THE WORLD OF SAINT PAUL, by Joseph M. Callewaert

The World of Saint Paul
Joseph M. Callewaert
Ignatius Press: San Francisco. 2011

What an excellent book! Mr. Callewaert ‘s life of St. Paul reveals a thorough familiarity with the geography, history, and mythology of the Mediterranean world.

With the usual caveat of “I have no window to look into a man’s soul” (attributed to St. Thomas More and to Queen Elizabeth I), one infers that Mr. Callewaert is a believing Catholic, the adjective “believing” sadly necessary at present.

Mr. Callewaert gives the reader an informal but not patronizing style, and deliberately and skillfully comes close to fiction in depicting for us the scenes and characters in St. Paul’s life. He describes the cities, especially, and provides clear maps to show us these cities and the routes of travel. His knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Semitic mythologies is wonderful, and he dissects – respectfully – many of Saint Paul’s letters to show us the historical and mythological allusions the Saint uses to appeal to his audiences. Perhaps without meaning to, Mr. Callewaert makes an excellent argument for returning to the teaching of mythology, the mythology which all Christian knew for 2,000 years and to which most schoolchildren were exposed (on a g-rated level) until the 1970s, when a secular obsession with testing isolated skills and a fundamentalist fear of anything that “ain’t in the Bible” pretty much ended the teaching of Christian civilization in grade school.

The only weak part of the book is the brief introduction in which Mr. Callewaert employs the first-person singular repeatedly and almost as repeatedly uses quotation marks to indicate sarcasm. These lapses into adolescent FaceBook-ese are, happily, not continued in the text.

Mr. Callewaert was born in Belgium and grew up during the German occupation. He is a Knight Commander of the French Order of Merit, has written numerous travelogues, and is now a citizen of the U.S.

The reviewer barely graduated from high school.