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Paul: A Biography Hardcover – February 27, 2018
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In this definitive biography, renowned Bible scholar, Anglican bishop, and bestselling author N. T. Wright offers a radical look at the apostle Paul, illuminating the humanity and remarkable achievements of this intellectual who invented Christian theology—transforming a faith and changing the world.
For centuries, Paul, the apostle who "saw the light on the Road to Damascus" and made a miraculous conversion from zealous Pharisee persecutor to devoted follower of Christ, has been one of the church’s most widely cited saints. While his influence on Christianity has been profound, N. T. Wright argues that Bible scholars and pastors have focused so much attention on Paul’s letters and theology that they have too often overlooked the essence of the man’s life and the extreme unlikelihood of what he achieved.
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." Wright contends that our knowledge of Paul and appreciation for his legacy cannot be complete without an understanding of his Jewish heritage. Giving us a thoughtful, in-depth exploration of the human and intellectual drama that shaped Paul, Wright provides greater clarity of the apostle’s writings, thoughts, and ideas and helps us see them in a fresh, innovative way.
Paul is a compelling modern biography that reveals the apostle’s greater role in Christian history—as an inventor of new paradigms for how we understand Jesus and what he accomplished—and celebrates his stature as one of the most effective and influential intellectuals in human history.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperOne
- Publication dateFebruary 27, 2018
- Dimensions1.8 x 6.3 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100061730580
- ISBN-13978-0061730580
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“An enthralling journey into the mind of Paul by one of the great theologians of our time, a work full of insight, depth and generosity of understanding.” — Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, author of Not in God’s Name
“NT Wright takes the most controversial and influential author of scripture and does something remarkable: he humanizes Paul. I was hooked from the first page.” — Mike McHargue, author of Finding God in the Waves as co-host of The Liturgists Podcast
“A compelling, erudite, and readable biography of the most seminal Christian theologian by one of today’s most celebrated Paul interpreters.” — Miroslav Volf, Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale University and author of Flourishing
“The most winsome feature is the way Wright paints Paul as a . . . three-dimensional, many-sided, complicated human being. Paul: A Biography is a bright, provocative, imaginative, and often brilliant book.” — The Gospel Coalition
“Paul is a compelling modern biography that reveals the apostle’s greater role in Christian history—as an inventor of new paradigms for how we understand Jesus and what he accomplished—and celebrates his stature as one of the most effective and influential intellectuals in human history.” — Englewood Review of Books
“In eloquent and inviting prose, one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars retells the story behind the story, the story of the Apostle Paul. A master teacher here communicates Paul in language every reader can understand.” — Craig S. Keener, F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of New Testament, Asbury Theological Seminary
“The life of one of Christianity’s founders is told by renowned biblical scholar N.T. Wright, who believes that in focusing on Paul’s letters and theology, scholars and pastors have not considered Paul as a person and in the context of his times.” — Publishers Weekly
“Written with the usual Wright combination of erudition, intuition, mature wit, and wisdom, Paul should serve us well as we seek to unlock the keys to the first great Christian theologian.” — Dr. Ben Witherington, III, Amos Professor of NT for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary
“Wright’s excellent book not only brings Paul to life but places that life in the complex and overlapping array of Jewish and non-Jewish communities, all set within the Roman empire.” — John Richardson, Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Edinburgh
“Brings alive not only Paul but also the communities where he formed churches and the religious ideas swirling around them. . . . This highly readable volume gives those interested in biblical history something to argue about and plenty to ponder.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Nobody who preaches on Paul or ever interested in Paul’s life and message will want to miss this treatment of him by N.T. Wright. It sheds fresh light on Paul’s ministry, theology and personhood, and it does so in a gripping and readable way.” — John Ortberg, Senior Pastor of Menlo Church
“Wright draws from a lifetime of study to construct this useful biography. Accessible and engrossing . . . Wright looks to the realities of what Paul dealt with . . . anxieties, broken relationships, beatings, imprisonments [revealing] a very human Paul. . . . An excellent introduction.” — Kirkus (starred review)
“C. S. Lewis spoke of three artistically construed figures who jump off the page—Plato’s Socrates, Boswell’s Johnson, and the evangelists’ Jesus. I am tempted to add a fourth candidate, having encountered Tom Wright’s careful, tender, and bracing enfleshment of the apostle Paul!” — Edith M. Humphrey, William F. Orr Professor of New Testament, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
“As lucid as it is salient, this book is a must-read for all readers of the New Testament and all interpreters of early Christianity.” — Paul N. Anderson, author of From Crisis to Christ
“Walking a fine line between presenting a fresh perspective in Pauline theology and reworking the Pauline corpus according to his own biblical theology, Wright’s work, although intended for the informed layperson, will spark much debate among scholars and students.” — Library Journal
