Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

by A.N. Wilson

It begins on the road to Damascus, in a moment graven on the consciousness of Western civilization. "Saul, Saul," asks the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, "why persecutest thou me?"

From this experience, and from the response of the Jewish merchant later known as Paul, springs the Christian Church as we know it today. For as A. N. Wilson makes clear in this astonishing and gripping narrative, Christianity without Paul is quite literally nothing. Jesus, with the layers of scholarship and ceremony stripped away, is a fastidious and fervent Jew who will lead his followers into a stricter, purer observance of Judaism; it is Paul who will claim divinity for him, who will transform him into the Messiah, center of an entirely new religion.

In Wilson's astute narrative, we see Paul negotiating the dangerous political currents of the Roman Empire, making converts, and writing the great epistles that define our understanding of Christ and of the sublime paradoxes of his teaching. What drove Paul? What would he think of what his church has become? The answers lie in Wilson's extraordinary biography, which lays bare the psychological journey of Christianity's true inventor.

"Wilson . . . does a tremendous job here of not only examining all that is known about Paul's life but also putting it into context with what was happening throughout the Roman Empire. As always, Wilson's insights fascinate and provoke."―Booklist

Genres: Religion, Biography, History, Nonfiction, Christianity, Theology, Biography Memoir

290 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Andrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.

Reviews

[Jeremiah John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an amazing book that transformed my limited perspective of Paul. As a secular historian, A.N. Wilson brings a skeptical eye to Paul that is refreshing.

Yet, even viewed through this lens, Paul is the innovator of Christianity. For instance, by removing the requirement of circumcision (punishable by death for the non-Jew under Roman law), Paul allows Gentiles to enter into Judaism. He is the universalizer of Christianity.

Paul gets a bad rap now-a-days. We forget his contribution and remember him for his casual statements of homosexuality and women, much of which may or may not actually be attributable to Paul himself by modern textual criticism. Wilson argues that focusing on these things skews our perspective of Paul.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book. It was fascinating.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally made it through to the end of Paul and was left with a strange sense of anti-climax – the man just vanishes - one of the most influential thinkers in world history simply disappears leaving no trace of what happened to him. Very disconcerting. In a way though it is quite fitting because Wilson makes it clear that Paul expected the return of Jesus within months or, at worst, a few years. I can only imagine the sense of anti-climax he must have felt when he didn’t come.
If Paul had been a lesser man that would have been the end of the story and Jesus would have just been another historical footnote, but Paul made the best of a bad job and founded Christianity!
This is where you could reasonably expect me to enter into a rant about what a lot of nonsense it all is. Well, I do find it hard to understand how intelligent, thinking people can believe the bible story, so much of it has been discredited, but I shall spare you the diatribe and concentrate on the book itself.
It’s a really solid piece of work and so engrossed me that I have ordered his book on Jesus. Wilson has done a sterling job in separating fact from fiction and distilling who Paul was and what he said and did. I emerged at the end with a better idea of the historical context of Christianity and an image of Paul wandering through the Roman empire, converting souls by the bushel, annoying the authorities, doing time, encouraging the faithful and distilling for me the best of Christianity, or at least the bit that appeals to me whether there is an afterlife or not.
“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.”

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently stalled, more like it. This book basically confirms my sense (and that of many others) that Paul, not Jesus, invented Christianity. I'm reading it to figure out why he so often makes me angry. I'll let you know.

[Gloria · Rating 2 out of 5]

I cannot recommend this book because the author writes from a non-believer's point of view which I did not like. He always refers to Jesus as a man, never as God, and is ridiculing the authors of the New Testament other than Paul. That being said, there is much interesting history here for those who like that.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

i learned a lot. I'm not sure i always understood his point, but he seems like a very good historian. i liked the secular approach, it seemed neutral.

[Matthijs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jezus Christus was niet de stichter van het christendom. Het was in de gepassioneerde, enigszins getourmenteerde geest van de apostel die Hem nooit ontmoet had dat Jezus verlossertrekjes kreeg en uitgroeide tot een geestelijke Christus die weinig meer van doen had met de historische Jezus van Nazareth. Die Christus, de geestesbaby van Paulus, is de Christus die we tegenkomen in de brieven en daarmee deels in de evangeliën, die geschreven zijn na de brieven van Paulus. Dat maakt Paulus tot stichter van het christendom, een geloof sterk getekend door Paulus' dringende overtuiging dat Jezus tijdens zijn leven nog terug zou komen om de wereld te oordelen, een overtuiging die een enorme urgentie in zijn brieven legt.

