Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

We moderns, accustomed to sudden changes and dramatic revolutions, need to remind ourselves that things have not usually worked this way. Slow and steady has been the rule.

So when, in what is probably his earliest letter, Paul talks about “advancing in Judaism beyond any of his age,”1 the word “Judaism” refers, not to

a “religion,” but to an activity: the zealous propagation and defense of the ancestral way of life.

Paul confronts our world, as he confronted his own, with questions and challenges. This book, a biography of Paul, is an attempt to address the questions. I hope it will also clarify the challenges.

Paul. I assumed without question, until at least my thirties, that the whole point of Christianity was for people to “go to heaven when they died.”

Looking back now, I believe that in our diligent searching of the scriptures we were looking for correct biblical answers to medieval questions.

It never occurred to my friends and me that, if we were to scour the first century for people who were hoping that their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and “go to heaven,” we would discover Platonists like Plutarch, not Christians like Paul. It never dawned on us that the “heaven and hell” framework we took for granted was a construct of the High Middle Ages,

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. (When

Paul was a contextual theologian.

But with a historical figure like Paul, the surrounding culture isn’t even a frame. It is part of the portrait itself.

requires careful handling. Despite this, however, I think it is clear that Saul and his family were indeed Pharisees.

We can safely assume, then, that Saul grew up in a cheerfully strict observant Jewish home, on the one hand,

Everything we know about him encourages us to think of the young Saul of Tarsus as an unusually gifted child. He read biblical Hebrew fluently. He spoke the Aramaic of the Middle East (the mother tongue of Jesus and quite possibly Saul’s mother tongue as well) in addition to the ubiquitous Greek, which he spoke and wrote at great speed. He probably had at least some Latin.

The Torah, in fact, functioned as a movable Temple for the many Jews who were scattered around the wider world.

Today, “religion” for most Westerners designates a detached area of life, a kind of private hobby for those who like that sort of thing, separated by definition (and in some countries by law) from politics and public life, from science and technology. In Paul’s day, “religion” meant almost exactly the opposite. The Latin word religio has to do with “binding” things together.

extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions”14 Where did this “zeal” come from? What did it mean in practice? If this is what made the young Saul tick, what was the mechanism that kept that ticking clock running on time? And what did it mean, as he himself puts it in his first letter, to exchange this kind of “zeal” for a very different kind?15 Addressing those questions brings us to the real starting point of this book.

Jewish life was and is centered on the rhythm of prayer.

Breaking human marriage bonds was a sign and symptom of the breaking of the divine covenant.

The Jewish communities in Turkey and in many other parts of the Roman Empire lived relatively peacefully alongside their goyische neighbors.

Gamaliel was one of the greatest rabbis of the period. Under his guidance, Saul would have studied the scriptures themselves, of course, and also the unwritten Torah, the steadily accumulating discussions of finer points

Gamaliel, at least as portrayed in Acts, advocated the policy of “live and let live.”

the bitter times around the two great crises, the Roman-Jewish war of AD 66–70

70

Gamaliel believed in living and letting live. Saul believed in zeal.

since under Roman rule only the Romans could carry out the death penalty.

“It was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Phinehas then; Saul now.

History is not just about events, but about motivations.

“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. 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.

For a start, nobody in the ancient stories had ever suggested that Israel’s time in Egypt was a punishment for wrongdoing.

But Israel in Babylon was a different story. Read the prophets—it’s hard to miss. Young Saul, as we saw, would easily have made the connection between Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden and Israel being exiled from the promised land.

That is the great story in which Saul and his contemporaries were living. That is the narrative they had in their heads and their hearts. That story gave shape and energy, in a thousand different ways, to their aspirations and motivations. It explains both hope and action. This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

He is seeing now, eyes wide open, conscious of being wide awake but conscious also that there seems to be a rift in reality, a fissure in the fabric of the cosmos, and that his waking eyes are seeing things so dangerous that if he were not so prepared, so purified, so carefully devout, he would never have dared to come this far. Upward again, from the chest to the face. 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.

and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

Paul remained to his dying day fiercely loyal to Israel’s God, seen in fresh and blinding focus in Jesus. Neither Paul nor his communities were engaged in “comparative religion.” They were not saying, “We’ve tried one way of being religious, and now we think we have a better one.” Nobody thought like that in the first century, certainly no Jew.

We in the modern world do not put much stock in “miracles.” But when we are faced with events that seem to fall in no other category, we speak of miracles as though they are caused by a “supernatural” power from outside the world that “invades” the chain of “natural causes.” It may sometimes feel like that. But a more biblical account would recognize the strange, steady work of God within so-called natural causes as well, so that the sudden and shocking new event is held within a larger continuum of ultimate divine causation.

So then Ananias baptized the puzzled Saul.

There was no period of waiting, teaching, or preparation.

The fourth and last point of immense significance in Ananias’s visit to Straight Street is that Saul was promised the gift of the spirit, and everything in his subsequent life and writings indicates that he believed this had happened then and there.

Not all Jews in this period, so far as we can tell, believed in a coming messiah in the first place. Those who did hope for such a figure envisaged the messiah as a warrior hero. He would be a new David; he would overthrow the wicked pagans, restore the Temple to make it fit for Israel’s God to come back to at last, and establish a worldwide rule of justice and peace.

Phinehas, the young priest who had speared the Israelite man and the Moabite woman, and Elijah, who had tricked and killed the worshippers of the fertility god Baal.

Phinehas is important for our understanding of Paul, for reasons to which we will return. Elijah is important for Paul not least because he gives us the clue to the journey to “Arabia.”

The word “Arabia” in the first century covered a wide range of territory. It could refer to the ancient Nabataean kingdom, which stretched from a little to the east of Syria—close to Damascus, in fact—southward through wh...

Mt. Horeb.3 (Horeb is either another name for Sinai or the name of a mountain close by from which the Israelites set off to Canaan.)

Paul says that he “went away to Arabia”—just as Elijah did—and “afterward returned to Damascus”—again just like Elijah.

Writing to the Galatians over a decade later, he explains that he stayed with Peter (whom he calls by his Aramaic name, Cephas)

axiomatic

Tarsus, as we have said, was full of talk, philosophical talk, speculation, logic, wise and not so wise advice about life, death, the gods, virtue, the way to an untroubled existence.

For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss. (If that sounds like much modern Western Christianity, that is our problem. It certainly wasn’t what Paul believed.)

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.”