Simon Gathercole

To summarise a book of over 1500 pages – roughly 800,000 words, or 25 times the length of the 13-letter Pauline corpus and probably longer than the Bible – in a sentence might be thought a foolhardy enterprise, but I think it can be done, because of the book’s overall coherence. Its central contention, at least as far as Paul’s theology is concerned, is as follows: Paul inherited from his pre-Christian Judaism the central foci of monotheism, election and eschatology, and he retained but fundamentally rethought all of these in the light of Christ and the Spirit.