De geest van de apostel
Dit is kort gezegd de opvatting van A.N. Wilson, de seculiere historicus die met deze schets – een biografie is het nauwelijks te noemen, vanwege het gebrek aan historische gegevens over Paulus – tracht door te dringen tot de geest van de apostel (de ondertitel van het boek). Op die manier krijgen we volgens Wilson een inkijkje in waarom deze apostel zijn leer omtrent Jezus heeft vormgegeven zoals dat gebeurd is; een vorm die volgens de schrijver radicaal een andere richting opgaat dan Jezus zelf zou hebben bedacht. Wie een klassieke biografie over de apostel verwacht komt bedrogen uit. Het boek is meer een schets van de leefwereld van Paulus, de gebeurtenissen van die tijd en de ontwikkeling van het christendom dan een verhaal over het leven van de apostel zelf. Daar is, zoals gezegd, simpelweg te weinig over bekend.

Deze benadering maakt het boek interessant, maar wat mij betreft ook speculatief. Er waren momenten waarop de schrijver op basis van algemene dingen conclusies trok over één persoon die wat mij betreft ver gezocht waren. Bovendien maakt het uiteraard nogal uit of je gelooft wat er in de Bijbel staat of niet. Als je er vanuit gaat dat Jezus niet uit de dood kan zijn opgestaan, ga je op zoek naar hoe die 'mythe' dan de wereld in gekomen is.

Reality check
Het is voor elke gelovige goed om boeken te lezen die vanuit een neutraal standpunt geschreven zijn. Het is voor elke gelovige goed om in de historische oorsprong van je eigen religie te duiken om te ontdekken hoe dingen nu tot zijn zijn gekomen. Dat maakte het boek voor mij, als overtuigd christen, soms uitdagend om te lezen, maar niet minder een reality check om na te denken over wat ik nu eigenlijk geloof en waar dat vandaag komt. Zomaar wat dingen die er voor mij uitsprongen, die voor mij een nieuw licht wierpen op het Nieuwe Testament.
- Noch Jezus, noch Paulus wilden een nieuwe religie starten, los van het Jodendom. Jezus en Paulus waren allebei Jood en ook al kunnen we aannemen dat Jezus altijd al de hele wereld op het oog had, Paulus wilde in eerste instantie zijn eigen geloof hervormen, zijn eigen geloofsgenoten doordringen van het feit dat Jezus de Messias was. Volgens de schrijver is de scherpe tweedeling tussen christenen avant la lettre en joden die we bijvoorbeeld in Handelingen tegenkomen aangezet omdat het boek na die tijd geschreven is. In het echt was dat lange tijd helemaal niet zo duidelijk.
- De brieven van Paulus zijn in verschillende perioden geschreven. Verschillende perioden van zijn leven, maar vooral ook verschillende perioden van de geschiedenis. Het maakt nogal uit of de brieven geschreven zijn in de tijd dat je vrij bent of in de gevangenis zit, of dat keizer Caligula aan de macht was (die de Joden schoffeerde) of keizer Nero die als eerste specifiek de christenen op het oog had.
- Er zijn verschillen in hoe Lucas in het boek Handelingen bepaalde gebeurtenissen beschrijft en hoe Paulus er in zijn brieven op terugkomt. Het lijkt of Handelingen, dat volgens de schrijver na de brieven van Paulus geschreven is, bepaalde ruzies en het verdeeldheid zaaiende karakter van Paulus' boodschap tracht te verdoezelen. Wilson vermoedt dat Lucas Handelingen heeft geschreven met het doel om aan Romeinse machthebbers (Theofilus?) te laten zien dat christenen echt geen oproerkraaiers waren. In de brieven van Paulus schemert soms door dat hij soms heel wat meer weerstand opriep dan Lucas wil laten merken.

Ik ben geïnteresseerd in de historische oorsprong van het christelijk geloof, omdat ik geloof dat onze blik op onze eigen religie soms vooral gevormd lijkt door traditie. Onze kijk op zaken wordt gekleurd door een gebrek aan kennis van de historische context. Wat mij betreft is het christelijk geloof een geloof dat geworteld is in concrete geschiedenis. Er was een historische Jezus, een historische Paulus, maar ook: er was een historische opstanding. Dat maakt dit soort boeken, ook al ontkennen ze die opstanding, zo razend interessant.

