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Paul: The Mind of the Apostle
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Average Rating:  out of 46 Reviews
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Price: $16.95
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Sale: $5.50
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Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780393317602
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: A. N. Wilson
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Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
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Dewey Decimal Number: 225.92
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Publication Date: 1998-04
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Reading Level: 274
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Description: 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
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: A good book - to understand a bad approach |
Date: 2008-12-09 |
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Details: This book is good if you want to understand the thinking an approaches used by one that does not believe
a) Jesus is God or ever claimed to be God
b) The apostles were inspired in any way
d) Scripture is inspired by God and applicable to us
According to this book there are three main groups coming from Paul, Peter, and James. James is the only one that "got" the meaning of Jesus' teaching, and that was to do good deeds. Peter and Paul had their own spins and battled it out with Paul's version winning the popular non-Jewish influence. It is sad this is even classified as "religious". But if you want to understand the approaches these type of people will use, this is a good reference book. |
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Review Summary: Thought-provoking but flawed |
Date: 2008-08-08 |
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Details: Since the Catholic church declared "The year of Saint Paul" commencing in July, 2008, a lot of people will be wondering whether to buy this book. I say yes - with some caveats.
Wilson is an engaging writer and makes a lot of illuminating observations. For example, describing the Temple as an "abattoir" sounds disrespectful at first glance, until you consider just what was happening to all those doves, lambs, goats, and heifers people brought in. This is an easily read book that is hard to put down.
But far too often Wilson builds his arguments on decidedly shaky foundations. On one page he will openly speculate and 20 pages later he treats that speculation as proven truth. And this happens again and again. This habit constitutes a major flaw of the book.
Surprisingly, Wilson seems most comfortable analyzing the theology of the "authentic" letters. And, while he is sceptical of Jesus' divinity, he can not help but wonder how a "simple Galilean exorcist and faith healer" exerted such an influence on his countrymen.
Perhaps this is best read from the library or as a used book. |
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Review Summary: Befogging Biography |
Date: 2007-12-16 |
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Details: All I wanted was a closer understanding of who Saul was. What I got was a harsh doubting editorial. Wilson continuously unfocuses his train of historical narritive to cast shadows upon Saul, Jesus, and Christianity' roots.....Book Quotes: "Paul was to develop into a richly imaginative, but confused, religious genius" pg27. Luke's gospel is "a rather strange introduction" pg 67. "Luke is a ham-fisted historian who attempts to put a shape on recalcitrant material" pg 67. Regarding feeding the five thousand; "We do not even know whether these events took place" pg 64. Regarding Stephen's martydom "It is hard to know how much of this story to believe" pg 64. Wilson calls Saul's conversion "Christian Mythology" pg61. Are you sitting? Hardy little Wlison goes onto attack the New Testament "the absurdity that bodies really come to life or float through the clouds" pg 73. Brothers and sisters he then turns upon you. "The modern Christian who bravely continues to believe in a real star of Bethlehem or an actual Garden Tomb in Jerusalem from which Jesus rose is making the same mistake....as Finding Homer's Troy" pg73. In one bold sentence Wilson slashes the reader, the resurrection and reduces Christianity to a myth. Doubtings and accusations fill this supposed biography. Page 205 "We can now guess" about Peter and Paul. Do you think that Wilson forgot to chip away at the Christian church? On page 163 he compares it to a "club" or "Freemason's lodge". He accuses the church as being "incorrigbly misgynistic" pg 143....... A biography is exactly that; a related culture bound experience. This fixated psychotic book does no justice to the indexes of 'biography'. It reduces early Christianity to the notion of a fantasy and Christ as a myth. This virulent editorial's ambition is raging gauze covered Christ bashing. Looking for history I was frustrated. Reading as a Christian I was exasperated. |
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Review Summary: An eye-opening journey into ancient history |
Date: 2007-07-26 |
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Details: Full disclosure up-front: I am not a Christian though I was raised in a semi-Christian household by a Catholic mother and Lutheran father. I knew the stories but they were never forced on me. I was never asked to believe anything, religious or otherwise, without testing it out first for myself.
It is probably for this reason that "Paul: The Mind of the Apostle" appeals to me so strongly. Wilson admits right up front that there are no extant non-biblical references to Paul which makes his task as biographer extremely difficult. Nevertheless, there is a fair amount of non-biblical historical data of the era and a great amount of literary scholarship of the past 1900 years that he utilizes to paint an incredibly detailed picture of the eastern Mediterranean of the first century. Within that framework, he creates as definite a portrait of the wandering tent-maker as he can without grossly overstepping the boundaries of speculation (or at least qualifying those few occasions as speculative).
Other reviews on this page cite him for picking and choosing his sources, agreeing with parts of Acts and discounting others, crediting certain sources above others, etc. This is true. However it is accompanied by an explanation of why he is doing this that is always well researched and well justified. Numerous times he pulls out the original Greek of the text he is critiquing and demonstrates how the original word has been corrupted by translation and what the original actually means. His critique of Acts is specifically along the lines of comparing the fiery temperament of Paul in his Epistles to the Rome-appeaser portrayed by Luke in his pseudo-history.
