The author of this absorbing book, which builds upon many aspects of recent Pauline scholarship, describes it as an ‘antibiography’. By this he means that he has abandoned the traditional quest for the essential self understood as a fixed identity in a linear chronology, ‘in favor of decentering the subject into multiple selves and developing more open-ending narrative structures’ (p. 3). While such an assertion arises out of a commitment to the view that we cannot know the essential self of anyone (the ‘real’ person of conventional biographical blurbs), part of it is attributable to a sense that we in fact have a rather thin gruel of sources upon which to base our account of Paul. So Harrill asserts that there are only seven authentic letters, the other six traditionally attributed to Paul (excluding Hebrews) being forgeries; and that the Acts of the Apostles, often treated as a kind of historical complement to the letters, with varying degrees of scepticism as to its historicity, is in fact a ‘secondary’ source about Paul, too infected by its author's concerns to be any kind of a reliable guide to Paul's life. All of this is argued for succinctly in the first part of the volume, with helpful attempts to illustrate particular arguments from the New Testament sources. Harrill argues strongly for the centrality of apocalyptic to Paul, which, inter alia, lay at the root of his decision to convert Gentiles. Opposition to his views on the Jewish law, which had in fact inspired Paul's own decision to persecute the Church, led to growing opposition amongst some of his own fellow Christians, and they may have been responsible, at least indirectly, for his arrest and subsequent trial in Rome. Harrill is clear that Paul never considered himself anything other than a Jew and, arising out of this point, he argues that his conversion to Christianity was not caused by a haggard and guilty conscience seeking solace in God's grace. Drawing heavily on what we might broadly call ‘the new perspective’, Harrill is clear that, on this point, the West got Paul wrong, thanks mainly to Augustine, and, related to this, he is confident that Paul was not, as, amongst others, Nietzsche, opined, the second founder of Christianity – there is too much in what he writes that is in continuity with those who preceded him, seen not least in aspects of his preaching on the law. In the most innovative section of the volume Harrill disputes the thesis of the ‘Paul and empire’ group of scholars, that Paul's letters are strongly opposed to the Roman Empire. Over against this view, already effectively critiqued by John Barclay in his Pauline Churches and disapora Jews (rev. this Journal lxiv (2013), 370–3), Harrill seeks to demonstrate how Paul makes use of Roman ideas, including that of auctoritas, to advance his own position on a number of fronts, especially in his own communities. This, Harrill is clear, does not make him pro-Roman but complicates and does blur the question of his relationship to empire.

In the second part of the book, entitled ‘Legend’, which takes up over 40 per cent of the volume, Harrill shows how the developing Church read Paul in a variety of ways, ranging from that of a friend of the family to an ascetic, to an object both of authority and of derision. Harrill also shows how this contested figure came to be a book from which people quoted, and how in doing so some took more seriously than others the adaptability and tension-filled character of the Apostle's theology. Sources invoked in this section range widely from Valentinus to Chrysostom to Augustine, Luther and Nietzsche. The variety of readings demonstrated here give evidence, Harrill asserts, of the complex character of the letters themselves.

Some might think that what Harrill has given us in his ‘antibiography’ is a sort of post-modern Paul for the twenty-first century, fissiparous and multi-layered, and that would be partly true. But Harrill is clear about a number of things, not least the nature of the authentic Pauline corpus, the character of Acts, the Jewish identity of Paul and the concomitant wrong-headedness of Augustinian and then Lutheran interpretations of Paul. This does not undercut the ‘antibiographical’ character of the volume, but it gives the reader a sense of the author's commitments – his desire to give a complex and impressionistic account of Paul is not done through opaque spectacles. It is precisely the author's commitments, conveyed in an arresting and fresh way, which make this book a stimulating and intriguing read.