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Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997) is a biography by Andrew Norman Wilson.

Abstract

"Focusing on the psychological motives behind Paul's life, the author of the best-selling Jesus shows how the apostle invented Christianity through his proselytizing, his teachings, and his negotiating the perilous political currents of the Roman Empire. Tour ... It begins on the road to Damascus, in a moment graven on the consciousness of Western civilization. "Saul, Saul," asks the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, "why persecutest thou me?" From this experience, and from the response of the Jewish merchant later known as Paul, springs the Christian Church as we know it today. As A. N. Wilson, biographer of Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, and Jesus, makes clear in this astonishing and gripping narrative, Christianity without Paul is quite literally nothing. Jesus, with the layers of exegesis, scholarship, and ceremony stripped away, is a Jew, a fastidious and fervent Jew, who would lead his followers into a stricter, purer observance of Judaism. It is Paul who will claim divinity for him, who will transform him into the Messiah, center of an entirely. new religion. In Wilson's deft and psychologically astute narrative, we see Paul negotiating the dangerous political currents of the Roman Empire; traveling everywhere; making converts; writing the great epistles that define our understanding of Christ and the sublime paradoxes of his teaching; defusing the natural antagonism of the supreme temporal power to this dangerous spiritual force, Christianity, which would in time consume that empire from within. What drove. Paul? What fueled this act of inspired creativity? What would he think of what his church has become? The answers lie in Wilson's extraordinary biography, which lays bare the psychological journey of Christianity's true inventor."--Publisher description.

Editions

Published in New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Translations

• Paolo: l'uomo che inventò il cristianesimo = Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997 Wilson / Finelli), non-fiction (Italian ed.)

Contents

The Emperor Nero's legacy to the Christian church -- Saul of Tarsus -- Jerusalem -- Conversion -- Paul in Arabia : the silent years -- The church of Rome -- Antioch -- Antioch vs. Jerusalem -- Paul in Europe -- Corinth -- Ephesus -- Last journey to Jerusalem -- Caesarea -- I appeal unto Caesar -- The school of Paul -- The voyage to Rome.

External links

• [ Google Books]