Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Paul wants them to know of his “great sorrow and endless pain,”37 not now the anguish he suffered in Ephesus, but a more long-lasting torture of the heart, which started with the looks of rejection when he returned home to Tarsus for those ten silent years, continued as interest turned to anger in one synagogue after another, and climaxed in plots and violence from the very people who, he might have thought, ought to welcome their Messiah now that Paul had explained so clearly the scriptural basis for understanding the events concerning Jesus. (Paul was not alone in this sad reflection: “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