SAINT PAUL

by Michael Grant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1976

Michael Grant, British historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, regards St. Paul as one of the world's ""most perpetually significant men"" and as such a deserving subject of general, not just theological, historiography. Situating Paul's perennial relevance primarily in the realm of ideas--his wrestling with the paradoxes of law and freedom, reason and faith, sin and salvation affect us yet--Grant devotes the bulk of his book to a careful, expert, and eminently reasonable untangling of the apostle's complex, even contradictory, assertions. With the authentic Epistles as primary sources, and Acts of the Apostles as secondary, he makes good use of the central and collateral texts and contemporary scholarship to elucidate Paul's thought in the light of its Jewish background, the Greek and Roman setting, and subsequent interpretation. In sum: a brief (198 pages of text), literate, well-informed, balanced, religiously neutral account of the saint's thinking and career. But the gospel Paul preached is more than the sum of its ideas, and to grasp it is to be confronted by its uncompromising demand for personal decision about Jesus as Lord and Savior. And that is why men like Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, Barth--and the Epistles themselves--communicate Paul's meaning with an authority that Grant's book, for all its correctness, lacks.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION