Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

"This book tells a story not of a man who set out to found a new religion called Christianity but of a visionary Jew who had a revolutionary idea of what it meant to be Jewish, and of what was happening to the world in his own time, during the reign of the Emperor Nero.". "Paul's ideas were fashioned not simply by books of the Bible, but by the experience of living where and when he did. This story brings to life the places in which Paul evolved his world-changing ideas. The story takes us to the newly-built Hellenized Jerusalem, one of the greatest cities of the Near East; to Antioch, the cradle of Gentile Christianity; to the great trading centres of Corinth and Ephesus; to Rome itself. This is a book which combines social history with detective work in order to reconstruct the world in which Paul lived - a world of roads, superstition, trade - a world which Paul was convinced was momently coming to an end. The tension between the Roman Emperors and the Jews is the political fact which broods over a story that is many-faceted, colourful and strange."--BOOK JACKET.