Best paul's letters books according to redditors

I would recommend Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity. In it Tabor builds the case that Paul's particular gospel, which Paul states as my gospel that was once a secret but has now been revealed, was markedly different from the gospel held by James and Peter at the Jerusalem church.

A Samaritan magician who claimed to have had visions of Jesus and/or claimed that he was Jesus. Tried to buy an apostleship from Peter and was rebuffed. Had a consort who was a former prostitute who he claimed was a Goddess of sorts and that she had been Helen of Troy among others. Conflicting reports of how he died. He may or may not be mentioned by Josephus who talks about a Simon the Magician, also called Atomos, who was an adviser to the Judean Procurator, Felix, in the 50's.

F.C. Bauer argued that Simon Magus was a cipher or caricature of Paul and others have followed. There are some significant parallels (including a relationship with Felix).

i you really want to see controversial, Robert M. Price has taken that a step further in The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul and argues that "Paul" is a sanitized version of Simon Magus.

N.T. Wright's book "Paul" synthesizes a lot of the information from the recent New Perspective on Paul and distills it in a manageable, nonacademic book. It's not the most current information, but it's a great start. (https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Perspective-N-T-Wright/dp/0800663578)

N.T. Wright, Wayne Meeks, E.P. Sanders, Beverly Gaventa, Douglas Campbell are all prolific, well-known contemporary scholars who deal with Paul (and there are many others). Wright writes both for academic audiences and lay people, so some of his books may be a bit more accessible than pure scholarly texts.

I very strongly disagree. Basing my opinions on the work of New Testament scholars who are not Bart Ehrman, I maintain that the content of Paul's message coheres rather brilliantly with that of the synoptic gospels. You are perceiving a contradiction because (1) you are forgetting the Second-Temple context in which the Pauline epistles and synoptic gospels emerged and (2) you are reading Paul through a reductionist lens, insisting that the emphasis was principally on Jesus' death as having paid for our sins. While Paul certainly does reflect a great deal on Jesus' death and its consequences for sin, the apostle's theological vision is so much more broad than just that one issue: as N. T. Wright contends in the masterpiece of biblical scholarship Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Paul's primary concern was articulating how exactly Jesus, as Moshiach, fulfilled in his person the promises that God had made to the people Israel.

You say that Jesus can be characterized in the synoptics as an "apocalyptic prophet," a characterization that I take to be inseparable from the fact that, within those gospels, Jesus' primary focus is on the proclamation of the "Kingdom of God" (as you acknowledge here). This apocalyptic notion of the "Kingdom" did not simply emerge out of nowhere as a wholly Christian innovation, but rather was a response to the eschatological imagination of Second-Temple Judaism in which God was expected to return to dwell among his people as their king (having previously withdrawn his presence, his shekinah, at the Babylonian exile, plunging his people into a period of pain, foreign domination, and darkness). N. T. Wright summarizes the eschatological expectations thusly:

>Central to second-Temple monotheism was the belief... that Israel’s God, having abandoned Jerusalem and the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile, would one day return. He would return in person. He would return in glory. He would return to judge and save. He would return to bring about the new exodus, overthrowing the enemies that had enslaved his people. He would return to establish his glorious, tabernacling presence in their midst. He would return to rule over the whole world. He would come back to be king

This is what Paul is concerned about. He wants to answer the question: How did Jesus fulfill these Jewish eschatological expectations? Or, phrased in a way that makes the connection with the synoptic gospels more obvious: How did Jesus institute the Kingdom of God? How has God, through Jesus, "delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son" (Colossians 1:13)?

Paul's answer is that God has kept his promises by returning to Israel in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (for "in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell" (Colossians 1:19)), the Messiah who himself is king and whose 'glory' is made manifest in his saving cross. Not only does Jesus defeat the greatest enemy, namely death, but his identification as the one true kyrios—Lord—directly contradicts Caesar's own claim to be the true ruler of the world. God's tabernacling presence has returned to his people, such that the Spirit of the one God can be said to dwell in the Messiah's followers (1 Corinthians 3:16). In other words, for Paul, Jesus has truly established the Kingdom of God, for which reason the message of his epistles and of the synoptics are entirely complementary.

