Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil. The resurrection proved it. If he had overcome death, it could only be because he had overcome the forces that lead to death, the corrosive power of idolatry and human wickedness.

Paul believed that, through Jesus and his death, the One God had overcome the powers that had held the world in their grip. And that meant that all humans, not just Jews, could be set free to worship the One God. The Jesus-shaped message of liberation included forgiveness for all past misdeeds, and this message of forgiveness meant that there could be no barriers between Jewish Messiah people and non-Jewish Messiah people. To erect such barriers would mean denying that Jesus had won the messianic victory. Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil. This translated directly into one of the great themes of his mature thought and particularly his pastoral efforts: the unity of all Messiah people across ethnic boundary lines. And this is one of the things that Saul’s own family must have found impossible to swallow.

Love and grief are very close, especially in warm, passionate hearts.

Saul shrank from neither. He wrote constantly of love—divine love, human love, “the Messiah’s love.” And he constantly suffered the grief that went with it.

he insisted in a famous passage that gender distinctions were irrelevant when it came to membership in the Messiah’s family.

But he saw women as fellow members on an equal footing within the people of God, and also, it seems, within the public ministry of that people. He could be friends with women and work alongside them without patronizing them, trying to seduce them, or exploiting them.

Barnabas shared Paul’s view that with the death and resurrection of Jesus the barriers to Gentile inclusion had gone.

Paul, the greatest theoretician of the new movement, was never merely a theoretician. Pretty much every idea he later articulated had been road-tested in the narrow, crowded streets of Antioch.

The three central Jerusalem leaders, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, and John, were content.

James, Peter, and John would work with Jewish people, while Saul and his friends would work with non-Jewish people.

Barnabas and Saul returned to Antioch, their mission complete. We assume that Titus went back with them. They had another young colleague in tow as well, John Mark, a youthful relative of Barnabas and also of Peter.

They denounced Paul and Barnabas as false teachers leading Israel astray. Paul’s response was to quote the prophets once more, this time his regular text, Isaiah 49: “I have set you for a light to the nations, so that you can be salvation-bringers to the end of the earth.”10 The Jewish reaction itself confirmed his scripture-fueled sense that, when Israel’s God did for Israel what he had promised, then the nations as a whole would come into the promised blessing.

The visit to New Rome thus ends with the start of Paul’s new life: that of a suffering apostle, a visible symbol of the crucified Lord he was proclaiming.

Jews from that day to this have accused Paul of compromising with paganism.

He explains that this kind of suffering is precisely the sign of two worlds clashing; they are on the cusp of the new world, and if this is what it costs, this is what it costs. So he will go on.

At the heart of Paul’s message, teaching, and life was—to use a technical phrase—radical messianic eschatology. Eschatology: God’s long-awaited new day has arrived. Messianic: Jesus is the true son of David, announced as such in his resurrection, bringing to completion the purposes announced to Abraham and extended in the Psalms to embrace the world. Radical: nothing in Paul’s or Barnabas’s background had prepared them for this new state of affairs. The fact that they now believed it was what the One God had always planned did not reduce their own sense of awe and astonishment. They knew firsthand that such a program would meet stiff resistance and even violence. What they could not have foreseen, as they traveled back through the southern part of the province of Galatia and then sailed home to (Syrian) Antioch, was that the new reality they had witnessed would become a focus of sharp controversy even among Jesus’s followers, let alone that the two of them, Paul and Barnabas, would find themselves on opposite sides as that controversy boiled over.

Paul had suddenly invented the eighteenth-century ideal of “tolerance,” but because he believed a new world order was coming to birth in which all Messiah people were welcome on equal terms, in which all were assured they were the “heirs” of the “kingdom” that was even now being launched. The events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the powerful gift of the divine spirit meant that the “powers” that had held the pagan world captive had been overthrown and that pagans who now came to believe in the Messiah were free from the defilements of idolatry and immorality.

Jerusalem at this time was still very much the center of the Jesus movement. James, the brother of Jesus himself, was the acknowledged and unrivaled leader; he would retain that role until he was murdered by hard-line activists in AD 62. Peter and John, the two remaining members of the three who were closest to Jesus in his last days (John’s brother James had been killed by Herod Agrippa in the early 40s), and James seem to have formed a new kind of triumvirate; “James, Peter, and John,” as we saw earlier, could be spoken of as “pillars,” the sustaining structure of the “new Temple.” They believed that Israel’s God had come back in person and was now dwelling among and within the followers of Jesus. This belief had now taken root, providing Jesus’s followers with a strong, though controversial and dangerous, sense of identity.

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.

he believed that the One God had called him to be the apostle to the non-Jews, the Gentiles.

in Galatians 3:29, the question Paul has to address is: How can you tell who are the true children of Abraham? And his answer is focused firmly on Jesus. So Paul’s point to Peter is simple. What matters is being part of the covenant family, and the covenant family is not defined by Jewish law, but “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.”

