Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

I do not regard it a virtue to decide ahead of time against either the Pauline authorship of some of the letters or the historicity of the Acts of the Apostles (on the grounds, perhaps, that Luke was writing long after the events, inventing material to fit his theology).

In particular, I make two large assumptions: first, a South Galatian address for Galatians; second, an Ephesian imprisonment as the location of the Prison Letters.

Occasional inventions that suddenly transform human life for good or ill—the wheel, the printing press, gunpowder, the Internet—are rare.

The term “Damascus Road” has become proverbial, referring to any sudden transformation in personal belief or character, any “conversion,” whether “religious,” “political,” or even aesthetic. One can imagine a critic declaring that, having previously detested the music of David Bowie, he had now had a “Damascus Road” moment and had come to love it.

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.

Did Paul “switch religions”? Or can we accept Paul’s own account that, in following the crucified Jesus and announcing that Israel’s God had raised him from the dead, he was actually being loyal to his ancestral traditions, though in a way neither he nor anyone else had anticipated?

Paul’s words, inspired, so we believed, by God, were charged with the grandeur of divine truth, and their meaning was to be sought by prayer and faith rather than by historical inquiry, even though, of course, those words themselves, if one is going to understand them, require careful study precisely of their lexical range in the world of the time.

It gave us license to suppose that when he called Jesus “son of God,” he meant the “second person of the Trinity.” But once you say you’re looking for original meanings, you will always find surprises. 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.

who Paul really was, what he thought he was doing, why it “worked,” and, within that, what was the nature of the transformation he underwent on the road to Damascus.

“Those he justified, he also glorified”4 meant, “First you get justified, and then you end up in heaven.” Looking back now, I believe that in our diligent searching of the scriptures we were looking for correct biblical answers to medieval questions.

if we were to scour the first century for people who were hoping that their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and “go to heaven,” we would discover Platonists like Plutarch, not Christians like Paul. It never dawned on us that the “heaven and hell” framework we took for granted was a construct of the High Middle Ages, to which the sixteenth-century Reformers were providing important new twists but which was at best a distortion of the first-century perspective. 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.

His gospel of “salvation” was about Israel’s Messiah “inheriting the world,” as had been promised in the Psalms. 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.

tentmaking, in which Saul had been apprenticed and which he continued to practice.

Some Jewish leaders proposed to Rome that, instead of praying to Caesar, they would pray to their One God for Rome and its emperor. Would that be enough? Yes, said Caesar, that will do. A special pragmatic privilege. Live and let live. That was the world in which young Saul had grown up.

they belonged to the strictest of the Jewish schools. They were Pharisees.

the Roman-Jewish war of AD 66–70.

In the ancient world there was virtually no such thing as private life. A tiny number of the aristocracy or the very rich were able to afford a measure of privacy. But for the great majority, life was lived publicly and visibly. The streets were mostly narrow, the houses and tenements were mostly cramped, there was noise and smell everywhere, and everybody knew everybody else’s business. We can assume that many of the Jews in Tarsus would have lived close to one another, partly for safety ( Jews, absenting themselves from official public “religion” including the celebrations of the imperial cult, were regularly seen as subversive, even though they tried in other respects to be good citizens) and partly for ease of obtaining kosher food.

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.

It was a narrative rooted in creation and covenant and stretching forward into the dark unknown.

Saul of Tarsus was brought up to believe that it would happen, perhaps very soon. Israel’s God would indeed return in glory to establish his kingdom in visible global power. He was also taught that there were things Jews could be doing in the meantime to keep this promise and hope on track. It was vital for Jews to keep the Torah with rigorous attention to detail and to defend the Torah, and the Temple itself, against possible attacks and threats. Failure on these points would hold back the promise, would get in the way of the fulfillment of the great story. That is why Saul of Tarsus persecuted Jesus’s early followers. And that is why, when Paul the Apostle returned to Jerusalem for the last time, there were riots.

Where did this “zeal” come from? What did it mean in practice? If this is what made the young Saul tick, what was the mechanism that kept that ticking clock running on time? And what did it mean, as he himself puts it in his first letter, to exchange this kind of “zeal” for a very different kind?15 Addressing those questions brings us to the real starting point of this book.

What happened next shaped the imagination of many generations. Things got out of control. The people were running wild. A plague broke out—heaven-sent retribution, it seemed—but they didn’t care. One man brought his Moabite girl into his tent, in full view of Moses and everybody else.2 That did it. Phinehas, one of Aaron’s sons, took a spear, followed the man into the tent, found the pair already in the act, and killed them both with a single thrust.