-by Fr. Lawrence Farley

First and Second Corinthians: Straight From the Heart


Shepherding the Flock: The Pastoral Epistles of Saint Paul the Apostle to Timothy and to Titus


The Apocalypse of Saint John: A Revelation of Love and Power


The Epistle to the Romans: A Gospel for All


The Gospel of Mark: The Suffering Servant

The Gospel of John: Beholding the Glory


The Gospel of Luke: Good News for the Poor


The Gospel of Matthew: Torah for the Church


The Prison Epistles: Philippians-Ephesians-Colossians-Philemon


Universal Truth: The Catholic Epistles of James, Peter, Jude, and John


Words of Fire: The Early Epistles of St. Paul to the Thessalonians and the Galatians

-By Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon


Christ in the Psalms


Christ in His Saints


Chronicles of History and Worship: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Books of Chronicles


Creation and the Patriarchal Histories: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Genesis


The Trial of Job: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Job


Wise Lives: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Wisdom of Sirach

-By Terry L. Frazier


Second Look at the Second Coming: Sorting Through the Speculations


-By Theron Mathis


The Rest of the Bible: A Guide to the Old Testament of the Early Church

-By Dennis E. Engleman


Ultimate Things: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on the End Times

My recommendations from books I read in the last year or so (yes, these are all VERY STRONG recommends curated from ~100 books in the last year) -

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Science fiction-

Derek Kunsken's The Quantum Magician (I would describe it as a cross between Oceans Eleven with some not-too-Hard Science Fiction. Apparently will be a series, but is perfectly fine as a standalone novel).

Cixin Lu's very popular Three Body Problem series (Mixes cleverly politics, sociology, psychology and science fiction)

James A Corey's The Expanse Series (which has been made into the best sci fi tv series ever!)

Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief series (Hard science fiction. WARNING - A lot of the early stuff is intentionally mystifying with endless terminology that’s only slowly explained since the main character himself has lost his memories. Put piecing it all together is part of the charm.)

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Fantasy-

James Islington's Shadow of What was Lost series (a deep series which makes you think - deep magic, politics, religion all intertwined)

Will Wight's Cradle series (has my vote for one of the best fantasy series ever written)

Brandon Sanderson Legion series (Brandon Sanderson. Nuff said. Creative as always)

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Manga -

Yukito Kishiro's Alita, Battle Angel series (the manga on what the movie was based)

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Non-Fiction-

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind - Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (and how we are not as rational as we believe we are, and how passion works in tandem with rationality in decision making and is actually required for good decisionmaking)

Rothery's Geology - A Complete Introduction (as per title)

Joseph Krauskopf's A Rabbi's Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play, available to read online for free, including a fabulous supplementary of Talmud Parallels to the NT (a Rabbi in 1901 explains why he is not a Christian)

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Audiobooks -

Bob Brier's The History of Ancient Egypt (as per title - 25 hrs of the best audiobook lectures. Incredible)

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Academic biblical studies-

Richard Elliot Friedman's Who Wrote The Bible and The Exodus (best academic biblical introductory books into the Documentary Hypothesis and Qenite/Midian hypothesis)

Israel Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed (how archaelogy relates to the bible)

E.P. Sander's Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63BCE-66CE ​(most detailed book of what Judaism is and their beliefs, and one can see from this balanced [Christian] scholar how Christianity has colored our perspectives of what Jews and Pharisees were really like)

Avigdor Shinan's From gods to God (how Israel transitioned from polytheism to monotheism)

Mark S Smith's The Early History of God (early history of Israel, Canaanites, and YHWH)

James D Tabor's Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (as per title)

Tom Dykstra's Mark Canonizer of Paul (engrossing - will make you view the gospel of Mark with new eyes)

Jacob L Wright's King David and His Reign Revisited (enhanced ibook - most readable book ever on King David)

Jacob Dunn's thesis on the Midianite/Kenite hypothesis (free pdf download - warning - highly technical but also extremely well referenced)

The Amazing Colossal Apostle, by Robert M. Price

>The story of Paul is one of irony, the New Testament depicting him at the martyrdom of Stephen holding the assassins' cloaks. Then this same Paul is transformed into the biblical archetype for someone suffering for their faith. He becomes so entrenched, it would appear that he had walked with the Christians all his life, that he was the one who defined the faith, eventually being called the “second founder of Christianity.” But much of what we think we "know" about Paul comes from Sunday school stories we heard as children. The stories were didactic tales meant to keep us reverent and obedient.