“One of Wright’s best books . . . Eloquent and moving.” — Bible and Culture
“A very deep dive into Paul. Professor Wright has such a gift in taking truth and presenting it [so] it just comes alive. I can’t say enough about it. I love the book” — Relevant Radio
“The great N.T. Wright [offers] this grand biography of Paul. An exciting book.” — The Eric Metaxas Show
“In his monumental, meticulously detailed and elegant study, Wright presents a fascinating portrait of a man who went from persecuting Christians to being their biggest advocate.” — BookPage
“A fresh look at the Jewish heritage and the essential place in Christian history of the man converted on the road to Damascus.” — Tampa Bay Times
“Substantive yet accessible, Paul provides a 432-page exploration of the Apostle’s beginnings, his missionary journeys, his struggles and passion, and much more.” — The Christian Post
“Compelling . . . a magnificent biography worthy of a wide readership.” — Church Times
From the Back Cover
For centuries, Paul, the apostle who “saw the light on the Road to Damascus” and changed dramatically from zealous Pharisee persecutor to devoted follower of Jesus, has been one of the church’s most widely cited early teachers. Yet for leading New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright, most Bible scholars and pastors have not fully grasped what Paul was actually doing and why.
In focusing on Paul’s letters and theology, Wright argues, they have, in short, overlooked the essence of the man’s life and the extreme unlikelihood of what he achieved. In response, Wright offers a new way of understanding one of the most famous Christian figures. Wright draws attention to Paul the man—the man who survived assassination attempts, imprisonments, and shipwrecks all while inventing new language and concepts for faithfully translating Jesus’s story for the Gentile world.
In this pioneering new account, Wright celebrates Paul’s humanity, arguing that this is the best context for understanding him and ultimately for appreciating how he invented new paradigms for how we understand Jesus. “The problem,” Wright explains, “is that while Paul is central to any understanding of early Christianity, we cannot understand him without taking full account of the pre-Christian Jewish beliefs and hopes that he believed had been fulfilled in Jesus.” Only when we consider Paul in this manner can we move on to understanding how he led the way for Christianity to conquer the Roman world.
About the Author
N. T. Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He serves as the chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews as well as Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University. He has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. Wright is the award-winning author of many books, including Paul: A Biography, Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope, The Day the Revolution Began, Simply Jesus, After You Believe, and Scripture and the Authority of God.
Product details
- Publisher : HarperOne; First Edition (February 27, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061730580
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061730580
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 1.8 x 6.3 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #52,111 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in New Testament Biographies
- #36 in Paul's Letters (Books)
- #1,719 in Christian Spiritual Growth (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Paul: A Biography
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About the author
N.T. WRIGHT is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He is now serving as the Chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. For twenty years he taught New Testament studies at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities. As being both one of the world’s leading Bible scholars and a popular author, he has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. His award-winning books include The Case for the Psalms, How God Became King, Simply Jesus, After You Believe, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, Scripture and the Authority of God, The Meaning of Jesus (co-authored with Marcus Borg), as well as being the translator for The Kingdom New Testament. He also wrote the impressive Christian Origins and the Question of God series, including The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection of the Son of God and most recently, Paul and the Faithfulness of God.
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There are many books about St. Paul, including other titles by Wright himself, but most of the books available deal with the complexities of Paul and less on the person. Oftentimes biographies of Paul tend to look at him from a psychological point of view, which given how he is such a larger than life personality can be fascinating, but very few books look at the person of St. Paul. This is what Wright does in this work and it is clear he not only is fascinated by studying the accounts of St. Paul in Acts of the Apostles and the letters, but Wright is fascinated by Paul and loves the man as he demonstrates by admiring his strengths and acknowledging his quirks and faults. As he writes about the events in Paul’s life, he also looks at the letters he was writing at the time. He also gives a good amount of time to understanding Paul’s Judaism and the Judaism of the time, both in Jerusalem and for those living in other parts of The Roman Empire which is key to understanding St. Paul. He likewise gives a vivid portrait of the Roman Empire at the time which is essential since most of St. Paul’s travels were to cities and colonies of the Empire. What emerges is a spiritual journey of one of the greatest figures of our faith and we gain an appreciation of not only his dedication to God but his contributions to the Early Church. This is not a sit down a read in one sitting kind of book, and while most chapters are lengthy, many are broken down into smaller portions. I read it in smaller portions which made it easier to follow what was happening and gave me time for reflection.
