In Paul’s Necessary Sin, I set down as clearly as I could, a presentation of Paul’s understanding that placed his own experience of liberation at the heart of all his thinking. What I was and remain convinced of is that, if someone tackles the interpretation of Paul without fully acknowledging that Paul is operating after a real and lasting shift in perception, then Paul’s thought appears complicated and incoherent at times. Once there is some clarity about his new perspective, a great deal of the complexity that is attributed to Paul disappears. In order to show this, I take a good deal of care over translation in the book and do this in a way that I intend to be accessible for people who are not biblical scholars and have not studied Greek. Without knowing about some of the issues of translation, any reader is inevitably limited by decisions that translators have made and scholarly complexity continues to prevent a clear understanding of what Paul is saying. The simple fact is that he is not writing for theologians. He is writing for communities who need guidance on this new way of life they have undertaken. Too much complication and his purpose is lost. Instead, I suggest that many, if not most, of the people he is writing to have also been through a similar shift in perception which means that they possess a key to what he is saying that is still needed in order to understand what he says today.
Unfortunately, Paul’s Necessary Sin: The Experience of Liberation, for most of the time it has been in print, has carried the high price of an academic book. At present it is available for £42.99 in the UK and $55-82 in the US. It was originally published by Ashgate in 2006 and then by Taylor and Francis in 2016.
My favourite review finishes with this enthusiastic comment: ‘it is Ashworth that you need if you want to be made to think again about your understanding of Paul’! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00438_30.x