What Paul Meant

Description

In his New York Times bestseller What Jesus Meant, Garry Wills offered a fresh and incisive reading of Jesus' teachings. Now Wills turns to Paul, whose writings have provoked controversy throughout Christian history. Upending many common assumptions, Wills argues eloquently that what Paul meant was not something contrary to what Jesus meant. Rather, the best way to know Jesus is to discover Paul. In this stimulating and masterly analysis, Wills illuminates how Paul, writing on the road and in the heat of the moment, and often in the midst of controversy, galvanized a movement and offers us the best reflection of those early times.

Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Praise for What Paul Meant: "With characteristic clarity and insight, Garry Wills has given us a vital study of the earliest voice in the New Testament." -Jon Meacham, author of American Gospel "The best description of how the Jesus movement emerged." -Andrew M. Greeley, author of The Catholic Revolution "A tour de force revision of what we thought we knew about the apostle who helped give the Christian faith its distinctive shape." -Slate.com "With this bracing book . . . [Wills] further cements his reputation as one of the most intellectually interesting and doctrinally heterodox Christians writing today." -The New York Times Book Review "Wills writes more gracefully and economically than scholarly authors in this gem of a book." -The Boston Globe "A fascinating read, worth examining by anyone with an open mind and an interest in Christianity and its most prolific early voice." -BookPage "Lucid . . . Wills is not a biblical scholar, but he is a voracious reader and an eloquent writer who makes judicious use of the best recent scholarship." -The Washington Post "Everybody should be as lucky as St. Paul. Not only did he have a transformative spiritual experience and become a founder of one of the world's greatest religions, but two thousand years later he has Garry Wills to explain, interpret and defend him. . . . One could hardly wish for a more capable advocate than Wills." -Chicago Tribune "A bracing book of spiritual commentary [by] one of this country's leading public intellectuals and American Catholicism's most formidable lay scholar." -Los Angeles Times