Pauline letters

Heilig, Christoph. “Counter-Narratives in Galatians.” Pages171-90 in Scripture, Texts, and Tracings in Galatians and 1 Thessalonians. Edited by A. Andrew Das and B. J. Oropeza. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023.

In this article, I bring together my interest in early Christian unease with the Roman Empire with a research focus on stories. The notion of  counter-narratives turns out to be very productive in scrutinizing how Paul in Galatians interacts with the dominating Roman ideology of his day.

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Heilig, Christoph. Paulus als Erzähler? Eine narratologische Perspektive auf die Paulusbriefe. BZNW 237. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020.

To many, Paul is known as a great thinker - or perhaps a muddled one. In any case, he is not particularly known as a storyteller. However, recent scholarship has claimed that we can find “narrative substructures” or a unified “worldview narrative” behind the text of his letters and that the arguments of the apostle can only be interpreted against that narrative backdrop. In this analysis, I argue that a proper narratological approach requires us to first scrutinize the explicit narratives in Paul’s letters before we can move on to address the issue of supposed implicit stories. This ultimately vindicates the “narrative approach” to Paul and emphasizes that a lot can be learned from taking the category of narrativity seriously in Pauline studies. The book is available in open access. It won the Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award 2022.

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Gospels and Acts

Howard, Ellen. The Verbal Aspect of Perfect and Pluperfect Verbs in the Narrative Literature of the New Testament. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2022. Publication is currently prepared.

My thesis is the product of a comprehensive analysis of the perfect and pluperfect verbs of the canonical Gospels and Acts. Through a close examination of four primary functions of the perfect and pluperfect in NT narrative literature, I argue that the aspect of these verbs is best described as “combative.”

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