- Hardcover
- Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc (April 1997)
- ISBN-10: 0614280427
- ISBN-13: 978-0614280425
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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From the Publisher
Jesus was no Christian, and his friends made no effort to break away from Jesus's religion, Judaism. What we call Christianity began with a Jew from Eastern Turkey known to the world as Paul of Tarsus.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
A.N. Wilson is an award-winning novelist and biographer. He is the author of the bestselling Jesus, which caused a sensation when it was published in 1992. Equally controversial, Paul, is stimulating, scholarly and highly readable. A.N. Wilson’s novels include The Healing Art (Somerset Maugham Award), Wise Virgin (W.H. Smith Award) and the five books in The Lampitt Chronicles. His biographies include studies of Jesus, Sir Walter Scott (John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and John Milton, as well as of Tolstoy (Whitbread Award for Biography), C.S. Lewis and Hilaire Belloc. He lives in North London. (19970801)
--This text refers to the
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ON 19 JULY in the year AD 64, a fire broke out among the squalid, timber-built little shops which clustered around the Circus Maximus, the great sports stadium in Rome. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
ON 19 JULY in the year AD 64, a fire broke out among the squalid, timber-built little shops which clustered around the Circus Maximus, the great sports stadium in Rome. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
As a fairly conservative evangelical christian I am usually wary of secular books on biblical subjects. There tends to be a desire to shock; 'Jesus was really a woman', 'Noah was chinese', that sort of thing; and a thinly-disguised antagonism to any spiritual element. However, having previously read A.N. Wilson's account of The Victorians I decided to give this a go.
In general I found it a very worthwhile read; we christians are perhaps too quick to see people like Paul in their biblical context, and forget that they were part of history too; part of the politics and culture of the Roman Empire, a relatively well-documented era of history. Wilson's book looks at Paul from this historical standpoint, in particular shedding light on Paul's vital role as 'apostle to the gentiles' by bridging the gulf between the Jewish mindset and the philosophy and customs of the rest of the first century Roman world.
He clearly likes Paul, and finds him intriguing, and this book strikes me as a very open-minded and honest attempt to understand Paul's outlook and milieu. I may not agree with all his conclusions - in particular I think it is a pity that he generally dismisses Luke's account in Acts since there is so much biographical information here, some of it witnessed at first-hand - however this book doesn't claim to be a devotional study of Paul and I am willing to accept that this is his genuine opinion as a historian; there is no fervent anti-christian bias here. If we only read books we agree with 100%, then our understanding of the world will be very limited.
In fact A.N. Wilson is willing to take most of Paul's writings at face value, and is carried away with enthusiasm when he speaks of the book of Romans, a book many christians would see as the key book in defining the message of the Bible, although, understandably, he sees its appeal in intellectual, rather than spiritual terms.
For christian's who are open-minded enough to appreciate another view-point, this book is an intelligent, thoughtful book that will shed light on the world of the New Testament, and for non-believers this is a useful exploration of the life and thought of a man who, like it or not, shaped how we all think today.
In general I found it a very worthwhile read; we christians are perhaps too quick to see people like Paul in their biblical context, and forget that they were part of history too; part of the politics and culture of the Roman Empire, a relatively well-documented era of history. Wilson's book looks at Paul from this historical standpoint, in particular shedding light on Paul's vital role as 'apostle to the gentiles' by bridging the gulf between the Jewish mindset and the philosophy and customs of the rest of the first century Roman world.
He clearly likes Paul, and finds him intriguing, and this book strikes me as a very open-minded and honest attempt to understand Paul's outlook and milieu. I may not agree with all his conclusions - in particular I think it is a pity that he generally dismisses Luke's account in Acts since there is so much biographical information here, some of it witnessed at first-hand - however this book doesn't claim to be a devotional study of Paul and I am willing to accept that this is his genuine opinion as a historian; there is no fervent anti-christian bias here. If we only read books we agree with 100%, then our understanding of the world will be very limited.
