Rowan Williams or Steve Jobs?

The former Archbishop is a reflective and pastoral theologian. The former chief executive of Apple was a hard-edged entrepreneur and businessman.

What they share in common is being likened to the apostle Paul.

Conrad Gempf, a New Testament lecturer at London School of Theology, sees Paul as a "really difficult character to deal with". His book, How to Like Paul Again (Authentic, £7.99), aims to unearth "a secret to liking an initially unlikeable person like Paul".

In an interview with Christian Today, Gempf said: "I imagine him a bit like Steve Jobs where he is difficult because he is a peculiar kind of perfectionist."

For Paul, "the values have to be pointing in the right way otherwise he explodes. He can tolerate people doing wrong if the values are right."

Tom Wright, the former Bishop of Durham and New Testament professor at the University of St Andrews, was asked the same question – which recent or contemporary figure do you see as most similar to Paul?

"He is an extraordinary combination of poet, theologian, pastor and teacher," he told Christian Today. "A lot of those lines point to Rowan Williams."

The striking difference cuts to the heart of how complex Paul's character was and how varied the readings of him are.

Gempf's book starts from the premise that Paul is "extremely confrontational". He likens Paul to Jobs because "there is this desire for excellence that means he something stepped on people's feet to get to it.

"I think that [Jobs] is somebody who can help us understand how difficult and yet successful Paul was."

The classic example of Paul's feisty approach is his letter to the Galatians where he breaks with the traditional niceties at the start of a Roman-style letter ("I always thank my God for you"), to give them a piece of his mind.

He writes in Galatians 1:"I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel."

In sophisticated Greco-Roman letter writing this would have been a dramatic break with convention. "He is angry because they are going in the wrong direction," said Gempf.

But Wright is not convinced that Paul is as prickly as Gempf thinks.

"It is hard to know enough about the situation around the rhetorical conventions of the time," he said. "He does vary the opening of different letters."

He added: "In Galatians he is writing on the basis of a very deep friendship which gives him the licence to jump straight in.

"I think he is just receiving this shock news they are proposing to go back on everything he taught them. So I think the only thing he sees that will stop them is a thunderbolt.

"Whether that makes him a tricky person or whether that makes him exciting, forthright or dramatic I don't know."

Wright's understanding is generally of a much softer man than Gempf imagines. He points to 1 Thessalonians 2 where Paul reminds the Thessalonians: "We were gentle with you."

"I think Paul has learnt the lessons of how to be with people," he said. "People think sex is what it is all about but he mentions gentleness and kindness more than sex.

"Being good to people is actually at the heart of the gospel. It is Paul repeating of the emphasis on gentleness that makes me think he had learnt to master this."

The suggestion that Paul appears to have wrestled with and tamed his own fiery temper is something both theologians agree on.

"It is very likely he gets angry and then decides whether he should calm down or not," said Gempf. "That would be monstrously hard to prove but I think throughout his letters you see him wrestling with boasting in a way that makes me think it is a personality problem he knows he has and is wrestling over and winning. 

Gempf speculates Paul may have had an "internal struggle" before writing 1 Corinthians that led to him deliberately building Peter up after famously falling out with him in Galatians.

And whatever their differences about the extent to which Paul was a spiky character, both agree there are vast lessons the Church can learn from how Paul handled different conflict situations.

"He is a very complex guy," said Gempf. "It is not just that he forgives after conflict, it is that everything he does, even in disagreements, is in submission to his values of spreading the gospel.

"There are places where the gospel is threatened and in those places Paul just goes beserk.

"But there are places, like in Corinthians, where his own pride or his superiority is at stake. There he doesn't go beserk. There is this consciousness that something bigger than him is at stake."

Gempf sums up Paul's attitude: "If you're neutral about the Church that is cool. But if you're neutral about Jesus that is not cool."

Wright sees Paul as handling conflict very differently depending what was at stake.

"Paul has a very definite take on what difference does make a difference. If those differences are ones that don't matter then let's go for it and just work out how to handle it," he said pointing at his different approaches to conflict in Philippians ("I plead with you to be of the same mind in the Lord," he told the feuding Euodia and Syntyche in chapter 4:2), 1 Corinthians and Romans 14.

In areas Paul did not think were fundamental his attitude was, "if you are on the strong side then you must defer to those who are classed as weak", Wright says.

"Which is interesting – it's a giving up of rights, which is a different way of handling conflict."

He adds: "It is not, 'Here is a conflict and here is how to deal with it.' The issue is whether this is an issue that does make a difference or doesn't make a difference."

"The question for the current debates in the Church is, which side does this fall on?"