Paul's Visual Piety

This book is at the interface between Visual Studies and Biblical Studies, and is the only monograph to date on St Paul's visual piety. It argues that the history of biblical scholarship is marked by a tendency to downplay this-worldly visuality in Christian culture, and that the exegesis of Paul is both a partial cause and a symptom of this 'disciplinary blind-spot'. By comparing Paul's presentation of the themes of 'metamorphosis' and 'beholding' in Romans and2 Corinthians with visual practices in neighbouring Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures, it argues that Paul did develop a distinctive and significant Christian visual piety. His Christian visualpractices owed most to his Jewish background, but they were quickly taken up by pagan converts who drew on Greco-Roman visual assumptions in interpreting and communicating them.