Retrieved from: my library0393040666, 1997
Suggested by: a review--and see below
My Ratings: 9 Merit, 9 Interest, 9 Fun
I read Wilson's biography of Jesus when it came out. It was a refreshing look at the gospels, with the knowledge that Wilson says that writing this book turned him from agnostic into an atheist. I was more than prepared to be annoyed with him then, and was very pleasantly shocked to find Jesus: A Life to be really well-written and disapassionate.
So I came to Paul--my bete noir in the New Testament, as he is for many modern Christians, I think--with certain expectations. Wilson lived up to my hopes. He only looks at the letters most scholars agree Paul definitely had somethign to do with himself: all of I Corinthians, some of II Corinthians, Romans, I Thessalonians and Philemon. He compares Paul's minimal autobiographical notes with the story told in Acts (by Luke), and finds several places where the stories don't just diverge, they contradict one another.
Wilson doesn't claim to do the primary scholarship of digging through the words of Paul's writings himself, he uses other's works for that. His talent is taking all the possible parts of the story of the first century and putting them together into a coherent whole so we 20th- and 21st-century readers get a sense of the politics and necessities of life at the time.
Because of his intentional limitations, this isn't a particular deep book, but as a synthesis, it is good. One of the things I liked most is his assumption of a basic familiarity with the period and timeline of history of the early Church. I didn't have to skip much, because he didn't really go into a bunch of what would be reruns for me. A really good overview of Paul. Move onto others after this, like Paul: A Critical Life, by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor.
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