Paul: His Story

Purchased for a church program. Read previously and liked it, gave interesting insight into the man and his program. Will re-read for program.

This book should be manatory reading for all Religious teachers, priest nuns and laity who want to know more about Paul of Tarsus.I find myself re-reading to get the full understanding of this tough saintly man.

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor offers here a nice little novel. Using Luke's Acts of the Apostles as his main road map, M-O sprinkles parts of St. Paul's New Testamental auto-biography through his story. (M-O begins by saying this book is offered in the wake of his more scholarly "Paul: A Critical Life". Perhaps this novel is a companion text for his earlier book.) "Paul: His Story's" novelistic writing style makes its 239 (hardback) pages a quick read. M-O's scholarship, as usual, is noteworthy. Using an extensive endnotes section he, curiously, does not apply reference numbers through the text. M-O's reconstruction of St. Paul's life is fascinating and illuminating. Certainly, much of the book's conjecture will invent discussion and inspire re-thinking of Pauline chronologies. Although the book is well-founded in Scripture, there is little comment from beyond the New Testament sources for Paul. Patristic sources are practically all ignored. Also, M-O offers no comment on St. Paul's nuclear family (his wife and children) and only marginal hypothesis for his family of origin (page 2). Knowing that history is often a best-guess enterprise, M-O tells a good story filling many gaps in Paul's life. M-O is original thinking about how, and which ways, Paul traveled. The book also proffers interesting analysis for biblical-geographical distances. This book is recommendable to all who are interested in St. Paul and the world of Late Antiquity.

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.

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.