Free PDF St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong
Reading St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong is a quite useful passion and doing that could be gone through any time. It indicates that reading a publication will not restrict your activity, will certainly not force the moment to invest over, as well as will not invest much money. It is a very budget-friendly and also obtainable point to purchase St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong However, with that really affordable thing, you could get something new, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong something that you never ever do and also get in your life.
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong
Free PDF St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong
Just what do you do to start reviewing St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong Searching the e-book that you love to review initial or discover an appealing publication St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong that will make you would like to check out? Everyone has distinction with their factor of reviewing a publication St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong Actuary, reading practice should be from earlier. Many individuals could be love to check out, however not an e-book. It's not fault. A person will certainly be burnt out to open the thick book with tiny words to check out. In even more, this is the genuine condition. So do take place probably with this St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong
This is why we suggest you to consistently see this web page when you require such book St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong, every book. By online, you may not go to get guide establishment in your city. By this on the internet collection, you can find the book that you actually want to check out after for very long time. This St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong, as one of the recommended readings, has the tendency to be in soft file, as every one of book collections here. So, you could additionally not wait for few days later on to get and also check out guide St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong.
The soft data indicates that you have to visit the web link for downloading and install and then save St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong You have actually owned guide to read, you have actually postured this St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong It is easy as visiting guide stores, is it? After getting this brief explanation, with any luck you can download one as well as begin to read St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong This book is quite easy to review whenever you have the leisure time.
It's no any faults when others with their phone on their hand, and you're too. The distinction could last on the product to open St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong When others open the phone for chatting and speaking all things, you could occasionally open and read the soft documents of the St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong Naturally, it's unless your phone is available. You can likewise make or wait in your laptop computer or computer that eases you to check out St. Paul: The Apostle We Love To Hate (Icons), By Karen Armstrong.
St. Paul is known throughout the world as the first Christian writer, authoring fourteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. But as Karen Armstrong demonstrates in St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate, he also exerted a more significant influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the world than any other figure in history. It was Paul who established the first Christian churches in Europe and Asia in the first century, Paul who transformed a minor sect into the largest religion produced by Western civilization, and Paul who advanced the revolutionary idea that Christ could serve as a model for the possibility of transcendence. While we know little about some aspects of the life of St. Paul—his upbringing, the details of his death—his dramatic vision of God on the road to Damascus is one of the most powerful stories in the history of Christianity, and the life that followed forever changed the course of history.
- Sales Rank: #116235 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-22
- Released on: 2015-09-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.40" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 160 pages
Review
“Armstrong does an excellent job of highlighting the pivotal role Paul played in the development of the movement that would later become the Christian church, while also showing how his writings have been both ignored and co-opted by Christians.” —Publishers Weekly
“The book succeeds in Ms. Armstrong’s purpose: a rehabilitation of the most influential Christian missionary, and an exploration of the issues that still haunt us. Her work seeks to repair Jewish-Christian relations, to refocus the importance of women in modern Christianity, and to actualize ‘the Kingdom’ in our world. It is time to stop persecuting Paul and appreciate his teachings.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“[Armstrong’s] concise book deals smartly with the familiar criticisms.” —The Independent
“Balanced and well informed.” —New York Review of Books
About the Author
Bestselling author Karen Armstrong is a distinguished writer noted for her memoirs and her books about religion. She majored in English at St. Anne’s College in Oxford while living in a convent, an experience she wrote about in Through the Narrow Gate, which was published to laudatory reviews. She became an independent writer and has since published twenty-five books. In great demand as a public speaker, she is also the founder of the Charter for Compassion, which was funded with a TED grant.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Damascus
�
Luke’s account of the descent of the Spirit on the Jewish festival of Pentecost may not be historically reliable but it certainly expresses the tumultuous character of the early Jesus movement. The twelve apostles and members of Jesus’s family, he tells us, were at prayer in their Jerusalem lodging when they suddenly heard a roaring sound, like a driving wind; flames appeared and rested over the heads of each one of them. Filled with the Spirit, they began to speak in different languages and rushed outside to address a crowd of Jewish pilgrims who came from all over the diaspora, each one of whom heard them speaking in his native tongue. The apostles’ demeanor was so wild that some of the spectators thought they were drunk. Peter reassured them: These men, he explained, were simply filled with the Spirit of God. This was how the prophet Joel had described the Last Days, which had been set in motion by Jesus, a man revealed to Israel by miracles, portents, and signs. But, Peter told his large Jewish audience, by the “deliberate will and plan of God he was given into your power, and you killed him, using heathen men to crucify him.” Yet God had raised Jesus to a glorious life in the heavenly world, thus fulfilling David’s prophecy in the psalm that begins: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’?” Israel must now acknowledge the crucified Jesus as Lord and Messiah; if people repented, were baptized, and separated themselves from “this crooked age,” they too would receive the Spirit and share Jesus’s victory.
