Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

I suspect that he spoke for two hours rather than two minutes. His speech would form a book in itself, but Luke has no space for such a thing within his own work. He has boiled it down to the bones.

But you do not take someone to the highest court in the land unless there are serious questions to be addressed, with the undertones of a potential capital charge. The Areopagus, to repeat, was not a philosophers’ debating society.

The Epicureans and the Stoics were two of the main philosophical schools of the time. There was also the “Academy,” the ancient school of Plato, which was making a comeback after years of cautious agnosticism. But the Epicureans, the most famous of whom at the time was the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Stoics, among whom were Paul’s near contemporaries Seneca and Epictetus, were the main contenders. Of the two, Stoicism was the more popular. The overlaps and differences between these two great systems can be seen on many fronts, but for Paul’s purposes what mattered was their view about “God” or “the gods.” What he was saying about the One God fitted with neither. Yet he could see that both schools were hinting at things that pointed beyond their own proposals.

The Epicureans held that, though the gods might well exist, they live in a world of their own entirely separate from the human world. The world inhabited by humans carries on under its own impetus. Its atoms (this view goes back to the fifth-century BC Democritus) move to and fro, “swerving” this way and that and thereby colliding with one another and producing different effects, different evolving life-forms. Everything in the world and human life thus has “natural” causes, and at death the constituent atoms are dispersed beyond recall and the entire human person ceases to exist. This worldview remained the opinion of a small minority right up until the eighteenth century. Since then, it has become the dominant one in modern Western culture. Many imagine it to be a modern “discovery.” The Stoics, by contrast, were basically pantheists. “God” and the world are more or less the same thing, and the divine spark of life, the logos, exists within everything. This life consists of a fire or spirit that animates the whole universe and that will eventually blaze out in a great moment of conflagration. After that, like the phoenix, the whole world will begin all over again, and events will take exactly the same course as before. Wise and virtuous human life then consists in thinking and acting in accordance with the inner logos of the world. Many Stoics, however, of whom Epictetus was a good example, enjoyed a flexible sort of pantheism in which, though they were themselves techni...

In particular, his message of Jesus’s resurrection, without which his whole life and work would mean nothing, contains within itself the news that Jesus’s crucifixion was a victory, not a defeat.

He is a Sherlock Holmes figure, explaining to the puzzled police chiefs that their different theories about the crime all have some sense to them, but that there is a different overall framework, under their noses all the time but never observed, that will solve the whole thing.

To make this point he uses three quite different images. First, he recalls Moses coming down the mountain accompanied by the sound of a trumpet, suggesting that Jesus will appear in like manner coming down from heaven. We should not make the mistake of supposing that Paul thought “heaven” was literally “up there,” a place within our space-time continuum. Ancient Jews were quite capable of using the language of a “three-decker universe” without supposing it was to be taken literally. Heaven (we might say) is a different dimension of reality, not a location within our dimension. Second, he recalls the image from Daniel 7 of “one like a son of man coming with the clouds” from earth to heaven, vindicated at last after suffering, exalted to the place of sovereign rule and kingdom. Even so, he says, those who belong to the Lord will be exalted like that, vindicated, sharing the Lord’s throne. Third, he recalls what happens when an emperor or grand official pays a state visit to a city or province. The leading citizens, seeing him coming, go out to meet him in the open country in order then to escort him royally into the city. Like that, those “who are alive,” he says, will “meet the Lord in the air.” How else can he describe the coming together of heaven and earth? The point is not that people will be snatched away from earth and end up in “heaven.” As we see frequently in his letters, that is never Paul’s view. The point is that heaven and earth will come together14 and those w...

This is how such language was used across many centuries in the Israelite and Jewish culture, which had always believed in the close link of “heaven” and “earth” and found it natural to use the language of “natural disasters” to bring out the significance of what we might call major sociopolitical upheavals. Actually, we do the very same thing, speaking of a political “earthquake” or of an election producing a “landslide.” Our own metaphors seem so natural that we forget they are metaphors. Other people’s metaphors, alien to our way of speaking, are often misinterpreted as though they are not metaphors at all. No doubt Paul faced the same kind of problem, moving as he did within a complex and confusing range of cultures.

