Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

he defined himself in terms of love: the love of God in the Messiah, the debt of that love which only love could repay, the love that bound him in a rich personal relationship with Jesus himself (“knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings”10). The love that constantly overflowed into what we might call “pastoral” activity but that, for Paul, was simply love in action.

Mind and heart are inextricably linked.

he had redefined what that loyalty would mean. It did not mean that, when eating with Gentile friends, he would avoid their type of food. It did not mean that he would keep the Sabbaths and the festivals the way he had kept them as a young man. When the reality has come, the signposts are no longer needed, not because they were misleading, but because they have done their work. One does not put up a sign saying, “This way to London” outside Buckingham Palace. Paul took the stance he now did neither because he was some kind of a “liberal”—whatever that might have meant in his day!—nor because he was making pragmatic compromises to try to lure Gentiles into his communities, nor, to say it again, because he secretly hated his own culture and identity. It was all because of the Messiah: “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.”11 If the Messiah has come, and if God has marked him out in his resurrection, then to be a loyal Jew is to be loyal to this Messiah and to the God who has acted in and through him. But if the Messiah had been crucified and raised, then the question of what being a loyal Jew actually meant had itself been radically redrawn. It now meant following this pattern of crucifixion and resurrection—reflecting, Paul would have insisted, the pattern of Israel’s scriptures themselves. It meant discovering the deep truth of baptism: that one was now “in the Messiah,” a member of his e...

What is true of him, Paul would have said, is now true of them, and they must live accordingly. They have already been raised “in him”; they will one day be raised bodily by his spirit; therefore, their entire life must be lived in this light. This takes faith, in all its usual senses, and when that faith is present, it is in fact indistinguishable from loyalty, loyalty to the Messiah, loyalty to the One God through him. This, ultimately, is what Paul learned on the road to Damascus and in his lifelong reflection on that shattering and blinding event.

There is One God, and this God has overcome the powers of darkness through his son; we should expect that by his spirit he will cause the light of the knowledge of his glory to spread throughout the world—through the faithful, suffering, and prayerful witness of Jesus’s followers. Or, to put it another way, the One God has already built his new Temple, his new microcosmos; the Jew-plus-Gentile church is the place where the divine spirit already lives in our midst, already reveals his glory as a sign of what will happen one day throughout the whole world. So, sooner or later, this movement is bound to thrive.

This movement doesn’t just run on its own steam. It isn’t just the accidental by-product of energetic work and historical opportunity. God is at work in the midst of his people to produce the will and the energy. This is bound to have its larger effect, sooner or later and by whatever means.

The Creator works in a thousand ways, but one central way is through people—people who think, who pray, who make difficult decisions, who work hard, especially in prayer. That is part of what it means to be image-bearers. The question of divine action and human action is seldom a zero-sum game. If the worlds of heaven and earth have rushed together in Jesus and the spirit, one should expect different layers of explanation to reside together, to reinforce one another.

what was it about Paul the man that made him—let’s face it—one of the most successful public intellectuals of all time? What did he have that enabled him to take advantage of the circumstances (a common language, freedom of travel, Roman citizenship) and establish his unlikely movement not only for the course of his own lifetime but thereafter?

The first thing, coming at us throughout his story, is his sheer energy. We feel it pulsing through the letters. We watch as he responds to violence in one city by going straight on to the next one and saying and doing the same things. He is the kind of person to whom people say, “Don’t you ever sleep?” He is working all hours, his hands hardened with his tentmaking, his back stiff from bending at the workbench. But he is ready every moment for the visitor with a question, for the distraught youngster whose parents have thrown him out, for the local official worried about his status if people discover he is following Jesus. He is ready to put down his tools for an hour or two and go from house to house to encourage, to warn, to pray, to weep. He is persistent. People know they won’t get rid of him, won’t be able to fob him off with glib excuses. He is all the while thinking through what he will say in his afternoon lecture in the house of Titius Justus in Corinth or the hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus. He takes time out to call a scribe and dictate a letter. He is relentless. He pauses to say the evening prayers with his close friends. He works on into the night, praying under his breath for the people he has met, for the city officials, for the Jesus-followers in other cities, for the next day’s work, for the next phase of the project.

