Stanley Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion (Edinburg University Press, 2024), 109-110.
[Paul’s] work was to find Greeks, Romans, and other non-Jews whom he could convince that their religious and moral practices were utterly false and evil. The only true and living god was the God of the ancient Judean writings that recounted the world’s nature and beginnings, and the history and fates of all the world’s peoples. Christ was a being possessed of God’s own pneuma and chosen humans could possess a share of this divine stuff that God had give to Christ. Paul was certainly not a sophist legitimated in the dominant fraction of the field, but belonged to one of the aspiring, competing, illegitimate fractions that were every bit as necessary to the existence of the field as a field of cultural-production-as-contestation.
The Amateur Exegete 