This would be an excellent choice for a church related book club or would be a fascinating way to spice up a Bible Study on Acts of the Apostles or the Pauline Epistles. What I do think is important to keep in mind, however, is that while Bishop Wright is a scholar and he can support his positions in the book which differ from other Pauline scholars, this book is not scholarly in nature. Still, it is a great book that enlightens us and challenges us as we look at this great figure from the New Testament and is sure to not only give the reader new outlook on St. Paul, but a better appreciation of what it means to follow Jesus Christ.
The book is composed of an introduction and fifteen chapters and presents Paul in a way accessible to non-scholars. Wright aims to invite a more general readership to seriously consider Paul anew, and so to this end he does not directly engage other Pauline scholarship. Additionally, Wright provides a friendly map at the beginning of each chapter, which greatly aids in following both Paul’s incessant movement as well as the narrative flow of Wright’s book.
Wright sets out two objectives for his book: First, he wants to get inside the mind of Paul, that is, to understand what Paul understood himself to be doing as he preached, traveled, wrote, and suffered for the Gospel. Second, and in light of Paul’s own understanding, Wright wants to revisit what happened on the way to Damascus.
Wright has a deep love for scripture and a deep love for history, and he reaches for both as he seeks to meet the two objectives of his book. What emerges is a careful unfolding of Paul’s own clearsighted apprehension (in light of the Risen Lord who calls him) of scripture as one Messianic story of God’s people, whose hope is finally fulfilled through the unexpected and unimagined faithfulness of a crucified Messiah, revealed to be the very Son of God, and before whom Temple and Torah are reckoned mere signposts.
If the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah (Christos) even to the cross is the answer to the hope of Israel, Wright also argues that Paul knows Jesus as the one in whose name the Gentiles also find hope. The faithfulness of the crucified Messiah, paradoxically, is revealed to be the one in whom all the promises of God find their ‘yes’ (2 Cor 1:19). So, as Wright notes, Paul, just because of his faith in the crucified Messiah, “can travel the world of Rome and think the thoughts of Greece without fear or shame” (201). This is because Paul knows that the Messiah and his cross are not one more truth among many small truths; rather, the cross is the Wisdom of God, ordering and purifying even the truths of pagan philosophy.
Still, the victory won by the Messiah cannot be understood apart from the story of Israel, and nowhere does Wright make this case more convincingly than in presenting Paul’s reason for writing the Letter to the Romans. Wright argues here, as he does also at greater length in his commentary on Romans in The New Interpreter’s Bible series, that Romans shows us Paul writing to an almost exclusively Gentile church, but one that is in danger of forgetting, or even of consciously rejecting, the Jewish people and therefore also the Jewish origins of their own faith. For Paul, this is an issue of surpassing theological concern, as well of great personal anguish, as we see so clearly in the letter. And so we have Romans, Paul’s masterpiece, in which he writes that the power of the Gospel is for “Jew first and then the Greek” (Rom 1:16), and that it is because of the Lord Jesus that the wild shoot of the Gentiles has been grafted onto the rich roots of the faith of Israel, and in God’s own time this shoot will aid in his Jewish people coming to faith in Jesus.
Wright is an engaging storyteller, and very effectively immerses us in the complex world of the 1st century. Moreover, he thinks Paul has something to say that the contemporary world ought to hear. We see Paul in action in a way that brings a renewed intimacy to the familiar figure of Acts of the Apostles. We see Paul’s boldness and tireless missionary zeal, especially in Wright’s gripping account of Paul’s evangelical courage at the Areopagus—surely an important word to those in the contemporary Christian landscape who advocate retreat in the face of a society hostile to the message of the Gospel. And we see what drove it all, namely, Paul’s great charity, borne from the love that he himself experienced personally from Jesus. “Yet I live, no longer I, but the Messiah lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Gal 2:20) occurs like a refrain throughout Wright’s book. By drawing on theology and history—God’s words in human fashion—Wright better positions us to see the power, and also the stumbling block, of Paul heralding the Messiah, crucified and risen.
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I got into Wright's writing this year after the passing of my Dad, himself a gifted preacher, who always told me, "Tom Wright really gets it." Thanks in part to this book, I think that I get it now, too. Since reading "Paul: A Biography, I've bought and gifted it to my father-in-law and grandfather, and anticipate repeating this several more times.