Gallio declared that the charges had nothing to do with actual illegal or vicious conduct. They were matters internal to the Jewish community, “a dispute,” he says, “about words, names, and laws within your own customs.”28 As far as Gallio was concerned, if Paul wanted to adapt Jewish styles of prayer by adding this or that name or title, that was up to him. Gallio refused to be a judge of such things. They would have to sort it out themselves. This was a momentous event in the history of the church, and one wonders if even Paul had seen it coming. What it meant was that, unlike the authorities in the other territories he had visited, the official Roman governor of southern Greece (“Achaea”) had declared that being a Jesus-follower was to be seen as a variation of the Jewish way of life. At a stroke, this drew the sting that had been part of the pain in Galatia. It meant (among other things) that when non-Jewish Jesus-followers absented themselves from the civic cult—which, we note once more, could hardly remain hidden in a proud Roman city—they would be able to claim the same exemption as their Jewish neighbors.

While Apollos was in Ephesus, it had become clear to the small group of believers that though he knew the basic facts about Jesus, he was thinking of Jesus as the extension and application of John the Baptist, rather than of Jesus as the Messiah whose death and resurrection had accomplished what John could only foresee.

But what we see in 1 Corinthians 8–10, discussing idol temples and meat that had been sacrificed there, is a sophisticated and delicate discussion of the pastoral challenges involved in dealing with two different opinions, which he calls the “strong” and the “weak.” These are Paul’s technical terms. Those with “strong” consciences are those who, like him, know that idols don’t exist, so that meat offered to them is merely meat. The “weak” are those who, after a lifetime of actually worshipping idols and imagining themselves to be participating in the life of the god by eating sacrificial meat, cannot now touch the meat without feeling themselves being dragged back into the murky world of idolatry and all that went with it.

If he were, he could never have quoted Psalm 24:1 as meaning that all foods are now acceptable.

Artemis was a fertility goddess whose many-breasted silver statues were themselves famous. (They still are; the last time I was in Ephesus the local tourist shops were full of them.) But what the modern tourist sees as a souvenir, the ancient citizen saw as an object of worship. When people placed one of these silver statues in their home, in its own little shrine, they were assured that the goddess was there with them, blessing their family and their fields, their business and their livestock. They prayed to her, greeted her when they went in and out, placed fresh flowers in front of her, and perhaps lit a candle or two. She looked after them. So the local silversmiths’ guild had the same problem with Paul as the slave-owners did in Philippi, only much more so.

That is what it has come to, he says; people who go around insisting that converts should get circumcised are no better than pagan cult members who want to make knife marks in people’s flesh.

Paul declares that being the Messiah’s man has produced the “contentment” for which both Stoics and Epicureans aim: I’m not talking about lacking anything. I’ve learned to be content with what I have. I know how to do without, and I know how to cope with plenty. In every possible situation I’ve learned the hidden secret of being full and hungry, of having plenty and going without, and it’s this: I have strength for everything in the one who gives me power.17

The key word, though, is “take you captive,” a single and very rare Greek word: sylagōgōn. Change one letter—a single pen stroke in the Greek—and it would become synagōgōn, “lead you into the synagogue.” We remember how, in Philippians 3, Paul warned against the katatomē, “mutilation,” as a contemptuous pun on peritomē, “circumcision.” In the same way, he is here sweeping aside any possibility that Jewish (or Jewish Christian) teachers might come and persuade the Colossian Jesus-followers to get circumcised.

Ephesians is like that. It seems to be a circular; there are no personal greetings or mention of a specific church. The words “in Ephesus” in the first verse (“to the holy ones in Ephesus who are also loyal believers in King Jesus”) are not found in the earliest and best manuscripts, and it looks as though a scribe, perhaps sometime in the fourth or fifth century, puzzled by the absence of an address, added one. There might be a good reason for this. If the letter was indeed a circular, but if it was written from prison in Ephesus, it is very likely that a copy would have been kept by the church in Ephesus itself, or even that someone from Laodicea or Colossae made a copy that found its way back to where it started. So the scribe, finding no address but knowing that the letter was located in Ephesus itself, would seem to be doing the sensible thing by adding the words. It isn’t only the absence of an address and greeting that make many people think the letter was a circular. Like the panoramic photograph, it covers a huge sweep of territory, with many different elements held together in a single view. There are stunning peaks and distant glimpses, but the point is that its author has stood back and tried to express it all at once. That is why some, even among those who are unsure whether Paul wrote it, have referred to it as “the crown of Paulinism,” the place where Paul’s ideas are put together in a single frame. A different kind of picture, indeed, but recognizable, I be...

