Product Description

A brilliant synthesis of the Apostle Paul’s thought and influence, written by a "foremost Catholic intellectual" (Chicago Tribune)

All through history, Christians have debated Paul’s influence on the church. Though revered, Paul has also been a stone on which many stumble. Apocryphal writings by Peter and James charge Paul, in the second century, with being a tool of Satan. In later centuries Paul became a target of ridicule for writers such as Thomas Jefferson ("the first corruptor "), George Bernard Shaw ("a monstrous imposition"), and Nietzsche ("the Dysangelist"). However, as Garry Wills argues eloquently in this masterly analysis, what Paul meant was not something contrary to what Jesus meant. Rather, the best way to know Jesus is to discover Paul. Unlike the Gospel writers, who carefully shaped their narratives many decades after Jesus’ life, Paul wrote in the heat of the moment, managing controversy, and sometimes contradicting himself, but at the same time offering the best reflection of those early times.

What Paul Meant is a stellar interpretation of Paul’s writing, examining his tremendous influence on the first explosion of Christian belief and chronicling the controversy surrounding Paul through the centuries. Wills’s many readers and those interested in the Christian tradition will warmly welcome this penetrating discussion of perhaps the most fascinating church father.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #393023 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This slender volume is something of a sequel to Wills's blockbuster What Jesus Meant; here, Wills defends Paul from detractors who insist that the apostle corrupted Jesus' radical message. Beginning with a reminder that Paul's letters are older than the gospels and therefore may represent the most authentic approximation of Jesus' teachings, Wills argues that Paul was right in line with Jesus. Both men stressed love of God and love of one's neighbor as the two principal commandments. Wills highlights the differences between the Pauline epistles and Luke's later writing about Paul, arguing that the famous story of Paul's road-to-Damascus conversion, which comes from Luke's account in Acts, is flawed, and that Paul himself did not consider his convictions about Jesus a "conversion," but part of his ongoing life as a Jew. Through a reading of Romans, Wills attempts to acquit Paul of the charges of anti-Semitism. And though Paul is often tarred as a misogynist, Wills shows that he "believed in women's basic equality with men." (Since Wills focuses only on the seven letters that most scholars agree were written by Paul himself, the egalitarian Paul becomes credible; some of the most overtly sexist passages come from letters written later and ascribed to Paul.) Provocative yet helpful, this book is sure to create a buzz. (Nov. 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Poor St. Paul. He is not in particularly good odor nowadays. A deluge of recent books and films has swept Jesus back into the public eye, but the apostle to the gentiles, whose Epistles fill nearly as many pages in the New Testament as the Gospels, languishes under a cloud of contempt.

The aversion is widely shared. Many Christians believe that rather than spreading the message of Jesus to the world, he betrayed it. Most Jews harbor a distinct dislike for this teacher of Torah who converted to Christianity. Besides, isn't he the original source of Christian anti-Semitism? Didn't he condemn Jewish law, exalt faith over works, and crisscross the Roman Empire urging synagogue congregations to accept Jesus as the Messiah? Didn't this prissy arch-patriarch warn women not to speak in churches, to cover their heads when they pray and to be submissive to their husbands? Isn't he also the font of Christian homophobia? All in all, the man some people call the true founder of Christianity does not seem to have many friends out there today.

But, says Garry Wills in his new and lucid book, all these depreciators are just plain wrong. Paul was neither an anti-Semite nor a misogynist. In fact, he never converted to Christianity at all, which did not yet exist when he had his blinding experience on the Damascus road. What happened to him on the road was not a religious conversion. It was a call, similar to those received by the Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah before him. As for women, the verses that put uppity sisters in their place are found not in Paul's writings but in those falsely attributed to him. Paul himself frequently commends women leaders in the congregations and proclaims that in these new messianic congregations there should be "neither male nor female, neither slave nor free."

What happened on the Damascus road was that God charged Paul with a message and a mission: Go tell Jews everywhere that the messianic era they had prayed for had dawned and that a certain rabbi from Nazareth, slain by the Romans as a threat to their empire and raised from the dead by God, was the long-anticipated Messiah. Therefore, Paul insisted, the hour had now come -- as the prophets had foretold -- to welcome the gentiles into the covenant community previously restricted to the seed of Abraham.

Not everyone believed Paul's message, of course, but enough -- both Jews and gentiles -- did to constitute a new movement within an already diverse Jewish community. Paul had no intention of starting a new religion. The only Bible he knew (and he knew it well) was the Jewish Scriptures. Wills believes that if Paul could have foreseen that his occasional letters to the small congregations he had launched in Corinth, Ephesus and other imperial cities would one day be collected in something called the "New Testament," and that the only scripture he knew would be called "old," he would have vociferously objected.

