: F.F. Bruce
: The Letters of Paul An Expanded Paraphrase
: Kingsley Books
: 9781912149100
: 1
: CHF 8.30
:
: Christentum
: English
: 204
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
This book is perhaps the most accessible introduction to the writings of St. Paul ever written in modern English. That's because Professor Bruce does not approach his 'expanded paraphrase' as a Bible translator, but as a storyteller recounting the life of Paul after his conversion and his correspondence with churches and individuals. Bruce's historical setting of the letters and his effort to make the 'course of Paul's argument as clear as possible' will open familiar passages with new insight and understanding. The Letters of Paul 'is really a treasure - it is illuminating and beautiful. The 13 letters of Paul are in approximate chronological order with a fascinating historical background for each. Originally published as a diglot with the Revised Version of 1881, this edition contains only Professor Bruce's paraphrase so that the reader can compare it with a favorite translation.

CHAPTER ONE


THE EARLIER EPISTLES


Paul’s Early Career

“SAUL, WHO IS ALSO CALLED PAUL,” was born about the beginning of the Christian era in Tarsus, an ancient and highly cultured city of Cilicia, in Asia Minor, to Jewish parents who traced their ancestry to the tribe of Benjamin. It was perhaps their tribal association that moved them to give their son the name of the most illustrious Benjaminite in Israel’s history – Saul, the first king of Israel. They had maintained their Palestinian Aramaic speech in the Greek-speaking environment of Tarsus, and brought up their son to be proudly conscious of his heritage as “a Hebrew son of Hebrew parents.” But he was born to yet another heritage, and a very different one – he was born a Roman citizen. By what means his father or grandfather had aquired the rare honour of Roman citizenship we can only speculate, but it is as a Roman citizen that he bore the Latin cognomen Paul, by which he is best known.

Tarsus was one of the three great university cities of the world in that day, next to Athens and Alexandria, and was a centre of Stoic philosophy. But it was not to any of the schools of Tarsus that Paul’s parents sent him to be educated, but to the rabbinic academy of Gamaliel in Jerusalem. Gamaliel was the most eminent Jewish teacher of his generation, a distinguished leader of the party of the Pharisees. Paul embraced with self-sacrificing ardour the Pharisaic ideal of devotion to the divinely-given law of Israel, and set himself to outstrip his fellows in mastery of the ancestral traditions and obedience to the commandments of God. A career to match Gamaliel’s own seemed to he ahead of him.

In his devotion to the law he opposed implacably any movement which threatened its supremacy and abiding validity – and in particular he threw himself wholeheartedly into a campaign of repression against the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was executed in A.D. 30 on a charge of blasphemy against Israel’s God and Israel’s law, and, while many of His followers nevertheless lived as pious and observant Jews, Paul recognized that at the heart of Jesus’ teaching there was a principle that menaced all that he held most dear. This principle came to unambiguous expression in the teaching of Stephen, a follower of Jesus from the ranks of Jewish Hellenists.6 Stephen was convicted before the supreme Jewish court on a charge of blasphemy very similar to that on which his Master had been convicted. He taught that the temple order in Jerusalem was obsolete (in so far as it had ever been divinely sanctioned), and that Jesus had replaced the traditional religion by a new sanctuary and a new law. Stephen’s conviction and execution were followed by a violent attack on the followers of Jesus, especially on those who were Hellenists like Stephen and s