Product Description

Paul is the most powerful human personality in the history of the Church. A missionary, theologian, and religious genius, in his epistles he laid the foundations on which later Christian theology was built. In his highly original introduction to Paul's life and thought, E. P. Sanders, whose research on Paul has substantially influenced recent scholarship, pays equal attention to Paul's fundamental convictions and the sometimes convoluted ways in which they were worked out.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100304 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
E. P. Snaders is Arts and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke University. He was formerly Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis in the University of Oxford and Fellow of The Queen's College. His books include Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (1983), and Jesus and Judaism (1985).

Customer Reviews

A vivid introduction to St Paul's thinking
In this short book E. P. Sanders provides a lucid account of St Paul’s theology. Paul’s life was a dramatic one: having been a Pharisee who had persecuted Christians he underwent a dramatic conversion in which he felt himself called to be Christ’s apostle to the Gentiles. This brought him into conflict with those Jewish Christians who believed that Jesus’s message was for the Jews only. Sanders explores Paul’s thought as it is developed in the letters he wrote (the New Testament books of Romans, Corinthians, Galatians etc). Paul emerges as a passionate and inspired theologian, above all a practical theologian. He was not concerned with theology as a dry academic discipline but with solving the problems of the young churches which he had helped to set up. (Should Christians be circumcised? Did salvation from Christ exempt Christians from the law? Is speaking in tongues more important than charity?) The tensions, and occasional contradictions, that Sanders highlights in Paul’s thinking reveal a depth and creativity that later Christian thinkers who have strived harder for consistency often lack. This is an excellent introduction to one of the most remarkable and influential figures in the history of Christianity.

empirical power
somehow sanders convinces he has stripped paul back to his original context and intent. brilliantly written and very very provoking for any serious christian