dictatorship over humankind has been severely damaged . . .. Sin’s shelf life was severely limited at thecross and resurrection. And we who are baptized into Christ’s death are aware that God’s love has provenstronger than sin. Consequently, while we now suffer, along with the rest of humanity, we know that therewill come a time when all will be well. And our hope is that this will be the case for all humanity, for allthat is.’

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Reading Paul. By Michael J. Gorman. Pp. x, 196. Paternoster, Milton Keynes, 2008, $22.00.

Lurking beneath the multiplicity of academic publications about Paul lies the problem of how to drawnew readers into a sound understanding of this difficult and elusive and unsystematic thinker. There areother introductions to Paul but this is as good as any: more reliable than Sanders very short introductionand less stretching that Wright’s account of what Paul really said. There is here only a very little on Paul’sbiography and the background and content of particular letters: the author prefers to concentrate of Paulas a thinker by outlining a number of theological themes, drawing on the various letters. It is anunashamedly confessional work. Michael Gorman provides not only a summary to each short chapterbut points for reflection which would be suitable for an individual reader or a church group who might beworking their way into Paul. Paul’s letters are here read as Scripture. Gorman focuses on the scripturalnarrative that underpins Paul’s theology but shows how he believes that narrative has been transformedin the arrival of Christ. It is a very orthodox account of Paul which emphasizes the incarnational andTrinitarian basis of the theology, but it also follows Wright and others in showing how Paul waspolitically subversive in his implicit criticism of the Emperor and the state. Gorman is a leftie-evangelicalwho believes that Paul – and a fortiori Christianity – stands for non-violence and peace-making. He givesa good account of justification but I am not sure he has all the details right. Yet he links justification withparticipation ‘in Christ’ to show the transformative power of Christian belief, emphasizing saint-linessand the cruciformity of the Christian life. The author brings the fruits of recent scholarship to lay peopleand new undergraduates in a way that, one hopes, will lead to the reading of the letters themselves. This isan excellent book that presents Paul as both profound and positive in the way he has shown what it is tothink and live the Christianity life.

Harrogate, UK Geoffrey Turner

Paul’s Necessary Sin: The Experience of Liberation. By Timothy Ashworth. Pp. xxv, 245, AshgatePublishing, Aldershot, 2006, d55.00

Paul and His World: Interpreting the New Testament in its Context. By Helmut Koester. Pp. xvi, 301, FortressPress, Minneapolis, 2007, $39.00.

Why is Paul so hard to understand? Perhaps it is a problem of wood and trees. So many writers examinesmall aspects of Paul that they do not even try to make sense of the whole. And those who do try to makesense of the whole of Paul have trouble pulling the disparate content of the letters together, as well ashaving to deal with the voluminous and increasingly confusing secondary literature on Paul. TimothyAshworth has been dealing with the wholeness of Paul for some time through his teaching andpresupposes that Paul is a coherent thinker, something that is sometimes denied, by Sanders for example.Ashworth keeps the secondary literature in its place by producing a main argument that is devoid ofreferences to anything but Paul’s letters and sometimes to Old Testament texts. He does, however, havedetailed discussions in almost every chapter about the main points of his argument with three authorswho have all taught in England: Dunn, Sanders and Ziesler. More often than not Ashworth disagreeswith them and offers a corrective. Around these discussions, the author’s main argument is all thestronger for being focused exclusively on what Paul himself wrote.Another obstacle in the way of understanding is the meaning of some of Paul’s Greek. Ashworth

spends some time in the earlier part of his book bringing out nuances of Greek words that affectmeaning, nuances that are not usually present in English translations. You do not need to know Greek toread this book but, if you don’t, it may send you scurrying to learn some. The translations we use areoften locked into theological traditions from the Reformation and Ashworth tries to undo thesewhere necessary. He takes the subjective genitive to be the natural reading of pistis Iesou Christou,the faith of Jesus Christ (‘faithfulness’ would be better but he never uses that word) and shows howit makes a difference, not least by omitting any hint of ‘justifying faith’ that is so important in Lutherantheology.

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