Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

These communities, small at first but growing, were an experiment in a way of being human, of being human together, that had never been tried in the world before. It was like a form of Judaism, particularly in its care for the poor, its strict sexual ethic, and its insistence on a monotheism that excluded the pagan divinities. But it was quite unlike the Jewish way of life in its open welcome to all who found themselves grasped by the good news of Jesus.

Jews from that day to this have accused Paul of compromising with paganism. But this scene makes it abundantly clear that, if Paul ever appears to be sailing close to the wind (he would say that this was a false conclusion, but many have drawn it), this was not because he was becoming some kind of pagan by the back door. He was as fierce and zealous a monotheist as anyone else.

What mattered, once again, was loyalty. Whose side are you on? Are you an out-and-out zealous supporter of the One God and his Torah, ready to do whatever is necessary to defend God’s honor and establish his kingdom—or are you a compromiser? Are you ready to do deals with the pagan world when it suits you?

If, as we have seen, the Jerusalem church had by this time established a sense of identity as some kind of counter-Temple movement, this did not mean its members were being “anti-Jewish.” If anything, they were putting themselves on a par with many other groups who regarded the present Temple hierarchy (the wealthy, aristocratic Sadducees, including the high-priestly family) as a corrupt and compromised bunch, out for their own ends and too eager to do deals with the Romans.

According to Acts, it was Peter himself who first broke the taboo and went to preach to and to share table fellowship with non-Jews; he received strong divine validation for this radical move and persuaded his suspicious colleagues in Jerusalem that this had been the right thing to do.1 But this move too seems not to have been thought through with regard to what they believed about Jesus himself. It was a pragmatic decision. This is how the spirit had led; therefore this must be what God wants.

Can we do things this way too?

The word on the street in Jerusalem, then, would have been that these Jesus-followers were not really loyal Jews. They were letting the side down. That was how the forces of darkness always worked, and there were many in Jerusalem who would be on the lookout for the first signs of it among the local Jesus movement.

Some types of Protestantism have imbibed this deeply, supposing that “the gospel” is all about inner feeling, a disposition of the heart, and not at all about outward reality or actions, whether moral or “religious.” Sometimes people have thought that this is the one and only meaning of Paul’s teaching about “justification by faith not works.” But things were not nearly so simple.

Obviously, we think, he was interested in a person’s inner reality, over against those fussy legalists who thought you had to obey a string of ritual instructions! He believed, we say, in a message of love rather than law, of inward feeling rather than outward conformity, of faith in the heart rather than rule-book religion or liturgical performance. In particular, we suppose, Paul believed that God didn’t require a perfect moral obedience from people, because God in any case always preferred right feelings (including “faith”) to right actions (which might make you proud). And so we could go on.

These caricatures are themselves full of contradictions. Anyone who thinks that having right “feelings” doesn’t make people proud is singularly blind to the currently fashionable notion that what matters is a correct “attitude” on the questions of the day. But that doesn’t make the caricatures any the less powerful.

Perhaps, indeed, that is what “holy scripture” really is—not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.

His writing, just like the gospel itself, was part of a radical redefinition of what “authority” might look like within the new world that the One God had launched through Jesus.

Up to this point he had happily sat down to eat with the Jesus-believing Gentiles, but now, seeing that the newcomers were taking a hard line, he drew back.

Even Barnabas! Barnabas had been with him through the joys and the trials of the mission in Galatia. They had shared everything; they had prayed and worked and celebrated and suffered side by side. They had themselves welcomed many non-Jews into the family. And now this. So what had happened?

Peter had drawn the other Jewish Jesus-followers with him in stepping back from the common table. Once he had made this move as one of the best-known figures in the whole movement, it would have been very hard for the other Jews to hold their nerve. This made it no doubt harder for Paul to confront him, but also all the more necessary. Peter had to be stopped in his tracks.

claiming the authority of the Jerusalem church,

Paul, said the messengers, was only ever a second-order representative of the Jesus message. He had picked up his “gospel” in Jerusalem, but had failed to grasp one of its essential elements

Paul appealed to Christ directly

It would be like a grand-society wedding at which the noble-born bridegroom arrives, only to announce that he is running off with a gypsy girl he’d met down the street.

We noted a moment ago the pressure on the Jerusalem-based Jesus-followers themselves. We can see how natural it would be for them to want to demonstrate to their suspicious friends and neighbors in Jerusalem just how loyal they really were by trying to put matters right.

Outward pressure was actually affecting the zealous not the other way around

First, to repeat, Paul is offering a reminder that what has happened through Jesus is the launching of new creation. The messianic events of Jesus and the spirit are not simply another religious option, a new twist on an old theme.