���� Overnight Jesus, the man, had been forever transformed. After seeing him standing at God’s right hand, his disciples had immediately begun to search the scriptures to help them understand what God had done for him. From a very early date they meditated on Psalm 110, which Peter quoted to the crowd. In ancient Israel, this had been sung during the coronation ceremony in the temple, when the newly anointed king, a descendant of David, had been elevated to near-divine status and made a member of the Divine Council of heavenly beings. Another psalm proclaimed that at his coronation the king had been adopted by Yahweh: “You are my son, today I have become your father.” The disciples also remembered that Jesus had sometimes spoken of himself as the “son of man,” a phrase that took them to Psalm 8, where the wonders of creation had inspired the psalmist to ask why God should have raised a lowly “son of man” to the eminence that, as they had seen with their own eyes, Jesus now enjoyed:
You have made him little less than a god,
You have crowned him with glory and splendour,
Made him lord over the work of your hands,
Set all things under his feet.
Again, the title “son of man” brought to mind the vision of the prophet Daniel, who had seen a mysterious figure “like a son of man” coming to the aid of Israel on the clouds of Heaven: “On him was conferred sovereignty, glory, and kingship, and men of all peoples, languages, and nations became his servants.” Jesus, the son of man, the disciples were now convinced, would soon return to rule the world and conquer Israel’s oppressors. With truly remarkable speed, the titles “lord” (kyrios in Greek), “son of man,” and “son of God” were attributed to Jesus, the Messiah, the Christos, and used routinely by all New Testament authors.
���� The Pentecost story suggests that the gospel had an immediate appeal for Greek-speaking Jews from the diaspora, many of whom joined the community of Jesus’s followers. First-century Jerusalem was a cosmopolitan city. Devout Jews came from all over the world to worship in the temple, though they tended to form their own synagogues where they could pray in Greek rather than in Hebrew or the Aramaic dialect used in Judea. Some of them were dedicated to ioudaismos, a word that is often translated as “Judaism” or “Jewishness” but which during the Roman period had a more precise significance. The emperors respected the antiquity and morality of Israelite religion and had granted Jewish communities a degree of autonomy in the Greco-Roman cities. But this was often resented by local elites who were smarting under their own loss of independence, so periodically anti-Jewish tension erupted among the townsfolk. To counter this, some Greek-speaking Jews had developed a militant diaspora consciousness that they called ioudaismos, a defiant assertion of ancestral tradition combined with a determination to preserve a distinctly Jewish identity and forestall any political threat to their community—even if they had to resort to violence. Some were even prepared to act as vigilantes to enforce the Torah and defend the honor of Israel. In Jerusalem, these more rigorous Jews were attracted to the Judean sect of the Pharisees, who were committed to a punctilious observance of the Torah. Because they wanted to live in the same way as the priests who served the Divine Presence in the temple, they laid special emphasis on the priestly purity laws and the dietary regulations that made Israel “holy” (qaddosh in Hebrew), that is, as “separate” and “other,” as God himself utterly distinct from the gentile world.
