This volume explores in particular how Paul positively avails himself of ideas and activities constitutive of his own time and place, such as divination, deification, magic, idols, and a host of other social practices traditionally attributed to pagans and so emphatically denied of Jews and Christians. At the same time, it interrogates how features of Paul's letters traditionally categorized as exclusively Jewish—such as his use of scripture, his claims about faith, his ideas about law, and his focus on foreskin—are themselves evidence of Paul's participation in wider Mediterranean ways of promoting engagement with the numinous. Paul operated "within paganism" even at his supposedly "most Jewish" points. 

Just as the "Paul within Judaism" movement emphasizes Judaism not primarily as the contrast to but rather as the context for and content of Paul's gospel, Paul within Paganism does the same for Paul in relation to wider Greco—Roman culture. Paul and his Judaism emerge here as instances of, not exceptions to, ancient Mediterranean religion.