Best biography apostle paul

Reading N.T. Wright is delightfully invigorating. He is surely the most influential, and perhaps the most prolific, living New Testament scholar of our day, and an evangelical Christian to boot.

This has made Wright into the darling of millennial Christian thinkers, who look to someone like an N. T. Wright, as having the academic smarts, challenging the critical voices against Christianity in the 21st century, as well as possessing a cheerful, pastoral giftedness. N.T. Wright puts the often complex world of contemporary scholarship closer near the “bottom shelf,” where mere mortal, everyday Christians can appreciate and apply a more learned approach to the New Testament, as opposed to simply reading the Bible on their own, with little to no oversight to guide them.

N.T. Wright: Scholar, Pastor and Popularizer

Otherwise known as “Tom” Wright, in his more popular writings, it has been often said that N.T, or Tom, Wright writes faster than most people can read. How he has found time to write as much as he has, while at one time serving as an active Anglican bishop, who only in recent years is now focused again on scholarship, is a wonder on its own.

Beleaguered by top notch critical scholars for several generations now, that appear to want to rip the Bible to shreds, thoughtful evangelicals take comfort in the fact that N.T. Wright has gone up against the brightest and best in the world of academia, and he has come out relatively unscathed. Even more so, he stands out with his good-natured, jolly British demeanor, as he declares his scholarly view of a wholly trustworthy and reliable Holy Bible. For a younger generation of evangelicals, N.T. Wright makes you feel lik

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"Except for the Lord Himself,no single figure has done more for the Christian faith."

If you want to understand Christianity, you need to understand Paul. But with so many books on the apostle, where do you start?

Paul the Apostle is the ideal choice if you want a solid understanding of Paul's life, ministry, and writings without getting weighed down with minutia. Author Robert E. Picirilli, who taught college courses on Paul for over twenty-five years, found that most books on the apostle were either too technical or too basic, so he wrote a book that strikes a happy medium. It offers:

• A profile of Paul in his historical and cultural context
• Outlines and explanations of his missionary journeys
• Introductions and brief analyses of each of his epistles

Useful for individual study or as a textbook (as it is in many universities today), Paul the Apostle is a great one-stop study of the man who wrote half the New Testament, spread the gospel to the heart of the known world, and gave his life for the Kingdom.

Nearly two thousand years after Paul’s death, books about the apostle continue to proliferate at an astonishing rate. Where does one begin exploring the life of the most important person (aside from Jesus) in the history of the church?

Reference Points

Aside from the New Testament itself, the place to begin is F.F. Bruce’s now classic Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Eerdmans, 1977)—the most readable and engaging biography of Paul. A classic from a previous era that still gives insights is William Ramsay’s St. Paul, the Traveler and the Roman Citizen (18th ed., 1935).

Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin, and Daniel G. Reid have edited the definitive reference on Paul’s writings in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (InterVarsity, 1993). Though mostly about Paul’s thought, it contains enough history to justify a recommendation!

In addition, any one of the many Bible dictionaries on the market are a gold mine of information on Paul and his times.

Exploring the Era

We live in the best of times in terms of books about Paul’s times. Specialized studies on nearly every aspect of first-century life are now available. A few I like are these:

Everett Ferguson’s Backgrounds of Early Christianity, second edition (Eerdmans, 1993) is perhaps the most accessible and thorough overview of the era, covering history, religion, and culture.

Joachim Jeremias’s detailed Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus: An Investigation into Economic and Social Conditions during the New Testament Period (Fortress, 1969) rewards the patient reader with numerous insights into the city and culture in which Paul was raised.

Westminster Press has recently (1986) published an 8-volume Library of Early Christianity (Wayne Meeks, general editor) that explores various aspects of first-century Christianity. For ex

A few days ago, I started reading a book that I bought about a year ago in a bookstore’s bargain aisle. The book is Paul by E.P. Sanders from the “A Brief Insight” series. The letters of the Apostle Paul form a big chunk of the New Testament. In those letters, his unique way of addressing problems in religious communities have had an enormous influence on the development of Christianity.

But Sanders’s 200-page work is the first book I’ve ever read focused specifically on Paul. Before I even finished reading the first chapter, I already started thinking about what the next book would be that I would read about Paul. I do this often: whenever I get interested in a new topic, I go on Amazon.com and try to find the most authoritative book on that subject. It’s handy information. Sometimes I even make a short bibliography of what the first books would be that I would read if I were to study the topic more closely.

It’s always satisfying to find the one definitive book on a subject: a recently-published and comprehensive resource you can turn to that will bring you up to speed on a subject in one fell swoop. Interested in Johannes Brahms? A quick search on Amazon.com will reveal that Jan Swafford’s biography, a 752-page tome decorated with 33 reviews averaging 4.5/5 stars, is beyond a shadow of a doubt the place to turn for all your Brahms needs.

No such definitive biography currently exists for Paul the Apostle. I was looking for a biography written by a scholar that focuses on the facts of his life and the historical context of his work: something objective that would give insights into Paul’s often-confusing letters. I found three works that kind of fit the bill. But none of these seems outstanding and can be called the current “definitive” biography. They are:

1. Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity by James D. Tabor, a professor of religious studie