I am pleased to announce that I will be presenting a paper entitled "Psalms of Solomon and Pauline Studies" at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November of this year. The paper will be presented in a joint session sponsored by six different Paul-related program units including the Pauline Epistles section and the Paul and Judaism section. In addition to the presentation, my paper will benefit from a formal response by N. T. Wright, Pamela Eisenbaum, and Ward Blanton.
In this paper I provide a brief overview of how the Psalms of Solomon have been used (or marginalized) in recent scholarship that attempts to situate Paul within his historical and cultural contexts. In this overview I will highlight the treatments of Psalms of Solomon in the two largest monographs on Paul ever written (N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God and Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God). I then explore one avenue in which further research on the Psalms of Solomon might allow for a more nuanced understanding of Paul and his engagement with Roman imperial ideology.
