Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography

this is a great book for people who enjoy engaging the real forces and faces in christianity. the prose is delightful. surely there is some conjecture and filling-in but it is all in good fun and indicative of chilton's love and high regard for his work. i have read several of his books and they are all imbued with a deep love of god and a tenacious passion for faith, truth and humanity.

Rewarding experience and refreshing insights by Mr. Chilton's writing about Paul. Everyone in church authority should be required to read this little volumn, especially individuals who use mass media for their message and platform. I am rereading a second time. Thank you again Mr. Chilton.

Since there isn't much hard, first-hand information available about Paul of Tarsus and his activities, the best we can do is rely on scholars to (1) piece together what little there is, (2) integrate it with historical facts and second-hand information written by others (often several decades after the fact), (3) apply their best educated guesses while reading between the lines, to (4) compile a quasi-fictional account of what was probably going on. My interest in Paul arose from a sense that what we Christians believe is the legacy of Jesus, is actually more the work of Paul, a Turk who never knew Jesus, yet was somehow able to create a Jesus-based tradition off the top of his head and sell it to a wide audience. The first book I happened to pick up was Hyam Maccoby's similar work, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. A minister-friend cautioned that I should read several such books before settling on any hard and fast conclusions. After reading a few, I understand his advice. Bruce Chilton's effort is probably as credible and creditable as any other, and is recommended to anyone who is interested in learning what there is to know about Paul and the formation for the Christian faith. But, to paraphrase the all too familiar ADA statement, "Rabbi Paul has been shown to be an educational resource that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of study and regular professional care." Read several such books before settling on any hard and fast conclusions about Paul and the formation of the faith. Gene Warner, author of ... Solutions for Secretaries of Small NPO's The Manitou Passage Story

`Rabbi Paul, An Intellectual Biography' by Professor of Religion, Bruce Chilton has a barely tautological title which is still capable of a hint of misdirection. The virtually obvious aspect of the title is the fact that so little is known with certainty of the hard details of `Paul of Tarsus' life that a 332 page book must, by necessity, spend a lot of time on the intellectual content of Paul's Epistles which make up the most robustly theological portion of the New Testament. There are two facts about this book that can be slightly misleading. First, I believe the title of `Rabbi' applied to Paul may be just a bit of a stretch. `Rabbi' is a strictly Jewish title which, I believe, is only applied to a teacher of `the law' as laid out in the Torah and explicated in the Talmud. The main thrust of Paul's Christian theology was to make the Torah irrelevant to being a Christian. Second, while this book does deal with Paul's theology, I find it very odd that the author devotes less space to discussing the Epistle to the Romans than he does the two Epistles to the Corinthians. `Romans' is commonly believed by everyone from Augustine to Martin Luther to Jonathan Edwards to Albert Schweitzer to 21st Century commentators to be Paul's greatest theological work. Professor Chilton appears to give that honor to the Corinthians letters, which probably have somewhat more gossip than `Romans', so they provide more material for the narrative. Even some of his statements on the provenance of `Romans' seem shaky. He claims the letter was written in the Greek Asia Minor city of Mellitus, while most other reliable Biblical commentaries say it was written while Paul was in Corinth (See `The Oxford Bible Commentary', page 1108). In one sense, this book can be seen as an exegesis to the Book of Acts of the Apostles, as this part of the New Testament provides most of the hard factual material upon which Chilton builds his speculations on the events in Paul's life. One example of `speculation' is the author's surmises on what Paul did during the years he spent in the desert of the Nabatean Kingdom south of Judea. The author's reasonable guess is that he made tents, as he came from a prosperous family of tent-makers in Tarsus. Aside from `Acts', `1 Corinthians' and `Galatians', there is relatively little material taken from the other Epistles. This is not to say the book has no scholarly credentials. The end of the book includes about fifty pages of notes and comments on sources. But Chilton is certainly aiming his narrative at a popular audience, since his main text is singularly free of the impedimenta to smooth reading found in scholarly works on Paul, of which there are thousands. This includes words, phrases, and sentences quoted in Aramaic, Greek, or Latin; long footnotes in barely readable fonts; and indecipherable references to six volume works in German, Latin, or French. Thus, while most of those thousands of works have no value for the average interested reade

In a companion work to his "Rabbi Jesus" (2002), Bruce Chilton writes a concise biography of the Paul from the New Testament. In both books, Mr. Chilton emphasizes the Jewishness of his subjects in his quest for the historical person. This work does not break new ground but pulls together the leading scholarship consensus on Paul. This work is intended for the general reader as an introduction to Paul's life and evolving theology -- it is thorough but concise at 350+ pages. Working from Paul's letters to the leaders of the local churches and from the Acts of the Apostles, Mr. Chilton emphasizes how Paul was responsible for broadening the faith in Jesus as the Messiah to including gentiles without the burden of the Law (the dietary rules and circumcision requirements). Among Paul's many contributions to Christian theology, this was the key one -- when the Jewish-Christian Church based in Jerusalem disappeared during the chaos of the War against Rome in the late 60's, the Gentile Church remained to carry on. For a different approach toward Paul, the reader can read Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's "Paul: His Story". Utilizing the same framentary material as Mr. Chilton, Mr. Murphy-O'Connor argues for a more unique and sometimes creative history of Paul. I prefer Mr. Chilton's less-daring but more probable account of the life of Paul. For a more advanced look at Paul, the reader can consult the earlier works of either E.P. Saunders or Gunther Bornkamm.