A very interesting and mature work presenting the life and thought of the most important Christian thinker in ancient history: the Apostle Paul. As a result of a whole research life on the figure, Tom Wright deals with confidence and—most of the time—with clarity about Paul in his historical context. Although aware of both Jewish and Roman backgrounds, Wright emphasizes—way more, one should say—the former as the matrix through which Paul is trying to read and explain the Christian faith. The second chapter, on the significance of "zeal" for the young Saul was very helpful for me. The question of change of style in some of Paul's letters (esp. from 1 to 2 Corinthians) as a result of experiences of deep suffering in Ephesus is also quite thought-provoking.
However, I still bring some important questions concerning the whole work. The main ones are:
1) It seems like Wright speculates too much about Paul's prayer life. For instance, according to Wright, the significance of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus is directly related to the Jewish practice of prayerful meditation in key passages, especially Ezekiel 1. Although a fascinating suggestion, it has very little biblical-historical basis. No direct scriptural echo is pointed. But for Wright, relating Ezekiel 1 to the Damascus experience explains why Paul suddenly understood why the One God Creator was present in Jesus Christ. Interesting, but too thin.
2) Wright is not clear concerning the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral letters. He spends several pages for Galatians and Romans, but Titus and 1-2 Timothy are briefly overviewed in 3 paragraphs, with a question mark on the chronology. Not that this position is exclusive to Wright—several Pauline scholars affirm that these letters were not penned by Paul—but he gives little clue to the questions. Maybe this is not the book for that, but a straightforward position, either pro or against Pauline authorship, could have been taken.
3) Wright does not get to more complicated issues concerning Paul in his historical context. A good example is the longe-debated affirmations of Paul about women in church. Wright explores the democratic statement of Galatians 3:28, and how this was attractive for women in the Roman World (check the chapter "The Challenge of Paul"), but how can we set passages such as 1 Corinthians 14 or 2 Timothy 2 in Paul's life and historical backdrop? Again, we're dealing with a biography, not a theological introduction to Paul, but it would be at least interesting to consider these passages as part of Paul's influence, in order to answer one of the book's big question "Why was Paul's ministry successful" in spite of such limitations to the female gender?
All in all, this is a consistent book, and some paragraphs can make you rediscover the power of Paul's legacy (See the closing of the book on pp. 430-2). Even the way Wright explores Paul's insistence on the unity of Jews and Gentiles in Romans and in the last chapter is highly elegant, way far from dead academic halls we can find elsewhere. Here's an author in love with Paul, and who might make you have a "road to Damascus experience" with the apostle's life.
A passionate deep thinker and troublemaker. A zealous energetic man. A man who has a way with words. Yet when we are introduced to him he Is also a persecutor of the followers of the Way, the followers of Jesus. He was driven and fervent in everything he did, but his “epiphany” on the road to Damascus when he met the risen Jesus renewed and transformed him. He was resurrected. Wow!
I think Paul is a bit like marmite; you either love him or you don’t.
Perhaps spread thinly he’s just about palatable but Paul was a man who rarely (lets say never) did things half heartedly. With Paul you got it all. He was a man dare I say (just like David) after Gods own heart.
So it was with great excitement when Igot my hands on Tom Wright’s new biography on Paul this year.
Useful as a doorstop (you are warned!) but this examination of Paul the man and his times is thrilling, heartwarming, vibrant, fascinating, illuminating and quite frankly brilliant. Paul is passionate. Paul like Jesus was a Jew. Paul like Jesus suffered both physically spiritually and mentally. Paul changed the world by spreading the Word; the Good News of Jesus Christ to all.
By his arguments, his discussions his public speaking, his actions, his love to all- gentile, Jew, Roman, slave, rich man or poor, woman or man, Paul transformed hearts and minds and ultimately people’s souls. I argue he still does today through the remnants of his letters,and of Luke’s portrayal of him in Acts.
No doubt about it Paul was a complex man. Highly intelligent, fervent but tempered by and through God’s love. He modelled what Jesus taught by loving and serving God with all his heart all his mind and all his strength and also ultimately his life.
Writing as Tom Wright rather than N T Wright means that this is a portrait of a man and his times made understandable to everyone and anyone. In other words you don’t need a theology degree! I read it every morning in bite sized chunks and would recommend it to anyone who wants to delve into Paul, the society and cultures he lived in and what motivated him. He speaks to us today just like Jesus still does. A compelling portrait; Paul the Apostle was and continues to be a fascinating compelling man.