The second thing, the sharp edge of all this energy, is his blunt, up-front habit of telling it as he sees it no matter who is confronting him. He will say “Boo” to every goose within earshot and to all the swans as well. There is a reason why Saul of Tarsus, in his early days in Damascus, is the one getting into trouble, just as there is a reason why the Jerusalem apostles then decide to pack him off home to Tarsus. He confronts Peter in Antioch. I have suggested that the only reason he doesn’t say more at the Jerusalem Conference is because Barnabas would have persuaded him to hold back. He is the kind of man you want on your side in a debate but who may just alienate more sensitive souls. He confronts the magistrates at Philippi; he is itching to speak to the vast crowd in Ephesus; he tries to explain himself to the Jerusalem mob that had been trying to lynch him; he rebukes the high priest. He knows how to turn the factions in the Sanhedrin against one another. He lectures the Roman governor himself about justice, self-control, and the coming judgment. He tells the ship owner where he should and shouldn’t spend the winter, and then says, “I told you so” when it all g...

When he says that his heart has been opened wide, that there are no restrictions in his affections for his churches, it rings true.15 His honesty shines out. With Paul, what you see is what you get, even if it isn’t what you wanted. You know where you are. You know he will do anything for you, because (he would say) God has done everything for him in the Messiah.

He modeled what he taught, and what he taught was the utter, exuberant, self-giving love of the Messiah.

when they were with him, they saw truth more clearly because they saw it in his face and felt the love of God more warmly because they knew it was what drove him on. He was the sort of person through whom other people are changed, changed so that they will themselves take forward the same work with as much of the same energy as they can muster.

one of the reasons why the strange movement he started thrived in the coming days was because his associates were, for the most part, fiercely loyal to Paul himself. He loved them, and they loved him. That is how things get done. It is how movements succeed.

for Paul one might say: Galatians, for the young reformer eager to defend the gospel and attack the heretics; 2 Corinthians, for the adult sadly aware that things are more complicated and disturbing than he had thought; Romans at last, to remind us, despite everything, that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord.”17 Like the psalms he knew so well, Paul’s letters wait for us just around the corner, to take our arm and whisper a word of encouragement when we face a new task, to remind us of obligations and warn us of snakes in the grass, to show us from one angle after another what it might mean to live in the newly human way, the newly Jewish way, the way of Jesus, to unveil again and again the faithful, powerful love of the creator God.

Paul had insisted that what mattered was not just what you thought but how you thought. He modeled what he advocated, and generation after generation has learned how to think in the new way by struggling to think his thoughts after him. His legacy has continually generated fresh dividends. It is a challenge that keeps on challenging.

Paul emphasizes, in letter after letter, the family life of believers, what he begins to call, and subsequent generations will usually call, “the church,”

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...

Paul’s Jesus-focused vision of the One God, creator of all, was able to take on all these philosophies and beat them at their own game.

His was the vision of the united, holy, and outward-facing church. He pioneered the idea of a suffering apostleship through which the message of the crucified Jesus would not only be displayed, but be effective in the world. He could not have foreseen the ways in which these communities would develop. He might well not have approved of all that was done. But the historian and biographer can look back and discern, in Paul’s hasty and often contested work, the deep roots of a movement that changed the world. This is not the book to address the next question, as to what difference it might make if the church in our own day were to reassess its policies and priorities in the light of Paul’s work.

But Paul’s vision of a united and holy community, prayerful, rooted in the scriptural story of ancient Israel, facing social and political hostility but insisting on doing good to all people, especially the poor, would always be central. His relentless personal energy, his clarity and vulnerability, and his way with words provided the motor to drive this vision, and each generation will need a few who can imitate him. His towering intellectual achievement, a theological vision of the One God reshaped around Jesus and the spirit and taking on the wider world of philosophy, would provide the robust, necessary framework for it all.

There is one more thing on which Paul and his successors would insist, and that is prayer.

“For us there is One God (the father, from whom are all things, and we to him); and One Lord ( Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things and we through him), and you shall love him . . .” It flows better in Greek than in English: Heis theos, ho patēr, ex hou ta panta kai hēmeis eis auton, Kai heis kyrios, Iēsous Christos, di’hou ta panta kai hēmeis di’ autou. This is what made him who he was. This is the reality that burst upon him on the road to Damascus. This, he would have said, is the ultimate explanation for why his work, so contested, so agonizing, so demanding, so inevitably open to misunderstanding, would not go to waste, but would grow, would produce not just “a religion,” but a new kind of humanity—new people, a new community, a new world. A new polis. A new kind of love. It would do things he could hardly have dared to imagine.

He prays the prayer, over and over. He prays it with the rhythm of his breathing. He prays it with the spirit’s breath in his innermost self. He declares his pistis, his loyalty, his love one more time. One God, one Lord. One. His life’s work has been to bear witness, openly and unhindered, to the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus, and that is what he now does in prayer as the executioner draws his sword. Loving this One God with his heart, his mind, and his strength. And, finally, with his life.