Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Paul congratulated the Thessalonians on their practical “love,” agapē, and urged them to work at it more and more. “Do good to everyone,” he wrote to the Galatians, “and particularly to the household of the faith.” “Celebrate with those who are celebrating, mourn with the mourners.” “Shine like lights in the world.” The gospel itself was designed to generate a new kind of people, a people “who would be eager for good works”; in fact, the new kind of humanity that was brought to birth through the gospel was created for the specific purpose of “good works.”21 This point has often been missed when people have read the phrase “good works” as meaning simply “the performance of moral rules,” especially when that in turn has been played off against “justification by faith alone.” Morals matter, faith matters, but that isn’t the point here. Paul’s emphasis here is all about communities through whose regular practice the surrounding world is made a better place. A glance at the second and third centuries is enough to confirm that all these things, particularly when we see them together, offer good explanations for the spread of the Christian communities. These Jesus-followers, strange though their views might have seemed to those around, antisocial though some might have supposed them to be, were doing things that really did transform the wider society. By the end of the second century, Roman officials were not particularly aware of the nuances of Christian teaching, but they did k...