[David Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an engaging and often acerbic study of St Paul, A.N. Wilson, regarding his subject, rather than Jesus, as the founder of what would become Christianity, seeks to reveal what it is the Apostle actually believed, as opposed to what later writers thought he believed, how those beliefs related to the historical and intellectual context, and how, if at all, the spiritual faith engendered by Paul's ideas of resurrection and grace were related to contemporary Judaism and the life and teachings of Jesus. In this endeavour, he is only partially successful, as while his fluent narrative is convincing in its reconstruction of the Apostle's life, his overly literal approach to Paul's thought and the written sources, plus a willingness to turn conjecture into fact, leads him to misrepresent the intention behind the texts and the specific, spiritual meaning of their universal message within their own context.
In the emergence of Christianity, there are clear time periods with their own natures and marked by specific events which determined how the faith came to develop. First, there is the very brief period of Jesus' preaching and teaching up to his death in c.AD 30; then there is the early apostolic age, in which his followers continued his ministry within traditional Judaism, centred upon the Temple in Jerusalem but spreading out to other communities within the Jewish Near Eastern world; next from c.AD 47 to c.64 there is the mission of St Paul, recorded in Acts and in his Epistles, in which the message of Jesus is infused with Greek spirituality and metaphysics within the conception of Christ as Redeemer and spread beyond Jewish communities; and then, after the Roman-Jewish war of 66 to70 and the destruction of Jerusalem and Herod's Temple, there is the era when Jesus' life is written down by the evangelists alongside the Acts and Epistles, and his teaching spread beyond the Diaspora into a recognisable non-Judaic religion that will eventually become codified in the Greek New Testament of the early second century as Christianity. In this latter phase, the Book of Acts will seek to rectify the contradictions between the early Jewish Jesus sect and the Christiological spiritualism of early Christianity, and in which Luke will tailor the oral tradition and the stories of Jesus' life so as to accommodate the radical and transcendental Christ-centred writings of Paul, thereby providing both a seemless narrative between the life of Jesus and the early Christianity of the New Testament, which would provide the theological basis for what was becoming recognised as the institutional Church of a community of believers under accepted historical, dogmatic, and human authority.
It is possible to regard these periods teleologically, as transitional stages on the road that would lead to the Christian Church, but, as Wilson shows, this is ahistorical, not only because the original Jerusalem movement remained firmly within Judaism with no conceptional basis for a non-Jewish religion, let alone a Church, but also because such was not Paul's intention, even though it was the Pauline Epistles which made this possible, once the Jewish foundations had been destroyed, by Luke's reconstruction of Jesus' life and Paul's mission in his two Books. What this suggests is that the story of the historical Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Mark, believed to be the original version from which both Matthew and Luke worked, has been glossed dually by Luke, once so as to try to bring it into accordance with the spiritual, Christiological understanding of Paul, and then again post-Paul and post-destruction of Jerusalem to ensure it accords with the new dispensation unknown to both Jesus and Paul, whereby Jews, particularly including Jewish followers of the Jesus movement, and non-Jews must accommodate themselves to the dominance of Roman law and institutions and the eclipse of the traditional Temple-centred priesthood, while also accepting that the End of Days which Paul believed was imminent, and in the expectation of which he preached and wrote his Epistles, has not come to pass. In effect, Luke, writing after AD 70, had to dehistoricise both Jesus and Paul, and to do so in a way which reconciled the known life and teachings of the messianic preacher with the Christ of Paul, and to do so such that these can be understood by the audience which Luke was addressing, that is a more Romanised, less Judaic, and Greek acculturated extra-Judean readership, who not only sought to follow their faith within Roman law, but who did so in the full knowledge that the eschatological prophesies ofJesus and especially Paul had not happened. And it is in this reimagining of the past and dehistoricisation and the need for the teachings of Jesus and Paul to be in accordance and be relevant for believers living after the time that the early followers of Jesus and Paul had believed should have been the end of time that Luke constructs both his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, and from which a Church, an institutional and authoritive necessity in the post-apostolic age, develops, an historical Church which neither Jesus nor Paul had envisioned, nor in their eschatological chronology thought necessary.
Wilson, it follows, is thus wrong to ascribe Christianity's foundation to Paul; rather it was Luke in his works, by seeking reconciliation between doctrinal and historical contradictions, and a continuity between the Judaism of Jesus and his followers, the spiritualism of Paul, and the historical reality of the late first century, who is more the real, if not founder, inspiration for Christianity, that is a religion formed AD 70 to c.100 that binds the Judaism of Jesus with the Greek thought of the New Testament and Paul's Christiology, and which, by recognising the reality of the Roman dispensation, is accommodated to the practicalities of secular power, to which it is sufficiently adaptive not only to become within three centuries the sole faith of the Roman Empire, but also the paradigm by which all European civilisation would develop. This was indeed an historical process, but separate from and postfacto the apostolic age and the early Jesus movement, whose works and thoughts were within an imminent eschatology, to be understood ahistorically, since they were constructed postpriori not to explain the dispensations of the messianic and apostolic ages, but to enunciate what these had come to mean when the evangelists came to write about them in their post-eschatalogical time. And because we have no contemporary proto-Christian historical documents contemporaneous to the pre-AD 70 age, we are forced to use what texts are available in the New Testament, not only reading these historically when they were never intended as such, but also recognising that what we are looking at in the period 4 BC to AD 68 has been filtered through the post AD 70 lens, and in Luke, our primary source, through the vision of Paul, since the most salient fact about the chronology of the writings used to understand Paul and the faith he propounded is that the Gospels and Acts, even if their subject matter circulated earlier in Aramaic and Greek oral histories, were only written down after Paul had written his Epistles, so that Luke's Books can only be understood if read through Paul, who not only provided the theoretical framework, the paradigm of Jesus the Christ, by which these were written, but did so within an ahistorical, eschatological, and presentist vision. Even if Luke was recording what we would regard as historical material, he was not doing so as an historian, and his writings were neither intended as history nor are they suitable for any historicist interpretation, which only our knowledge of late first century Christianity can provide postpriori.
To be fair to Wilson, he constantly iterates that the faith movement he is describing, and of which Paul is a, if not the, leading figure, cannot be regarded as a Church, just as the belief system similarly cannot be described as Christianity, as these terms were later, as we have seen, historical abstractions. However, he still, by the very means of comparing the early Judaic Jesus movement with what was to become the early Christian Church, fails to fully contextualise the events of Paul's life and the thoughts and writings these engendered within the eschatological specificities and prophesies of his time, particularly the years between his conversion and disappearance from the historical record, that is, c.AD 32 to 64/5, while also recognising that we can only observe these events through the equally temporally-specific lens of Luke, writing after AD 70 and the destruction of Jerusalem for a Romanised, non-Judaic dispensation, which did not exist in the apostolic age. If Wilson truly wanted to understand the mind of Paul in his own time, he would have first established the historiographical context within which he would be assessing the materials relating to Paul, and reading these within their eschatological and belief-centred context, rather than conceiving of that mind, as observed from a modern, secular, post-Anglican perspective, not so much as the mind of Paul, but the interpretation of Paul within the mind of Andrew Wilson.
