We have long been aware of the fact that students of the past inevitably bring to their work concerns of the present. This is not something that can be avoided but must be acknowledged in a self-critical way. In this elegant and thoughtful book, White gives voice to the consequences of this observation for the study of Paul. He notes how pursuits of the real Paul in modern scholarship stem from the work of F. C. Baur, who, taking up work begun by Schleiermacher, argued for a set of four genuine or ‘Hauptbriefe’ by Paul, to be distinguished from pseudonymous and secondary epistles. It was these texts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians, which contained the essential message of Paul, exemplified in the idea of justification by faith. Far from this Baurian vision being an account of the real Paul, so White argues, it was in fact an argument in favour of a Protestant Paul, near to Baur's heart and to subsequent generations of scholars. Such scholarship, however acute and however erudite, reflected the setting out of which it came, and has continued to influence the way in which scholars study Paul and his corpus.

In engaging in such an interpretation of Paul, Baur was doing little more than theologians of the second century, the time in which it is possible to see Paul and his letters becoming the subject of interpretation as Paul himself became a figure of Christian tradition, exemplified in a fairly widespread view of him as the sanctified and martyred Apostle. White's point is a telling one because Baur and many of those who followed him saw second-century writers as either uninterested in Paul or as misunderstanding him. White rejects both claims, arguing that what the second century presents is a series of images of Paul, of diverse interactions with the extant oeuvre and developing tradition. To this effect he homes in on what he takes to be two proto-orthodox interpretations of the Apostle, that evidenced in 3 Corinthians and in Irenaeus' Adversus Haereses. Both these writers reflect an image of Paul allied to his ‘orthodox’ defence in the wake of gnostic and other ‘misinterpretations’, and they take as the major elements of their defence the image of Paul which emerges from epistles like the pastorals rejected by Baur. The Paul transmitted from the past mixes with elements of the present to produce a complex image of the Apostle sitting beside other complex images.

With a bold clarity, White rejects an approach to these variant images in terms of a question about who gets Paul right, a failing he locates even among many of those who accept a view of Paul in the second century as fragmented and falling along a number of trajectories. The correct question when examining this material, he argues, is ‘Which Paul?', and such a question has a three-fold aspect, one relating to the letters that an individual writer uses and chooses not to use, a second to the effect of the context of the writer on his or her interpretation and a third aspect to the types of oral tradition which play a role in the writer's presentation of Paul. Here questions about an essential, a real Paul, are simply put to one side and replaced by what might seem like questions which are easier to answer.

White concludes with eight considerations for practising Pauline studies. Historically situating discourses on the real Paul should not be seen as a threat, but as a crucial part of the historiographical process. Awareness should be shown of the institutionalised frameworks of our knowledge (for example, the prioritising of the Hauptbriefe in Pauline study) but equally institutions, here understood as academic institutions, should be seen as the places where methods and approaches can be sharpened through open exchange. Following on from this discussion of methodologies should be central and claims about the real Paul should be falsifiable. While Pauline letters will continue to be the prime source for knowledge of Paul, there should be an avoidance of the creation of a core of Hauptbriefe, at least until a criterion other than theological preference is found for such a judgement. Once we have absorbed the implications of the letter collection of Paul as the embodiment of a kind of collective memory of the Apostle, only then should we be prepared to talk about the historical Paul, here understood in terms of the broad impressions of Paul across the whole of the corpus. It is this, not the isolation of particular parts of the corpus, which will give us the gist of the man.

Although this is a short book (its main text runs to 181 pages), it calls for little less than a paradigm shift in Pauline studies. Drawing both on developments in the sociology of knowledge, in a raft of theoretical works on history, tradition and related matters, as well as developing forms of historiography of the second century (one thinks of the work of Karen King, David Brakke and Judith Lieu), it attacks current approaches to Paul, which conceive of their task as the discovery of a real Paul within a specific corpus of texts (often not approximating to that corpus as it is presented in the New Testament). This is done both by historicising the discourse of the ‘real’ Paul and by showing its precariousness as a means of approaching that corpus. By discussing in parallel the development of discourses about Paul in the second century, White both makes plain the perennial nature of the role of location in the creation of images of Paul, and also locates the point at which Paul is clearly a part of the tradition and himself a centre of disputation. In doing this, he provides his reader with an intriguing insight into the historiography of Pauline studies as well as with some stimulating close readings of ancient texts which themselves seek to present their reader with the real Paul.

Where are we left at the end, however? Perhaps at a more self-critical place, even a more modest one where, aware of the complex character of the interpretative process, we agree to pay much more attention to a kind of reception-historical approach to Paul, an engagement with his image and much less concern with his historical reality, understood as the ‘real Paul’. To some this may not be a restriction but a liberation, a chance to examine the contextualised character of the development of that image and to engage in a richer and more sophisticated way with the hermeneutical complexities raised by the letters. At the end of his book White does hint at the possibility of ‘broad impressions’ of a historical Paul, here invoking the work of Dale Allison on the historical Jesus, where a recognition of the fact that what we have in the Gospels are memories of Jesus leads to an approach to that material, which is less scientistic and more suggestive. White does not develop his claims about ‘broad impressions’ and one suspects that were he to do so at greater length (and we are told that this is the first part of a two-part project) his results would be more modest than those of Allison (the gist of Allison's Jesus is boldly drawn). But that is perhaps not the question with which to end this review, a question which may do little more than betray the difficulty that this reviewer and many others will experience in giving up the real Paul and a more positivistic historiography. Rather we should express our thanks for a piece of work which contributes both to the question of the future of Pauline studies and also to what, perhaps slightly inaccurately, we might term the beginning of that study in the second century.