PAUL the PHARISEE

John Dominic Crossan's new biography, Paul the Pharisee, subtitled A Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization, has an image on its cover that is also the core of its content. Im-age and content are based on a mosaic from Sicily's Monreale Cathedral in which, as the Latin inscription explains, "Paul gives letters to his disciples Timothy and Silas to be carried through the whole world (per universum orbem)." This is that 1st-century Jewish futurist and Messianic mystic, Paul of Tarsus, claiming