>As adults reading the New Testament, we catch glimpses of a very different kind of disciple—a wild ascetic whom Tertullian dubbed “the second apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics.” What does scholarship tell us about the enigmatic thirteenth apostle who looms larger than life in the New Testament? The epistles give evidence of having been written at the end of the first century or early in the second—too late to have been Paul’s actual writings. So who wrote (and rewrote) them? F. C. Baur, a nineteenth-century theologian, pointed persuasively to Simon Magus as the secret identity of “Paul.” Robert M. Price, in this exciting journey of discovery, gives readers the background for a story we thought we knew.

I’m not really sure either way, but this might be a helpful resource.

Try this. Paul reworked the Shema so that Jesus received a place of mention beside the Father. Also note how Paul sometimes treats them as interchangeable.

For non-biblical sources, N. T. Wright has put out a couple books on the subject: Jesus and the Victor of God is perhaps the most relevant, but his recent monster of a book Paul and the Faithfulness of God dedicates a portion of the book to Monotheism in Paul's thought. If you're into academic stuff you could give PatFoG a try, as it goes over historical research in the time as well. It's 1700 pages though.

> Paul is a Stoic through and through

I really hate to nitpick, and I know of at least one scholar who agrees with you, but I think Paul wasn't as much of a stoic as some think. N.T. Wright (in his latest gargantuan work on Paul) argues expertly against Troels Endberg-Pedersen, effectively demonstrating that Paul has some very important (almost irreconcilable) differences from stoicism.

***
> Neoplatonism is an incredibly obvious influence, especially on the Gospel of John

Interesting... How so? Are you referring to the hellenistic idea of the λόγος? I didn't know that was neoplatonistic. I knew it was hellenistic, but I'm not all that familiar with neoplatonism.

All four books of N.T. Wright's Christian Origins series for $4.99 apiece. Normally ~$30 apiece. That's a link to the fourth one but you can find the others easily.

Not sure what sorts of perspectives you're looking for, but NT Wright is a top notch academic writing from a somewhat conservative Anglican perspective, and has written a ton on these two guys:

Jesus and the Victory of God

The Resurrection of the Son of God

Paul and the Faithfulness of God

And if ~3200 pages isn't quite enough to scare you out of attempting the project, you should also read the first volume in this series, The New Testament and the People of God.

There seems to be a large gap between what is taught in the churches and what is thought to be accurate - like Abraham, Moses, Exodus, etc. A growing number want to know if their beliefs are backed by evidence.

From this sub, I found reference to Tabor's Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity This is not what I learned in Sunday school. I watched a lecture referenced here: What Was The Exodus? Again, excellent and not what I was taught.

Academics sharing thoughts and references makes a difference. I hope a solution can be found and agree with a FAQ with links to books, lectures, articles, etc.

I'm a big N.T. Wright fan for the perspective he gives on the context and world of 2nd Temple Judaism and Jews in the Grecko-Roman world.

For more academic and lengthy reading, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. For more casual and accessible reading, Paul: A Biography

Another potential good read for those interested:
Paul and the Faithfulness of God https://www.amazon.com/dp/0800626834/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_4-wJAbN6F1NS6

The N. T. Wright Christian Origins and the Question of God series are all $4.99 each. If you purchased the print copies at some time in the past, they are only $2.99. Whether you love or hate Wright, all four of these are excellent and a great value at a mere $5.

New Testament People God

Jesus Victory of God

Resurrection Son of God

Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set, Biggest bang for your buck.

Definitely. Check out this book for starters.

Great!

Question: Would the Christian origins series be better to start with?

OR, if I want to get into Wright and Paul would the 2 volume set "Paul and the faithfulness of God" be okay? I'm thinking maybe the overview of "Paul and his recent interpreters" might be better.

Saarinin

Patristics

N.T. Wright


You will find that Jude and 2 Peter are incredibly similar.

I did a short teaching on the two, and would be happy to send you the PDF of those notes too. Not too in depth, but perhaps worthwhile.

I thought I saw one with the name Paul on it somewhere.

ah, here's one
http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Jesus-Apostle-Transformed-Christianity/dp/1439123322/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450243565&sr=1-3&keywords=paul+the+apostle

Here are a few of my favorite theologians, Bible scholars, and books

For Biblical exegesis

Inductive Bible Study by Robert Traina and David Bauer

For Systematic Theology

Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology by Thomas C. Oden (Almost anything by Oden is good really)

For Pauline Studies

Paul and the Faithfulness of God by NT Wright

The Theology of Paul by James D. G. Dunn


For Cultural Background in New Testament

Craig S. Keener (his commentary on John's Gospel is phenomenal, as is the IVP Background commentary by him)

