What Paul Meant by Gary Wills

Continuing on my reading of these wonderful books by Gary Wills we explore Paul, perhaps the most controversial of the apostles.

Paul has been blamed for being an antisemetic and that this has created many of the problems including Hitler's genocide.

Reading Wills interpretation of Paul brings you a different conclusion. Wills feels that interpreters from Luther to Augustine misunderstood much of Paul's writing or those writings that have passed down and were altered themselves.

Mark and the Gospel of Mark come in for the harshest review by Wills as he believes that Mark was not telling the story of Paul but the story he wanted to tell of Paul and those are two different things.

Paul having been a Pharisee who persecuted the followers of Jesus until he himself was visited by the Messiah becomes a great prophet. Paul is very busy, trying to aid the followers from Judea to Rome.

The most telling conflict was between the brothers who would be the Jews who believed in Jesus as the messiah and those such as Paul who administered to the Gentiles. Paul wanted all to be one but the issues of unclean foods and circumcision became a constant sticking point.

Jesus himself had said that nothing was unclean unless man made it unclean. Unclean is what comes out of our mouths and hearts not the food we put in it.

In Wills most telling comment he states that Paul and Jesus had one overarching thing in common and that is that they were both killed by religion. Paul fought against much of the politics of religion just as Jesus did.

This is not an easy book. I read it in small doses and contemplated what I read. It is invaluable however and perhaps the best of the three books in this vein that Wills has wrote.