Though Paul does not mention baptism in this passage—he will come to that a chapter later—the sequence of thought he describes here is exactly what, in his view, baptism is all about (as in Romans 6), which is leaving the old life behind and coming through “death” into a new life entirely. And insofar as he is still the same flesh-and-blood human being (“the life I do still live in the flesh”), he now finds his identity not in his human genealogy or status, but in the Messiah himself and his (the Messiah’s) faithfulness and loyalty.

as though the true and living God had not revealed his covenant love once and for all not only to Israel but through the personification of Israel, the Messiah, to the world.

they mean that the creator God has called time on the old creation and has launched the new one in the middle of it.

The Messiah’s death has defeated the powers of the world.

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. The third chapter of the letter to the Galatians outflanks the eager Torah loyalty of the Jerusalem zealots and their diaspora cousins. Moses himself leaves Israel, at the end of Deuteronomy, with the warning of a curse, and the curse will culminate in exile, just as it had for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Moses’s Torah was given by God for a vital purpose, but that purpose was temporary, to cover the period before the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Now that this has happened, the Torah has no more to say on the subject.

All those who belong to the Messiah are the true “seed” of Abraham, guaranteed to inherit the promise of the kingdom, of new creation.

it is establishing a Jew-plus-Gentile family of faith—as God always intended.

this has been accomplished through the long-awaited “new Exodus.” Every Jew knew the story: slavery in Egypt; divine victory over Pharaoh; Israel (as “God’s firstborn son”) redeemed and brought through the Red Sea; the gift of the Torah on Sinai; the glorious divine presence coming to dwell in the Tabernacle; Abraham’s children heading home to the “inheritance” of the promised land. Paul retells that story in Galatians 4:1–7 with Jesus and the spirit at the heart of it. The whole world is enslaved; God sent his son to redeem and his spirit to indwell; Abraham’s children are assured of their “inheritance.” There is a sting in the tail, however.19 Paul warns the Galatians that they are now in danger of behaving like those Israelites in the wilderness who wanted to go back to Egypt. If they get circumcised, they will be saying that they prefer the old slavery to the new freedom.

This, then, is Paul’s famous doctrine of “justification by faith.” It is not that “faith” in the sense of a “religious awareness” is somehow a kind of human experience that is superior to others, but that those who believed the gospel and who were loyal to the One God it unveiled were to be known, and were to know themselves, as the single worldwide family promised to Abraham. And that meant a new community sharing a common table despite all differences: neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no “male and female,” since “all are one in the Messiah, Jesus.”20

“What matters is new creation.”23

The final word is then left to James, who we know from various sources was held in enormous respect not simply because he was Jesus’s own brother, but because he devoted himself so assiduously to prayer.

A letter was agreed upon, from the whole church to “our Gentile brothers and sisters.” That already made the point that the uncircumcised believers were indeed part of the family.

what had already come to define Paul. “I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer; it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”26 It doesn’t get any clearer or any more intimate than that.

Mark was related not only to Barnabas, but also to Peter. Peter had of course supported Paul’s mission at the Jerusalem Conference; but Mark, a young man with a question mark already over his character, might be inclined to take the same line that Peter had taken in Antioch. Supposing there were still some in Galatia who were claiming the authority of Peter or James in support of a two-table mealtime

“The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.”9 She was baptized with all her household and insisted on inviting the whole party, Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Luke, to come and stay at her home.

The message can be summed up in two basic points: first, the scriptures point to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah; second, Jesus was and is that Messiah. The message was accepted by some of the Jews, several of the God-fearing Greeks, and quite a number of the leading women.

The other Greek word for which Paul would reach is of course agapē, “love,” but once again our English term is so overused that we can easily fail to recognize it as it walks nearby, like a short-sighted lover failing to recognize the beloved; what we so often miss is that it means the world, and more than the world. “The son of God loved me,” Paul had written to the Galatians, “and gave himself for me.” What we see as Paul makes his way around the cities of northern Greece is what that love looks like when it translates into the personal and pastoral ministry of the suffering and celebrating apostle.

Paul’s “Areopagus address” in Acts 17:22–31, have supposed that he was trying to argue his way, on philosophical grounds, up to a statement of Christian belief.

The Areopagus was a court. Paul was on trial. It was a dangerous moment. It could have gone badly wrong. He was all alone, or so it seems, still waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him.

Athens itself had staged the trial of Socrates (399 BC), seen from that day to this as one of the most important events in the history of philosophy.

But he was from Tarsus, one of the main centers of philosophy in the ancient world, and now here he was in Athens, the ultimate home of learned discourse, the city of Socrates, of Plato, of Aristotle . . .

There was also the “Academy,” the ancient school of Plato, which was making a comeback after years of cautious agnosticism.

But the Epicureans, the most famous of whom at the time was the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Stoics, among whom were Paul’s near contemporaries Seneca and Epictetus, were the main contenders.

Few people who have studied the apostle would start with Acts 17 to explain who this remarkable man really was or what made him tick. But a strong case can be made for doing just that.

Jew and Roman meet in Paul the Greek thinker and traveler.

Paul the loyal Jew can see all truth as God’s truth and therefore all observation and debate as observation of God’s world and debate about what it all means.

In particular, his message of Jesus’s resurrection, without which his whole life and work would mean nothing, contains within itself the news that Jesus’s crucifixion was a victory, not a defeat.

The victory of Jesus on the cross, as we have seen, has a deeply intimate meaning for Paul: “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me.”