Still, one old and vexing question remains: Why did a tiny Jewish sect, born in Palestine, spread with such uncanny rapidity through the Roman world? Wills suggests simply that the time was ripe for just such a message. With the Roman pantheon in decay -- dismissed by thoughtful people as mere superstition -- and with Roman society rife with moral putrescence, the Jews' strict monotheism and stern morality held a powerful attraction. Large numbers of gentiles were already attending synagogues but hesitated to undergo the circumcision and dietary restrictions required for conversion. At the same time, many Jews were looking for a more universal expression of their faith, in keeping with the emerging cosmopolitan culture. Paul's message attracted both. He taught that God had given his law to both Jews and gentiles, the former in the Torah, the latter by nature. All had fallen short, but now all were forgiven and called to constitute a single new and inclusive community in which there was "neither Jew nor Greek."

Wills is not a biblical scholar, but he is a voracious reader and an eloquent writer who makes judicious use of the best recent scholarship. So it is odd that he ignores the most exciting new direction in Pauline research, which suggests that the Roman Empire was not just the background of Paul's life and work but shaped his every word and deed. The empire was shaky, and Paul discerned its inner rot. He saw his task as preparing infrastructure that would replace it when it collapsed. Thus he gave the congregations he organized a political, not a religious name: "ecclesia," meaning an official assembly of citizens. When these upstarts insisted that there was someone higher than Caesar to whom they owed supreme loyalty, Roman officials saw that they threatened the symbolic capstone of the whole system. The empire executed Peter and Paul, and Jesus before them, because the imperial elites did not view their movement as a harmless, otherworldly cult but as a real and present danger.

Paul has gotten a bad rap. He took the first big step in transforming a universal message, stifled by a provincial culture, into a world-circling faith. It is time to free him from the misconceptions that have distorted his significance.

Reviewed by Harvey Cox
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Lacking the distracting critiques of WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) buttons and Benedict XVI that bracketed the main text of What Jesus Meant (2006), that book's companion gets right to the point. Is Paul "the bad news man," who corrupted the teachings of Jesus into an antisexual, antiwoman, anti-Semitic apology for oppression? Apocryphal second-century writings characterize Paul as an instrument of Satan, early critics called him the father of heresies, and to him has been attributed the most stringent, damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't predestinationism. Newly translating the seven epistles now considered authentic for his references, and arguing from historical discoveries about other New Testament references to Paul, especially in Acts, Wills begs to differ. Paul's writings are the earliest Christian texts and, Wills maintains, are as orthodox as their priority suggests. They attest that Jesus is the Messiah, preaches a gospel of love, and rose from death to redeem humanity. They uphold Jewish law, repeatedly acknowledge women's equality, and discourage sex and marriage only personally, not as a matter of faith. Like Jesus, and since his epistles predate them, more authoritatively than the Gospels, Paul taught that salvation comes from the Jews. To help clarify his exculpation, Wills avoids certain words, especially church, Christians, priests, and sacraments,because nothing corresponding to their modern meanings was used by early followers of Jesus. The affect of that decision is revelatory and makes this explanation of Paul dazzlingly enlightening. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A popular presentation of Pauline Issues.LIttle Theology.
`What Paul Meant' by Garry Wills is a new entry into the growing field of popular and semi-popular / semi-scholarly books on the life and doctrines of the apostle, Paul of Tarsus. Other recent entries into this sweepstakes include N. T. Wright's `What Saint Paul Really Said', `Rabbi Paul, An Intellectual Biography' by Professor of Religion, Bruce Chilton, and `The Gospel According to Paul' by Oxford (Lincoln College) don, Robin Griffith-Jones. And, this is not all of them, but only the ones I've read and reviewed recently. Pastor Wright's book, for example, is a reply to another recent book, `Paul: The Mind of the Apostle' by A. N. Wilson and Wills' book is rich with bibliographic notes to yet other, more scholarly titles. The best thing about this bumper crop is that each and every volume has been written by a major scholar in the field of New Testament studies. Most, other than Professor Wills, appear to have a Protestant affiliation. This is not surprising as ever since Martin Luther, Paul has been the hero of Protestant theology to the likes of Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, Kierkegaard, Barth, Harnack, and Bultmann.

My hunch is that the wellspring of all this popular writing has been the scholarly writings of Professor Ed. P. Sanders, who, with some others, has created a `new perspective' on Paul's intellectual background with his books published over the last thirty years. While I have been studying Paul and the New Testament for just a short time, my overall impression at the moment is that what most of these `new perspective' writers, including the authors of these popular works, is to restore us to the opinion of Albert Schweitzer, whose scholarly works on Paul were published between 60 and 90 years ago. Schweitzer's opinion was that Paul's thought was firmly rooted in the Judaism of the Pharisees, and that the century of scholarly blather preceding Schweitzer's work had done nothing to establish the contention that Paul imported Hellenistic (stoic and Platonic thought primarily) thinking into Christianity.

I have looked closely only at Paul's Epistle to the Romans, but I do know Platonism quite well and I find it totally puzzling how anyone could consider Platonism to be a more important influence on Paul than the Jewish writings in `the law and the prophets and wisdom' which we today call the `Old Testament'. Every page of Romans seems to bristle with references to Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Leviticus and what have you. Against pages dedicated to theology of the God of Israel, I see one brief reference to a notion that may possibly have been borrowed from Plato's doctrine of innate ideas.

