Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Phinehas, a new Elijah. The scriptural

Saul's zea! Was do to Phinehas' righteous judgment in the OT

History is not just about events, but about motivations. Motivations, no doubt, float like icebergs, with much more out of sight than above the waterline.

Why did Paul do the things he did motivations

We can study that. When, therefore, something shakes someone to the very core, so that that person emerges from the cataclysm in some ways the same but in other ways radically different, there are, no doubt, many explanations that could be given. Such explanations ought not to cancel one another out. What we can try to do, and will now try to do in the case of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road and thereafter, is to take what we know of our subject before the event and what we know of him after the event and place these apparently contrasting portraits within the rich cultural and spiritual Jewish world of his day, replete as it was with various forms of the controlling Jewish narrative. We must look carefully to see what emerges, not only about the event itself, whatever it was, but about the way in which the “zeal” of the eager young Torah student emerged in a different form as “zeal” for what he called the “good news,” the euangelion, the gospel, the message about Jesus—the fulfillment, shocking though it seemed, of the ancestral hope. Some saw it at the time, and many have seen it since, as one narrative replacing another. The word “conversion”

Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

One way or another, it was a culture suffused with hope. Hope long deferred, but hope nonetheless.

Hopein the future

What does it contribute to our effort to understand the man whose subsequent writings would shape a worldwide movement and, in a measure, the world itself?

Zeal for God, desire to be free from Rome, realizing freedom is in Jesus

world.

Saul was going to Arabia to go to God with zeal. God through years and revelation and the torah showed Saul that Jesus is God and that the gospel was for all going around Jews. He addressed the Gentile culture and showing them Christ. The zeal of a message for all