Customer Reviews

Evidence and Paul's Journeys

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I love history because I love stories, and the Acts of the Apostles is filled with wonderful stories. But Luke's narrative tone is a bit prosaic, and the familiarity wrought by frequent rereading can take the edge off the excitement of the events Luke describes.

"Evidence and Paul's Journeys" brings the excitement back. As he corroborates detail after detail of Paul's missionary journeys, Mr. White casts a raking light on the excitement and drama of Paul's travels and brings them into sharper relief.

All Christians recognize St. Paul's importance in shaping the early church and in spreading the Gospel well beyond its earliest boundaries. But I for one was only dimly aware of the sheer drama of his life. What adventures he had! Arrests and trials, torture, shipwrecks, preaching before cheering throngs and reviled by angry mobs, encounters with fascinating people from all walks of life and of countless ethnic backgrounds (was Paul the first multiculturalist?). All Paul's adventures and encounters are here, placed solidly within their social and historical context so that Paul's great courage and faith shine forth.

"Evidence and Paul's Journeys" will send you back to Acts with fresh eyes, able to appreciate once again the power of the wonderful stories Luke tells.

Jefferson White's Evidence & Paul's Journeys: An Historical Investigation Into The Travels Of The Apostle Paul is a comprehensive guide and a fascinating survey to Paul's travels for the purpose of spreading the message that the Messiah had arrived and his name was Jesus. Written specifically for the non-specialist general reader, Evidence & Paul's Journeys is a compelte and detailed examination of the historical evidence for Paul's journeys and related activities in founding and advising Christian communities. Very highly recommended for personal, small group, and parochial school studies, each evidential point presented in Evidence & Paul's Journeys is scrupulously footnoted to a comprehensive and scholarly appendix that aptly serves as a basis for further study making it ideal for personal and small group New Testament studies.

The majority of this book deals with Acts. The author breaks all the evidence therein down into bite-sized chunks and deals with each piece in a straightforward and no nonsense fashion while following a self-imposed rule that "a contradiction cannot be proved if there is a reasonable explanation for it" (p. 118). This rightfully narrows the field of contradictions down to a scant few and warrants the author's assertion that: "The Acts account of Paul's journeys is as reliable as we may expect history to be. So far as it can be tested by objective evidence, Acts has proven to be an astonishingly accurate record of events" (p. 134). All of this evidence eventually points to "one of the most striking aspects of the Acts record" which is how many of the details "belong to the middle of the first century, and to that era alone" (p. 132).

He also deals with empirical evidence regarding 1 and 2 Corinthians and states: "If Paul had not written a second letter to Corinth, or if that letter had been lost to history, the travel plans that he outlines in the first Corinthian letter would contradict Luke's account of his movements in the third journey" (p. 88). We can apply this same logic to the perceived contradictions elsewhere and wonder if they wouldn't be just as easily cleared up if there were more manuscripts extant relating to that time--we shouldn't look askance at the Biblical narrative because it has a remarkable track record but question our limited understanding of that particular time.

Easy writing style that won't leave you exhausted; nicely done.
--Moza

This is an excellent introduction to the missionary journeys of Paul. While concise and easily readable, the book does a nice job of blending history, archaeology and the Book of Acts into an informative narrative.

The author briefly and directly dissects the recorded accounts of the apostle Paul's journeys. Problems, real and not so real, with reconciling the accounts to information from other sources, are analyzed. This is hardly a gripping page-turner, it is rather dry, but it is informative. A far more enjoyable exposition of Paul is John Pollock's `The Apostle: A Life of Paul,' but, while also being quite informative, Pollock's is a very different kind book. At only 134 pages plus notes, bibliography and other materials, White's book is very focused and concise. His scholarship seems rather solid. Taken as brief essays in their own right, his Prologue and Conclusion are quite interesting. This from his Conclusion:

"The present study has been concerned with the problem of empirical evidence and its relationship to the record of Paul's journeys.
"This stands in marked contrast with the purpose of modern biblical scholarship, which is largely concerned with theoretical matters rather than with evidence. Nor should it surprise us that scholars find theory more interesting than evidence. After all, the primary purpose in getting a Ph.D., or for publishing scholarly papers, is to demonstrate the depth of one's knowledge and erudition. Since the empirical evidence surrounding Paul's journeys is limited and can be understood even by non-scholars, career-track biblical scholarship almost has to be about something else. And that something else must be complex enough so that only the cognoscenti can understand it. As a discipline, biblical scholarship inevitably points away from empirical evidence and toward intellectual novelty.
"It does not help that the primary purpose of the New Testament is to record God's intervention in human history. Modem scholarship in general proceeds from an intellectual culture of unbelief. That culture is based on the a priori assumption that any theory, no matter how subjective, automatically trumps any argument, no matter how empirical, that points to the possibility of divine intervention in history."

I used this book to supplement a teaching series on Paul's journeys. I found the book to be easily readable, very informative, and interesting. In my opinion, anybody who wants to study the missionary journeys of Paul should read this book. The extra-biblical evidence is not only interesting but encouraging and faith building.

I am the author of this book. The single star review of my book is okay in and of itself. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. But the reviewer states that my book is a rip-off of Conybeare and Howson's 1851 book on the Apostle Paul -- and that is a flat-out lie. There are eleven pages of footnotes in "Evidence and Paul's Journeys," most from twentieth century works dealing with historical evidence that C-H had no knowledge of. Even the main nineteenth century authorities that I cite are all post-Conybeare and Howson, as is their evidence. (On Paul's letters, I relied heavily on Paly, who is actually before C-H). Indeed, I did not use C-H as a source at all because they are just too dated. This review should be taken down by Amazon, since it is a fraud.

A good portion of this book is lifted from Conybeare and Howson's "Life and Epistles of St. Paul" without citation.

This is a very carefully written synthesis of New Testament information concerning the missionary travels of St. Paul. The problem of reconciling information contained in N.T. letters attributed to Paul and the Acts of the Apostles is not trivial, but this book does a very good job of analyzing the data.

I found this book to be particularly helpful in preparation for adult Sunday School teaching.