Wilson, as with all writers dealing with such limited biographical and historical materials, must make conjectures, but in seeking to form a continuous framework for the understanding of Paul's mind from often contradictory evidence, he seeks a unity which is not there by suggesting a direct historical link between the Paul of the Epistles and Acts and the Pharasee Saul, by, one, proposing that Paul was a Temple guard at the time of the Crucifixion, and, two, that he therefore had direct personal knowledge of the Jesus condemned and crucified in c.AD 30. However, this supposition contradicts Wilson's later examination of Paul's Christiology, which he regards, as it is, as a spiritual reimagining in faith of the suffering of the crucified man. If Paul had known Jesus, he would have mentioned it, particularly in relation to his conversion, and if he had been involved, even tangentially in the death of Jesus, he could not have conceived of him simply as Christ, but would have instead retained in his writings the messianic, Jewish Jesus. It is not Jesus the man Paul knows, it is the Christ that he becomes through his Passion that he believes in, and in effect, the events of Jesus' life, of which Paul knew nothing first hand before his conversion are irrelevant when compared to the thing that matters most, his suffering on the Cross and Resurrection as the Christ. Paul is converted to the abstracted Christ he envisages, a non-historical, divine being, and not the man Jesus, which is why, firstly he needs to make contact with Jesus' followers after his conversion in order to make corporeal his Christ in the man Jesus as was known to his followers, who lived a human life, and, secondly, why he is resented and even opposed by those who had known Jesus in his lifetime, particularly Peter and James. As to Peter, for the necessities of apostolic continuity and the Petrine commission it was vital that he was believed to have accepted the Pauline Christ he too had once denied, and that Luke through his cleverly crafted narratives would show this, so that the accepted Christ conceptualisation of the late first century would be regarded as having been true not only during the early Judaic apostolate, but also in the lifetime of Jesus, being something theologically true, if historically false, hence the ahistorical nature of Luke and the other New Testament books. The postpriori Christ must become a priori in the Judaic Jesus of the messianic mission and early apostolate, if the teachings of Paul are to be true and the Christ of the Crucifixion understood as both Man and God, two natures, equal in one body, while for a non-Jewish readership after the destruction of Jerusalem it made more sense for Luke to interpret Paul's conversion as from Judaism to belief in Jesus than as within the Judaic-Jesus movement from understanding of Jesus as Messiah to understanding him as the Christ, not only as after AD 70 differences within Judaism no longer had relevance, but also because it allows both the Pauline and Peter/James conceptualisations of Jesus the Man/Jesus the Christ to coexist within the paradigm that Jesus was the Christ, but this was only revealed after his death, a revelation manifested in the conversion of Paul. In effect, the Judaic Jesus movement is reconstructed through the paradigm of early, Greek Christianity and Pauline Christiology, so that the latter are ahistorically determinant of the former.
In addition, the very act of Paul thinking and writing in Greek was not only an act of translation, but by application of a new lexicon to terms which had previously been known only in Aramaic and Hebrew, an act of transcendence. The early Jesus movement had been confined to the Judaic world because it was understood only in the semitic languages of Palestinian Jewry, but the Pauline Epistles, the Gospels, and the other Books of what would become the New Testament were in Greek, giving those terms a Greek meaning, and opening them through the language to the world of Greek thought, so that while the Aramaic oral history of Jesus and his personal followers and the Temple-centred, Hebrew Law they continued to follow even after the Crucifixion were ethnically and spacio-temporally specific, the Greek of the Epistles gave them a universalist meaning beyond the Judaic world. And, although the codified New Testament of the second century can be scoured hermeneutically for some Aramaic Urtext, a chimeric pursuit if ever there is one, none will emerge since the New Testament only became realised as codified written texts, both canonical and apocryphal, once written down, and that, being done in Greek, meant these texts, as much as they related to events in first century Palestine among Aramaic speaking Jews and their Jewish and Hellenised successors, were part of the Greek speaking- and Greek thought-world, making them products of and subject to the metaphysical universe and interpretation that implied. Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, etc, might not be subjects of the Greek language texts, but it is their ideas and the words they used in description and interpretation which determined how the words of the Evangelists and the Epistle writers must be understood, particularly when it comes to the two works of the highly educated Luke, either a Greek or Hellenised Jew. Early Christianity is as much Greek as Anglicanism is English today, since both can only be made sense of within the context of the languages in which their texts are written and their rituals performed. Paul and Luke did not create the Church, but by writing in Greek, and by Luke reinterpreting the life of Jesus through the prism of Greek thought as applied to the beliefs engendered by Jesus' death in Paul, they created what after the destruction of Jerusalem would become Christianity, as lived under the Roman socio-political dispensation. So, if we are to understand the process by which the Early Church developed, we must recognise the profound transformative effect of not just the writing of the Books of the New Testament in Greek, but that their writers, unlike Jesus and his disciples, thought in Greek within a universalist, metaphysical Greek thought-world, which provides the metaphysical lexicon of the Christiology of Paul, since only Greek thought would permit the cognition of Christ, as a distinctive conception separate from but intimately related to the Jesus the Man of Aramaic-Hebrew oral tradition, a cultural and linguistic tradition within which conception of the Christ was impossible.
Similarly, just as Paul must be understood in terms of his Greek thought-world, so his Epistles must be comprehended within his cosmology, in that, believing that the return of Christ and the End of Days was imminent, he thought and wrote entirely in and for the present. Paul's teachings and letters are not only universalist and directed beyond the spacial confines of first century Judaic Palestine, but also beyond time, since not only for Paul is the past irrelevant, since Resurrection through faith only happens in the present and is an immediate epiphany with God through the intermediate identification with Christ, but any putative future can be ignored since it will never exist. Just as Jesus' message was for his present, the Judaic present which is the completion of the Law in his time by his ministry, so Paul's message is for his universal present. It is this presentism that Wilson fails to fully understand, as while a historical Paul can be constructed by a writer thinking historically, his thinking and writing were intentionally ahistorical, although recorded after AD 70 by Luke in a manner open to historical interpretation, but only in the sense that in his eschatological time Paul's thought must be understood ahistorically, relating events and writings that Paul thought of as existing outside of history, and therefore interpreted only within the specific present in which Paul lived and believed was about to end, not subject to the temporally-specific and teleological dehistoricised dialectical historicism favoured not only by Wilson, but, sadly, by most students of the premodern past, who seek to impose our post-Scientific Revolution and post-Enlightenment conceptions of time upon people who conceived of time differently and had totally different cosmologies. The reason that Biblical texts can appear contradictory, even within Books by the same presumed author, as with Luke, is not just a failure of literalism, but also a failure to understand that they were written in and for the present time in which they were composed, in effect meaning that the Bible is not an historical narrative, but instead a collection of texts with multiple presents intended to be read in the present outside of history, which explains why the events of the Bible can be contradicted by archaeology and historical reasoning , not because they are false, but because they are not intended to be historically true: their meaning is not in their historicity, which only exists to give contextualisation, but in the value to be drawn by the believer in her present. Luke has provided a postfacto historical context for the life of Jesus and the acts of the Apostles because of the need to give events in the past which were temporally specific to their faith-defined present a comprehensible form for readers living after the age about which he writes, an age Paul thought could not be. But, Paul has no such need for historicity, which is why not only his message is universalist, but why its presentism ensures it means what it does today just as much as it did in his own time, and why post-Pauline Christianity has been able to evolve within historical development without Paul's message losing its relevance, adapting to social and intellectual changes, even when man-made institutions are unable. Unlike Orthodox Judaism or Islam, spacio-temporal faith systems based upon particular religious and ethnic experiences, Pauline Christianity is always in the present, as Paul, thinking outside of history and intentionally ahistorically, always writes in the reader's present, and why Christianity as a belief system needs to be approached ahistorically, even though the Church, the Church which develops from the Greek New Testament of early Christianity, can be, as a human institution, understood historically. Paul can be understood historically as a man living in his specific time of the first century, but his thought, the mind which Wilson has made the subject of his book cannot, because the mind of St Paul is always in the present, and must be understood as such. The mind of St Paul lives outside of history.
(Abridged)

