Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Though Paul does not quote Jesus’s prayer for God’s kingdom to come “on earth as in heaven,” the whole of his career and thought was built on the assumption that this was always God’s intention and that this new heaven-and-earth historical reality had come to birth in Jesus

So when we try to understand Paul, we must do the hard work of understanding his context—or rather, we should say, his contexts, plural. His Jewish world and the multifaceted Greco-Roman world of politics, “religion,” philosophy, and all the rest that affected in a thousand ways the Jewish world

an alarmingly clear case of making God in one’s own image. So

The story was the story of Israel as a whole, Israel as the children of Abraham, Israel as God’s chosen people, chosen from the world but equally chosen for the world;

If the Romans wanted to run the world, so be it. Jews would study and practice the Torah by themselves. This, broadly speaking, had been the teaching of Hillel, a leading rabbi of the previous generation.

You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.

He raises his eyes to see the one he has worshipped and served all his life . . . And he comes face-to-face with Jesus of Nazareth.

This wasn’t about “religion,” whether in the ancient or the (very different) modern sense. It was about Jesus. About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.

There was nothing called “Christianity” in the first century, only groups of people who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord. There was nothing corresponding to what we now call “Judaism” in the first century

Paul remained to his dying day fiercely loyal to Israel’s God, seen in fresh and blinding focus in Jesus.

“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 Paul wrote those words at least fifteen years later.

We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate,

This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised,

Saul would not have held back; he would not have toned down his message. There would have been no stopping him. Either Jesus was the Messiah, or he wasn’t. And, if he was, then there could be no “take it or leave it.” One could not shrug one’s shoulders and walk away. If Israel’s Messiah has come, then Israel must regroup around him,

And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil. The resurrection proved it. If he had overcome death, it could only be because he had overcome the forces that lead to death, the corrosive power of idolatry and human wickedness.

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.

This was the beginning of a partnership that would launch the first recorded official “mission” of the new movement—and that would also, within a few years, reflect the inner tensions within that movement still awaiting resolution.

Luke claims that it was in Antioch, in this period, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christianoi, “Messiah people.”

Luke’s report of Paul’s speech before Herod Agrippa, is what Jesus had said to him on the road to Damascus: I am going to establish you as a servant, as a witness both of the things you have already seen

am going to send you so that you can open their eyes to enable them to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of the satan to God—so that they can have forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith in me.3

And Paul believed that in his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth had overcome the power of darkness. Something happened when Jesus died as a result of which “the satan”—and any dark forces that might be loosely lumped together under such a label—no longer had any actual authority.

simply about persuading people to believe in Jesus, as though starting from a blank slate. It was about declaring to the non-Jewish nations that the door to their prison stood open and that they were free to leave. They had to turn around, away from the enslaving idols, to worship and serve the living God.

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.)

“Forgiveness of sins” had arrived in space and time, a new reality to open a new world.

When, later on, he faces suffering at other levels as well—including what looks like a nervous breakdown—he will, through gritted teeth, explain that this too is part of what it means to be an apostle.19

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. That is one of the most extraordinary statements ever written by a Jew of the first or perhaps any century. It tells

who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our father, to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.15

The living God had acted in person, in the person of Jesus, to rescue people from that “present age” and to launch “the age to come.” The two ages were not, as it were, back to back, the first stopping when the second began. The new age had burst upon the scene while the “present age” was still rumbling on. This was the direct effect of the divine plan by which Jesus “gave himself for our sins”; the power of the “present age” was thereby broken, and the new world could begin. There is a sense in which the whole letter, and in a measure all of Paul’s work, simply unpacks

You are saying that the Messiah didn’t need to die. You are saying you still belong in the old world. You are cutting off the branch you have been sitting on.”

“Whatever Jewish messengers may tell you,” Paul is saying, “I can show you that what has happened through Jesus and what has been happening through my own work is what Israel’s scriptures themselves always envisaged.”

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. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

What is remarkable is that Paul’s writings were already being referred to as “scriptures.”

“If I was hungry,” Israel’s God had said in the Psalms, “do you really suppose that I would tell you about it?”8

God intended for people to search for him! Perhaps even reach out for him and find him!

What mattered is that Paul went out from their presence.13 He got off. If this was a trial, he was acquitted.

Indeed, people spoke of a curse on the project; Caesar, Nero, and Caligula all died violently after trying to get the scheme going.) Corinth

scripture speaks of a Messiah who dies and rises again, and this Messiah is Jesus.

Kyrios Iēsous

Jesus is Lord

Around this time too Paul had a vision of Jesus himself encouraging him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Speak on, and don’t be silent, because I am with you, and nobody will be able to lay a finger on you to harm you. There are many of my people in this city.”

For us there is one God, the father, From whom are all things, and we live to him and for him; And one Lord, Jesus the Messiah, Through whom are all things, and we live through him.35

Love is the present virtue in which believers anticipate, and practice, the life of the ultimate age to come.

“If the Messiah wasn’t raised,” he declares, “your faith is pointless, and you are still in your sins.”

his long-held practice of Jesus-focused prayer, taking the ancient scriptural poems and patterns and finding Jesus at their heart, was crucial in helping him to find his way out of despair and back into hope.

He is saying that his own home has been taken over by the architect who built it in the first place and that it is now

being rebuilt around him.

if Israel’s Messiah has come and has been raised from the dead, then those who follow him are the true people of God.

This means knowing him, knowing the power of his resurrection, and knowing the partnership of his sufferings. It means sharing the form and pattern of his death, so that somehow I may arrive at the final resurrection from the dead.11

All power is vested by God in Jesus. Any power Jesus’s followers may have comes only through his work. He thanks the Philippians once more for the gift. He sends Epaphroditus on his way.

He is the image of God, the invisible one, The firstborn of all creation. For in him all things were created, In the heavens and here on the earth. Things we can see and things we cannot— Thrones and lordships and rulers and powers— All things were created both through him and for him. And he is ahead, prior to all else And in him all things hold together; And he himself is supreme, the head

Over the body, the church. He is the start of it all, Firstborn from realms of the dead; So in all things he might be the chief. For in him all the Fullness was glad to dwell And through him to reconcile all to himself, Making peace through the blood of his cross, Through him—yes, things on the earth, And also the things in the heavens.29