From the author: George Martin
Welcome to this website and the news about my book to be published in 2022. I am a retired Episcopal priest. For most of my ministry I preached on the gospels, and only occasionally preached on readings from Paul’s letters. I also knew that many of those letters did not come from him, but were written in his name long after he had died. Paul had many fans in the early church and some of them adopted him to promote their own ideas. Some of those letters he did not write were difficult to deal with when many of us in the Episcopal church were seeking to approve the ordination of women to serve as ordained deacons, priests, and bishops. We were wrestling with texts from letters Paul wrote and those he certainly had no hand in writing. I decided late in my ministry that I needed to know more about Paul’s letters and his story. This book was born out of my extensive research that put me in touch with hundreds of amazing Pauline scholars. With this book we have a Paul who never became a Christian, but that’s because he never knew the word. He called himself a Judean which meant he was tied not only to the land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem, but the story of God beginning with the book of Genesis. His story regarding Jesus of Nazareth had its ups and downs. It began with Paul fearful of early followers of Jesus claiming that he had risen from the dead after his crucifixion. And then? Paul had an apocalyptic experience of the Risen Lord. He was still rooted in the faith story that shaped him—and Jesus as well—but he was on a journey that would take him from the sands of the Arabian desert, all the way to what he hoped would be his final preaching mission in Spain. This is the story which places Paul in the midst of the early decades of the first century. This Paul placed his life alongside of the majority of those in the Roman Empire who lived desperate lives—literally living as best they could for their daily bread. In the process Paul welcomed women into ministry and gave a message of hope and dignity to all, including slaves, in the early communities which Paul framed as families where all were equal.

I welcome your questions and comments as you read the blogs that are in the website.

I am willing to lead Zoom discussions about Paul. Let’s FIND PAUL together!