“That Saint Paul . . . . He's the one who makes all the trouble.” Anyone who wants to understand that trouble would do well to take up this book, and anyone charged with teaching a course on the troublesome apostle will find it made for this purpose. That the author chooses this line from Hemingway for an epigraph tells us that he, too, wants to stir up a bit of creative trouble, in the classroom and in academic discourse about Paul. The book is an admirably succinct introduction to the current state of Pauline scholarship but wants also to offer an important correction. The book, identified as “a historical biography” with full awareness of the ambiguity of both adjective and noun, is divided into two roughly equal parts: “the life” and “the legend.”

Those address in turn the two pivotal insights that emerged in twentieth-century scholarship on Paul. First, to understand the life one must know the social and cultural context within which that life was lived and by which the surviving evidence for it was shaped. Second, to discern the significance of the life one must explore the ways its story was retold and appropriated or resisted by succeeding generations of interested parties.

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship, the cultural context of nascent Christianity was defined by a supposed antithesis between “Judaism” and “Hellenism.” Only slowly did we come to realize, by the turn of this century, that there were many different ways in which Jewish communities adapted to the complex culture of the Greco-Roman world, appropriating some elements, resisting others, in order to maintain but reshape their own identities. And the little sect and emerging trans-ethnic cult that would become “Christianity” must be understood—not “against” that “background,” but—as indigenous in that dynamic culture. Harrill is fully in accord with that shift of consensus, but he wants to correct it in one important respect: Paul was not only “Jew” and “Greek,” he was also Roman. That is the subject of chapter 3, which is effectively the book's center, and will likely provoke the most surprise and resistance. New Testament scholars tend to dismiss the notion that Paul might be in any way pro-Roman, as they tend to doubt the assertion of the book of Acts that he was born a Roman citizen. The recent influence of post-colonialist theory has strengthened this tendency; Paul is now commonly seen as deliberately anti-Roman. Harrill will have none of this, dismissing it as wishful thinking (91–94).

The key term for Harrill's understanding of Paul's romanitas is the Latin auctoritas, which he translates “clout” or “influence.” Here he depends heavily on the work of Karl Galinsky on Augustus and the culture of Augustan Rome. In one of the most arresting sections of the book (81–83), Harrill compares the rhetoric of 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul lists the rights he has renounced as apostle, with that of Augustus's Res Gestae. He concludes that “the Roman discourse of auctoritas formed the language of Paul's apostolic authority—and even shaped his thinking about God's authority” (85).

The second half of the book gives quick glimpses of “the many different ‘Pauls’ that appeared in writings of his interpreters”: “Competing Stories about Paul in Late Antiquity” (chapter 4), “Paul the Scriptural Authority: Contradictory Discourses” (chapter 5), and “How the West Got Paul Wrong” (chapter 6). It seems that the “trouble” Paul made was largely through the history of what Harold Bloom would call “strong misreadings.” And most of the trouble, including that which worried Hemingway, was the work of Augustine and the Augustinian monk Martin Luther. Harrill here follows in the way of a growing number of twentieth-century scholars, notably the late Krister Stendahl, who coined the phrase, “Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” which Harrill adapts. These chapters provide a lively, even provocative entrée into the study of the afterlife of those letters bearing Paul's name, which now has a secure place in academia with Gadamer's impressive label, Wirkungsgeschichte.

And here perhaps the reviewer owes a full disclosure. In his preface, Harrill tells us that the book is a by-product of an undergraduate course he taught in three universities over nearly twenty years. The course is called “Paul and His Influence in Early Christianity.” In 1967, I designed a course with just that title in one of those three universities. The following year the late Herbert J. Muller asked if I would consider compiling a book from the readings assigned in that course for a new series he was editing, the Norton Critical Editions in the History of Ideas. The resulting book, published in 1972 and in a revised and enlarged edition jointly with John T. Fitzgerald in 2007, is the one Harrill cites frequently and suggests as “a potential companion volume” (xi). The reader may consequently wish to discount some of my praise for the present book as expressing the pride of an academic grandfather. It is, nevertheless, sincere, despite quibbles I might make about his historical reconstruction at one or two places. Through it Paul will continue to make creative trouble, for “There is no end to Paul” (166).