Transient Apostle: Paul Travel, and the Rhetoric of Empire
by
Timothy Luckritz Marquis
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013

A review by George Martin
2/16/2023

The regret of any scholar who has written a book, is to find one you wish you’d read before your book was published. That is the case with this book. It is not, as if Transient Apostle comes to conclusions at odds with what I discuss in Paul Found in His Letters, but it would have been something like a good conversational partner for me.

You might think from the title that you would discover commentary on the cities and provinces in the Roman world that Paul visited. That is not to be found in Marquis. You also will not even find a single reference to the book of Acts. It is a scholarly account of the meaning and significance of travel and the letters about this topic in the ancient world. Since travel meant danger, and the possibility of death those were frequent topics as the ancients reflected on mythic heroes like Dionysus, Odysseus, and Polyneices. It is against this background where Marquis finds Paul.

Rather than references to the actual travels of Paul the author’s main focus regards Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, and also to the communities in Rome. With regard to Romans I especially liked a question he asked in reference to a quote of Paul regarding “the feet of those who bring good news.” Marquis wonders at once point “...has Paul intentionally slipped on his apostolic feet.” (p.151). What the author emphasizes, however, is the close connection for Paul who creates a kind of international body of linked assemblies in which “the gospel is fully proclaimed only through the act of apostolic travel.” (p. 151) Throughout the book Paul is described not only as “the traveling apostle” but also “the wandering apostle.” I would link the latter term to my chapter on “Paul the Mystic” because Paul only travels with the guidance of Holy Spirit.

One idea discussed in this book that deserves more attention is the dual possibility that at one point Paul considered suicide (what the author terms “self-killing”) and then rejected it, all the while knowing that in Roman eyes it was considered the honorable way to die. His chapter on this topic begins with reflections on Paul’s comment regarding their sufferings in the opening verses of 2 Corinthians, when “we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.” (2 Cor. 1:8) Marquis suggests that it is Paul’s apocalyptic background which leads him away from taking his own life.

One difference between the way Marquis reads 2 Corinthians and my approach in Paul Found in His Letters, is that in my discussion where I ask if Paul was a failed pastor I was led to see this all-important letter as a combination of five different letters. Marquis sees it as a single letter. I don’t think that difference is a real problem, however.

Where we really are in agreement is to be found in Marquis’s assessment that we must always  consider “Paul’s marginality” which wasn’t just in his rhetoric—which is was!—but also in his self-presentation. My history of Paul in the first century finds him placing his life on a daily basis alongside the least in his world.

Some might consider this a slim volume (153 pages of text), but as another reviewer of the book noted “the volume does not lend itself to a quick read.” [Brian C. Small, Review of Biblical Literature, 08/2015). The author does not have Paul wandering all over the world, but he has Paul in dialogue with the communities he founded, and with his letters, his visits are either recently in the past or forthcoming. And they are always framed in the gospel of Christ crucified.
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