Paul: His Story

Rating:
Summary: The Search for the historical Paul of the New Testament
Review: Father Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a respected Roman Catholic priest and New Testament scholar, has written his second work upon Paul in a decade. Utilizing his years living in Jerusalem & his personal knowledge of bibical Israel and the Mediterranean world that Paul inhabited, he has written a brief but engaging reconstruction of Paul's life and theology.

Father Jerome takes issue with traditional Pauline scholarship as he re-interprets Paul's letters and Luke's Acts of the Apostles. He advocates for a more worldly Paul and fills in the considerable gaps of his personal life with bold deductions (Paul's parents were slaves, Paul was married, his children later died in an accident, etc). His views on Paul's theology are more mainstream but fused with his knowledge of that era.

This book is geared toward the general reader and could be read in tandem with the recent publication of Bruce Chilton's "Rabbi Paul" which represents a more traditional outlook of Paul. For those readers wanting to dig deeper into Paul's life and theology, the earlier and more detailed works of Gunther Bornkamm and E.P. Saunders are still available.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent life- the place to start.
Review: Paul will always remain an enigma. He was a complex, insecure man whose contradictions drove him into tortured eloquence. In many accounts of Paul's theology, however, one misses this. He is treated as if he had a coherent and worked out theology which laid down rules for all times. The greatest achievement of this biography is to show just how human Paul was and why one certainly should not give 'gospel truth' status to his letters. They were written in such a variety of circumstances and in response to so many different challenges (most of which remain unrecorded) that they can really be treated as only relevant to the immediate circumstances in which they were written. O' Connor knows his subject and , as is not always the case with writers on Paul, the world in which he lived backwards and so his portrait is compelling. In making Paul so human,Murphy O'Connor actually makes his achievement seem more rather than less remarkable. In short this book is a healthy antidote to the forbidding theological superstar image (created originally by the church fathers in the fourth century) that Paul is often given and much more credible as a result.