John Dominic Crossan’s new biography, Paul the Pharisee, subtitled A Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization, has an image on its cover that is also the core of its content. Im-age and content are based on a mosaic from Sicily’s Monreale Cathedral in which, as the Latin inscription explains, ‘Paul gives letters to his disciples Timothy and Silas to be carried through the whole world (per universum orbem).’
This is that 1st-century Jewish futurist and Messianic mystic, Paul of Tarsus, claiming, as those letters internally insist, a universal message ‘for the nations’ of the world. In assessing that universal claim, the present biography reveals a cosmic Paul by imagining his visionary DNA as a double helix but one whose twin and intertwined spirals are his 1st-century chal-lenge and his 21st-century relevance.
Paul the Pharisee is concerned with reclaiming that universal Pauline vision from then to now, from past to present, from church sanctuary to public square, and, above all else, from his thinking of external divine sanctions to our thinking of internal evolutionary conse-quences. Paul’s Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization is about the sustainability of our species as we increase weaponry and decrease biodiversity in an environment deemed dis-posable. From antiquity to modernity, Paul has wisdom not just for theological Christianity but especially for evolutionary humanity. Such modern Pauline wisdom might warn us: You are on the Titanic but you are also the iceberg.
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