in Damascus, King Aretas, the local ruler, was guarding the city of Damascus so that he could capture me,

He had sometimes been tempted to wonder whether he had been wasting his time, but each time that thought returned, he played it through the mental loop of Isaiah 49 (the servant’s question whether it was all in vain and the divine vocation that always answered that question).

Romans is in a different category from Paul’s other letters for many reasons, but particularly because of its careful and powerful structure. It comes in four sections, each of which has its own integrity, underlying argument, and inner movement. Together these four sections form a single line of thought, rising and falling but always on the way to the particular points that he wants to make. It remains an open question (at least for me) whether Paul was aware of literary models or precedents for this kind of thing. What cannot be doubted is that he had thought it through very carefully and knew exactly what he was doing. Scholars and preachers sometimes speak and write as though Paul just made things up on the fly. There may be passages like that—one thinks of some of the sharp phrases in Galatians, for instance, which a cooler editorial eye might have struck out—but not in Romans. He has thought, prayed, and taught this material again and again. He has now decided to pour this distilled essence of his biblical and Jesus-focused teaching into these four jars and place them in a row where together they will say more than the sum of their parts.

Paul would have longed to announce that Jesus was the true Kyrios right under Caesar’s nose. No matter what it cost. But for this he needed a base, both, we may assume, as a source of financial and practical support and also as a community that would enter into koinōnia with him in prayer.

But that is only a start. There was a more pressing need. Something had happened in the recent past that had put the Roman Jesus-followers in a new and complex position. We recall that Claudius, who became emperor in AD 41, had banished the Jews from Rome after riots in their community. We have less information about this than we would like, but such evidence as we have suggests the late 40s as the probable time. (We should also assume that not all Jews would actually have left, only that the community would have been decimated and that any remaining Jews might have had to go to ground to hide their identity.) Paul’s friends Priscilla and Aquila were among those who had left, which was why they were there in Corinth when Paul first arrived, probably in 49. But with Claudius’s death in 54 and Nero’s accession to the throne, Claudius’s edict was revoked. Jews could once again be, if not exactly welcome, at least permitted back in town. I say “if not exactly welcome” because in this period, as in many other times and cultures, there was a streak, and sometimes more than a streak, of anti-Jewish sentiment in Rome. (We use the term “anti-Jewish” not “anti-Semitic,” because the latter implies some kind of racial theory unknown until the nineteenth century.) Think of the charge in Philippi that Paul and Silas were Jews, teaching things it would be illegal for Romans to practice. Think of the angry whispers when Alexander, a Jew, stood up to speak in the amphitheater at Ephesus. T...

Worshipping Jesus would no longer be invested with the echoes of the Psalms and prophets, according to whom Israel’s Messiah would be the Lord of the whole world. The Jesus movement would turn itself into a kind of private spirituality, less concerned with the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven and more concerned with cultivating one’s own spiritual interiority. It would no longer be a movement based on messianic eschatology. It would become a “religion” that saw itself as different from “the Jewish religion,” a private religion that would no longer pose much of a threat to the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities. This is exactly what happened in the second half of the second century with the rise of so-called Gnosticism, a religion of inner self-discovery rather than of rescue, of private devotion rather than public witness. Though Marcion regarded Paul as a hero (because he misunderstood him to be saying that God had finished with the Jews and their law), Paul himself, and especially Romans, stands firmly in the way of his entire scheme.

God has revealed that what his covenant purposes had always involved was the “putting forth” of Jesus the Messiah as the means of establishing a new reality, a single family whose sins are forgiven, a Jew-plus-Gentile covenant family, as he always promised to Abraham. That is the thrust of the first part, chapters 1–4.

