Paul: A Biography

To some extent, Wright (New Testament and early Christianity, Univ. of St. Andrews; Paul and the Faithfulness of God) is not providing a biography of the apostle Paul—there just isn't enough historical data for that. However, with the sources available, Wright is after the central concerns that impelled his subject, in particular the idea of zeal and faith as reckoned as righteousness. In many ways, this is a distillation of Wright's most recent works. His view of Paul is a mix of conservative biblical scholarship—e.g., he takes the "we" passages in the Book of Acts to be Luke's firsthand report and argues that most, if not all the so-called disputed letters of Paul are authentic—and a radical reworking of biblical theology, in which his own Exile theory is central. Wright offers a sense of the cultural, political, intellectual, and spiritual forces of that time that acted in the development of Paul's thought.