Ben Witherington III (his commentaries are generally good)

For Christian ethics

Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard B. Hays

For Old Testament

Walter Brueggeman (pretty much anything by this guy)

Terrence Fretheim (I especially like his commentary on Exodus)

Sandra Richter (Epic of Eden, a good primer on ancient Israelite and Canaanite culture and how it shaped the OT)

Philosophy of Religion

Soren Kierkegaard (my absolute favorite philosopher, I especially recommend Fear and Trembling)

Thomas Aquinas

St. Augustine

Alvin Plantiga (I personally dislike Plantiga's philosophy, but he's become a big name in philosophy of Religion so not someone to be ignorant of)

William Hasker

William Abraham

Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne (I'm not a process theologian, but this book in particular is highly important in modern theology, definitely worth a read)


Edit:
If you wanted a broad, general sweep of theology, I'd recommend The Modern Theologians by David F. Ford. It's a good overview of various theological movements since the start of the 20th century and covers theology from many different perspectives.

Paul said there is neither male nor female in Christ. He also included a woman in a list of fellow apostles.

There's more than one way to interpret Paul. For a thorough and eye-opening look at Paul's teachings on gender (and sexuality), I wholeheartedly recommend Paul Among the People.

I think those are great resources on prayer for a small group setting.

In terms of prayer in worship, I'd recommend Hughes Oliphint Old's Leading in Prayer.

Derek Thomas' book on Jesus' prayer life is also good: Praying the Saviour's Way.

DA Carson's book Praying with Paul was immensely helpful to me.

N.T. Wright is generally considered to be the current expert on Paul.

A really great and short book, adapted from a lecture series: Paul in Fresh Perspective.

An exhaustive 1700 page monster: Paul and the Faithfulness of God. I'm working through this one now. It's very informative and a good read, but it really does engage with pretty much every academic writer of any substance from the past hundred years, so sometimes it feels like you're listening in on the middle of a conversation. The earlier books in this series, particularly The New Testament and the People of God (which is volume 1, and has much of the background material) covers the political and religious situation during the Second Temple period. It has a lot of great discussion about the Pharisees (a very complex group of people) and their opponents, Roman and Greek stuff, and so on.

I think what Paul really did was strip the “Jewishness” out of Christianity. The absolute core of Jesus’ message is love, and Paul did get that right.

There is a great book on the subject titled Paul and Jesus. The Book does a much better job explaining the subject than I ever could, and it describes a time when Paul’s actions may have saved the religion from obscurity or even destruction.

The big thing about reading Paul is context. Despite Christian's fondness for quoting individual verses (myself included), most of what he wrote really only makes sense if you consider his situational and cultural surroundings when he was writing.

If it's a big issue for you, I recommend Paul Among the People written by a classics scholar, who became a Christian, and has a fresh perspective of Paul living in the mess that was contemporary Roman culture.

I can't imagine it being too dated. This one by Wright is a great nugget as well:

http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Perspective-N-T-Wright/dp/0800663578

But truly, Westerholm put it all together and won the debate for me.

Haven't read it, but this may be up your alley: https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Stoics-Troels-Engberg-Pedersen/dp/066422234X

David Dryden is the author of The Apostle Paul - Saul of Tarsus: The Bitter Root.

Reviewed here.

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http://www.amazon.com/The-Amazing-Colossal-Apostle-Historical/dp/156085216X

This isn't a direct answer to your question but it is related. I haven't done much research on this myself, but there's a group of academics out there who argue that Stoicism as opposed to Platonism had a much larger influence on Christianity. Especially so regarding the Apostle Paul. At one point someone even forged a correspondence between Seneca and Paul. Check out section 6.5 of the SEP article on Stoicism.

If you want to learn more you can also check out these books:

• Paul and the Stoics
  
  
• Stoicism in Early Christianity

I’m still in process of figuring out what I believe, so while I’ve done a lot of research on the subject, it’s a wee bit off-the-cuff.

The thing to remember with Paul and his letters (the authentic ones, certainly) is that they are written to specific communities and in response to specific situations. Galatians and Romans are not theological treatises, and shouldn’t be treated as such, though they are theological works. This will become important in a moment.

There are two questions I think I see in what you’re asking. First, What is sin? and second, What is ethical behaviour for a Christian?

