Book review: "When You Were Gentiles" by Cavan W. Concannon

The twenty-fourth book I read in 2017 was "When You Were Gentiles": Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul's Corinthian Correspondence by Cavan W. Concannon.  This book began as a dissertation, and it reads like it. The academic prose is heavy and repetitive, with extra padding: first Concannon tells you what he's going to tell you, then he tells you, then he tells you what he just told you.

The jargon might be worth hacking one's way through if there were anything interesting on offer beneath the verbiage, but all this sound and fury, at base, comes down to speculation.  The recipients of the epistles may have been this or that; they may have practiced some or another occupation; they may have had picnics in graveyards.  There's no facts at bottom, no documentation, only some snapshots from the author's vacation in Greece.  The one thing Concannon seems to be sure of, based on his repeated pledges of allegiance to feminist and postcolonial scholarship, is that the Corinthians definitely disagreed with Paul and that the apostle's white (oops) male interference in their community was unwelcome and officious.