Apostle paul biography book

To Wright, "The problem is that Paul is central to any understanding of earliest Christianity, yet Paul was a Jew; for many generations Christians of all kinds have struggled to put this together. Loading interface About the author. Wright books 2, followers. Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world's leading Bible scholars.

He also publishes under Tom Wright. Write a Review. Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book! Community Reviews. Search review text.

Apostle paul biography book: The Apostle Paul: His Life

Displaying 1 - 30 of reviews. What a great book! The result is enlightening I've been studying Paul my whole life and I just now after reading this book feel that I have a grip on his story and fascinating. Sometimes as Christians we make the mistake of assuming Paul was like a replacement Jesus, a perfect man whose example we can follow to live the best Christian life he was, after all, writing the Bible as he went!

But not only was Paul not perfect, he was bossy, cantankerous, short-tempered, depressed, and error-prone. This, of course, is exactly what we as Christians need from Paul. Not someone to mimic, but someone like us to learn from as he follows Christ. Wright illuminates this perfectly. Paul Fulcher. Author 2 books 1, followers. His books are actually published under two different names, or perhaps brands is a better label - causing some confusion on Goodreads classification system - NT Wright for his heavier theological tomes and Tom Wright for his more entry-level books, such as the New Testament for Everyone collection.

This wonderful new biography of Paul, the towering figure of the early Christian church is pitched somewhere between the two different strands of his writing, although the fact that it has come out under the Tom Wright name speaks to its wonderful accessibility. If at times - see below - it didn't answer all my questions, it certainly sent me in fruitful search of NT Wright's more detailed arguments.

Wright's focus here is to attempt a historic reconstruction of Paul's life, work and his theological developments drawing on the available sources - of course, primarily, the New Testament - but also setting this in the context of what we know of the Roman and Greek world and philosophy Jewish and secular within which Paul lived and worked.

He takes us on a plausible account of Paul's life, consistent with Acts allowing for Luke's requirement to condense many years of travels into a short story and how, why and when each letter was written, struggling only, on both logistical and textual grounds, to find an obvious place for 1 Timothy and Titus. And Wright is excellent at plunging us into the sights, smells, sounds and day-to-day reality of 1st century life, particularly emphasising that for all his brilliance - and one of Wright's key themes is that Paul taught the Church not so much what to think as how to think - that Paul was no ivory tower thinker, but a passionate, often too passionate, human being and a fiercely focused worker.

We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the apostle paul biography book were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop.

Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus. It is history but also, more crucially in my mind, that this is a work my words of deduction but not of creative imagination. So for example, he makes no attempt to guess what Paul's 'thorn' might be, but can deduce that Isaiah 49 must have been a key foundation text for Paul's view of his own role and, somewhat more speculatively, that Paul may well have been meditating on Ezekiel 1 on the road to Damascus, but that when he raised his eyes to the figure on the throne, he saw not God but instead the Lord Jesus.

Wright has had his particular, and somewhat controversial although I think I generally agree with himtheological points to make, notably about his view of what Paul meant by justification and his view on what Paul would have meant by heaven. These are expounded in much more detail in 'NT Wright' works notably: Paul and the Faithfulness of God which is the more theological companion to this biography and Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church where Wright argues Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.

A quote from another of his works see below What Saint Paul Really Said, links both: Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian. And the total context of this doctrine, here in Philippians 3, is that of the expectation - not of a final salvation in which the individual is abstracted from the present world, but of the final new heavens and new earth, as the Lord comes from the heavenly realm to transform the earthly.

Wright's main argument in both cases is that we often interpret Paul's teaching through the lens of the 16th Century reformers for justification and 19th century apocalyptic thinkers for the end of the world view of the resurrectionrather than what Paul would have meant, and this book, while not getting into the theological detail, is excellent at setting Paul's developing theology in his 1st Century context as a faithful Jew.

The other 'charges' which Paul often faces are that he, rather than Jesus, essentially invented Christianity, that, post the road to Damascus, that he despised his own Jewish religious origins and implicitly may therefore be responsible for the later anti-semitism that sometimes stains the Church throughout history and also that his teaching on matters like the role of women and homosexuality has echoes in modern day misogyny and homophobia.

Here he doesn't address the issue directly, but Wright clearly sees Paul's teaching as rooted in the life and teaching of the historic Jesus, and Paul's role, in his own mind, as well as a prophet in the line of Isaiah and Ezekiel: yes, to make the first attempt in turning what Jesus had done into a coherent way of life in response, for Jew and Gentile, but not to distort the teaching of Jesus but rather directly inspired by his encounter with the resurrected Christ.

The second - of being ashamed of his Jewish origins - he addresses in much more detail here, indeed he argues precisely the opposite, that Paul's missions always started in the apostle paul biography book and that he had no concept of Christianity being a seperate or new 'religion', rather the fulfilment of the Torah and the prophets.

And that Paul's key message was He was determined to establish and maintain Jew-plus-Gentile communities, worshipping the One God in and through Jesus his son and in the power of the spirit, ahead of the catastrophe. This is why Paul insisted, in letter after letter, on the unity of the church across traditional boundaries. This book is, though, a little disappointing on the last aspects, which receive little coverage.

He concluded that speech: I believe we have seriously misread the relevant passages in the New Testament, no doubt not least through a long process of assumption, tradition, and all kinds of post-biblical and sub-biblical attitudes that have crept in to Christianity.

