The opening move
Novenson begins by setting Paul beside the anonymous author of 4 Ezra, a Jewish apocalypse of roughly his own period. In 4 Ezra the messiah's work is to die, so that his people may participate in his death, and then to effect the resurrection of the dead and the new creation. Every clause of that description is also true of Paul. The two writers differ in one respect, and it is a difference of tense: 4 Ezra awaits that messiah; Paul holds that he has already come, died and risen, within Paul's own lifetime.
Everything else follows from the tense. If the messiah has come, then the ends of the ages have arrived, the form of this cosmos is passing away, and Christ is ὁ ἔσχατος Ἀδάμ, the last man, the last human being made of dust. Paul's statements about the Jewish law are consequences of that premise rather than a doctrine held alongside it.
The problem named in the chapter title is therefore simple, though Novenson is careful to distinguish simple from easy. The solution has proved intolerable rather than obscure: it asks a modern reader to take seriously the proposition that the world came to an end in the first century of the Roman empire. A reader who cannot hold that proposition steady will reach for some other account of what Paul was saying, and the history of the debate is largely a history of those other accounts.
The methodological claim
The second move governs the rest of the book. Judaism is not something Paul stands outside of and criticises; it is the medium he thinks in. He does not stand in a subject-object relation to it. Later Christian readers did stand in that relation, and read him as though he did too, which is the source of the misreading rather than one instance of it.
From this Novenson takes his own posture, stated without apology: he comes to interpret Paul, not to praise him. There is no Great Man here, and no villain either. He is willing to let Paul be useless for modern projects, on the argument that a Paul who is useless to us is a Paul we can see.
The thesis, in the book's own words, is that because of a peculiar combination of ethnicity and eschatology, the religion of Paul is neither what we normally think of as Judaism nor what we normally think of as Christianity. Novenson names predecessors who argued along these lines and were dismissed on grounds he considers beside the point: Schweitzer, the late Stendahl, Dale Allison and Paula Fredriksen.
The objections
Luther would deny that the church's reading is a contamination. On his account the letters were written to congregations of the Messiah, and those congregations became the church that canonised them; to read Paul with the church is the letters arriving at their address. The sharper form of the objection concerns the word intolerable. Luther found the letters tolerable only after they had first terrified and then consoled him, and he would say that a method which classes every reading with living stakes as a Christian imposition leaves the field to readers with no stakes at all. This is reconstruction rather than quotation; Luther never met the objection, but the 1545 preface and the 1535 Galatians lectures make the shape of it plain.
Hart would grant the historical point and keep the reception at arm's length. His years of stripping later theological vocabulary out of the corpus in translation produced the same finding Novenson states as method: the sediment on these letters is real, it is thick, and it is late. One can honour the church's reading as the church's, a long and sometimes catastrophic reception, without mistaking it for the letters themselves.
Wright is named in the book and is entitled to answer. Novenson's charge, at page twenty-two, is that rubrics like inaugurated eschatology, associated with Vos, Cullmann, Ladd and Wright, elide Paul's perspective on time with our own; this may make for good theology, but it certainly makes for bad history. Wright's reply would concede the warning and refuse the premise. The claim that Paul's very soon and the already-and-not-yet cannot be the same shape is itself an assumption, and it treats inauguration as a modern comfort smuggled backwards rather than as Paul's own grammar of a resurrection that has begun. He would add that a reconstructed first-century context is also a construction, assembled by scholars with their own century in their bones, and that the choice is never between a theological Paul and a neutral one but between frames examined and frames smuggled.
Schweitzer would accept the chapter as a late vindication and would fasten on one sentence in it. Paul's expectation is not, strictly speaking, falsified; neither is it vindicated. What requires accounting for is the very soon, not the question of a set date, which was never the interesting one. Schweitzer's consistent eschatology made that argument in 1930 and was reviewed as an Alsatian fever-dream; the book concedes the substance of it a century later.
Paul's own account
Paul never addresses the question the chapter asks, since the question is about how his letters have been read. What the letters supply is the premise the chapter reconstructs, and they supply it in his own order of importance.
He names his subject as "the gospel of God, promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, concerning his Son", which is a claim about continuity rather than departure: the announcement is new, the promise is not. He describes the present as the interval in which "the whole creation groans together and suffers birth-pangs together", which is a stronger statement than arrival and a weaker one than delay; the contraction is under way and the birth has not occurred. And he states the stake without hedging it: "if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."
That last sentence bears on the chapter's closing question. Paul does not treat the non-arrival of the end as harmless to his position. He names the condition under which his position would be worthless, which is what a writer does when he believes the condition has not been met.
The remaining disagreement
Every party at this point agrees that Paul expected the end within his lifetime. The disagreement is over what follows for a reader who knows it did not arrive.
Novenson's answer is that this is not Paul's problem. He is describing what a first-century writer believed, and the non-arrival of the end damages the theologies built on the letters rather than the letters themselves. Wright's answer is that the new age is genuinely present wherever the Messiah's people are, so the expectation was fulfilled in a form the objection does not capture. Schweitzer's answer is that the letters are dispatches from an interval history outgrew, and that this is a loss to be borne rather than a difficulty to be dissolved. Luther's answer is that the question is wrongly put, because what the letters do to a reader is the evidence that matters and no historical finding touches it.
Novenson does not adjudicate between the last three. He is a historian, and the book's discipline is to describe what Paul thought and to decline to say whether it is true. Paul's own reckoning, quoted above, is less comfortable than any of the three answers built on it.
The same chapter as a dialogue sets these positions in the participants' own voices, which is how this was first written.