Paul now thinks, but according to Genesis 15:6 Abraham believed God—believed, that is, the promise that he would be the father of an uncountable family that would inherit the whole world—

Now, therefore, the loyal faith by which a Jew or Gentile reaches out to grasp the promise, believing “in the God who raises the dead,” would be the one and only badge of membership in Abraham’s family. The family could not be created either by circumcision (which was added later than Gen. 15) or by following the law (which was added hundreds of years afterward). It could only be by a fresh act of God’s grace, received by faith. The use of Romans 1–4 in popular teaching today to declare universal human sinfulness and “justification” by grace alone and through faith alone is fine as far as it goes. Sadly, it routinely shrinks what Paul is actually saying in these chapters and fails to see that they are only one part of a larger argument and do not make full sense without the material that then follows. Romans is not written to explain how people may be saved. It describes that, to be sure, vividly and compellingly, but it does so in order to highlight the faithfulness of God and, with that, the challenges facing the covenant people. Those were the themes the Roman church urgently needed to understand.

This time he tells more explicitly the story of the human race from Adam to the Messiah and on to the final promise of renewed creation. These chapters offer an astonishingly rich and multilayered account of the new Exodus, which was such a strong theme in early Christianity. The whole section is carefully structured in paragraphs almost all of which lead back to Jesus the Messiah. After the basic statement of “from Adam to the Messiah” in 5:12–21, 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. But then Israel arrives at Mt. Sinai and is given the Torah—which promptly declares that Israel has already transgressed. Indeed, as Deuteronomy made clear, the Torah simply brought Israel to the place of exile, of a new kind of slavery. The lament at the close of chapter 7 is the lament, seen with gospel hindsight, of “the Jew” who rightly celebrates the Torah and longs to be loyal to it, but finds that loyalty thwarted by the dark Adamic strain that runs through all humans, Jews included. This is the complex problem—Adam’s problem, if you like, magnified enormously in the rebellion of God’s own people—to which Romans 8 is the matchless answer. The death of the Messiah and the gift of the spirit together do “what the law was incapable of doing,”30 that is, giving the life the law promised but could not bring about because of human (and Israelite) sin. Throughout c...

Romans 5–8 (and indeed Romans 1–8) have often been allowed to stand by themselves as though they constituted “the gospel” and the rest of the letter was a mere succession of appendixes or “practical applications.” It is true that one can take these first two sections, perhaps especially 5–8, and let them have their own impact.

Marcion

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

Either Jesus was Israel’s Messiah—which means, as any first-century Jew would know, that God was reconstituting “Israel” around him—or he was an imposter and his followers were blaspheming. There was no middle ground.

People have probed Romans 11 for specific promises about what it would mean for Jews to abandon this “unbelief,” in other words, when and how they might come to see Jesus as Messiah. Popular myths abound, some even suggesting that Romans 11 predicts the return of Jewish people to their ancestral homeland (which at the time of his writing they had not left). That is not the point. Paul is not trying to second-guess what God has in mind. He is saying, as strongly as he can, to a church in danger of Marcionism, of rejecting its Jewish heritage: “Don’t boast over the branches,”44 the branches that have been broken off from the original olive tree because of unbelief. God can graft them back again. What is more, the present fate of unbelieving Israel is itself the long outworking, as though in a shadow, of the messianic vocation itself:

Some have suggested yet another motive. According to this view, in Romans 11 Paul was hinting that one day a large number of presently unbelieving Jews would turn to the Messiah and that this event would precipitate the final day, the coming parousia of Jesus himself, the resurrection of the dead, the rescue of the old creation from its slavery to decay, the joining into one, in the Messiah, of heaven and earth themselves. “What will their acceptance mean,” he had written, “but life from the dead?”4 Paul did indeed hope for all these things. Did he link them to the collection? Almost certainly not. He did not say in Romans 15, “I am going to Jerusalem with the collection, so please pray that they will welcome it, so that a great many presently unbelieving Jews will turn to Jesus as Messiah and that Jesus will then return.” He asked them to pray simply that he

We can well imagine his walking through the arguments again: Adam, Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, Isaiah, the Psalms, the Messiah—with

