Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

For Paul, the word meant all of that but also much more. For him, this “believing allegiance” was neither simply a “religious” stance nor a “political” one. It was altogether larger, in a way that our language, like Paul’s, has difficulty expressing clearly. For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not. That was already the position that Barnabas was taking. He saw a single community living a common life. Saying that he recognized this as the result of divine grace is not simply the kind of pious fantasy some might imagine, since in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact. But there it was. A new kind of “family” had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus. Barnabas saw it, and he was glad.

On the one hand, they would have to put down roots firmly into the Jewish traditions, into the scriptures. On the other hand, they would have to think through what precisely it meant that Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of those same scriptures, had been crucified and raised from the dead. Only by going deeply into the scriptural story of Israel and the events concerning Jesus, reflecting from many different angles on its full significance, could such a community keep its identity, its integrity, and its nerve. Who did Barnabas know who had that kind of knowledge and the eager energy and the way with words that would communicate it? There was one obvious candidate.

Barnabas hadn’t forgotten him. He had a strong sense that Saul was the man for the job. This was the beginning of a partnership that would launch the first recorded official “mission” of the new movement—and

Barnabas and Saul would sing from the same sheet . . . until someone tried to add a new verse to the song.

Luke claims that it was in Antioch, in this period, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christianoi, “Messiah people.”2 That claim has been challenged by those who rightly point out that our word “Christian” implies an organized movement separate from the Jewish world and that there is no evidence of such a thing for at least a generation or so. The only other places in the New Testament where the word is used are on the lips of Herod Agrippa, who teases Paul for “trying to make him a Christian,” and in an early letter where Peter refers to people “suffering as Christians.”3

One of the best-known things about Paul’s thought is his view that when a person has come to faith in Jesus as the risen Lord, that event is itself a sign of the spirit’s work through the gospel, and that, if the spirit has begun that “good work” of which that faith is the first fruit, you can trust that the spirit will finish the job. That is what he says in Philippians 1:6,

The three central Jerusalem leaders, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, and John, were content. Their view carried weight; they were known as the “pillars.”

the “pillars” shook hands with him on it. They struck a deal whose apparently simple terms (as quoted by Paul in Galatians) become more complicated the more we think about them. James, Peter, and John would work with Jewish people, while Saul and his friends would work with non-Jewish people.

decisive opening statement of Romans he says that the gospel is “to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek.”9 It looks as though the agreement Paul reports in Galatians 2 was a temporary arrangement, a way of mollifying the Jerusalem hard-liners, trying to reassure them that Jewish followers of Jesus, at least, would not have to compromise their own purity, would be able to carry on without straining their consciences.

And however much it might seem incredible, the early Jesus-followers really did believe that God’s kingdom was not simply a future reality, though obviously it had a strong still-future dimension. God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.

When Rabbi Akiba declared in AD 132 that Simeon ben Kosiba was God’s Messiah, this meant that Simeon was now the ruler of a small Judaean state in rebellion against Rome. (That “kingdom” lasted for three years before the final disaster, but it shows how the logic works.)

As I think of Paul launching this new venture, the image of the tightrope over the volcano doesn’t seem to go far enough. He was inventing, and must have known that he was inventing, a new way of being human. It must have been a bit like the first person to realize that notes sounded in sequence created melody, that notes sounded together created harmony, and that ordering the sequence created rhythm. If we can think of a world without music and then imagine it being invented, offering a hitherto undreamed-of depth and power to space, time, and matter, then we may have a sense of the crazy magnitude of Paul’s vocation.

This then became the focal point of what we said before: people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out. (The fact that skeptics at the time, like skeptics today, could and did give different explanations of what was taking place does not alter the fact that this is what people said was happening to them, that this is what Paul understood to be going on, and that the consequences, whether they were all deluded or speaking a dangerous truth, were long lasting.)

He was, after all, one of the half dozen most intellectually sophisticated first-century persons for whom we have evidence, up there with Seneca, Plutarch, and a select band of others.

the Jews were not a seafaring people,

Pisidian Antioch.

The civil wars that had scarred the Roman world after the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC had left tens of thousands of military veterans in Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere.