[Charles Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a lapsed but confirmed Roman Catholic, I have to admit my almost empty knowledge of Paul's story apart from the glimpses of him in Biblical passages appearances in a variety of books on Christianity and Roman history. I was therefore blown away by the reality of Paul's life as told by A.N. Wilson. Other reviewers have commented and appreciated the authors' secular approach to his analysis of Paul, directing his story to textual analysis and historical confirmation of various events and timelines. These characteristics of Wilson's writing are true and allow the more secular minded reader to connect with Paul's life more easily. Wilson's presentation of the facts of Paul's life , intellectual and moral genius were startling and explained once and for all the centrality of Paul to the reality of Christianity as a faith, indeed, Wilson argues that without Paul, the Gospels and New Testament as we know them would not exist without Paul.
What was more powerful - indeed compelling about Wilson's writing was his clear articulation of Paul's hyper emotional and ecstatic belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. More than any other, including James and Peter and the rest of the "Jesus followers" based in Jerusalem, Paul saw in the life and more importantly the death of Jesus the difference and the power of his example. As an observant Jew he states,"...more than that I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of things and regard them as rubbish in order that I might gain Christ and be found in him...the righteousness from God based in faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead"
Wilson goes on..."the religion of Paul, by contrast, wild, ecstatic and confused as it must often appear as we turn the pages of his few surviving writings, contains all the makings of a religion with universal appeal even though he himself, life Jesus, would perhaps be astonished by the turns and developments by the the Christian religion was to take after his death."
As a non practicing Christian, more guided by the historical and political import and impact of Christianity on Western life, history and culture, I was nevertheless captured by Wilson's description and quotation of Paul's deep, messianic faith and the power of his ideas.
I have given 4 stars and perhaps as a result of this review given it 5.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a popular, yet intelligent and artfully well-written, speculative biography of Saul of Tarsus (aka Paul), arguably the most important figure in and writer of what have become the Christian scriptures. While superb in many respects, this book is seriously flawed by one very important error upon which much of its argument rests. This flaw has to do with the conflation of the two Jewish revolts in Palestine (there was a third, in N. Africa, rarely discussed), those of 66-73 and 132-135. By assigning events of the second revolt, such as the banning of Jews from a Jerusalem renamed 'Aelia Capitolina', to the period of the first, Wilson erroneously argues for a very early dating of the synoptic gospels and the Book of Acts. Still, while this weakens the evidential support for his portrayal of the epistolary apostle, the pictures he paints of Saul/Paul and of the first century movements, Jewish and gentile, which revered the Galilean rabbi, Yeshua/Jesus, remain for the most part worthy of consideration.