In the end, it is a compelling and entertaining read that walks a road considered dangerous - even blasphemous by one reviewer - by those who blindly accept traditional biblical history. For those who are interested in the process of searching for the actual story - and even some suggestions as to what "The Way" might have been had orthodox doctrine not taken it over - I have yet to find a better read. |
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Review Summary: A.N. Wilson: The Limited Mind of the Author |
Date: 2007-03-22 |
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Details: The first tip that we are in the realm of the skeptic is the blurb by Karen Armstrong on the back of the hardcover. Then as we read the first chapter we find the author's aside that although first century Christians probably did not deliberately start the fires in Rome that Nero used as a pretext to slaughter them, maybe there might be some truth to the mad Emperor's claim as the fire may have accidentally started in a Christian's home. Then a few pages later we read that although Nero's immolation of Christians and feeding them to wild animals was cruel, certainly later Christian Church endorsed acts such as the persecution of the Albigensians were more terrible in scope and nature. Hmm, if one were reading a book that touched incidentally on the Cambodian genocide or the Holocaust and one read sentences like "Perhaps the Cambodian victims inadvertently brought their persecution upon them by their dedicated adherence to a foreign culture..." or "Although the Holocaust was terrible, later acts of oppression and apartheid by the Israeli state were far worse..." one would think one was reading the work of a kook with an axe to grind. That is about the scope of what we are looking at in A.N. Wilson's book. He has a marked distaste for Christianity as an irrational peasant religion (Gibbon is quoted frequently and admiringly) and feels Jesus was an ordinary preacher whose death created a synergy with the messianic and apocalyptic mood of the times to offer a ready-made myth that was developed and expounded into a more universal religion by Paul and others.
No matter what one makes of Wilson's premise, the tools of his analysis are clumsy and ill-wielded. The only evidence we have of the preaching of Jesus and Paul's life and career come from Scripture. Wilson postulates the entire New Testament is inaccurate propaganda written long after the event that occurred and is mostly fictional, intended to justify certain ideological conclusions that the actual events did not necessarily ratify. The problem then is that if every piece of evidence offered is tainted and flawed, how can you use it to argue any position let alone a contrarian one? That is Wilson's dilemma, and he cannot fulfill this impossible mission. He selectively cuts and pastes texts, opposes Gospel to Acts, Acts to Epistles, Epistles to Gospels and sometimes finds one source convincing and other times the other source, based on, you guessed it, whether or not that particular source agrees with his thesis. So some parts of Acts are good, others bad, some parts of the Gospels useful, others unreliable, etc. He also completely ignores the Gospel of John, saying it is entirely propaganda and not at all truthful, which is necessary for Wilson's premise as some elements in John (Jesus' claims of divinity and ministry to Gentiles) completely sink Wilson's main ideas.
The extreme arbitrariness of Wilson's judgment and overt manipulation of relevant texts suggests to the reader that his argument is not to be taken seriously. Basically Wilson says don't listen to the Christian interpretation of the Bible, listen to his instead. I see no reason why we ought to do that, as his jumbled argument and cavalier attitude towards his main sources would be unacceptable in a college freshman's research paper. The Biblical story as presented and interpreted by mainstream Christian thought is far more persuasive, compelling, and logical than anything Wilson offers in opposition.
Strengths of the book? Wilson appears to like Paul more than he thought he might. As a result, he does a bit to clear Paul of the slanders made against him by post-Enlightenment secular culture. Paul's attitudes to women, homosexuality, and oppressive political authority are justified in Wilson's view because of the eschatological mindset of the apostle and the intellectual and cultural background he was raised in. (It is a sad sign of the state of scholarship in our times where an author recognizing such obvious points is unusual, but I will give praise where it is due.) Besides this relative and limited open-mindedness, Wilson has done much research into the ancient world, and his knowledge of the history and culture of ancient Rome is impressive, although again very selectively presented and interpreted so as to buttress his conclusions. He is a witty writer, and very entertaining at times, and his willingness to speculate wildly can occasionally produce some interesting insight, like in his chapter on Paul in Arabia. Overall though, much of Wilson's narrative is utter speculation and not in the least well-grounded in any objective historical evidence.
I am hard pressed to define an audience for this book. Devout Christians will find Wilson's condescension, anti-Christian bias, and utter skepticism to be off-putting, if not actually blasphemous. Open-minded believers willing to at least listen to secular interpretations of the Biblical world will be disappointed as the wild-eyed manufacture of radical theory and overt heavy-handed arrangement of history and Scripture into a tortured knot that supports the radical premises is paradigmatic of bad scholarship, an exercise in futility that makes "The Da Vinci Code" seem realistic and nuanced in comparison. Atheists who could care less about Christianity won't want to waste time on this odd little diatribe when they could be reading that new book by Dawkins instead, and anti-Christians will be annoyed by Wilson finding anything good to say about that "nasty paternalistic homophobe", Paul.
In conclusion, this book's overly partisan mindset and flawed historical and text analysis methodologies leave much to be desired. Wilson wants to twist the evidence to suit his idea of what Christianity is and how it started, and unless you agree with his every premise and will turn a blind eye to his dishonest and biased mishandling of the historical record, you will find this book to be a dead end. Occasional moments of wit and generally good writing cannot justify a wrong-headed intellectual premise and inept literary execution.
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