George H. van Kooten offers a radical contextualization of Paul's view of man within the Graeco-Roman discourse of his day. On the one hand, important anthropological terminology such as "image of God" and "spirit" derives from the Jewish creation accounts of Genesis 1-2. On the other hand, this terminology appears to be compatible with reflections of Graeco-Roman philosophers on man as the image of God and on man's mind, and is supplemented with Platonic concepts such as "the inner man". For this reason, the author traces the development of Paul's anthropology against the background of both ancient Judaism and ancient philosophy. Paul's anthropology, which calls for inner transformation and is universally applicable, criticizes the superficial values of the sophistic movement in Corinth and the anthropomorphic images of the gods, and offers a strategy to overcome the ethnic tensions which divide the Christian community in Rome.weiterlesen