Tom Holland

Theologians have been rather hard on the apostle Paul.  Many have accused him of taking the Christian faith in a direction of his own, changing basic teachings of Jesus to suit his own views.  Tom Holland presents a conservative, if provocative, thesis that affirms the consistency of Paul’s teaching with that of Jesus.  He does so by causing the reader to look into the mind of the Jewish Paul to understand how he views the Old Testament, his source of scripture.  Holland shows how Paul’s Christology was formed from Old Testament prophesies both in the prophetic writings and in the Jewish traditional rituals.  He shows how his theology was shaped by and formed for Jewish thought.  Those who would seek to discredit Pauline theology will appreciate Holland’s scholarship and the sound arguments on Paul’s behalf.  Those who ascribe to Paul as an apostle of Jesus Christ will appreciate Holland’s apologetic prowess and find Paul’s Jewish hermeneutic illuminating.  This text is a must read for a serious student of Pauline theology, and may be too technical for the casual reader.

Scholarship: 5/5  Readability: 4/5

CONTOURS OF PAULINE THEOLOGY: A RADICAL NEW
SURVEY OF THE INFLUENCES ON PAUL’S BIBLICAL WR1TINGS
Tom Holland
Fearn: Christian Focus, 2004, 382 pages, £14.99, ISBN: 1-87592-460-X

Tom  Holland  of  the  Evangelical Theological College of Wales here offers an interesting thesis about the origin and centre of Paul’s theology. He sets out in section one with an exploration of the heritage of Paul. Holland argues rightly that the Scriptures of Israel are of prime importance, claiming that ‘Paul continually refers to the great themes of the promises made by the prophets when they spoke of a coming New Exodus’. Holland argues that early Judaism had a high expectation of a new exodus. In further chapters he describes his methodological presuppositions (including an interesting discussion of the role the Jewish pseudepigrapha play in NT research) and on Paul’s references to believers as slaves.

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Contours of Pauline Theology
A Radical Survey of the Influences on Paul’s
Biblical Writings
Tom Holland
Genies House, Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2004, 384 pp., £14.99, hb ISBN 1- 85792-469-X

SUMMARY

The thesis of this book is that two important axioms have been missing from the interpretation of Paul’s writing. The first is that the story of the Passover and the exodus are the interpretive keys to Paul’s thought and, in particular, to the interpretation of Jesus’ death. The second lens is that the Pauline writings should be read as being implicitly corporate and covenantal their approach. Holland excludes the literature of Second Temple Judaism and the pseudepigraphal writings from the interpretation of Paul’s writings. The strengths of the book are its robust challenge to many scholarly presuppositions and an impetus to new research on Paul’s debt to the Old Testament.

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Contours of Pauline Theology: A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings.
By Tom Holland. Geanies House, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2004. 382 pp. Cloth. $22.99.

Many NT scholars in the past have tried to say that Jesus’ message was not the same as Paul’s. Others, in the last hundred years, have tried to prove that the Gospels were written by Christian communities who created these stories in order to teach Gentile believers what Jesus might have taught if had He lived among them. Holland reacts, “But if these records do not accurately record Jesus’ teaching, then we cannot possibly ask if Paul is teaching the same thing as Jesus” (p. 11). Both schools of thought have undermined the credibility of the Bible. In this new book, Holland sets out to map a new Pauline paradigm, which looks through the eyes of the Passover and a corporate reading of Scripture (i.e., a unified community rather than disconnected individuals).

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This review appeared in the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology. The text of the review is available as a PDF file (1Mb).

British Messianic Jewish Alliance “Chai” magazine spring 2005: Issue 223
Book Review
Contours of Pauline Theology
A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings
Tom Holland
2004 Mentor: Christian Focus Publications
ISBN 1-85792-469-X

In this book Tom Holland is introducing to mainstream biblical scholarship what the Messianic movement has been saying about Paul for many years. With scholarly insight and uplifting erudition Tom Holland is making Paul kosher again, demonstrating that the apostle was not, as is sometimes claimed, a self-hating Jew who transformed a good rabbi called Yeshua into a powerful divinity in order to give his new religion an edge over the Greek pantheon of gods.

