British writer A.N. Wilson has had diverse interests, as a journalist, biographer and novelist. He seems drawn to religious themes and characters - before this book, in 1997 he had written biographies of Milton, Tolstoy, Hilaire Belloc, C.S. Lewis and Jesus.

His writing is rich and allusive - perhaps too much so. It is difficult to follow his line of thought without some knowledge of the history of Christian thought and current biblical scholarship. It helps to know that liberal Christian scholars who favour a meek and mild peace-loving interpretation of Jesus over the fiery Jesus who drove the money lenders from the temple tend to blame Paul for polluting the pure stream of Christian love with moral theology. It also helps to know that the Acts of the Apostles, which precedes the letters of Paul in the New Testament was written after the letters, that the letters are not in the order they were written, and that some were written by Paul's disciples.

At the same time, Wilson does present that information succinctly and forcefully. He examines the differerences between the Sadduccees, the Pharisees, the Essense and other classes and sects of Palestinian Judaism. He looks at the distribution of Jews around the ancient world and the social tensions between Jews and majority cultures in Syria, Turkey and Greece, and the political tensions between the Romans, their Greek and Arab puppet kings in Palestine, and various sects of Jews in Palestine. He gives us a social context to understand Paul that is absent in purely religious writing, and a religious context that is absent in purely social and critical writing.

Wilson's aim is to understand Paul's mind. His view is that Paul was a devout Jew, likely in the sect of the Pharisees who may have witnessed the execution of Jesus, underwent a radical conversion, and became a rabble-rousing preacher. Paul seems to have visited Jewish communities in present day Turkey and Greece and preach his own vision of the transformation of the law of the Torah by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. His version of church building started with preaching to Jews, founding faith communities and opening them up to other converts. His teaching was a radically inclusive version of Jewish monotheism, open to Gentiles without requiring converts to undergo circumcision or to follow dietary laws. This put him in in conflict with more conventional Jews and with other early Christians (including the Jerusalem Christians) who tried to hold to Jewish law and tradition. The Romans did not distinguish between Christians and Jews when they suppressed rebellions in Palestine around 70 AD. The churches founded by Paul survived and grew.

Wilson sees Paul as an apocalyptic thinker, who expected the end of the world, rather than a social thinker writing a systematic theology intended to carry believers through the centuries. He sees Paul as an obsessed mystical thinker whose passionate writing about personal conversion and faith proved both foundational and problematic for later generations of Christians.