The corporate personality hypothesis is still a frequent recourse in Pauline scholarship. Despite some quite damaging criticism from Old Testament scholars it remains, in one form or another, a popular means of accounting for Paul's understanding of the relation of believers to the risen Christ. This essay undertakes a re-assessment of the empirical data for the hypothesis. It comes to the conclusion that Paul is unlikely to have had at hand in Judaism a conceptual model for the inclusion or

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... orporation of believers in Christ. The phenomena that have commonly been taken as evidence for the concept either have simply been misread or may be explained by reference to other less speculative aspects of Jewish thought and literary method 1966), 15-16.