In fact A.N. Wilson is willing to take most of Paul's writings at face value, and is carried away with enthusiasm when he speaks of the book of Romans, a book many christians would see as the key book in defining the message of the Bible, although, understandably, he sees its appeal in intellectual, rather than spiritual terms.
For christian's who are open-minded enough to appreciate another view-point, this book is an intelligent, thoughtful book that will shed light on the world of the New Testament, and for non-believers this is a useful exploration of the life and thought of a man who, like it or not, shaped how we all think today.
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a sort of companion book to Wilson's "Jesus" but is actually the better of the two. As a biographer, Wilson has great gifts, but as a Biblical exegesist he's just an enthusiastic amateur. This book, then, plays to Wilson's strengths, which are a profound ability to empathise with spiritual and psychological conflicts and a great imaginative grasp of the period. Wilson certainly brings the 1st century Mediterranean world to life and the book is full of interesting asides, anecdotes and literary allusion. Wilson also seems to _like_ Paul (something few Christians could boast of) and is content to explore and tease out the many contradictions in his personality and history without imposing some theological agenda on the matter. As with "Jesus" this is not a book for Bible-based Christians, who will dislike having the omissions, evasions or outright fabrications of Scripture pointed out to them, but it's a book terrifically sympathetic to Christianity, though refusing to be sentimental about its origins. Terrific.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A.N. Wilson creates a vivid picture of Paul, the man we like to blame for virtually everything we don't like about the Christian religion. He tells us about Tarsus (a city in what is now Turkey) where Paul grew up as part of a Jewish diaspora and gets us to think about the difficulties that Paul faced in making sense of his identity - an issue very familiar to us today.
Wilson also prompts us to think more sympathetically about Paul's personality. He was neither the "saint" of church history nor the demon of anti-church history, but instead a flawed and self-contradicting human being like us: conservative in some things, progressive in others; a man in which an idealistic light battled the darkness of fear and ambition. Wilson also reminds us that without Paul's relentlessness and conviction the nascent Christian movement might well have come to nothing; it takes a forceful man to set a force in motion.
Finally, it's interesting to compare this book with Wilson's biography of Jesus. As good as that is this is better. Thinking about why that should be the case it seems to me that there's an element of self-identification going on: Wilson feels (I think) a certain kinship with the hard-to-love but passionately intelligent apostle.
Wilson also prompts us to think more sympathetically about Paul's personality. He was neither the "saint" of church history nor the demon of anti-church history, but instead a flawed and self-contradicting human being like us: conservative in some things, progressive in others; a man in which an idealistic light battled the darkness of fear and ambition. Wilson also reminds us that without Paul's relentlessness and conviction the nascent Christian movement might well have come to nothing; it takes a forceful man to set a force in motion.
Finally, it's interesting to compare this book with Wilson's biography of Jesus. As good as that is this is better. Thinking about why that should be the case it seems to me that there's an element of self-identification going on: Wilson feels (I think) a certain kinship with the hard-to-love but passionately intelligent apostle.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Reads like a novel
Wilson is simply a master at making the reader 'feel' a bygone era rather than merely describing it in dry, academic terms. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Andrew Carruth
A skeptic's take on a man of faith and courage
A.N. Wilson sets out to explode the traditionally respected Apostle Paul. Unfortunatley Wilson sometimes asks for greater leaps of faith to believe his 'naturalistic'... Read more
Published on 15 Oct 2008 by KC
A Secular Examination Of The Sacred
"Paul: The Mind Of The Apostle" is A. N. Wilson's attempt to delve into the mind of one of the most influential people world history. Read more
Published on 10 Aug 2006 by James Gallen
Intelligent, elegantly written historical polemic
Wilson has written an intelligent, lively and (to me at least) revelatory book about the crucial role Paul had in "inventing" Christianity. Read more
Published on 22 Nov 1998
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