A stimulating insight into St. Paul

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2005 by R.D. Kernohan

Paul: His Story. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]16.99 xvi 259 pages. ISBN 0-19-926653-0

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a Dominican and the New Testament professor at the Ecole Biblique et Archaelogique Francaise in Jerusalem, is probably best known for his masterly archaeological guide to the Holy Land, but he is also a biographer, twice-over, of St Paul. His new book develops and concentrates some of the themes in his earlier, critical life of the Apostle who, although 'an Hebrew of the Hebrews', took the Gospel to the Gentile world. It relies much more heavily on the Epistles than on the Acts of the Apostles and draws liberally on the author's scholarship, biblical and historical, and on conjecture. Luke is not so much the 'beloved physician' and travelling companion as an editor handling a 'we-source'. Citizen Paul (or Saul) of Tarsus is allotted a Galilean ancestry and a wife and family who may have died in some calamity. He is not reckoned to have encountered Jesus at all before the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

The famous reference to the thorn in the flesh is treated as Paul's frustration over opposition to his ministry and not as a physical ailment. The alleged mission to Spain is treated both as fact and failure, like the Athenian one which Luke presents with such a ring of glorious authenticity. There is less than might be expected about the Road to Damascus, and no more than is needed to dispel the absurd but prevalent notion that Paul was a misogynist and not an encourager of women's ministries. There is also a relatively conservative view, in the circumstances, of Paul's authorship of the Epistles. But unless the reviewer and the index have both overlooked something, there is no mention of the martyrdom of Stephen and Saul's role in 'consenting unto his death', which Luke's source--surely the consenting party himself--suggests as a major stage in the Apostle's spiritual and emotional life.

Much of this is eminently disputable, yet the result is constructive stimulation rather than mere provocation. But the strength of the book, apart from the author's successful deployment of his historical knowledge, which ranges from the economics of tent-making to the hazards of travel and best ways of carrying money, lies primarily in his skilful and convincing bid to exploit details in the Epistles 'to reveal what was going inside Paul. His emotions were very close to the surface.'

The book certainly fulfils its aim of ensuring that Paul is seen as a 'distinctive individual', though some readers will be astonished at the notion that hitherto Paul has usually come across as a 'disembodied mind' and not a vital personality. Many Christians must surely have emerged from old-fashioned Bible classes with a view of Paul not unlike that of the passionate, inspired, disputatious, and occasionally cantankerous Apostle who is described with flair, scholarship, and finesse by Professor Murphy-O'Connor. Perhaps there are differences here in the assumptions and experience of different Christian traditions. An author from a different one might also have felt compelled to use space to combat the notion, still sometimes heard, that Paul somehow distorted the teaching of Christ.

But Paul 'made his hearers believe that they were present at the Cross', which he saw as an act of self-sacrifice by Jesus. 'He could not think of the death of Jesus without wanting others to appreciate the extraordinary depth and power of the love it revealed'. That may seem the heart of the matter. It certainly is the heart of this biography.