���� But other Greek-speaking Jews may have found life in the Holy City disappointing. In the diaspora, many had come to appreciate Hellenistic culture. They tended, therefore, to emphasize the universality inherent in Jewish monotheism, seeing the One God as the Father of all peoples, who was worshiped under different names. Some also believed that the Torah was not the possession of the Jews alone but that in their own way the ancestral laws of the Greeks and Romans also expressed the will of the One God. Instead of concentrating on ritual minutiae, therefore, these more liberal Jews were drawn to the ethical vision of the prophets, who had emphasized the importance of charity and philanthropy rather than the ceremonial laws of purity and diet. They probably found the Pharisees’ preoccupations stifling and petty, and they may also have been offended by the commercial exploitation of pilgrims in the Holy City. So when they heard the Twelve talking about Jesus, they would have been drawn to some of his teachings. For instance, he was said to have been critical of the Pharisees: “You pay tithes of mint and rue and every garden herb but neglect justice and the love of God. It is these you should have practiced, without overlooking the other.” They would also have liked the story of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple as he quoted the words of Isaiah that reflected the universal implications of the cult: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”
���� When they joined the Jesus movement, these Greek-speaking Jews continued to pray in their own synagogues. But, Luke tells us, tension broke out between the Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking members. According to Acts, it began as a disagreement about the distribution of the food, which the Twelve solved by appointing seven Greek-speaking deacons to apportion rations to the community so that they themselves could devote more time to prayer and preaching. But Luke’s account is full of contradictions, and it is clear that the duties of the seven deacons were not simply domestic One of them was Stephen, who was a charismatic preacher and miracle worker, while Philip, another of the Seven, led a mission to the non-Jewish regions of Samaria and Gaza. Reading between the lines of Luke’s narrative, we can see that the Seven may have been leaders of a separate “Hellene” congregation in the Jesus movement who conducted their own preaching missions and were already reaching out to the gentile world.
���� In Luke’s story, this trivial dispute about food escalated with horrifying speed to a lynching in which Stephen was killed. Some of the diaspora Jews who were committed to ioudaismos were incensed by Stephen’s liberal preaching and had him dragged before the high priest. At all costs, Stephen had to be stopped. “This fellow is forever saying things against this holy place and against the law. For we have heard him say this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy [the temple] and alter the customs handed down to us by Moses.” Luke claims that these were trumped-up charges put forward by false witnesses; yet he makes Stephen give a long speech that does conclude with a defiant rejection of the temple cult. This, as we have seen, was indeed a bone of contention. Stephen’s views were shared in part by the Qumran sectarians and by the peasants who refused to pay their tithes. According to the gospels, Jesus also predicted the temple’s destruction. When Stephen finally cried, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God,” his accusers were filled with rage and, flinging their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, they hustled Stephen out of the city to stone him. “Saul,” Luke ends this tragic tale, “was among those who approved of this execution.”
Most helpful customer reviews
54 of 62 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting reading but not Biblical scholarship
By Dr. John Bunyan
I have valued some earlier books by Karen Armstrong, notably A History of God and The Case for God, even writing a sonnet about the latter - "Upon first opening The Case for God"! However, this book is quite different. It begins with a rather silly sub-title (perhaps imposed by the publisher?) and it goes on to give a general account of the life and work of St Paul as the author sees it. I think it is a clear and well-written introduction for the general reader and useful in that respect. However, unlike those two books I have mentioned, it is not - and no doubt - is not intended to be a scholarly book. There are detailed end-notes, mostly referring to relevant verses in the Pauline and deutero-Pauline writings. However, there is no index and, more important, no bibliography and little reference to the vast number of scholarly works written about St (St. is strictly not correct) Paul. In setting the context the author does rely heavily on the social and Biblical studies of Crossan some of whose conclusions regarding 1st century Palestine are accepted by some but questioned by others. She assumes the existence of a Q document and indeed a Q community, taking no note of the (mainly British) scholars - notably Farrer, Goulder, Goodacre, who argue against the whole idea of a Q document. There is little reference to important.contemporary works relating to early Jewish Christianity in its various forms and the eventual success of Pauline Christianity (see e.g. Bart D.Ehrman's various writings), or to recent major studies of Jesus by e.g. Geza Vermes (e.g. The Authentic Gospel of Jesus and The Changing Faces of Jesus) or Maurice Casey (Jesus of Nazareth) which also have some relevance. All in all, though very much appreciating the author's earlier work, I found this disappointing - not a book for one interested in recent Pauline scholarship.
