Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Paul believed (and he believed that God believed) in ultimate freedom, a freedom of creation itself from the “slavery to decay,” a freedom that would mean ...

“Wisdom” is in fact the subtext of much of Colossians.

Paul wants people to learn to think—not simply to imbibe rules and principles to learn by heart, but to be able to grow up as genuine humans, experiencing “all the wealth of definite understanding” and coming to “the knowledge of God’s mystery.”25 All this will happen as they realize that it is Jesus himself who reveals that “mystery.” The Messiah himself is “the place” where they are to find “all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”26

when God made the world, his work was neither random nor muddled, but wise—coherent and well ordered;

The book known as Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, written around 200 BC, imagines Lady Wisdom wanting to come and live among humans and wondering where to establish her dwelling. There is no contest: the Temple, of course, is the answer.27

David’s son Solomon, the ultimate “wise man” in the Bible, is also the king who builds the Temple.

Proverbs 8 had Lady Wisdom declare that God created her “as the beginning of his work,” bereshith darkō. And the account of creation in Genesis 1 reaches its climax with the creation of the humans in the image of God.

Creation as a whole is a Temple, the heaven-and-earth reality in which God wants to dwell, and the mode of his presence in that Temple (as anyone in the ancient world would have known perfectly well) was the “image,” the cult object that would represent the creator to the world and that wider world before the creator. Complicated? Yes, but it only seems that way to us, because our culture has done its best to unlearn this kind of thought. Complex but coherent, a bit like creation itself, in fact, or indeed like a human being.

as he teaches young Timothy the vast world of scripture, which is his natural habitat.

He is the image of God, the invisible one, The firstborn of all creation. For in him all things were created, In the heavens and here on the earth. Things we can see and things we cannot— Thrones and lordships and rulers and powers— All things were created both through him and for him. And he is ahead, prior to all else And in him all things hold together; And he himself is supreme, the head Over the body, the church. He is the start of it all, Firstborn from realms of the dead; So in all things he might be the chief. For in him all the Fullness was glad to dwell And through him to reconcile all to himself, Making peace through the blood of his cross, Through him—yes, things on the earth, And also the things in the heavens.29

he is invoking and celebrating a world in which Jesus, the one through whom all things were made, is now the one through whom, by means of his crucifixion, all things are reconciled.

They see bullying magistrates, threatening officers. They see prisons and torture. But they are now invited to see the world with the eye of faith, the eye that has learned to look through the lens of scripture and see Jesus.

Like an apocalyptic vision, this mystery-revealing poem offers a glimpse of another world, a truer world than the violent and brutish world of paganism then and now. It was a Jewish world, but with a difference—a Jewish world made sense of at last by the coming of the Messiah, the true son of David, the truly human one (the “image”), for whose reality and meaning even the Jerusalem Temple was the advance signpost. “All the Fullness”—the full divinity of the One God—“was glad to dwell” in him. This is Temple language. It offers the highest view of Jesus one could have, up there along with John’s simple but profound statement: “The Word became flesh, and lived among us.”30 And Jesus is the Image, the truly human one at the heart of the world temple, the one who straddles heaven and earth, holding them together at last, the one whose shameful death has reconciled all things to the Creator.

the Messiah, will be revealed in glory. When that happens, the person you already are in him will be revealed as well.

The victory that was won by the cross must be implemented through the cross.

as with the gospel itself the divine power could only be made known through human weakness.

Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his power. Put on God’s complete armor. Then you’ll be able to stand firm against the devil’s trickery. The warfare we’re engaged in, you see, isn’t against flesh and blood. It’s against the leaders, against the authorities, against the powers that rule the world in this dark age, against the wicked spiritual elements in the heavenly places. For this reason, you must take up God’s complete armor. Then, when wickedness grabs its moment, you’ll be able to withstand, to do what needs to be done, and still to be on your feet when it’s all over. So stand firm! Put the belt of truth around your waist; put on justice as your breastplate; for shoes on your feet, ready for battle, take the good news of peace. With it all, take the shield of faith; if you’ve got that, you’ll be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is God’s word. Pray on every occasion in the spirit, with every type of prayer and intercession. You’ll need to keep awake and alert for this, with all perseverance and intercession for all God’s holy ones—and also for me! Please pray that God will give me his words to speak when I open my mouth, so that I can make known, loud and clear, the secret truth of the gospel. That, after all, is why I’m a chained-up ambassador! Pray that I may announce it boldly; that’s what I’m duty-bound to do.46

For the Messiah’s love makes us press on. We have come to the conviction that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all in order that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised on their behalf.13

“The fear of the Lord” is a reverent fear; but there is also, and above all, love.

