What Paul Meant (Hardcover)

by Garry Wills (Author) "The most important event of Paul's life, that which determined everything else, was his encounter with the risen Jesus..." (more)
Key Phrases: whole gathering, Jewish Brothers, Jewish Law, Gentile Brothers (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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)
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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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (November 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670037931
• ISBN-13: 978-0670037933
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #230,478 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

112 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A popular presentation of Pauline Issues.LIttle Theology., December 6, 2006

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`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.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Raises some interesting points, January 1, 2007

By	Reader from Fairport (Fairport, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Paul Meant, May 3, 2008

By	Stephen Williams "Stephen Williams" (Hawthorne, California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: What Paul Meant (Paperback)

Review of: "What Paul Meant"

By: Garry Wills

Paul was the first letter writer of Christianity.

His epistles are considered the most pessimistic writings of the early church.

Despite the pessimism of Paul's epistles, he guided the early church and aided the growth of the early church. The author, Garry Wills, calls the growth of the early church an explosion of belief. He says of Paul: "Paul was part of this explosion of belief." Garry Wills says that Nietzsche called Paul the "dysangelist" or the bad news bearer, and "a man with a genius for hatred." This is in contrast to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the "evangelists" or the good news bearers.

The author asks the question: "how much of this notoriety is deserved?" His answer: "very little."

This book uses seven of Paul's letters: "Letter to the Thessalonians", "Letter to the Galatians", "Letter to the Philippians", "Letter to Philemon", "First Letter to the Corinthians", "Second Letter to the Corinthians" and "Letter to the Romans." These are the letters whose authorship is not disputed.

Author Wills shows that Paul echoed and amplified the message of love spoken by Jesus. Paul had the same message of love as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John when he reports on the teaching of Jesus.

This book also gives details of the life of Paul and of the history of early Christianity.

See Also:

What the Gospels Meant

and

What Jesus Meant

This book is a good amplification of the meaning of Paul's letters. It is clear and easy to understand and the reasoning is very sound.

I recommend "What Paul Meant" as a supplemental guide when reading the New Testament or as a stand alone text.