Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

HUMAN CULTURE HAS normally developed at the speed of a glacier.

In Paul’s day, “religion” consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another. In the modern Western world, “religion” tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture, politics, and community life. For Paul, “religion” was woven in with all of life; for the modern Western world, it is separated from it.

Why did these little communities founded by a wandering Jew turn into what became “the church”?

What we were after, therefore, was what Paul himself was trying to say.

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves. And ancient history in particular introduces us to some ways of thinking very different from those of the sixteenth or the twentieth century.

For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world. (When Paul says, “We are citizens of heaven,” he goes on at once to say that Jesus will come from heaven not to take us back there, but to transform the present world and us with it.) And this hope for “resurrection,” for new bodies within a newly reconstituted creation, doesn’t just mean rethinking the ultimate “destination,” the eventual future hope. It changes everything on the way as well.

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul’s perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new “otherworldly” hope.

the whole of his career and thought was built on the assumption that this was always God’s intention and that this new heaven-and-earth historical reality had come to birth in Jesus and was being activated by the spirit.

Paul believed that in Jesus the One God had acted “when the fullness of time arrived.”5 Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

Even in Jerusalem, with a mostly Jewish population and with the Temple itself, the building where heaven and earth came together,

We know from Paul’s mature life and writings that he engaged in manual work. “Tentmaking” probably included the crafting of other goods made of leather or animal hair in addition to the core product of tents themselves.

Everything we know about him encourages us to think of the young Saul of Tarsus as an unusually gifted child.

He read biblical Hebrew fluently. He spoke the Aramaic of the Middle East (the mother tongue of Jesus and quite possibly Saul’s mother tongue as well) in addition to the ubiquitous Greek, which he spoke and wrote at great speed. He probably had at least some Latin.

He has pretty certainly read other Jewish books of the time, books like the Wisdom of Solomon, quite possibly some of the philosophy of his near contemporary Philo.

The best guess has him a little younger than Jesus of Nazareth; a birth date in the first decade of what we now call the first century is as good as we can get. As for his family, we find later that he has a sister and a nephew living in Jerusalem; there may well have been more relatives there, although Tarsus was probably still the family home.

One God, whose never-to-be-spoken Name was replaced in the great prayer by Adhonai, which went into the ubiquitous Greek as Kyrios. One God, One Torah; One Lord, One People, called to utter loyalty. And with that loyalty went the one hope, the Passover hope—freedom, especially freedom from the rule of foreigners. A whole new world, with Israel rescued from danger once and for all. A new creation. A new Eden.

the increasing excitement as people searched the prophetic writings, particularly the book of Daniel, finding plenty of hints that the time was now ripe and plenty of suggestions as to how they might pray their own way into that future.

The late twentieth century is obviously very different from the early first century, but “zeal” has remained a constant.

They were talking as if heaven and earth were somehow joined together in him, in this crazy, dangerous, deluded man! They were speaking as if, by comparison with this Jesus, the ancient institutions of Israel were on a lower footing. The Temple itself, Stephen was saying, was only a temporary expedient. God was doing a new thing. And, yes, the present generation was under judgment for rejecting Jesus and his message. Stephen, on trial for his life, made matters worse. “Look!” he shouted. “I can see heaven opened, and the son of man standing at God’s right hand!”10 Heaven and earth open to one another, and this Jesus holding them together in prayer? Blasphemy! The court had heard enough. Stephen was rushed out of the city and crushed to death under a hail of rocks. Saul approved. This was the kind of action the Torah required. This was what “zeal” was supposed to look like.

The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is celebrated on January 25 every year in many Western churches, including my own.

The whimsical English poet John Betjeman puts it like this: St. Paul is often criticised By modern people who’re annoyed At his conversion, saying Freud Explains it all. But they omit The really vital part of it, Which isn’t how it was achieved But what it was that Paul believed.1

History is not just about events, but about motivations. Motivations, no doubt, float like icebergs, with much more out of sight than above the waterline.

