Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

These cautious historical proposals about the real-life situation faced by Jesus-followers in Jerusalem and by their colleagues (if they saw them as such) in the Diaspora offer a corrective to the oversimplifications that have all too easily crept into readings of Paul. This has been a particular problem for modern Western readers. Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: “science” deals only with “hard facts,” while the “arts” are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.” Some types of Protestantism have imbibed this deeply, supposing that “the gospel” is all about inner feeling, a disposition of the heart, and not at all about outward reality or actions, whether moral or “religious.” Sometimes people have thought that this is the one and only meaning of Paul’s teaching about “justification by faith not works.” But things were not nearly so simple.