40 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating biography of the most influential apostle
By Joanna Daneman
You could argue that Paul (Saul of Tarsus) was the most influential apostle in Christianity. His writing, which shows a lawyer-like mind with clarity of thought, educated unlike the most of the other apostles, was the basis for much of today's Christian practice, whether Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant. But he's not a cuddly, warm figure in history. He was literally the early Christians' worst enemy, persecuting them as a zealous Pharisee. This book is a highly readable, enjoyable look at what we can tell of Paul's life and path to his belief, and the times in which he lived.
Karen Armstrong is one of the most prominent authors on theology and religion and a clear and captivating writer. She gives us what is known about Paul's origins (not much), his demise (a mystery),the speculations about Paul's personal life and the background of the Roman rule over the Holy Land with its brutality and draconian enforcement of the law. Crucifixions were so common, she tells us, during one rebellion, they ran out of lumber and places to nail up the condemned. She discusses Jewish customs regarding the executed, including the conflict between the Roman disregard for Jewish custom of same-day burial and how that impacts the story of Jesus' burial.
Armstrong does a great job of creating the mise-en-scene at the time of Paul's writing and creating an image of Paul the man, struggling with the turbulent and dangerous times as he follows his faith and his calling as one of Christ's most influential apostles and literally one of the giants in founding Christian belief. What we have of Paul are his letters, but those are enough, along with what we know of history from Josephus and others to work out what his life might have been like and how his mind worked. Why is he "the apostle we love to hate?" He's not a fatherly and humble fisherman or a gentle physician but a severe, educated man who was single-minded and totally dedicated to any task he chose to take on. Paul can be scary, like a strict but superbly accomplished teacher or coach.
Caveat: If you are a believer in the Bible as written literally, you may not be happy with this book, as you will find that it does not conform to Christian dogma. You might not be comfortable with historical versus religious interpretations of events in Paul's time. If you can separate out Christian dogma as taught in your church from reading secular historical analysis, which this is, you may enjoy it as such. Karen Armstrong was trained as a Catholic nun in the UK in the 60's and left her order after both a change in faith and health issues. Her personal faith is now neither Catholic or Protestant mainstream but her own and as a writer and historian, this is her viewpoint. You may not share her views, nor appreciate them.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Nice introduction to the true Paul
By D. R. Fernandez
Very nice book about the new vision of Paul that is emerging (or maybe already prominent) among scholars, based on the idea that half of the letters attributed to Paul are forgeries; therefore, Paul is not the mysoginist who want to silence women, justify slavery, blame the Jews instead of the Romans for Jesus' Death, etc., but someone who follows the revolutionary ideas of Jesus about the Kingdom of God on Earth, based on justice and equality, against Roman imperial and unfair rule. Once you separate true from false letters, Paul does not contradict itself, accepts women as apostles like him, is someone who is persecuted by the Romans and opens what started as a sect within Judaism to something that offers salvation for everyone, including gentiles. If you like Karen Armstrong as an author, and you like her emphasis on compassion and comparative religion, you are likely to love this one. It made me read more about Paul.
See all 70 customer reviews...
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong PDF
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong EPub
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong Doc
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong iBooks
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong rtf
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong Mobipocket
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong Kindle
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong PDF
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong PDF
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong PDF
St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons), by Karen Armstrong PDF
