Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

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.

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.

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.

Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

will almost always be much harder than one might have supposed to get to the root of the personality, the deep springs of motivation, the dark agonies that produce sleepless nights or dysfunctional days.

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.