Augustus therefore founded colonies for these ex–service personnel well away from Italy. Pisidian Antioch was the most important such colony in the region, retaining its name (Antioch) from its earlier foundation, though now officially renamed Colonia Caesarea (“Caesar’s Colony,” a telling name in itself) when the province of Galatia, of which it formed the most substantial southern city, was founded in 25 BC.

some have suggested that when he goes on to say that the Galatians welcomed him so warmly that, had it been possible, they would have torn out their eyes and given them to him, this is an indication that he suffered from some kind of sickness of the eyes.17 That, I think, is a case (and not the only one) of modern readers failing to spot a well-known first-century metaphor.

Another theme that resonates throughout Paul’s public career first emerges here in Lystra. He would have been well aware, from his early days, of the non-Jewish religious culture of ancient Anatolia: many gods, many “lords,” many tales of divine goings-on, traceable all the way back in the classical world to Homer, but then diversifying into local legends and folktales. One such, reported by the Roman poet Ovid, tells of the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes wandering unrecognized in the region. Later inscriptions from the area indicate that these two divinities were subsequently celebrated there.20 So it isn’t surprising that, when Paul dramatically heals a man who had been crippled from birth, the locals assume that the old stories have come true: Zeus and Hermes have appeared at last. (Luke, in an interesting bit of local color, tells us that the crowds are shouting out their welcome in the local Lycaonian language.) Since Hermes is the “messenger of the gods,” and since Paul seems to be doing all the talking, they assume that Paul is Hermes. That, by process of elimination, means that Barnabas must be Zeus. Before the apostles know what is happening, the local cult swings into action. The priest of Zeus brings out a procession to meet them. He has oxen and garlands, all the paraphernalia for a great sacrifice. There is no doubt music and dancing. They find themselves in the middle of a classic pagan celebration.

For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences.

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.

When the Romans closed in on Jerusalem in the last months of the war, crucifying so many Jews that they ran out of timber for crosses, Josephus records sorrowfully that more Jews were in fact killed by other Jews than by the Romans themselves.

The early Jerusalem church seems to have lived in some ways like other groups who believed that God was ushering in “the last days”—whatever they may have meant by that. In the excitement of the early stages, they had shared their property communally; this eager social experiment may well have contributed to their later poverty. They lived a life of prayer, fasting,

These cautious historical proposals about the real-life situation faced by Jesus-followers in Jerusalem and by their colleagues (if they saw them as such) in the Diaspora offer a corrective to the oversimplifications that have all too easily crept into readings of Paul. This has been a particular problem for modern Western readers. Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: “science” deals only with “hard facts,” while the “arts” are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.” Some types of Protestantism have imbibed this deeply, supposing that “the gospel” is all about inner feeling, a disposition of the heart, and not at all about outward reality or actions, whether moral or “religious.” Sometimes people have thought that this is the one and only meaning of Paul’s teaching about “justification by faith not works.” But things were not nearly so simple.

Perhaps, indeed, that is what “holy scripture” really is—not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.

Understanding a letter like Galatians—where the author is dictating so fast and assuming so much shared understanding that he skips over a hundred things we wish he had spelled out more fully—is notoriously like listening to one side of a complicated telephone conversation. Speaker and hearer assume a great deal that the listener has to fill in.

If God was indeed bringing in his kingdom, rescuing Israel and the world from the powers of darkness to which the pagan nations had given their allegiance, then of course a clean break was vital. If pagans were allowed into the covenant people, the people who would inherit God’s new creation, they would have to exhibit covenant loyalty too. And that meant circumcision.

The point is that, in a world where the key thing for a zealous Jew was “loyalty” to God and his law, Paul believed (1) that Jesus the Messiah had been utterly faithful to the divine purpose, “obedient even to the death of the cross” as he says elsewhere;9 (2) that following Jesus, whatever it took, had to be seen as itself a central expression of loyalty to Israel’s God; (3) that the followers of Jesus were themselves marked out by their belief in him, confessing him as “Lord” and believing that he was raised from the dead; and (4) if this Jesus-shaped loyalty was the vital thing, then nothing that the law could say was to come between one Jesus-follower and another. In other words (continuing Paul’s description of what he said to Peter): That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the Jewish law. On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared “righteous.”10

Once again we must avoid oversimplifications, especially any suggestion (this has been common) that the Galatian Jesus-followers, having been taught good Reformed theology, were now embracing Arminianism or Pelagianism and trying to add to their God-given salvation by doing some “good works” of their own.

