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  • St. Paul

  • The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons)
  • By: Karen Armstrong
  • Narrated by: Karen Armstrong
  • Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (14 ratings)

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St. Paul

By: Karen Armstrong
Narrated by: Karen Armstrong
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Summary

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.

©2015 Karen Armstrong. (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
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Informative

I don't usually like author read books as, writing a good book, does not apparently equate to being a good reader, however, in this instance I found Karen Armstrong's reading worked well. I found the establishment of Paul's history and conversion as well as the contextualisation of Paul's relationship with other disciples and the Jesus cults very informative.

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Paul - baddie or goodie or both?

Few are indifferent to Paul, who gave us that wonderful hymn to love in 1Cor:13, but who also possibly (Armstrong challenges this) ordered women to cover up and shut up in church. It is a concise knowledgeable account of the life and work of Paul of Tarsus, as far as we are able to reconstruct it, taking account of recent scholarship, and avoiding dogmatism.

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I don't hate Paul any longer...

I read this because I've always struggled with Paul's teaching, which I find unintelligible, longwinded and contradictory. Turns out, the author says he didn't write most of the most controversial books. She gives tons of context, but her style is almost too authoritative as she rarely explains the sources of her claims (maybe those are in the footnotes of the written book, which didn't translate to the audiobook?) After the first chapter, which was incredibly compelling, the text became increasingly dense and hard to follow. I finished it simply by listening when I was walking home from work with nothing better to do. It had some great insights, but not written for the layperson (she'd made a TV documentary preciously so I wrongly assumed she'd be good at communicating clearly and engagingly)

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