[Joe Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book with a church men's study/discussion group. Honestly, I was not entirely enthusiastic about it, but it did get me to thinking more about the crucial role Paul had in the formation and evolution of the early church. It kind of makes one wonder if there had been no Paul would we be Christians today?

The author's bio describes him as "an award-winning novelist, biographer, and journalist." So, it's not like he's been working in Biblical studies for decades--my impression...just something to keep in mind. I will say that, having had this reading experience, I will be more alert to and interested in Pauline studies, going forward.

[MpaulM · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aweful book. He writes about a man who spreads the Christian message but doubts the Bible as a source and Paul as a Christian. He almost always puts what the Bible says about Paul or dates in quotations but never with other ancient sources. I couldn't finish reading a book about someone whom the author doubts the main source material we have about him.

[Bob Manning · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good biographical look into Paul's life done with historical research. Wilson is neither a Christian apologist or a critic, howerever he does point out problems with some parts of Luke's description of Paul in Acts. He gives Paul large credit for the growth of the Catholic Church and many of its current beliefs.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as many interesting stories as Jesus, but still interesting...

[Daniel Greear · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tough, thought provoking read on an individual who is tough to understand. Paul the Apostle, as this book explains, is probably the most important person in the history of Western Civilization. He is, from a historical perspective, more important than Jesus, and can be considered the true founder of Christianity.

Paul was a Jew born in Asia Minor and a Roman Citizen. He was a tent maker by trade, spoke Greek, and seemingly had connections throughout the Mediterranean. He was not one of the original disciples and never knew Jesus. He even persecuted early followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. He converted to “Christianity” after he had a vision of Christ speaking to him sometime after the crucifixion. He never looked back.

Because he spoke Greek and had connections in many major cities, Paul spread the Jesus movement throughout the eastern Mediterranean, where before it was strictly isolated to rural towns around the Sea of Galilee in Palestine. Because Paul understood the Roman/Greek religion, there is evidence that his writings were influenced by gods such as Mithras and Dionysus. These influences helped market Christianity to the gentiles, something that the other early Christians weren’t interested in doing. Other Christians at the time, aka Jews, did not believe that uncircumcised men could become Jewish. Paul’s main point and argument was, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, free or slave, all can follow Christ. Paul was one of the great liberators of history.

We can attribute Christianity as we know it to Paul even though he, along with all of the early followers of Jesus, never saw themselves as anything but Jewish and the word Christian is a retroactive term that would come about after their lives were long over. Paul thought the second coming of Jesus and the end times were imminent, he never imagined a world that has been shaped by 2000 years of Christianity. He never imagined a body such as the Roman Catholic Church, the Schism, Protestantism, etc. He would have been disgusted, and disappointed.

As the book says, we can thank Paul and his writings for: “The certainly of human unworthiness before the perception of God, the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, the glorious promise of the Resurrection and ever lasting life.” All are key tenets of Christianity today. Most importantly, Paul taught love. Love above all. Love is the greatest force in the world and the greatest thing that God taught humans.

