Excerpt from Epochs in the Life of Paul: A Study of Development, in Paul's Career

I have faced the manifold problems of criticism which meet one at every turn in such a study, and have formed my own judgment where the evidence justified such a conclusion. I am still a learner about Paul and still in the dark on many points. But enough is known (reasonably clear, I think, to one who is Open to historical evidence) to enable one to project a vivid and true outline of the life of Paul. The main outline is all that is here attempted. Questions of geography and general history are touched upon only incidentally.

Paul wrought so widely and wrote so much that it IS well-nigh impossible to compass it all from every point of view in one volume of moderate size. The great events in Paul's career are just the ones which it is most important to seize upon and which are often missed. If one does this well, he will have less trouble in filling in the details. Sometimes one cannot see the wood for the trees.

The task is complicated further by the fact that Paul has so many sides. He cannot be understood unless all sides of his life are brought up adequately and to gether. His own environment, his intellectual and spiritual development, his relation to Jesus, his out ward activities, his literary remains, must all be kept in mind. The Epistles furnish rich personal material and illustrate the growth of Paul's theology. The formal exposition of the Epistles and of his theology is not attempted. The interest is centred in Paul him self. But the orderly and progressive study of his life in its main points helps one to solve the riddle of Paul, as some scholars make him.

Paul is so masterful as to be beyond praise. Some, indeed, go to the point of making him the real author of modern Christianity and the perverter of the original Christianity of Jesus. How far short that view falls of the truth the present volume will endeavor to show.

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