism? The Pauline Exegesis of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
  • Daniele Conti (Florence) Biblical philology in late Quattrocento Florence: Marsilio Ficino, the Epistle to the Romans and the Graeca veritas

Saturday, March 23

9:00 Panels 7 (S4-S5 | zoom room 1) and 8 (D02.1549.A | zoom room 2)

Panel 7

  • Marie Barral-Baron (Besançon) Erasme, lecteur de saint Paul
  • Rui Luis Rodrigues (Campinas) Paul, le Dissimulé : Une lecture érasmienne des stratégies rhétoriques de l'apôtre, à la lumière des débats intellectuels de la première moitié du XVIe siècle
  • Jan Klok (Utrecht) Paul in the Letters of Erasmus: a Work in Progress

Panel 8

  • Stefan Krauter (Zurich) Paul as an Epic Hero: Petrus Rossetus’s “Paulus” (1522)
  • Patryk Michal Ryczkowski (Innsbruck) Martyr Succession? The Apostle Paul as Biblical Role Model in Early Modern Hagiography (Rossetus, Paulus, 1522)
  • Federica Rossetti (Innsbruck) The Image of Saint Paul in the Editions of the Apocryphal Correspondence with Seneca (15th-16th Centuries)

10.30  Coffee Break

11:00  Panel 9

(S4-S5 | zoom room 1)

  • Bruce Gordon (New Haven) “What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching.” Paul’s Farewell to Timothy as Pastoral Admonition as Interpreted by Swiss Reformers
  • Austin Steen (Melbourne) Paul’s Intention: Grammatical Points of Departure between Augustine's and Calvin's Readings of Romans
  • Bernd Roling (Berlin) A Thorn in the Flesh: Early Modern Medical and Exegetical Debates on 2 Cor 12,7

12.30  Closing remarks

Zoom Links

Room 1:       https://unige.zoom.us/j/66058586674

Room 2:       https://unige.zoom.us/j/68665463792

 

Places

  • CMU, Université de Genève - Rue Michel-Servet 1
    Geneva, Switzerland (1206)

Event attendance modalities

Hybrid event (on site and online)


Date(s)

  • Thursday, March 21, 2024
  • Friday, March 22, 2024
  • Saturday, March 23, 2024

Keywords

  • reformation, reforme, Paul, exegesis, épitre, corpus paulinum

Contact(s)

  • Matteo Colombo
    courriel : matteo [dot] colombo [at] unige [dot] ch

Information source

  • Céline Vonlanthen
    courriel : secretariat-ihr [at] unige [dot] ch

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« The Many Faces of Paul », Conference, symposium, Calenda, Published on Friday, March 08, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/vzin

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