The narrative in question was the hope of Israel.

Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this.

Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.

Saul’s world, those unshakable promises were focused on one great story, with one particular element that would make all the difference. The great story was the ancient freedom story, the Passover narrative, but with a new twist. The One God had liberated hi...

what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.

When the One God finally puts away the idolatry and wickedness that caused his people to be exiled in the first place, then his people will be free at last, Passover people with a difference. That was the ancient hope, cherished not only by Saul of Tarsus but by thousands of his fellow Jews.

One way or another, it was a culture suffused with hope. Hope long deferred, but hope nonetheless.

That is the great story in which Saul and his contemporaries were living. That is the narrative they had in their heads and their hearts. That story gave shape and energy, in a thousand different ways, to their aspirations and motivations. It explains both hope and action. This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

Two of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel,

if they prayerfully studied the Torah, then it might be as if they were in the Temple itself.

it would have to do with the long-awaited renewal of creation itself—the ultimate prophetic vision.

Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.”

There was nothing called “Christianity” in the first century, only groups of people who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord. There was nothing corresponding to what we now call “Judaism” in the first century (the word then, as we saw, had an active force meaning “the zealous propagation of the Jewish way of life”), only the many communities of Jews around the world, praying to Israel’s God, studying the scriptures, focusing on Temple and Torah.

Paul remained to his dying day fiercely loyal to Israel’s God, seen in fresh and blinding focus in Jesus.

“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no ‘male and female’; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.”

Ananias explained to Saul that Jesus had sent him so that Saul would be able to see again and so that he would receive the holy spirit. Who knows what those words did to Saul after his three days of turmoil and blindness? Whatever was going on inside him, the outward evidence was clear: something like scales fell from his eyes (another proverbial phrase; had the blinding light caused some sort of a scab?), and he could see. We in the modern world do not put much stock in “miracles.” But when we are faced with events that seem to fall in no other category, we speak of miracles as though they are caused by a “supernatural” power from outside the world that “invades” the chain of “natural causes.” It may sometimes feel like that. But a more biblical account would recognize the strange, steady work of God within so-called natural causes as well, so that the sudden and shocking new event is held within a larger continuum of ultimate divine causation.

To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one. Insofar as it marked out members of the family, it functioned somewhat like circumcision for a Jew, except of course that women were included as well. Equally, it was a bit like a slave being branded (so that the slave was now under a new master), though of course slaves and free alike were baptized. The important thing was that, having been baptized, one now belonged to the Messiah.

Israel’s hope has been fulfilled! The King has been enthroned! He was declaring that the crucified Jesus was Israel’s long-awaited Messiah.

Mt. Sinai was where God had come down in fire and had given Moses the Torah; it was the place of revelation, the place of law, the place where the covenant between God and Israel, established earlier with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was solemnly ratified. Sinai, the great mountain in Arabia, was, in that sense, the place of beginnings. It was the place to which subsequent generations looked back as the starting point of the long and checkered relationship, the often shaky marriage, between this strange, rescuing, demanding God and his willful, stiff-necked people. Sinai was where Elijah had gone when it all went horribly wrong. Sinai was where Saul of Tarsus went—for the same reason.

Writing to the Galatians over a decade later, he explains that he stayed with Peter (whom he calls by his Aramaic name, Cephas) for two weeks, seeing no other Jesus-followers except James, the Lord’s brother, already acknowledged as the central figure in the new movement. The

Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus. His heart was still zealous, loyal to the One God.

we can be sure of is that he prayed, he studied, and he figured out all sorts of things.

the real point was that I had to learn humility, to understand that ‘when I’m weak, then I am strong.’”

Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person.

This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day.

look again, and you will see, not least in the Psalms, not least in the royal predictions of Psalms and prophets alike, that when Israel’s true king arrives, he will be the king not only of Israel, but also of the whole world.

What sense could it make that Israel’s Messiah would come to his own and that his own would not receive him?