Apostle paul biography book: In this definitive biography, renowned Bible

Just as I think we need radically to change our traditional pictures of the afterlife, away from the mediaeval models and back to the biblical ones, so we need radically to change our traditional pictures both of what men and women are and how they relate to one another within the church and indeed of what the Bible says on this subject. I do wonder, sometimes, if those who present radical challenges to Christianity have been all the more eager to make out that the Bible says certain things about women, as an excuse for claiming that Christianity in general is a wicked thing and we ought to abandon it.

Of course, there have been plenty of Christians who have given outsiders plenty of chances to make that sort of comment. But perhaps in our generation we have an opportunity to take a large step back in the right direction. By contrast, Wright emphasis many times that sexual morality was a key cornerstone of Paul's teaching, and something that marked-out the early Christian churches inspired by his example.

Excuse me. Did you see University Challenge apostle paul biography book night? One of the contestants got the answer right: It was Nikita Khrushchev. Philip Yancey. Author books 2, followers. Wright fluctuates between scholarly academic works and more accessible works for the lay reader. This one finds a happy medium between the two, using Wright's formidable scholarship to enrich the breezy tale of one of the most remarkable men in history.

John Anthony. Tom Wright showed me how wrong I was. This is a masterpiece: I saw Paul as I had never seen him before — flesh and blood like the rest of us, human, humane but no slacker or push-over. Driven by the sound and vision of his King, Jesus, on the road to Damascus which fired his cylinders for the rest of his days. This is one of the most important books I have read, this year certainly.

Enlightening and faith affirming - thanks to the Saint and Bishop Tom. I will probably say more when I have had longer to reflect. Scott Wozniak. Author 5 books 93 followers. I thoroughly enjoyed this biography of the Christian apostle Paul. The author does a great job of sharing the cultural context, practical implications, and life choices of Paul.

I've studied the scriptures for years and I still learned some cool things about his life that I hadn't heard before. It was written with humility acknowledging where there is uncertainty or debate and with honesty not pretending that every choice Paul made was correct. Great read. Matt Pitts. Marvelously, marvelously good from start to finish, but the last third was the best.

There are of course the usual caveats of occassional and occasionally significant disagreements with Wright. But those who have mainly heard about Wright from critics who point out where he goes wrong will be thrilled, if they will give him a chance, to see how much he gets right and how beautifully, winsomely, and confidently he goes about it. I listened to the audiobook and loved it so much I bought a physical copy too.

The narrator, James Langston, was a perfect fit for Wright's prose. I'm already ready for more from this partnership. BJ Richardson. Author 2 books 88 followers. NT Wright is currently my favorite author. This summer I read The Day the Revolution began and I felt this book covered a lot of the same ground. Where that book was more specifically on the theology of atonement, this one was a biographical approach in putting Paul's letters into their historical context.

In both books Wright does an excellent job at taking the larger biblical narrative, tying it into the historical context, and then showing us its practical relevance for us today. One thing I did pause on was his speculation on Paul's experience in Ephesus. Wright places the prison epistles here rather than the later more commonly accepted placement in Rome.

I was mostly listening to this on my commute to and from school and do wish I had a hard copy instead so that I could have slowed down here so that I could more critically analyze this theory. It is definitely something I would like to look more deeply into. Wright helps readers sort out all the pieces from Acts and Paul's letters to see a picture of the man, his motivations, his travels, and his life.

Summary: Wright translates his scholarship that gives a "new account" of Paul's life into a popular biography, tracing the life and apostle paul biography book of the apostle through the letters he wrote and narrative of his journeys. Over the last thirty years, perhaps no one has written more on the life and thought of the Apostle Paul than N.

Wright, most notably his two volume Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Wright is associated with what is called "the New Perspective" on Paul. What he has done in this volume is distill his scholarship into a highly readable account of the life and thought of this apostle. Reading this, you will see some of the ways Wright casts the life of Paul in new perspective.

We see this in his portrayal of Paul's Damascus road experience. He imagines Paul possibly reflecting on the vision of Ezekiel, perhaps praying the Shema, when suddenly he gazes upward Wright challenges us to see that this was not a conversion to a new religion, but the shattering and transforming realization that Jesus was the fulfillment of the scriptures Paul had studied so long--that he "had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel's vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah.

In the Galatian controversy with Peter and his subsequent letter, we catch the first glimpse of Paul's transformed vision, where he sees both Jew and Gentile incorporated and included into a new people enjoying the blessing of Abraham's faith. He wanted them to know the heart of God and hear His message of truth and love. Some of the most beautiful truths of the Bible are found in the letters from Paul.

Paul and Jesus gives us a new and deeper understanding of Paul as it illuminates the fascinating period of history when Christianity was born out of Judaism and became the religion we recognize today. Tim is the Founder of Lord's Library. He believes the Bible commands us to minister "as of the ability which God giveth" 1 Peter Tim aspires to be as The Lord's mouth by "taking forth the precious from the vile" Jeremiah and witnessing The Gospel of Jesus Christ 1 Corinthians to the whole world.

Menu Menu. Paul: A Biography. The Apostle: A Life of Paul. Professor Wright has such a gift in taking truth and presenting it [so] it just comes alive. Wright [offers] this grand biography of Paul.

Apostle paul biography book: In this definitive biography,

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