For the first question, this is actually fairly easy to answer. Sin, as such, has very little if anything to do with individual action. It is a power, a force in the world; it enslaves and binds us (we are “sold into slavery under sin”), and no matter what we do fight against it we cannot win. Sin is also innately tied to death and to the Law (“The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law”). Christ comes to deliver us from it’s power, and does so by dying – he defeats death by entering into it (the author of life cannot die, so when he dies he dissipates death, like how light dissipates darkness), removes its sting (sin) and thus frees us from the power of sin (the Law). We are no longer under the curse of the Law or enslaved to sin and the fear of death, but liberated and freed and made righteous (justified, or more literally “uprighted” or “set-at-rights”).

Now, this brings us to the second question, how are we to live as those brought into the covenant. The important thing to remember about Paul is that his ethical diatribes are levelled at the rich Christians. In Corinth, for instance, he’s been told that the rich converts are showing up to church early with all their expensive food and wine and sharing it with each other, but not giving anything to the poor and the slaves who show up late; he excoriates them for this, and attacks the wealthy women who show off their ostentatious wealth with their jewellery and expensive makeup. Everything we have belongs to the whole church, we are all equally members of the Body of Christ – equally sinners and equally justified – and anyone who shames their fellow christians for their poverty or withholds any part of their abundance from those who have nothing will fall under God’s judgement.

This also is at the root of Paul’s comments about sexual behaviour. What gets him going is abusive, exploitative behaviour. The terms Paul uses in Romans and Corinthians that have been used to justify homophobia (for only the past 50 years or so, interestingly – Kathy Baldock has a good overview of this history, it’s actually closely tied to McCarthyism and the post-WWII red scares) have nothing to do with homosexuality as we think of it today. Same-sex behaviour is as old as the human race, and exists across the animal kingdom; but in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, same-sex behaviour was not and could not be egalitarian, it was abusive and exploitative as a matter of course. This is because sex itself was largely seen in terms of honour and shame – in basic terms, if you were a bottom it was shameful and dishonourable (see Rev. Danny Cortez’s sermon “Why I Changed My Mind On Homosexuality” and Sarah Ruden’s book Paul Among the People for more info). Thus, for a Roman gentleman, your primary means of getting your jollies was to buy a sex slave if you were rich enough, or hire a prostitute. Or kidnap a kid and rape him. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, this most almost (though not exclusively) directed at children and young boys; pederasty was damn-near an integral part of the education process, and there’s a lot of poetry and writings out there saying that boys they were “useless” as sex objects once they started growing facial hair. What Paul is condemning what he is talking about arsenokoitai and malakoi are the people who do that – the men who would buy slaves or prostitutes or use their power and influence to “seduce” and abuse young boys – and his condemnations of porneia are not condemning extra-marital sex per se, but rich men buying slaves or hiring prostitutes (who were, again, slaves) to satisfy their lusts (though at the time recreational sex wasn’t available to anyone except rich men who could afford prostitutes and sex slaves; women would generally get executed for it).

In short, Paul hated how the rich acted as if they owned everyone and everything and treated the world as if its only purpose was to satisfy their desires, and how now they were bringing that same attitude into the Church.

Now, for ordinary Christians (i.e. the not-wealthy), Paul had a few things to say; if you want a list, check out Galatians 5 (though be aware most translations mistranslate a number of terms there to fit their moral and theological agenda). First, you don’t have to do any boundary-maintaining behaviours (keeping kosher, circumcision, etc.). Second, don’t be idolators – both in the sense of offering sacrifices to idols, and in the sense of being greedy or hoarding money and food – and don’t exploit or abuse others, don’t be cruel or callous. Third, be honest and faithful in all things, be peaceable, gentle, and compassionate, do justice to all as God said in the Torah (justice for the oppressed, the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant), and always act in solidarity with your fellow believers (“bear one another’s burdens” – and that isn’t pablum, it’s mutual aid, in the “pay for what they need if you have money and they don’t” sense).

If you’re interested in more, there’s some good stuff on YouTube – check out the work of Douglas Campbell, and Michael Hardin’s series on Romans and on Galatians.

If you’re more the book-reader type, I can recommend: Paul: A Very Short Introduction, by E. P. Sanders; Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul, by Theodore W. Jennings , Jr.; Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission, by Michael J. Gorman; and Reading Paul With the Reformers: Reconciling Old and New Perspectives, by Stephen J. Chester. Also, the notes and articles in the Jewish Annotated New Testament are amazing.

Of course, all this comes with a giant caveat that this is my interpretation based on my research, and lots of people who are smarter than me and have been doing it longer than i have come to different conclusions.