Without Paul’s work, our history as we know it would be vastly different. The Jesus movement amongst the Jews would have most likely died out in Palestine and only be a footnote in history. Without the spread and growth of Christianity, there would not have been the Catholic Church, the Crusades, the religious wars, the inquisition, the Renaissance, the Reformation, etc. Some good, some bad. History is history. Our history without Paul raises more questions than answers. Without Christianity being the uniting force in Europe, would Europeans have remained pagan? Would they have been conquered by Islam? Again, more questions than answers.

Paul is like Jesus, in that both of their lives also lead to more questions than answers. We know so little about both of them, that it’s hard to divide fact from myth. Paul simply disappeared from history after he went to Rome and his story remains incomplete. However, his teachings changed the world and Paul the Legend, whoever he was, lives on.

[Bob Lundquist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saints Peter and Paul and their followers had arguments on whether someone had to become a Jew to be a follower of Jesus’ teachings. Aside from this, Paul established churches in Asia Minor and Greece before heading for Rome and maybe even Spain. Paul was born in what is now Turkey as a Jew. So, he was raised a Jew. As a result, he eventually got to Jerusalem and traveled around Arabia for a few years as he became what might be called a Christian. After his stay in Jerusalem, Paul established churches in Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica, and more. As can be imagined, he had difficulties doing all this as he converted pagans to Christians for lack of a better word since Christianity was not quite established yet. By the time Paul died, this would change as Christianity became an established religion.

This book is a good narrative of how Paul did all this. In addition, it describes how the times affected his efforts. Some of this is based on sketchy evidence thousands of years old. There is the issue of interpretation of the evidence available and how this did or did not have an impact on Paul’s story. Intertwined with all this is how Paul eventually made Christianity attractive to a large portion of the Roman Empire. There are maps of Paul’s travels but they are small and hard to read.

[Scott Holstad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I FINALLY finished this book! It took me forever because it's fairly dry and the content doesn't interest me as much as that in some other books. Still, this was a fairly interesting book to read. The author is apparently an agnostic or atheist and ensures one understands he believed Jesus was a Jew with no intention of starting a religion, and undoubtedly not the son of God or God himself. If you're a Christian and you can get past that, you're good to go. This book presents Paul as THE founder of Christianity and THE individual responsible for asserting Jesus was the Messiah, gone to glory in the clouds, and returning again some day -- soon. The author asserts Paul thought Jesus was returning in a matter of months or years, thus the urgency in some of his letters.

When I read nonfiction books, I don't underline passages -- I turn over page corners so I can go back and catch important portions of the text. Normally I will have turned over 10-20 pages in a typical nonfiction book. In this book, I must have turned over 50 pages or more. I often quote from these passages, but I obviously can't do that here -- I don't have the time or inclination.

Wilson asserts that Paul was a traveling tent maker and that's how he supported himself, along with donations. He also calls into question whether Paul was a one time Pharisee or not. He alludes to Paul's potential homosexuality, in his nonstop efforts to force sexual morality on people and in his almost loving letters to Timothy and other men who were his followers. Yes, sacrilege, I know. Still, interesting stuff. Wilson writes,

"Old-fashioned liberal Protestants detected in the Gospels the seeds of modern feminism -- Talitha cumi, Damsel arise, became the motto of Victorian Christian feminists. The Jesus of the Gospels outraged Jewish opinion by speaking to the woman at the well of Samaria, and by offering forgiveness to the prostitute who, though she had sinned much, had also loved much. Impossible, says such wisdom, to imagine the misogynist puritanical Paul extending such forgiveness, nor being so much at ease with the opposite sex."

We also get in-depth details on Paul's travels here and their context, which I found really helpful. You also get a history lesson on Rome, at the time, and the state of the Jews. Wilson additionally delves into other religions and gleefully admits to Paul having stolen some traditions from paganism for Christianity.

Wilson is pretty hard on Luke and his book of Acts. He asserts much of it is contradictory to Paul's own writings and probably made up. And his arguments, which I can't paraphrase here, are good. (I didn't know Luke was a Gentile.) Wilson also deals with Paul's intent focus on evangelizing and converting Gentiles, something he argues Peter and James were opposed to. Of Luke, the author writes,

"By the time Luke writes up the story, perhaps twenty years or more later, it must be obvious that the Lord has not come and that all Paul's immediate prophesies and predictions about the nature of the world and God's purpose for it, have been not just slightly off beam, not open to interpretation, but plumb wrong. Christianity -- not a word which Paul ever used -- will have to sort out the contradictions of all that. It it Luke's dull task to smooth over the cracks and hide the glaring discrepancies in his story, and to persuade 'dear Theophilus', some Roman magistrate or bigwig, that the Christians are safe, good citizens. As Paul's last visit to Jerusalem shows, he was none of these things."

Wilson deals with Paul's end, which we don't know, and for that he takes umbrage. He asserts that Paul could have been acquitted by Nero or some other Roman official, he could have been made a martyr, as many people believe, or -- this is Wilson's own belief -- he could have been let go and traveled to Spain, starting churches, but dying in oblivion.

