Corpus-Paul

["Paul Miller" <pm AT midsouth.rr.com>]

Chris Cutler wrote:
Paul: A Critical Life
by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor (Clarendon 1996)

If anyone has already read it, can I have an opinion on the
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I haven't read this, but I am also interested in this title because
according to the review below  it contains arguments on Acts as being
unreliable and corrupt. Plus the description of it as a dry historical tome
made me reach for my wallet. It does sound somewhat speculative however.

From Kirkus Reviews , May 15, 1996
A dry historical tome that would be more aptly titled ``Paul: A Cultural
History.'' The difficulties of doing ancient biography are compounded when
one of the two major sources available is believed to be historically
unreliable and corrupt. One of New Testament scholar Murphy-O'Connor's
primary objectives is to demonstrate why Luke's account of Paul's life,
contained in the Book of Acts, is an inaccurate basis for biography. Point
well taken, but where to go from there? The author relies heavily on Paul's
own letters, but the portrait available from them is incomplete at best.
Paul revealed relatively little about his personal life, preferring to call
attention to his mission. Some surprising hypotheses do emerge from this
work. First, Murphy-O'Connor conjectures that Paul was not a bachelor, but a
widower who had lost his family in some sort of tragedy. The psychological
evidence for this is slim, and the historical evidence is nonexistent. Much
stronger are the author's deductions about the letters themselves; he makes
an excellent case for 2 Thessalonians as a genuine Pauline letter, a
minority opinion among New Testament scholars. He also challenges Rome as
the traditional site of Paul's imprisonment and demonstrates why Ephesus was
a far more logical locale. The primary contribution of the book is not that
it is a biography of Paul, but that it opens the door to Paul's world
through geography, Roman history, and Jewish-Christian conflict.
Unfortunately, the prose is mired in academic passivity and such dense
phrases as ``abstracting from the spurious clarity of the philological
argument.'' The book is so weighed down with cultural history that there is
relatively little about Paul himself, and what there is seems to be mostly
speculation. Acts, though historically imprecise, makes for a much better
story.



Paul Miller
Memphis