Price has written a book about Paul called The Amazing Colossal Apostle in which he spells out his reasoning. IIRC, he tries to make a case that Paul is a cipher for Simon Magus, who was the popularizer of a competing version of Christianity (non proto-orthodox). Marcion or one of his disciples compiled or created the epistles based on Simonian teachings, and then the proto-orthodox re-worked them into the current version of the epistles.

It's been a while since I read it, so I can't give you any of the specifics of his argument. I remember that he goes through each epistle and tries to break down each epistle into its Marcionite and orthodox components.

I'm not Bible scholar, just an interested lay person who hasn't spent much time on Paul yet, so I can't tell you how good his arguments are.

For scripture, you just need to read Paul at face value and understand that the version in Acts is a fiction meant to harmonize the two factions when Luke writes two or three generations later.

This book might be a good jumping off point:

https://smile.amazon.com/Paul-Jesus-Apostle-Transformed-Christianity/dp/1439123322/

Dr. Daniel Kirk wrote a book to this effect (which I believe eventually lead him to separate from Fuller Seminary.) Basically, Dr. Kirk argues that there are moral trajectories in scripture, and one ought not to simply repeat the paradigm, but follow the trajectory. Take slavery, which goes from being straight permitted (including war brides and the buying of goyim slaves in Deuteronomy) to the Torah texts which then provided laws about how to treat slaves, to earlier portions of the NT (where we are told "neither slave nor free, but slaves obey your masters) to the verse in 2 timothy where slave-traders are listed along with liars, adulterers and other bad people who will not inherit the kingdom. At each step of the way there are limitations. Slavery is ok. Well its ok if its gentiles. Well its ok if you treat them well by these guidelines. Well its not ok, but its a reality so live as a Christian not as slaves and masters. Well, its not ok to be a slave trader. This would be an example of a trajectory, where scripture takes a cultural practice (slavery) and slowly reforms it.

Someone might argue that this trajectory continues, so not only is slave trading bad, but slavery itself is evil and ought to be abolished. Therefore we ought not just replicate the latest portion of the trajectory in the biblical world (slavery is bad but permissible as per the NT and slave trading is evil) but replicate the trajectory (God values and promotes equality and human freedom.)

Dr. Kirk did something very similar (but more carefully nuanced than I did above) with LBGT issues. He has a chapter in his book "Jesus have I loved, but Paul?" http://amzn.com/080103910X and has dealt with it on a fair number of blog posts from his "storied theology" blog.

My objective in discussing Paul was to emphasis how his conceptualization of the law was indelibly connected to his understand of Jesus, i.e., his Christianity. My mistake if I misunderstand what you were attempting to say.

Paul's concept of the law is complicated and, interestingly, may even have changed as he aged and his personal theology evolved. Both James Dunn and NT Wright have good books about Paul's theology, two Christian academics you may be able to respect.

>Discussions about what is the most appropriate meaning to draw from texts is pedagogy, not debate...

This must be one of those statement you consider merely an opinion lacking any objective evidence [smile]. Why would you assume that I'm hostile simply because I make lengthy comments and expect rational argumentation?

i don't think your example is a contradiction or particularly interesting, but your questions about paul's authority are a subject that many works have been written on. some critics go as far to say that christianity as it exists today should be called 'paulism' (i'm in that camp). thomas jefferson wrote something to that effect in a letter that i can't find now. i recommend two recent books on paul that represent this critical viewpoint:

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

and

Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

No problem. I also enjoyed Wilson's Paul: The Mind of the Apostle but I felt MacCoby's work was a bit more scholarly (IMO).

This is a great book with a very insightful interpretation of the entire book of Romans:
https://www.amazon.com/Grace-Not-Gods-Backup-Plan-ebook/dp/B00U1WBCXQ

Read DA Carson's book on the Prayers of Paul.

A good book on this subject is called "Jesus I Love, But Paul?" It's by a Fuller prof. http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Have-Loved-but-Paul/dp/080103910X

Not really an answer, but, if this is the direction you're going, Carson's book is a must read.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-d-tabor/paul-the-jew-as-founder-o_b_3930630.html

http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Founder-Christianity-Gerd-Ludemann/dp/1591020212

I didn't say Paul was 3rd century: I was referring to religions that persisted until then.

I dunno if Paul existed. Brodie thinks he didn't.

A book I should read is The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul

https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Jesus-Apostle-Transformed-Christianity/dp/1439123322