Read Online Paul A Biography edition by N T Wright Religion Spirituality eBooks

Product details File Size 5645 KB Print Length 476 pages Publisher HarperOne (February 27, 2018) Publication Date February 27, 2018 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B072L5DTCH

Paul A Biography edition by N T Wright Religion Spirituality eBooks Reviews

• This exceptional book is the fruit of 40+ years of exceptional scholarship and thought. I am a New Testament professor and this is one of the finest books I’ve read in recent years. It can be appreciated by everyone from the general reader to academic theologian. Do yourself and those you care about a favor read this book and reflect on the rich insights on every page.
• I read this book in a little over a week, finishing last evening. It is classic N. T. Wright. He attempts to get into the psyche of the former zealous Pharisee to see what made him tick following his Damascus Road experience. Paul comes across as a loveable, but a sometimes prickly defender of God's Covenant People, now extended to include Gentile believers in Jesus. Paul, Wright contends, never left his Jewish roots, but he did understand them now in terms of Jesus as Messiah.
  
  One of his passions was the absolute unity of Jew and Gentile in the one body of Christ with no distinctions between them. He abhorred the idea of two churches, one for Jews and one for Gentiles. The is perfectly aware of the sensibilities of each group but insisted that they respect each other and have full fellowship - down to table fellowship - with each other.
  
  He also maintains that, following the example of Jesus, Paul gave high value to women. He cites the number of women Paul greeted in his salutations to the house churches in Rome, for example, including one whom he recognizes as an "apostle." He argues that Paul is not a misogynist, but that he elevated the place of women in society.
  
  His final summation of the success of Paul's work is priceless. To me, the highlight of the book was in the final chapter. There he contends that Paul;'s emphasis on love and an outward look in the churches he established and nurtured was responsible for Christians establishing hospitals in the 2nd & 3rd centuries, as well as the development of education for a population that was virtually illiterate prior to the work of Paul. Even the technological advance from books on scrolls to codex format he attributes to Paul's extensive use of the Old Testament Scriptures and the consequent need to be able to thumb through instead of scroll through.
• Wright has knocked it out of the park with this book. There's a lot more than dates and places as Wright digs into the culture and customs in which Paul would have found himself. Many biographers seem to feel that they need to make the subject of their book appear to be a saint. Wright has painted Paul as a human being sometimes kind and loving, sometimes angry, and often coming across as arrogant.
  I especially appreciated the way the Wright used Paul's letters to give more insight into Paul the Apostle, and Paul the Man.
  This book definitely gives me a new insight into reading and understanding the Pauline letters.
• Yes, the book is repetitive, as you might expect or have come to expect from someone who writes as much as NTW—repetitive within the book itself and of Wright’s major insights published elsewhere. No, there aren’t biographical bombshells; Wright doesn’t know whether Paul was married, or when and how he died, or whether he went to Spain or wrote Titus. The book takes sides on a few well-established points of debate about Paul’s life, but the sides as well as the debates are well-established. Yes, a fair bit early on, the account shades toward biographical speculation on the one hand (was Saul mystically meditating on the road to Damascus?) and cultural exposition on the other that almost loses track of the individual being biographised.
  
  But this is one of the most inspiring books I’ve read in a long time. The book turns on when Wright ties the themes of individual Pauline epistles to a reconstructed Pauline life behind them. The pathos of 2 Corinthians will never be the same—the account of 2 Corinthians is just where I fell in love with the book. Getting three or four pages on an epistle rather than two hundred seems to clarify and prioritise Wright’s style immensely. I understood much better how it all fits together, and I’ve read a lot of Wright (for instance, if you’re like me and waded through 1500+ pages of Paul and the Faithfulness of God but forgot on p. 1284 what was said on p. 1011, some repetition is a helpful aid to memory).
  
  We need a biography of Paul, and this biography, not to reduce the Pauline epistles to autobiographical source material, but to reconstruct how the man lived out his own Christ-shaped theology and ethics, and to sense from that how we might. When Paul was alive, it wasn’t obvious who Christ was (or would be to believers in a mainstream or orthodox Christianity), or what it would be like to follow Him. The drama of Paul’s life is to see that meaning of a Christlike life contested in one of the first and most important Christlike lives. Christians have been living off the victories and clarities won in and through Paul ever since.
• Absolutely amazing!! I greatly appreciate Mr. Wright's work and have been following, thinking, and praying about the things in which I read of his. This book is outstanding and well worth the read. I am a Minister and ALWAYS love "subtext" if you will. Just below the surface of the text where all the wonderful gems of truth are. Just waiting to be discovered and I believe Wright does a marvelous job of unearthing it. I recommend the book!