Excellent ( )

What I have always appreciated about Wright is how he has worked very diligently to demonstrate how one can still hold on to canonical Christian beliefs and understand them in historically intelligible ways.

Such is on display in Paul: A Biography (link in picture). Wright attempts to reconstruct the life of Paul based on Paul’s letters and Luke’s account in Acts of the Apostles, contextualizing his development, the experiences he endures, and the letters he wrote situated in their appropriate chronological order and contexts. In short, Paul: A Biography is a diachronic and more popularly directed condensation of Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

By virtue of necessity such an exposition will be speculative in many respects, although the speculation is historically informed by what is known about the Eastern Mediterranean world of the first century. I still remain unconvinced by his early Galatians hypothesis (I understand it as written around the same time as 2 Corinthians), but walked away with a far greater willingness to countenance an Ephesian imprisonment in which Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon were written.

I would thus highly recommend Paul: A Biography just like I tend to recommend a lot of Wright’s popular level writing: it is great for an audience which is not well versed, and not much interested, in the “inside baseball” of the world of scholarship on Paul, as long as one recognizes there is a lot of analysis going on which may not be explicitly manifest in this work but can be found in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, etc. Likewise, it is good to remember he is crafting a story for coherence and there are a lot of questions behind the scenes which cannot be fully resolved. But he provides a well-reasoned portrait which can help believers better understand Paul in his context. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3809188.html

This book by the former Bishop of Durham is meant to be a popular biography of the Apostle Paul, tracing his voyages, both intellectual and across the Eastern Mediterranean, in the middle part of the first century AD. St Paul is probably the most important historical figure in Christianity apart from Jesus Christ, and it's therefore of interest to get a better understanding of what he was actually trying to do. We are impeded by the fact that there is no contemporary record of his existence outside the New Testament, where he is a key character in the Acts of the Apostles and traditionally regarded as the author of a dozen or so of the Epistles, with most modern scholars agreeing that he really did write more than half of them. We are also impeded by the fact that while a lot of his surviving writing seems to be arguing against other lines of thought inside and outside the early Christian community, we barely know what the other side really said because only Paul's side of the argument survives.

Faced with all of this, it's a difficult task to make sense of the story for the non-specialist reader, and for this non-specialist reader, it didn't quite come together. I got that Paul's particular innovations were to cast Jesus as a fulfiller of Jewish tradition, and to embrace non-Jews in Christianity. I didn't really get the basics of what Paul thought the faith basis of Christianity is - I felt that Wright was striving to avoid being trapped in the traditional Protestant v Catholic debate here and ended up not saying all that much. I think there is probably more to be said about Paul's views on women, especially women in ministry, which I suspect were more modern than most people like to believe. I did like the nitty-gritty (if largely imagined) detail of Paul continuing to ply his trade as a maker and repairer of tents while also evangelising the Levant. I was frustrated that Wright presents very little of other scholars' views, and gives no recommendations for further reading.

The single most interesting thing about St Paul is that he had a sudden conversion experience one day while travelling to Damascus, probably in the mid-30s, only a few years after the Crucifixion. Until then, he had been colluding in the persecution of Christians (not yet called that of course) by Jewish and Roman authorities. But in that moment on the road, he experienced the direct presence of Jesus, was struck blind for several days, and then felt compelled to preach Christianity for the rest of his life (probably about thirty years). It's pretty difficult to explain, let alone explain away, and Wright doesn't really try. Of course it comes near the very start of the story, and we don't know a lot about the end (though apparently his remains have recently been identified).

Anyway, I found this not totally satisfying. ( )

Respected biblical scholar N. T. Wright offers an insightful look at the life of the Apostle Paul. He correctly bases his insights on first century culture. He examines the Scriptures and looks at recent scholarship, offering his interpretations. He looks at Paul's writings in relation to what was going on in Paul's life at the time. This book will be studied for many years to come. ( )

This biography of Paul is both deep and accessible. Wright makes a point of placing Paul in his own time and cultures, often making even well known passages suddenly make sense. ( )