Second, what has happened in the gospel events, and what has happened in Paul’s own ministry, is in fact the fulfillment of the scripturally sourced divine plan.

This leads Paul, third, to the vital point. All this has effectively bypassed the problem posed by Moses.

Fourth, this has been accomplished through the long-awaited “new Exodus.”

So, finally and decisively, the living God has created the single family he always envisaged, and it is marked by faith, pistis.

How can you tell, then, where this single family is? The only sure indication is pistis—faith, faithfulness, loyalty.

Paul was a dangerous and subversive character.

We can imagine Paul biting his lip,

The main point at issue had thus been dealt with—though we should not imagine that everyone meekly acquiesced. Things do not work like that in real communities. Just because an official pronouncement has been made, that does not mean that all churches will at once fall into line.

As we saw earlier, the normal translation of koinōnia is “fellowship,” but that coin has worn smooth with long use. It can mean “business partnership” too; that is part of it, but again it doesn’t get to the heart. And the heart is what matters. When our words run out, we need images: the look of delight when a dear friend pays an unexpected visit, the glance of understanding between musicians as together they say something utterly beautiful, the long squeeze of a hand by a hospital bed, the contentment and gratitude that accompany shared worship and prayer—all this and more.

But part of his belief in divine providence included the belief that the One God had strangely but surely established the Roman world, with all its pagan wickedness, for which it would be called to account, as a means by which, however paradoxically, he and others could proclaim Jesus as Lord.

Just like Mormons claim America as making the Restoration possible

The Lord will come like a midnight robber, just when people are saying “peace and security.”16 Who in that world was claiming to offer “peace and security”? The Roman Empire, of course; it proclaimed, on coins and other symbols, that with the rise of the empire the whole world was now “safe.”

the mob—always a volatile element in a crowded city—saw

The load we had to carry was far too heavy for us; it got to the point where we gave up on life itself. Yes: deep inside ourselves we received the death sentence.

If somebody came to see me and said something like this, I would recognize the signs of serious depression.

At the same time, there were divisions in the church; several members declared that they didn’t regard Paul as their real leader. They preferred Peter (Cephas) or Apollos instead.

sneering comments about what these Jesus-followers were up to behind closed doors, with men and women meeting together and talking a lot about a new kind of “love,” not to mention the disturbing gossip about eating someone’s body and drinking their blood.

those who persist in styles of life that corrupt and destroy that genuine humanity cannot inherit it.

Those with “strong” consciences are those who, like him, know that idols don’t exist, so that meat offered to them is merely meat. The “weak” are those who, after a lifetime of actually worshipping idols and imagining themselves to be participating in the life of the god by eating sacrificial meat, cannot now touch the meat without feeling themselves being dragged back into the murky world of idolatry and all that went with it.

make extra trouble for him (who are they? It isn’t clear) are simply drawing attention to the message of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus.

He knows only too well (if he had not already, the recent experience with Corinth would have taught him) that a community composed of people from very different social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds will find all sorts of interesting reasons for divisions, perhaps over seemingly unrelated issues. Every such impulse must be resisted.

“the partnership of his sufferings.”

“God was reconciling the world to himself in the Messiah,” Paul wrote later, “not counting their transgressions against them, and entrusting us with the message of reconciliation.”

“if he’s wronged you, put it down on my account. I’ll make it good.”

the remarkably “high” view of the church in these letters was thought to contrast with the more “protestant” view of Romans, Galatians, and the Corinthian letters. This is in fact a straightforward mistake.

Nineteenth-century Protestantism didn’t favor Jewish thought either, and it certainly didn’t want Paul to be too Jewish.

As historians, we must not set up the artificial standards of contemporary moralizing and then construct a “Paul” to fit. Fashions come and go in the scholarly world. The fashion for rejecting Ephesians and Colossians—or perhaps we should say for helping the Protestant Paul to keep his distance from Judaism, on the one hand, and from Catholicism, on the other—has had a long run for its money.

Therefore, recognize that you are under no obligation to obey regulations regarding diet, festivals or Sabbaths, no matter what visions and revelations people may claim as they instruct you.”

To make widely differing gifts work for unity, not division, as in chapter 4, is hard enough.

The new wine of the gospel would be too sweet for some and too dry for others. But he had no choice. “The Messiah’s love,” he had written to Corinth, “makes us press on.

this new cult, though “accidentally” having begun in the Jewish world, had now become a completely Gentile phenomenon.

The Jesus movement would turn itself into a kind of private spirituality, less concerned with the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven and more concerned with cultivating one’s own spiritual interiority. It would no longer be a movement based on messianic eschatology. It would become a “religion” that saw itself as different from “the Jewish religion,” a private religion that would no longer pose much of a threat to the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities.