PREFACE

Summary

In this book I have endeavoured to put forward a narrative of the life of the Apostle of the Gentiles during that period of his career in which he was in contact with the original community of Christians in Jerusalem, who were responsible for the preservation of the record of the life and teaching of Our Lord. Such a narrative involves an examination of the nature and implications of his doctrines, and the extent to which they were already explicitly held by those who were before him in the faith or represented a new development in the Christian religion. The attempt is complicated by the vast amount of literature published in recent times both on the whole life of S. Paul and on particular aspects of his teaching. The difficulty is increased by the fact that much of this literature is the work of specialists who have pressed their own particular point of view to lengths which a fuller knowledge of other aspects of the subject would have shown to be untenable. Naturally I do not flatter myself that I have avoided the opposite danger of giving a very inadequate amount of attention to many, if not all, of the features which call for consideration. For example, I am conscious that the relation of S. Paul to the contemporary religious movements of the Hellenistic world needs fuller consideration; but until the literature and in particular the original writings available for the study of the subject are more accessible this shortcoming is hardly to be avoided.