All the signs are that Paul understood the scripturally rooted purposes of the One God to have been fulfilled in the Messiah, Jesus, and that he understood this to involve the creation of a particular type of community. As far as he was concerned, therefore, what we call “theology” and what we call “sociology” belonged firmly together.

Nor should we imagine that these pressures—the grinding of gears between different social and cultural groupings—were seen, either by the people concerned or by Paul himself, as (in our terms) “sociological” rather than “religious” or “theological.” Such distinctions make no sense in the first century. Everybody knew that divine worship was central to communal life.

Kyrios,

So, for Galatians, we may simply note five points that come out again and again. Each could be spelled out at length. First, to repeat, Paul is offering a reminder that what has happened through Jesus is the launching of new creation.

Second, 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.

Fourth, this has been accomplished through the long-awaited “new Exodus.”

Anyone who suggests that Jerusalem is still the center of everything, so that its leaders must have the last word, is to be reminded that what counts is the heavenly Jerusalem.22 There cannot be “another gospel,” whether the “gospel” of Caesar or a supposed “gospel” of Torah-plus-Jesus. “What matters is new creation.”23

The challenge facing Paul and the others was how to live as an extended family without ties of kinship or ancestral symbols, without the geographical focus of Jerusalem and the Temple, and without a central authority like that of Caesar.

The journey itself was encouraging. As the two traveled south through Phoenicia and Galilee and into Samaria, approaching Jerusalem, they told the little groups of believers they encountered on the way what had happened in the Galatian churches. The response was encouraging. This would not only have strengthened their resolve; it would have given them practice in telling their stories to good effect. That was what they then did in Jerusalem, setting out in one story after another the extraordinary things that God had done through their work. They would have explained too the violent opposition they had received, but the important thing was the way that Gentiles had been grasped by the gospel and transformed by the spirit. We can imagine Paul biting his lip, restraining his desire to expound Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the rest, and Barnabas shooting him warning looks and hoping and praying that the plan would work. It did.

James sets all the strange stories they have heard in the context of scripture. What has happened, he says, is the clear fulfillment of ancient biblical hopes, that when God finally sends the Messiah, the true son of David, then his inheritance will consist of the whole world. God will “rebuild the Tabernacle of David which had collapsed,” and the result will be that “the rest of the human race may seek the Lord, and all the nations upon whom [God’s] name has been called.”25

What was he doing that caused these little communities, with all their problems, contested loyalties, and external threats, not only to survive, but to thrive? This question is sharpened to a point by what happened next.

Indeed, the solution that emerged—Barnabas and John Mark going back to Cyprus, Paul and someone else going to Galatia and beyond—was staring them in the face and could have been agreed on with prayer and mutual encouragement. But no. There was what Luke calls a paroxysmos: a blazing, horrible, bitter row. Nobody came out of it well.

Troas, near the site of ancient Troy, stood on the edge of the Hellespont, the narrow waterway, four miles wide, famous in ancient history for separating the Greeks and the Persians and in modern literary history for Lord Byron’s successful attempt to swim across it on May 3, 1810.

Philip II, king of Macedon from 382 to 336 BC, the father of Alexander the Great.

under lock

and to Paul’s own repeated statements in his letters. 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.

koinōnia.

Generations of readers, studying what has been called 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. Many in the modern period who have wanted to construct what is sometimes called “natural theology”—arguing for the existence of God and perhaps the truth of Christianity by observation of the natural world alone, without appeal to special divine revelation—have hailed this speech as a forerunner of their efforts.

But all this is a misunderstanding. 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. It appears that Timothy had come to him in Athens,1 but that Paul, anxious about the little church in Thessalonica, had sent Timothy back at once to see how they were getting on. He has important things on his mind; as he says on another occasion, there are battles outside and fears inside. He has no leisure, physical or mental, to play the detached philosopher. It is, however, utterly characteristic of the man that he would seize the opportunity not merely to defend himself—though that is what he is doing throughout the speech—but to do so in such a way as to challenge, with considerable rhetorical skill, the basic assumptions of the Greek worldview.