I still can't believe that after reading this small book I've learned so much about one of the most influencial apostles of our time. If you don't know much about Paul, or want to brush up a little, this really is an excellent book.

Of course, if you want to deeply study Paul, you may want to go with a book that's more than 100 and some odd pages, but for my purpose, which was simply finding out "Who the heck is Paul?", I don't think I could have found a better book.

Sanders, the author of several highly acclaimed works on Palestinian Judaism and of two absolutely magisterial works on the historical Jesus, here presents a highly condensed and accessible summary of Paul's thought. The reader should be aware that Sanders (a) locates Paul within the Judaism of his time and (b) has what most Christians (I'm not Christian myself) would call an extremely "liberal" approach to New Testament interpretation.

The book is already so short that summarizing it will require preternatural brevity. But here goes: for Sanders, Paul has an answer (Jesus's death and resurrection) to which he doesn't know the question, and his writings are an attempt not only to pass along the answer but to figure out just what that question is.

This little book is a nice introduction both to Sanders's thought on Paul and, for that matter, to Sanders himself. He's a master of expository prose style, reasonable almost to a fault, and a genuinely towering figure in modern New Testament scholarship; if you find that you like him, you'll want to check out his other books. I especially recommend _Jesus and Judaism_, _The Historical Figure of Jesus_, and _Studying the Synoptic Gospels_ (which he co-wrote with his wife, Margaret Davies -- who, incidentally, is the daughter of famed New Testament scholar W.D. Davies).