“My grace is enough for you,” said the Lord. “My power comes to perfection in weakness.”

So I will be all the more pleased to boast of my weaknesses, so that the Messiah’s power may rest upon me. So I’m delighted when I’m weak, insulted, in difficulties, persecuted. and facing disasters, for the Messiah’s sake. When I’m weak, you see, then I am strong.22

He is marked out, beyond any question, as the representative of the crucified Messiah.

(We use the term “anti-Jewish” not “anti-Semitic,” because the latter implies some kind of racial theory unknown until the nineteenth century.)

“The Messiah’s love,” he had written to Corinth, “makes us press on.

Paul retells the Exodus narrative. Coming through the waters of baptism (chapter 6) is like going through the Red Sea, leaving behind slavery and discovering freedom.

God’s covenant was always the bond of love and the promise of that love having its full effect. Now, in the Messiah and by the spirit, that covenant love is seen to be victorious. Romans 8 is the richest, deepest, and most powerfully sustained climax anywhere in the literature of the early Christian movement, and perhaps anywhere else as well.

“The Messiah is the goal of the law,”36 so that covenant membership may be available for all who believe.

“He came to what was his own,” John wrote of Jesus, “and his own people did not accept him.”)38 That is the substance of Paul’s lament, as also of the prayer “for their salvation.”39 And the way to that is stated in the clearest terms at the very center of this section: “If you profess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”40

First, “Remember the poor”! Second, “There is no longer Jew or Greek . . . in the Messiah, Jesus.”

You know the grace of our Lord, King Jesus: he was rich, but because of you he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.2

“I commit you to God,” he says, “and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and give you the inheritance among all those whom God has sanctified.”14 God’s word of grace was the powerful word of the cross, the life-transforming word of the gospel, the word that started in the ancient scriptures and told the story reaching forward to the explosive new event of Jesus himself. And it was Jesus himself whom Paul invoked at the end. Just as the Jerusalem leaders had urged him to “remember the poor,” so Paul urged the Ephesians to “work to help the weak,” since Jesus himself had said (in a saying unrecorded elsewhere), “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”15 That was how the church was to be known—as the community that modeled the outgoing, generous grace of God. That was how it would confront the principalities and powers who were all out for their own ends. That was why, no doubt, the wolves would come in to snatch what they could; this kind of community was by its very nature vulnerable, and would always be. Loyalty would be contested. But God’s grace and God’s word were stronger, and like good wholesome food they would build up the church’s strength, nourishing the believers and their leaders so that they would indeed “inherit the kingdom,” the worldwide inheritance promised to the Messiah and his people.

But then, as now, when people are angry, they can read things whichever way they please.)

he was simply doing his best to tell the world what Moses and the prophets had been saying all along, namely, “that the Messiah would suffer, that he would be the first to rise from the dead, and that he would proclaim light to the people and to the nations.”32 Paul had always been, and still remained, a loyal Jew. That was the whole point.

the wall between Israel and the Gentiles, can be done away. They can now have “forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith” in Jesus.36

whether the focus of Paul’s gospel was either personal forgiveness or the inclusion of the Gentiles. This verse, true to what Paul says in every letter from Galatians right through to Romans, indicates that it is both—and that the two are mutually defining.

more important echo is Isaiah 49, the text which meant so much for Paul: the Lord’s servant will not only “raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel”; God will give him “as a light to the nations, that [God’s] salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”40

“I pray to God that not only you but also all who hear me today will become just as I am”—and then, with a smile and a gesture to the visible signs of his own status—“apart, of course, from these chains.”46

the appeal, though it will send Paul to Rome in chains, will at least send him to Rome. He will stand before the ultimate earthly king, and he will do so as a helpless prisoner. When he is weak, then he will be strong.

In the book of Daniel, one of the most popular books in the Jewish world of Paul’s day,

(Luke mentions that this was after the Day of Atonement, which in AD 59 fell on October 5.)

in the sudden egalitarianism of emergency—gasp and splash their way to shore. There is no distinction: all are soaked, scared, freezing, and exhausted. Rank and wealth mean nothing as they crawl or stagger onto dry land. But the trial by water is over. All have been saved.

There is evidence at this time for Christian groups in Pompeii,

More specifically, third, was Paul put to death then, or did he have a new lease on life—unrecorded in any contemporary sources—that allowed him more travel and perhaps more writing? If so, when and how did he ultimately die?

