In this area, fragments and details of individual epistles are actively studied, much more both Jewish and pagan primary sources are involved, containing possible parallels to Paul's images and ideas. At the same time, we have been flooded with a flood of very different quality auxiliary literature, and now every conscientious researcher faces the difficult task of shoveling through a multitude of special publications and, if possible, speaking fairly about each of them. Therefore, the current commentaries contain a lengthy history of the issue rather than fundamental theological statements. This, perhaps, is not a bad thing, if, of course, we understand that in this way the ground is prepared for future theological research and fertilizes it, I dare to hope, with the best of all that is so attractive in its accessibility in our days.

Meaning

The question of the significance of the Apostle Paul for the present day is still acute. Some, as before, prefer to play on the downside: they say, let's place the Holy Apostle in his historical context and leave him there, but, in fact, under the guise of a modern approach to interpretation, it is proposed to exclude Paul's ideas from our worldview and theological constructions. Others continue to use Paul's name to justify the old-fashioned "preaching of the gospel," according to which our only "problem" is human sinfulness and pride, and the only "way out" is the cross of Christ. Finally, there are those who, while not denying this aspect of Paul's thought, nevertheless try to operate with broader concepts and to pose more general questions, which, in their opinion, form an integral part of Paul's teaching as a whole. In this category, as I hope it will become clear from this work, I include myself. In such an approach there are excellent opportunities to address the specific problems of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and thus discover the meaning of those Pauline texts that were previously considered to be "dark places." Thus, for example, when confronted with a completely self-sufficient modern Western neo-paganism, in which violent materialism, on the one hand, is combined with New Age philosophizing on the other, it would be well to remind ourselves (and we will do so in a later chapter) that the main addressee of Paul's preaching was not Jews, but pagans, and he has something to say to their modern co-religionists. But more on that later.

As we point the research lens, the personality of the apostle Paul begins to emerge against the background of a more general problem. What is Paul's role in the founding of the church? How correctly did he interpret Jesus' words? Or was he an arrogant upstart who imposed a new religion on those around him, in which a certain "Jesus" played the main role, although it had nothing to do with the teachings of Christ?

This is what some of the modern researchers are trying to assert, in particular, on the Jewish point of view. For example, the well-known Jewish scholar and apologist Chaim Maccoby argues in a number of his works that Jesus, whose personality (in the author's opinion) is extremely obscured by the Christian "gospels," was none other than a Pharisee, a respectable and law-abiding Jew who did not intend to abandon the basic principles of Judaism and did not propose a new religion. But Paul, Maccoby believes, contrary to all his claims, was never a Pharisee. He, an eternal marginal in the Jewish milieu, a typically Hellenistic thinker, reinterprets the teaching of Jesus in the categories of Greek, if not Gnostic, thought. The Jesus he invented is exclusively a figment of his religious and philosophical imagination, a character in no way connected with the corresponding historical figure and who came rather from the world of ancient religion – a kind of deity of the Greek pantheon. In this way, Maccoby believes, Paul paved the way for anti-Semitism in Western culture.

Another author, the writer and journalist E. N. Wilson, who publicly renounced Christianity and then published a book about Jesus designed to justify at least some of his personal apostasy, recently produced a similar work on the Apostle Paul. Apparently deaf to Schweitzer's warnings not to introduce Hellenistic concepts into the interpretation of Paul's texts, since the apostle himself was much closer to the Jewish ones, he speaks a little patronizingly of Paul as undoubtedly the greatest thinker, but unfortunately overlooked the true nature of Jesus. It was Paul, who translated into the categories of Hellenistic thought what Jesus taught rather incomprehensibly but inspiredly, who became, in Wilson's opinion, the true "founder of Christianity." From these two examples, as well as from many others like them, it is evident (and this will be discussed later) that the inventors of such theories wander in the misty foothills, and above them in all their dazzling glory rise peaks and glaciers, sheer cliffs and cliffs – and this is the real landscape of Paul's thought.

Thus, in the twentieth century, the teaching of the Apostle Paul was used and distorted no less than in the first. But are we able to listen to it at least a little at the end of the century? Are you ready to apologize for having been unfair to him, and at least a little respect for his views? That is what I have tried to do in my book—to go off the beaten path to the Pauline texts and, at least partially, to see in them what Paul himself is talking about. I try to read the Apostle Paul "in his language." I try to understand what he really wanted to say.