Paul : The Mind of the Apostle - Softcover

A.N. Wilson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 071266663X ISBN 13: 9780712666633

Publisher: Pimlico, 1998

Synopsis

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. Paul has had many detractors, believing him to be the originator of the Christian prejudice against women and homosexuals, or the bigoted theologue who distorted the message of Jesus. This book sees a different Paul, the first of the great romantic poets, the man who made the crucified Jesus his inner light and in so doing preserved the image of Christ the Saviour for posterity.

About this title

Review

A.N. Wilson, who has written revisionist biographies of Jesus, Tolstoy, and C.S. Lewis, trains his critical eye on the first self-identified Christian writer in Paul: The Mind of the Apostle. Wilson's book may purport to be a biography of Paul, but it is really an argument about the origin and nature of Christianity. His premise is that "Jesus was a devoted Jew who did not seek to found a new religion, but to call his followers to a stricter observance of Judaism." It was Paul, not Jesus, who exemplified the central tensions of Christianity. ("Jewish or non-Jewish? Roman or anti-Roman? Apocalyptic or practical?") And according to Wilson, it was Paul who first claimed Jesus' divinity and called Jesus the messiah. Wilson's argument, though heterodox, is no hatchet-job. Paul may be "widely regarded as someone who distorted the original message of Christianity, by adding 'theology' to the supposedly simple message of love Jesus preached," but Wilson sees Paul as "a prophet of liberty, whose visionary sense of the importance of the inner life anticipates the Romantic poets more than the rule-books of the Inquisition." Wilson concludes that Christianity is "an institutionalised distortion of Paul's thought, the inevitable consequence of the world having lasted ... more than nineteen hundred years longer than he predicted." Wilson's prose is just this lively and provocative throughout, and his observations are always skeptical and forgiving: "Paul did not imagine that there would be such a thing as Christianity, or Christian civilization, any more than Jesus did." --Michael Joseph Gross

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pimlico
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 071266663X
• ISBN 13: 9780712666633
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288