I am inclined now to give more weight than I once did to the testimony of Clement, an early bishop of Rome. Writing about Paul in the late first century, he says:

After he had been seven times in chains, had been driven into exile, had been stoned, and had preached in the east and in the west, he won the genuine glory for his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world and having reached the farthest limits of the west. Finally, when he had given his testimony before the rulers, he thus departed from the world and went to the holy place, having become an outstanding example of patient endurance.17 “The farthest limits of the west” would of course mean Spain. Clement could have been simply extrapolating from Romans 15, and it would suit his purpose to give the impression of Paul’s worldwide reach. But he was a central figure in the Roman church within a generation of Paul’s day. He is writing at the most about thirty years after Paul’s death. It is far more likely that he knew more solid and reliable traditions about Paul than we, discounting him, can invent on our own.

For Paul there was no question about the starting point. It was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfillment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God—so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism, one would worship and invoke Jesus as Lord within, not alongside, the service of the “living and true God.” Jesus, the one for whose sake one would forsake all idols, all rival “lords.” Jesus, above all, who had come to his kingdom, the true lordship of the world, in the way that Paul’s friends who were starting to write the Jesus story at that time had emphasized: by dying under the weight of the world’s sin in order to break the power of the dark forces that had enslaved all humans, Israel included. Jesus, who had thereby fulfilled the ancient promise, being “handed over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.”1 Jesus, who had been bodily raised from the dead on the third day and thereby announced to the world as the true Messiah, the “son of God” in all its senses (Messiah, Israel’s representative, embodiment of Israel’s God). Jesus, therefore, as the one in whom “all God’s promises find their yes,” the “goal of the law,” the true seed of Abraham, the ultimate “root of Jesse.”2 Jesus, then, the Lord at whose name every knee would bow. Jesus, who would reappear in a great future event that would combine the sense of a true king coming to claim and establish his kingdom and the sense ...

between those two, the accomplishment of the putting-right project first in cross and resurrection and then in the final fulfillment at Jesus’s return, God had given his own spirit in the powerful and life-transforming word of the gospel. The gospel, incomprehensibly foolish to Greeks and blasphemously scandalous to Jews, nevertheless worked powerfully in hearts and minds. Listeners discovered that it made sense and that the sense it made transformed them from the inside out. This is the great “evangelical” reality for which Paul and his letters are famous.

he explains the purpose of “being saved by grace through faith”: God has made us what we are. God has created us in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared, ahead of time, as the road we must travel.6 God has made us what we are; or, to bring out a different but equally valid flavor of the Greek, we are God’s poetry, God’s artwork. God has accomplished, and will accomplish, the entire new creation in the Messiah and by the spirit. When someone believes the gospel and discovers its life-transforming power, that person becomes a small but significant working model of that new creation. The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world. As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image-bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world and to reflect the praises of creation back to God. Humans were therefore made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth—like an “image” in a temple, no less—and to be the conduit through which God’s life would come to earth and earth’s praises would rise to God. Here, then, is the point of Paul’s vision of human rescue and renewal (“salvation,” in traditional language): those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents. They are poems in which God is addressing his world, and, as poems are designed to d...

That is what Paul’s gospel and ethics are, at their heart, all about. God will put the whole world right at the last. He has accomplished the main work of that in Jesus and his death and resurrection. And, through gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does and agents of further transformation in God’s world. This is the heart of Paul’s famous “doctrine of justification,” which is so important in Galatians, Philippians, and Romans, though remarkably inconspicuous (until we realize how it is integrated with everything else) in the other letters. Once again the problem has been the wrong framework. If we come with the question, “How do we get to heaven,” or, in Martin Luther’s terms, “How can I find a gracious God?” and if we try to squeeze an answer to those questions out of what Paul says about justification, we will probably find one. It may not be totally misleading. But we will miss what Paul’s “justification” is really all about. It isn’t about a moralistic framework in which the only question that matters is whether we humans have behaved ourselves and so amassed a store of merit (“righteousness”) and, if not, where we can find such a store, amassed by someone else on our behalf. It is about the vocational framework in which humans are called to reflect God’s image in the world and about the rescue operation whereby God has, through Jesus, set humans free to do exactly that.

he realized early on that it was his job not just to teach people what to think and believe, but to teach them how. How to think clearly, scripturally, prayerfully. How to have the mind renewed and transformed so that believers could work out for themselves the thousand things that he didn’t have time to tell them. How to think with “the Messiah’s mind,” especially as it was shaped around the story of the cross: “This is how you should think among yourselves—with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus.”8 This is the only way in which the church would be either united or holy, and since both were mandatory—but very difficult—it was vital, Paul recognized, that those “in the Messiah” should acquire the discipline of the Christian mind. In that quest, he drew on all the resources he could find, including ideas and phrases from contemporary philosophy. “We take every thought prisoner,” he writes, “and make it obey the Messiah.”9 This, I submit, is part of the reason for the remarkable success of his work.