Unlike Pastor Wright's excellent volume, Professor Wills' book is less directed at explaining Paul's theological doctrines than it is directed at disproving many false impressions created over the years about Paul's opinions, most of which are more social or historical than theological. Like `Rabbi Paul', much of Wills' argument is with the disparities between Paul's letters and Luke's `Acts of the Apostles'. One of my early discoveries in my recent study of Paul is the fact that of all the `books' of the `New Testament', Paul's genuine letters were by far the earliest writings.

Of the thirteen (13) Pauline letters, seven (7) are believed to have been written by Paul himself. These are, in chronological order, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and Romans. All were written before 55 CE, decades before the first Gospels and Acts of the Apostles were written. This means that of the events in Paul's life and work, they are the only first hand reports we have, as Paul was executed around 62 CE in Rome, probably as part of Nero's `pogrom' against the Christians in his effort to blame them for start ing the Roman conflagration. So, any misconceptions about Paul that arose from reading Acts are immediately suspected.

Professor Wills addresses Pauline issues regarding relations with Peter, women, difficult gatherings, Jews, his relation to the James and the Jerusalem church, and the Roman church. Just as it is almost incomprehensible that people should attribute Paul's theology to Hellenistic sources, it is baffling how, after reading Romans, his longest and most important Epistle, one can possibly consider his writings to be the foundation of Christian anti-Semitism. On the other hand, it is quite easy to see Luther's writings as a source of Christian and German anti-Semitism, but then, Luther misinterpreted Paul's approach to Judaism to fit his own agenda.

While Wills' book is written for a lay audience, it is quite careful in avoiding misleading language and anachronistic terms which Paul himself never used, such as `church', `congregation', `Christ', and `Old Testament'. Thankfully, Wills is much better at avoiding extreme revisionism, unlike Griffith-Jones in `The Gospel According to Paul', which becomes almost unreadable until you get used to his `authentic' translations.

Wills' book may not be the best starting point for a study of Paul, as his bibliography is just a bit thin. (Wright's book is far better, although it is also more difficult reading). However, Wills' book is by far the best if you want a strong overview of Paul's thought with no interest in pursuing Pauline theology or the history of scholarship into Paul's life and writings.

This book certainly whets my appetite for reading Professor Wills' book on Augustine, on which he appears to be a major authority.

Raises some interesting points
I thoroughly enjoyed "What Paul Meant." Wills points out many interesting things about Paul's letters and does a good job contrasting them to information about Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. It's a very interesting book--I like his translations of Scripture. (I presume the translations are his--he never says so explicitly). Wills seems to have as good a vision of Paul and his mission, as it is possible to have almost 2000 years later. He is right in pointing out that there was no Christian Church, as we think of it now, in Paul's life time. Becoming a follower of Jesus did not mean leaving Judaism for Paul or for any other Jew.

I would have wished to know more about Wills' criteria for judging the reliability of those Christian documents that came after Paul's letters. He does believe that much of what Luke writes about Paul is not historical--Luke had a particular agenda. But he often quotes later Christian works in support of a particular point he is trying to make. For instance he cites the Letter of Clement of Rome, which suggests that Paul might have made it to Spain. But Clement almost certainly wrote after Luke. So why should we trust Clement?

I would recommend "What Paul Meant" for people interested in this great apostle, who do not want to wade through a "scholarly" book.

half a loaf
In his book Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000) Garry Wills left readers wondering why he remained Catholic given his unsparing criticisms of institutional Catholicism. He tried to answer that question two years later with Why I Am A Catholic (2002). With five books on Saint Augustine, and his book Lincoln at Gettysburg (1993) that won the Pulitzer Prize, Wills remains one of our country's most important public and outspokenly Christian intellectuals. Today he is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. In this sequel to What Jesus Meant (2004), Wills tries to rescue Paul from those who view him as "the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus" (Thomas Jefferson).

There's a sense in which Wills agrees with detractors like Jefferson, or Bernard Shaw, who excoriated Paul as a "monstrous imposition" upon the gentle Jesus, for at the end of the day he too excises what he considers is a "massive misreading" of Paul by interpreters like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, with their emphases on sin, guilt, election, justification, and predestination. Wills's Paul is a radical egalitarian who taught the same ethic of indiscriminate love as Jesus (cf. 1 Corinthians 13), and a "heroic traveler" who logged more than ten thousand miles to spread this love. In his view, later "impersonators and interpolators" turned Paul into a misogynist and anti-Semite. Undergirding this interpretation of Paul are two critical presuppositions--that most everything that Luke writes about Paul is "nonsense, exaggeration, poetic creation, [and] fiction," and that only seven of the epistles attributed to Paul are authentic. So much for canonicity (contrast, for example, Jaroslav Pelikan on Luke in his book Acts).

Still, I appreciated Wills's intent to argue that "what Paul meant was not something other than or contrary to what Jesus meant, but that we can best find out the latter by studying the former. His letters stand closer to Jesus than do any other words in the New Testament." Wills was a classicist who taught Greek for many years, so I also appreciated the appendix with his translations of key words, an effort to move readers from stubborn anachronistic and linguistic accretions that have bred over-familiarity ("gathering" instead of "church," for example, or "emissary" instead of "apostle.").