Product Description: For someone who has exercised such a profound influence on Christian theology, Paul remains a shadowy figure behind the barrier of his complicated and difficult biblical letters. Debates about his meaning have deflected attention from his personality, yet his personality is an important key to understanding his theological ideas. This book redresses the balance. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's disciplined imagination, nourished by a lifetime of research, shapes numerous textual, historical, and archaeological details into a colourful and enjoyable story of which Paul is the flawed but undefeated hero. This chronological narrative offers new insights into Paul's intellectual, emotional, and religious development and puts his travels, mission, and theological ideas into a plausible biographical context. As he changes from an assimilated Jewish teenager in Tarsus to a competitive Pharisee in Jerusalem and then to a driven missionary of Christ, the sometimes contradictory components of Paul's complex personality emerge from the way he interacts with people and problems. His theology was forged in dialogue and becomes more intelligible as our appreciation of his person deepens. In Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's engaging biography, the Apostle comes to life as a complex, intensely human individual.
Disappointing To begin with, the author does not, as someone else has indicated, use Luke's book of Acts as the blueprint or roadmap in his account of Paul's life (he makes this clear in his preface). On the contrary, he takes his primary information only from Paul's letters, appeals to Luke when it suits his point, and blatantly states Luke is in error when Acts disagrees with his view.
For example, the author appeals to the accuracy of Acts in its account of Gamaliel's status as a teacher (5.34), that he was Paul's teacher (22.3), his warning not to persecute the followers of Jesus (Acts 5.38-39), of Paul's conversion experience (9.3-22), of his vocation (18.3), and of Barnabas' recruitment of Paul to preach in Antioch (11.22-26). So far, so good. Yet he goes on to deny Luke's account of Paul's ever having any official sanction from Jewish authorities to persecute the church (9.1-3); denies the account of 9.19-25, that Paul was ever in any real danger in Damascus, "One is forced to wonder if Paul did not exaggerate the danger"; and considers the account of the first missionary journey (Chaps. 13-14) to totally inaccurate and has "so many improbabilities that it becomes impossible to accord it any real confidence. One can only speculate as to what Luke's sources might have been, and then on the use he made of them."
A further problem is that of proof texting, e.g., based solely on Acts 21.21 the author has Paul opposing the retention of any Jewish practise by Jewish Christians. But that is not what that verse says. Verse 21 is part of James' discussion with Paul upon Paul's return to Jerusalem and after the Judaisers and others have been roaming throughout the new churches attacking him, the gospel he preaches, and trying to stir up animosity and opposition toward him from any quarter possible. In light of these facts and Paul's own teaching in Romans 14-15 it is pure eisegesis to interpret Acts 21.21 as proving Paul forbade any voluntary retention of old practises. This is further proved by Paul's own conduct as described in verses 22-26.
It is truly unfortunate that Father O'Connor has decided to cut and paste Scripture to his liking in order to further his own theories and hypotheses, for he is a gifted writer and obviously a very learned man. But one cannot have it both ways. Either Luke's account is on the whole reliable and can be appealed to or is inaccurate and should be ignored.
Many in modern scholarship, both critical and conservative, consider Luke's account in both his volumes to be an accurate reporting of the facts, and his writing to be the closest to a truly historical account (from a modern perspective) of all the books in the Bible. It has achieved this recognition because over time it has been subjected to rigourous analysis and investigation which has resulted in many parts of his accounts being validated through extra-biblical sources, e.g., archaeology.
While Father O'Connor's book offers some insight into Paul's life, because of the problems exampled above it is on the whole a disappointment and is not a book I would recommend.
Nice Little Novel Jerome Murphy-O'Connor offers here a nice little novel. Using Luke's Acts of the Apostles as his main road map, M-O sprinkles parts of St. Paul's New Testamental auto-biography through his story. (M-O begins by saying this book is offered in the wake of his more scholarly "Paul: A Critical Life". Perhaps this novel is a companion text for his earlier book.)
"Paul: His Story's" novelistic writing style makes its 239 (hardback) pages a quick read. M-O's scholarship, as usual, is noteworthy. Using an extensive endnotes section he, curiously, does not apply reference numbers through the text.
M-O's reconstruction of St. Paul's life is fascinating and illuminating. Certainly, much of the book's conjecture will invent discussion and inspire re-thinking of Pauline chronologies.
Although the book is well-founded in Scripture, there is little comment from beyond the New Testament sources for Paul. Patristic sources are practically all ignored. Also, M-O offers no comment on St. Paul's nuclear family (his wife and children) and only marginal hypothesis for his family of origin (page 2).
Knowing that history is often a best-guess enterprise, M-O tells a good story filling many gaps in Paul's life. M-O is original thinking about how, and which ways, Paul traveled. The book also proffers interesting analysis for biblical-geographical distances.
This book is recommendable to all who are interested in St. Paul and the world of Late Antiquity.
The Search for the historical Paul of the New Testament Father Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a respected Roman Catholic priest and New Testament scholar, has written his second work upon Paul in a decade. Utilizing his years living in Jerusalem & his personal knowledge of bibical Israel and the Mediterranean world that Paul inhabited, he has written a brief but engaging reconstruction of Paul's life and theology.
Father Jerome takes issue with traditional Pauline scholarship as he re-interprets Paul's letters and Luke's Acts of the Apostles. He advocates for a more worldly Paul and fills in the considerable gaps of his personal life with bold deductions (Paul's parents were slaves, Paul was married, his children later died in an accident, etc). His views on Paul's theology are more mainstream but fused with his knowledge of that era.
This book is geared toward the general reader and could be read in tandem with the recent publication of Bruce Chilton's "Rabbi Paul" which represents a more traditional outlook of Paul. For those readers wanting to dig deeper into Paul's life and theology, the earlier and more detailed works of Gunther Bornkamm and E.P. Saunders are still available.
An excellent life- the place to start. Paul will always remain an enigma. He was a complex, insecure man whose contradictions drove him into tortured eloquence. In many accounts of Paul's theology, however, one misses this. He is treated as if he had a coherent and worked out theology which laid down rules for all times. The greatest achievement of this biography is to show just how human Paul was and why one certainly should not give 'gospel truth' status to his letters. They were written in such a variety of circumstances and in response to so many different challenges (most of which remain unrecorded) that they can really be treated as only relevant to the immediate circumstances in which they were written. O' Connor knows his subject and , as is not always the case with writers on Paul, the world in which he lived backwards and so his portrait is compelling. In making Paul so human,Murphy O'Connor actually makes his achievement seem more rather than less remarkable. In short this book is a healthy antidote to the forbidding theological superstar image (created originally by the church fathers in the fourth century) that Paul is often given and much more credible as a result.
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