Gempf, Conrad. How to Like Paul Again: The Apostle You Never Knew. Authentic Media, 2013. ISBN 978-1-78078-061-0. 178pp [Link to Buy]
For many Christians, Paul is a problem. We admire him, quote him, even build our theology around him, but few of us really warm to him as an individual. Whereas Peter seems like someone we could have a bit of craic with, Paul seems stern, argumentative, and a little too serious. We might like to quote him, but I wonder what it would have been like being on his church planting team? Sharp disagreements[1], being worshipped as a god[2], beaten[3], circumcised[4]? Perhaps God is calling me to another team, Paul. I’m sure you understand…
Conrad Gempf’s How to Like Paul Again opens by naming this unease with unusual honesty. “He’s just the kind of Christian that people object to,” Gempf writes, channelling a typical view of many expressions of Christianity, “full of don’t do this and don’t do that; so into authority and stuff. Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
The charm of this short, witty book lies in how gently Gempf dismantles those assumptions. His purpose isn’t to defend Paul’s image or polish his reputation but to help us meet the Apostle as a person. “Paul is a genius, someone you’ll be glad is on your side,” he concludes early on. “Like is not too strong a word. I know you don’t believe it yet. The thing is, you have to get to know him.” The book shows us how.
While doing a module on the pastoral epistles in 2021, I had bought this book, glanced at it briefly, and then put it in my ‘to-read’ pile. I only got round to reading it a few weeks ago, and now I’m sad that I hadn’t read it sooner!
Reading Paul as a Person, Not a Problem
Gempf argues that our dislike of Paul often stems from how we read him. Modern Christians, he says, treat the Bible “flatly,” as if it were a manual rather than correspondence. We mine it for quick relevance, stripping away tone, audience, and relationship. “If… the only thing I care about is myself—relevance—then my reading of the Bible will be very flat,” he warns in one of his insights. By contrast, a “three-dimensional” reading listens for the texture of relationship, the warmth or frustration between author and recipient.
“There’s a saying that you shouldn’t criticize another person until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins,” Gempf writes. “In giving us epistles rather than a theological textbook, the Bible invites us to take that walk and see what Paul writes not as pronouncement but as reply.” This line crystallizes his method. Paul’s letters, Gempf insists, are not abstract lectures but responses to real people. Understanding them requires empathy, not merely intellect.
The Humanity Behind the Apostle
That empathy begins on the Damascus Road. Gempf retells Saul’s conversion not as a dramatic moral reversal but as a divine interruption in a young man’s ambitious career. The Pharisee from Tarsus, trained under Gamaliel, was on a trajectory toward religious prestige when grace stopped him mid-stride. “Jesus is God’s irritant,” Gempf quips. “And this thick-skinned Pharisee trying to kickstart his career needed to learn that his future lay not in kicking against the irritant but in going along with it.”
It’s a wonderful line from Gempf, humorous, vivid, quietly profound, and something I wish I’d said! Saul’s encounter with Christ is less about guilt than about surrender. His passion, so often mistaken for harshness, is the passion of a man who has been interrupted by love.
Letters, Not Lectures
The heart of the book is Gempf’s plea to read the epistles as letters. “If you believe that God is behind the writing of the Bible,” he writes, “the inclusion of epistles is deliberate. We need to take the content seriously, but we also need to take them seriously as letters.” Form is part of revelation. God speaks through tone and texture as well as through content.
To illustrate this, Gempf invents a fictional “hotel complaint letter” and its polite corporate reply, showing how much we can infer from one side of a correspondence. The same is true of Paul. “Read it as a letter,” he says, “and vistas open up in many directions. And so do understanding and smiles.” This playful hermeneutic is pastoral at its core. Reading Paul relationally allows us to hear humour where we once heard scolding, affection where we assumed anger. It humanises both author and reader. “Being interested in the other,” Gempf reminds us, “is the first step in getting past flat hearing and flat reading.”
Rediscovering Paul’s Voice
In his chapters on Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and Philemon, Gempf applies this approach with disarming clarity. Galatians becomes a story of heartbreak rather than polemic. Paul is not merely defending doctrine but pleading with friends swayed by persuasive teachers. “Paul’s argument is, ‘My teaching doesn’t come from ordinary human beings, my message comes by revelation from Jesus,’” Gempf explains. “For him to have thought that this was a biting argument, it is very likely that the opponents were taught by human beings, not by Jesus.” Suddenly, the sharp edge of Galatians 1 sounds less authoritarian and more personal. Paul is a wounded pastor fighting for his people’s freedom.
In 1 Corinthians, Gempf helps us hear the weary humour behind Paul’s sarcasm, “Already you are kings!” but also the affection behind his rebukes. In Philemon, he draws out the apostle’s gentleness. Paul “could order you to do what you ought to do… yet prefers to appeal on the basis of love.” Each letter reveals not a rigid pedantic theologian but a man whose theology flows from his relationship with Jesus.
Why It Matters
The pastoral genius of How to Like Paul Again lies in its tone. Gempf is a teacher who writes like a friend. He neither scolds us as readers for misunderstanding Paul nor apologises for Paul’s strength. He simply reintroduces him. The humour in this book lowers our defences, but his insight is as good as anything we might read in an academic commentary. The result is quietly transformative.
“Disagreeing about something isn’t really a good reason for disliking someone, is it?” Gempf asks early on. “Don’t we all have friends we love to bits even though they hold some opinion we know is just dumb, dumb, dumb?” That playful realism threads through the whole book. It’s not just about liking Paul, it’s about recovering a way of relating to Scripture, and to people, with curiosity rather than fear. In my opinion, the way he approaches both Paul, the Bible, and potential opponents, is winsome and super helpful for sharing the Gospel in relationships.
For pastors and teachers, Gempf’s approach is deeply practical. It’s a book I would gladly put into the hand of someone struggling to read Paul’s writings. It reminds us that exegesis is not merely intellectual work but relational work. To preach Paul well is to help people overhear a conversation, between God and His people, between grace and the human heart. So many times we elevate the words of the Bible to a degree that we obscure the human element, Gempf almost does the opposite, to a really helpful degree.
Conclusion
By the final page, it’s hard not to feel that Gempf has succeeded in more than his title suggests. He hasn’t just made us like Paul again, he’s helped us read the Bible again. And he’s done it with empathy, humour, and warmth. “Read it as a letter,” he says, “and vistas open up.” They do. And when they do, we discover that beneath Paul’s arguments beats a pastoral heart, which is both fierce, loving, and profoundly human.
Maybe I would like to be on his church planting team after all!
[1] Acts 15:36-40
[2] Acts 14:8-18
[3] Acts 16:22-23
[4] Acts 16:1–3