Paul and His Letters: Missionary Work

Schnabel first focuses the spotlight on Paul's missionary work -- the realities he faced, and the strategies and methods he employed. Applying his grasp of the wide range of ancient sources and of contemporary scholarship, he clarifies our understanding, expands our knowledge and corrects our misconceptions of Paul the missionary.In a final chapter Schnabel shines the recovered light of Paul's missionary methods and practices on Christian mission today. Much like Roland Allen's classic Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours' of nearly a century ago, Schnabel offers both praise and criticism. For those who take the time to immerse themselves in the world of Paul's missionary endeavor, this final chapter will be both rewarding and searching.

Ware examines Paul's understanding of the role of the churches he visited on his missionary journeys in the spread of the gospel. He focuses on Paul's little-studied letter to the Philippians, in which he finds an unusual level of interest in the preaching of the gospel that shows promise of clarifying Paul's understanding of the place of his churches in the gentile mission.

Recent investigations of the chronology of Paul's life have been either minimalistic (asserting that only one or two external, absolute dates can be fixed with certainty) or outright agnostic (i.e., no external absolute dates, nor any internal relative dates, can be fixed with any degree of certainty). Riesner's careful and thorough study bucks this trend. According to Riesner (Univ. of Tubingen), much can be known about Paul. The author takes umbrage with those who argue for exclusive dependence on Paul's letters and dismiss Acts as unreliable. His research discovers just the opposite: a comparison between the chronological outline that Acts provides and secular sources confirms that the outline is trustworthy. Moreover, this outline coheres with internal evidence in Paul's letters. This cohesion gives Riesner a solid basis for fixing absolute dates and establishing relative ordering of Paul's letters. English readers will welcome this Stott translation of the author's Die Fruhzeit des Apostels Paulus (Tubingen, 1994). Paul's missionary strategy is examined beginning in Chapters 13 forward.