As I was entering the Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity program at the University of Virginia, I was told another entering student would be working on theosis or deification in Paul, and I thought, "That's weird." I hope I can be forgiven such a dismissive reaction, since my interest in Paul at the time was mostly to do with the so-called apocalyptic Paul. In Joseph Kitagawa's foreword to Peter Brown's Haskell Lectures ( The Cult of the Saints ), he observes, "A number of graduate students remarked to me that at the beginning of the five lectures, they had no interest in the cult of the saints at all; by their conclusion, they had more interest in that subject than in their own area of research!" (x). I have occasionally felt the same about the work of my colleague at UVa, David Litwa . I have already mentioned that his book, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul's Soteriology (BZNW 187; Goettingen: de Gruyter), came out earlier thi...