But maybe, just maybe, their new plan might work. He goes ahead with the ritual of purification. He makes the declaration. (Those who suppose that the “real Paul,” being a good Protestant, would never have done anything like this have missed the point. Paul’s gospel did not make him opposed to the Temple and its sacrificial system. Just because he believed that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, that did not mean that following the Levitical code was now sinful.) The purificatory ritual takes a week—it must have seemed a very long week to Paul and his anxious friends—after which Paul and the other men enter the Temple. Has the ruse worked? Have they gotten away with it? Will the Jerusalem church be spared the embarrassment—and more than embarrassment—of being associated with a notoriously traitorous character? Will Paul be spared the outcry that might so easily follow?

(How Paul must have longed to explain to them the difference between abolition and fulfillment.

Proverbs 15:1,

since this is the only mention of Paul’s family in the whole narrative, Paul’s sister’s son heard about it. (This opens in a flash a window on other questions: How many relatives did Paul have in Jerusalem? Were some of them Jesus-followers? We do not know.) The lad came to tell Paul, and Paul got him to tell the tribune.

Claudius Lysias,

So Paul is handed on to the provincial governor himself. The governor at the time was Antonius Felix.

He was, however, married to a Jewish princess (his third wife), Drusilla, a daughter of Herod Agrippa. There was at least a small chance that he might listen favorably to a plea from the Jewish hierarchy.

Jesus is the fulfillment, not the abrogation, of the law and the prophets.

First, the Messiah “would be the first to rise from the dead.”37 There is Paul’s theology of the two-stage resurrection, as in 1 Corinthians 15, in a nutshell, in which the Messiah’s own resurrection inaugurates a new period of history and the resurrection of all his people follows later. Second, the Messiah “would proclaim light to the people and to the nations.”38

because the world did not end after the first Christian generation, it has been common coin, particularly among those who have wanted to distance themselves from early Christian ideas in general and Paul’s in particular, to say, sometimes with kindly and sometimes with patronizing intent, that “They expected the end of the world and they were wrong, so perhaps they were wrong about a lot of other things too.” The irony of this position is that the idea of the “end of the world” is neither biblical nor Jewish nor early Christian. It comes from the secular world of nineteenth-century Europe fueled by dreams of revolutions past and still to come. When, toward the end of that century, some writers began to take seriously the Jewish contexts of the kingdom language of Jesus and his first followers, they were attuned not to the way such language worked in the first-century Jewish world, but to the way such language worked within current European ideologies. They projected that back onto Jesus, Paul, and the rest. It made a good story at the time, particularly when Europe then plunged into a horrendous, “apocalyptic” century with wars, rumors of wars, and worse. But this didn’t help with the essentially historical question of what motivated Paul. What, then, caused the urgent note in Paul’s eschatology? The main point is that the long-awaited event could occur at any time, not that it had to occur within a specific time frame. The event that was to occur within a generation was n...

What he did not share, as he thought through his tradition in the light of Jesus and the spirit, was the idea that the people of Israel, as they stood, constituted the answer to this problem—as though all one had to do was to become a Jew and try to keep the Torah, and all would be well not only with Israel, but with the world. Paul knew that view, and he firmly rejected it.

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.

He will never ask anyone to face anything he hasn’t faced himself, up to and including horrible suffering and hardship—which

Nor was he simply teaching a “religion” or a “theology”; if we were to do Paul justice today we ought to teach him in departments of politics, ancient history, economics, and/or philosophy just as much as in divinity schools and departments of religion.

Thus, 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

Pagans routinely practiced infanticide for unwanted children in general and girls in particular, but the Christians followed the Jews in renouncing such behavior. The consequent shortage of marriageable girls in the pagan world and the surplus of them among the Christians resulted in many marriages between Christian women and pagan men, who might then either convert or at least give consent for the children to be brought up as Christians. And, once again against the common perceptions of our age, the fresh evaluation of the role of women, though it came ultimately from Jesus himself, was mediated not least through Paul—the Paul who listed several women among his colleagues and fellow workers (including one “apostle”), who saw early on that in the Messiah’s family there was ultimately no “male and female,” and who entrusted Phoebe with the responsibility of delivering and almost certainly expounding the letter to the Romans.