Tom challenges the current tide of scholarly opinion about Paul by stating that the apostle’s theology can be properly understood only in the light of his Jewish background. In order to correctly read Paul’s writings we must view them through the lenses of Passover and the “New Exodus” spoken of by the later prophets.

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Pauline Theology
Bill James

Tom Holland, lecturer at the Evangelical Theological College of Wales, has produced a welcome and important contribution to the controversial area of Pauline theology: Contours of Pauline Theology; A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings (Mentor/Christian Focus, 2004 hc, 382pp).

The author’s thesis is simply that the roots of Paul’s theology are to be found in the Old Testament, and particularly in the prophecy of Isaiah. He rejects earlier scholarship which places too much emphasis on a Hellenistic cultural setting, and the reliance of recent scholarship on the Pseudepigrapha as the background to Paul’s thought. Rather he sees Paul’s theology as an exposition of the Old Testament prophetic hope of a New Exodus, now fulfilled in the coming of Christ. Paul quotes in particular from the prophecy of Isaiah, and Holland suggests that it is this prophecy that actually provides the skeleton of his teaching. He points out that ‘…if the letter to the Romans was laid out as a continuous papyrus, and the citations from Isaiah were raised out of the text and suspended at their point of use, those texts, in that order, would summarise salvation history. Such a pattern could not be anything but intentional.’ (p.31).

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Trinity Theological Journal, Vol.13, 2005

Thomas Holland, Contours of Pauline Theology: A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings (Fearn: Mentor, 2004). 382 pp., £14.99.
Reviewed by Tan Kim Huat

So much has been written on Pauline theology in recent years that one wonders whether a book that announces a concern with its contours has anything fresh to say. Often, what promises to be radical, fresh and creative does not live up to its claims. But the same cannot be said for Holland’s book. This is certainly radical and it boldly pushes forward an idea that has not really been discussed in Pauline scholarship. Holland’s central thesis is that the hermeneutical template with which to organize, and thus, understand, Paul’s theology is the Jewish Passover and the central ideas connected with it.

Holland’s book is divided into four sections. It starts with some necessary ground-clearing work through which he criticizes past attempts to situate Paul’s thought within a Hellenistic framework, and argues instead that the primary background for understanding Paul is the Old Testament He also emphasizes, rightly in my opinion, the importance of corporate perspective of Paul’s theology. The establishment of these key hermeneutical principles completes section one of the book.

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Contours of Pauline Theology: A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings
Tom Holland Christian Focus, 2004, 351 pp. + bibliography & indexes, hardback. £14.99
ISBN 1 85792 469 X

This book demands a significant amount of concentration from the reader, but is both rewarding and refreshing in terms of the biblical thrust of its main thesis. It should be compulsory reading for any who feel in any way seduced by the arguments of either liberal or ‘New Perspective’ theologians on the origins and content of Paul’s theology. It presents compelling evidence that Paul’s theology was thoroughly rooted in the Old Testament.

Dr Holland has a number of goals in this book. Firstly, he challenges head-on the liberal idea that Paul’s theology represented an imposition of Hellenistic thinking upon the Semitic ideas of Jesus and so resulted in a departure from Jesus’ teaching.

Secondly, he wants to cut the ground from under the feet of those, from E. P Sanders on, who place great emphasis upon extra-biblical Jewish writings as an aid to the interpretation of the New Testament.

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This review appeared in the March-May 06 edition of the CWI Herald.

There is a Redeemer

How should we read the New Testament? Until recently it was thought that a thorough grounding in Classics was a prerequisite for anyone who aspired to be a New Testament scholar. Paul, it was assumed, borrowed ideas from the Gentile world in order to explain the gospel to his pagan hearers. An understanding of the world in which the apostle to the Gentiles travelled and worked is a great help to any serious New Testament student, but must we automatically assume that Paul’s teaching can be understood only or largely by reference to first-century Gentile culture?

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