I'm going to end my review with Wilson's final (and long) paragraph in the book, because I think it's a good synthesis of what he is trying to accomplish in writing this book.

"It could be seen, then, that the essence of the Gospels, the thing which makes them so distinctive, and such powerful spiritual texts, namely the notion of a spiritual savior, at odds with his own kind and his own people, but whose death on the cross was a sacrifice for sin, is a wholly Pauline creation. The strange contrarieties which make the Jesus of the Gospels such a memorable figure -- named his insistence on peace and kindness in all his more notably plausible of 'authentic' sayings, and his virulent abuse of Pharisees, his Mother, and the temple authorities on the other -- could point less to a split personality in the actual historical Jesus, and more to the distinctive nature of Paul's spiritual preoccupations a generation later. Even in this respect, therefore, Paul seems a more dominant figure in the New Testament tradition than Jesus himself. The Jesus of the Gospels, if not the creation of Paul, is in some sense the result of Paul. We can therefore say that if Paul had not existed it is very unlikely that we should have had any of the Gospels in their present form. The very word 'gospel', like the phrase 'the New Testament' itself, are ones which we first read in Paul's writings. And though, as this book has shown, there were many individuals involved in the evolution of Christianity, the aspects which distinguish it from Judaism, and indeed make it incompatible with Judaism, are Paul's unique contribution. It is for this reason that we can say that Paul, and not Jesus -- was -- if any one was -- the 'Founder of Christianity'."

Interesting, thought provoking book. Recommended.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm as sceptical of Christianity as they come, but I'm quite impressed that Wilson's heavy-handed treatment of the topic has pushed me more towards belief. He is very knowledgeable but his use of conjecture is a bit barefaced (Paul might have been circumcised as an adult to impress a Jewish lady who jilted him, or he might have feasibly been involved with the persecution of Christ in his employment in the temple guard, or Luke might've made up the details of Paul's final voyage to Rome...) I give stars for a very informative and entertaining read - the bare facts are reported well, but if you aren't a mature reader you risk getting a bit carried away.

[Andrew Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

More info at my reviews site
An interpretation of Paul’s life and work based on his letters and four Gospels juxtaposed with the historical events and available historical data. Author suggests that Paul, and not Jesus, was the “Founder of Christianity”. He claims that there was nothing in the religious vocabulary of his tradition which would have enabled him to see his death as an atoning sacrifice. It is Paul’s letters which see Christ as the gateway to salvation.

[Kadi W · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book about 25 years ago and finally decided to pull it off the shelf and read it in preparation for a trip to Greece. What a masterly book! Wilson - a secular historian - does a brilliant job placing the apostle Paul into the context of his times and proposes, and thoroughly explains, that Paul - not Jesus - should be viewed as the “founder of Christianity.” The book’s subtitle is “the mind of the apostle,” and reading it has definitely given me new insight into Paul’s impact on the de elopement of Christianity.

[Jon Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I purchased my copy of this book used in hardback from a vendor on eBay. My wife and I will be going on tour of Greece next month that is will visit a number of sites that the Apostle Paul visited on his missionary journeys. In preparation for this trip, I wanted to read a secular biography of Paul that would put his journeys in historical context. This book is certainly secular, and it does a good job of putting Paul's life in the context of the first century. The book is densely written in a scholarly tone with many, many footnotes. Four out of five stars.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not what I was looking for. It is his philosophical musings, so I didn’t know what was based on historical evidence and what was his opinion. There are likely dozens of books like this written by evangelical preachers with very different conclusions. The writing was smooth and erudite; proof again that the British are masters of the English language, but at the same time it read like an unfiltered stream of thought bouncing around between ideas and time periods.

[Monica Mcjunkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read, a bit heavy. I think I've read this one twice. Next time someone tells you that Paul said that women should be quiet in the church, you can point to this book and instruct them that Paul didn't write that letter; some of his epistles were written by his followers.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like 3 1/2 stars for his interesting point of view. However I find it difficult to take seriously what a journalist learns in a brief study of research for a book vs. the lifetime study of a Biblical scholar who teaches about what that person has learned and may end up writing about.

[Brian Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very academic — which isn’t surprising. If you’re looking for an approach to “the historical Paul” this is a decent option. I’m fine with a biographer with a heavy hand, however, not everyone will be.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book. It puts Paul within the millennial switch from BC to A.D. Paul was a Jew, he believed in God, he thought Jesus his Savior. A.N. Wilson tells us his story in a very readable and historical context.

[Ginger Heskett]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14339287

[Ion Morosanu · Rating 4 out of 5]

not impressed

[Mady Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hey Alexa, play “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M.

[Nicholas Kless · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want a non believer view point here is your book. Full of inaccuracies and self doubt. I labored through the book and found it exhausting.

[Anthony Falbo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was ok but the disbelievers point of view got old (my problem, not Wilson’s).