The Syrian megalomaniacal king Antiochus Epiphanes (the word “Epiphanes” means “the divine manifestation”) tried to do to the Jewish nation what, as Saul’s father would remind him, the goyim always tried to do—choke the life out of the Jewish people and overthrow once and for all their perverse and antisocial belief in the One God. Only in this way could Antiochus turn the Jews into docile members of his own empire.

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.

the increasing excitement as people searched the prophetic writings, particularly the book of Daniel,

Saul would have studied the scriptures themselves, of course, and also the unwritten Torah, the steadily accumulating discussions of finer points that would grow as oral tradition and be codified nearly two hundred years later in the Mishnah.

the Roman-Jewish war of AD 66–70 and the Bar-Kochba rebellion of AD 132–35,

in November 1995, when the then prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a student called Yigal Amir.

Amir was not studying to be an attorney in a Western-style court. He was a zealous Torah student. His action on November 4, 1995, was, so he claimed at his trial, in accordance with Jewish law. He is still serving his life sentence and has never expressed regret for his actions.

The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is celebrated on January 25

since the exile was the result of Israel’s idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.

the book of Ezekiel. In one of the strangest scenes in all scripture, the prophet sees the heavenly throne-chariot upon which the One God goes about his business. He describes it with immense caution, starting down below with the whirling and flashing wheels and the strange four-faced creatures (angels? who can say?) that inhabit them. (Even reading the text can make you giddy. Some of the later rabbis tried to keep people from reading it until they were at least forty years old.)

Saul of Tarsus, head full of scripture, heart full of zeal,

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel’s God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel’s scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

What would the word “God” itself now mean? What would the word “Israel” now mean? (This question was faced by many Jewish groups of the period, from the Covenant Sect at Qumran to the eager groups supporting various potential “messiahs” over the next century or so, each claiming an exclusive inside track on the divine purposes.) Saul, knowing the Psalms and prophets and, behind them all, the great story of creation and the Exodus, prayed and prayed.

“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.”15

The story in Acts doesn’t say that Saul spoke in tongues or prophesied. The idea that things like that had to happen for the spirit’s gift to be genuine is a much later fiction.

In Acts 9:20–28, Paul announces Jesus in the synagogue in Damascus until a plot against his life forces him to leave town and go back to Jerusalem. Somewhere in that story there must be room for a desert pilgrimage, after which Paul “returned again to Damascus.”

Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. 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.

In this new world (this too became axiomatic for Paul’s mature thought and thematic for his public career) it mattered that Israel’s God was indeed the One God of the whole world. A tight-knit orthodox Jewish community in the midst of a bustling, philosophically minded pagan city must have been a fascinating place to start thinking all this through. At first glance, Israel’s scriptures might seem to demand that Israel stay separate from the nations, the goyim. The pagans, like the Moabite women sent to seduce the Israelites in the desert, would lead them astray. They should stay separate. But 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. Saul, in Tarsus, must have reflected on what it would mean for Psalm 2 to come true, where the One God says to the true king: You are my son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, And dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.15

That, indeed, seems to be the message of another psalm: God is king over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. The princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham. For the shields of the earth belong to God; he is highly exalted.16 Put those psalms together with others such as Psalm 72 (“May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth”17),

The puzzled uncertainties of the “Academy,” the successors to Plato (“We can’t be sure whether the gods exist, but we’d better keep the civil religion going just in case”) were giving way, in some newer teaching, to a vision of an upstairs/downstairs world such as the picture sketched by the biographer and philosopher Plutarch in the generation after Paul. For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss. (If that sounds like much modern Western Christianity, that is our problem. It certainly wasn’t what Paul believed.)

Paul’s own question, what it would look like if the One God created a new single family of “brothers and sisters” in the Messiah, had potentially revolutionary answers. And traditional societies do not welcome revolution. For Saul, this question cannot have been merely theoretical. Here we probe, with caution, into one of the most sensitive parts of the silent decade in Tarsus.

his Gentile mission. Here’s how it works. 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.

the Jesus-followers in Jerusalem gave him the nickname Barnabas, which means “son of encouragement.” Some people have the gift of enabling others to flourish. Barnabas was one of those.

Syrian Antioch,

Present day Antakya

Syrian Antioch

If the scriptures had seen the coming king as Lord of the whole world, how could membership in this kingdom be for Jews only?

If they were sharing in the ancient promises, ought they not to share in the ancient culture as well? What sort of a common life ought this new community to develop? These were the questions that buzzed around Paul’s head, like large worried bees, for much of his public career. These were, in fact, massive and fateful questions for the entire new movement. Antioch was where they came to a head. Barnabas and Saul were at the center of them. Their friendship, which went from firm to fluctuating to tragic, helped to shape Saul’s mind and teaching.

love (remembering that for the early Christians “love” meant a shared family life with obligations of mutual support)