Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 13:1 (Fall 2008)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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DBSJ 13 (2008) p. 109

Book Reviews

Paul: Missionary of Jesus by Paul Barnett. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. xvi + 240 pp. $16.00.

Barnett, former Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, is lecturer at Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia) and teaching fellow in biblical studies at Regent College (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada). He has authored at least seventeen books since 1973, including The Second Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT, 1997), Jesus and the Logic of History (1997), Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity (1999), First Corinthians (2000), Romans (2003), Is the New Testament History? (rev. ed., 2004), and The Shepherd-King: Reading John Today (2005). He is currently finishing a trilogy entitled “After Jesus”: (1) The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years (2005), (2) Paul: Missionary of Jesus (2008), and (3) Finding the Historical Christ (forthcoming).

The tide of this second book in Barnett’s trilogy expresses the book’s thesis: Paul was a missionary of Jesus. This might appear to be a tame thesis, but it is a polemic against a view common among liberal Protestants. This liberal view, propagated by influential scholars such as Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), William Wrede (1859–1906), and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), claims that Paul became the second founder of Christianity by hijacking and altering Jesus’ teaching and mission. Barnett, “with apologies to Malachi,” summarizes this view as “Jesus have I loved and Paul I have hated” (p. 11). Barnett boldly challenges this view, and he convincingly demonstrates that Paul was true to Jesus’ intentions, continuing and extending Jesus’ teaching and mission.

People place a wall between Jesus and Paul for at least four reasons:

(1) they fail to address how chronologically close Paul was to Jesus;

(2) they incorrectly speculate that Paul was influenced more by Hellenism than a Palestinian ideology; and they draw wrong conclusions about Paul’s (3) relative silence about the details of Jesus’ life and (4) relatively infrequent references to Jesus’ teachings (pp. 15—22).

After introducing this controversy in chapters 1–2, Barnett proceeds in chapters 3—12 to study Paul’s life chronologically from his birth in about A.D. 5 to the end of his decade of missionary work in Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia in about A.D. 57 (see chronologies on pp. 5, 136—37). Paul was born in Tarsus as a Roman citizen, nurtured in a conservative Jewish home, and educated in Jerusalem before becoming an eminent Pharisee with a scholarly grasp of the

DBSJ 13 (2008) p. 110

Greek Old Testament; he was the Lord’s ...

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