"Women are to remain quiet at meetings ... they must keep in the background as the law itself lays down. If they have any questions to ask, they should ask their husbands at home..."
This and similar injunctions ascribed to the apostle Paul have helped to make him the Christian saint even the most devout of women (and many men) love to hate. They may be pleasantly surprised, then, to learn that the scholarly author of this Critical Life flatly denies their authenticity. Which makes sense when one reads Paul's warm references elsewhere to his several women collaborators in his ministry.
Not that his alleged misogyny has been totally responsible for his bad press. He is too often seen, outside the church, as the prototype of the latter-day evangelist, the all too successful zealot who turned the words of a gentle Jewish teacher into the "mission statement" of a world religion. His name and authority have been since invoked over centuries of Christian controversy, on questions of faith and works, justification, election, and the like; much ink spilt, and far too much blood. It all seems a far cry from the good news of the Gospel.
Among Christians today, of course, he earns due if somewhat remote veneration. But, excepting a minority among whom the old disputes are still alive, he- remains a somewhat shadowy figure, at, best a voice of authority, if of little immediacy; heard during Sunday worship in extracts from his letters to Corinthians, Romans, Galatians and other early convert communities.
But it is these letters, seen and interpreted in context - social, cultural, historical, geographical - that form the rich biographical texture of the present volume. Clearly of considerable scholarly and perhaps controversial significance, the book represents the culmination of a lifelong study of Paul and his times. And to the general reader its great virtue lies in bringing this extraordinary but very human man splendidly alive. One thinks of another "shadowy figure", our own apostle Patrick, who breaks through all the false greenery in his own living words: "I Patrick, a sinner..." But from him we have only the Confession and one letter, precious though they are, while Paul has left us a great bundle of material "in his own write", the first and greatest pilgrim's progress.
Paul the missionary pilgrim is of course a central figure in St Luke's Acts of the Apostles, but Murphy-O'Connor is not alone in regarding Luke's account, as less than totally reliable. Reconstructing the story from the Letters is of course a challenging task, involving close textual and linguistic analysis, and demanding a sensitive awareness of the social and religious complexities of the territories of Roman hegemony, especially in Asia Minor. The challenge is admirably met, not least in relation to the divisions and dissensions which bedevilled the mission to the Gentiles.
In contending with the two main factions whom Murphy-O'Connor identifies as "Judaizers" and "Spirit People", Paul's response to the dual challenge of legalism and embryonic Gnosticism generated the slow and painful evolution of his own Christocentric theology. As a former Pharisee, Paul "knew the dangers of legalism" - though I was surprised to find him described as a "radical antinomian". (And he clearly had little time for pseudo-mystical elitism). But he remained loyal to the mother church in Jerusalem, in charity, if not in legal observance - as witness his continued insistence on contributing to their material needs.
Professor Murphy-O'Connor brings a light touch to his writing, and to his very considerable scholarship. His command of details is impressive, as in his construction of a chronology for Paul's career, and often provocative - as in his speculations regarding Paul's marriage, his cultural and linguistic sophistication, his tent-making, his pre-conversion felon-setting. And not only Paul but his contemporaries emerge from the shades of Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonia and elsewhere on his long pilgrimage. The Irish reader may be entertained if not altogether edified, by the chapter dealing with our far-off Celtic cousins, the Galatians.
My own "discovery" of the man Paul occurred nearly sixty years ago when I read Brother Saul by the prolific (but short-lived) Ulster novelist Donn Byrne. Now, once again, biography is far more fascinating than fiction.