Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Clearly Paul was unmarried during the time covered by his letters. Most of the traveling early Christian teachers were married, and their wives accompanied them on their journeys, but Paul was different

He did not imagine that women and men were identical in all respects. Nobody in the ancient world, and not many in today’s world, would think that. But he saw women as fellow members on an equal footing within the people of God, and also, it seems, within the public ministry of that people. He could be friends with women and work alongside them without patronizing them, trying to seduce them, or exploiting them.

That meant a new dimension to his devotion, a new shape for his “zeal,” a new depth to “loyalty.” And that new dimension, shape, and depth would produce a string of hastily written documents whose compact, explosive charge would change the world.

THE VISITOR WHO came to Tarsus looking for Saul was Barnabas.

Non-Jewish writers of the time sneered at the Jews for their “Sabbath,” claiming Jews just wanted a “lazy day” once a week. The fact that Jews didn’t eat pork, the meat most ordinarily available, looked like a ploy to appear socially superior.

Beneath these social indicators was the more deep-seated non-Jewish suspicion that the Jews were atheists. After all, they didn’t worship the gods.

Barnabas and Saul were at the center of them. Their friendship, which went from firm to fluctuating to

One obvious Greek term for “loyalty” is one of Paul’s favorite words, pistis, regularly translated “faith,” but often carrying the overtones of “faithfulness,” “reliability,” and, yes, “loyalty.”

Luke claims that it was in Antioch, in this period, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christianoi, “Messiah people.”2 That claim has been challenged by those who rightly point out that our word “Christian” implies an organized movement separate from the Jewish world

and that there is no evidence of such a thing for at least a generation or so. The only other places in the New Testament where the word is used are on the lips of Herod Agrippa, who teases Paul for “trying to make him a Christian,” and in an early letter where Peter refers to people “suffering as Christians.”3 Both of these look as if the word was a nickname used by outsiders, quite likely in contempt (“Messiah freaks!”),

The Antioch-based Jesus-followers knew what they had to do. They had never supposed themselves to be independent of the Jerusalem Jesus-followers.

Just as Antioch was the first place where we see a genuine effort at a new kind of transethnic community life, so in this action Antioch was the first place to demonstrate that the followers of Jesus thought of themselves as a translocal

Paul would have been the first to say that just because you give generously to others does not mean you are compelling

koinōnia. That Greek word is often translated “fellowship,” but in Paul’s world it also meant, among other things, a business partnership, which would often overlap with family ties.

They had taken with them a young man, a non-Jew who

had become an eager and much-loved follower of Jesus, a member of the fellowship in Antioch. His name was Titus.

Barnabas and Saul stood firm. The problem was not so much the embarrassment and physical pain that circumcision would cause Titus. It was a point of theological principle.

The freedom for all, Jew and Gentile alike, to share membership in the new world, the new family, the new messianic and spirit-led life. And if that was the new “freedom,” then anything that challenged it was a form of slavery.

The three central Jerusalem leaders, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, and John, were content.

new Temple. A new kind of purity. No wonder confusion abounded, especially among those who were

and no wonder that the two friends held their ground.

almost relentless way Paul seemed always to be on the move, crossing mountain ranges, fording rivers, staying in exotic places like Ephesus or Corinth, making good use of the remarkable networks of Roman roads and the almost equally remarkable opportunities for sailing across and around the Mediterranean and the Aegean.

At one level the answers are obvious. Paul went on a mission to tell people about Jesus; he believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of the scriptures, that he had been crucified, raised from the dead, and exalted to God’s right hand.

As I said earlier, I assumed for many years, and many readers will still assume, that the only real point of it all was to get people to “believe” in this Jesus so that they would be “saved”

But this was not the concern that drove Pau...

The early Christians did not focus much attention on the question of what happened to people immediately after they died.

They were much more concerned with the “kingdom of God,” which was something that was happening and would ultimately happen completely, “on earth as in heaven.”

Whatever happened to people immediately after death was, by comparison, unimportant, a mere interim.

God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.

All this will become much clearer as we proceed, following Paul in his initial journey to Cyprus, up into central southern Turkey, and then back again. We can date this trip roughly to AD 47/48.

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

begins to look as though Paul’s geographical strategy had a quiet but definite political undertone. Many of the key places on his journeys—Pisidian Antioch, where we will join him presently, but also such places as Ephesus, Philippi, and Corinth—were key centers of Roman rule and of Roman cult in the eastern Mediterranean.

Barnabas himself came originally from Cyprus,

From now on this is how he will be referred to and, in Acts and the letters, how he will refer to himself. Why the change? “Saul” is obviously a royal name, that of the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin.

King Saul and applying it to his own vocation.7 Some have speculated that he deliberately set aside this name, with its highborn overtones, in order to use a Greek word connected to the adjective paulos, “small, little”—a sign, perhaps, of a deliberate humility, “the least of the apostles.”

shared even by the governor in the present story. Like most Roman citizens, Saul/Paul would have had more than one name, and it is quite possible that he already possessed the name “Paul”

came under that kind of suspicion when scholars tried to maintain that Paul gave little thought to Jesus’s Davidic messiahship.

“New Rome.”

Paul might be clever at expounding scriptures, but nobody had ever heard of a crucified Messiah, and nobody had imagined that if Israel’s God finally did what he had promised, some of the Jewish people themselves might miss out on it,

Most could only see the threat to their way of life, the drastic redrawing of the shape their hopes had always taken. They denounced Paul and Barnabas as false teachers leading Israel astray.

But the aristocrats of Antioch would have been alarmed, as Romans were always alarmed, by any suggestion of strange new subversive teachings that might upset the delicate social and cultural status quo. Paul’s message seemed to point to uncharted territory, to a new kind of “Jewish” community claiming continuity with Abraham, David, and the prophets, but now including any non-Jews who professed allegiance to the newly heralded “Messiah,” Jesus, and at the same time threatening (as Paul and Barnabas seem to have threatened)

that any Jews who refused to see Jesus as their promised Messiah would themselves be missing out on this new fulfillment.

The Galatians, however, had welcomed Paul as if he were an angel from heaven or even the Messiah himself.18 As Paul would later explain, the bodily marks of identification that mattered to him were not the signs of circumcision, but “the marks of Jesus”—in other words, the signs of the suffering he had undergone.

Paganism, he believed, was simply a parody, people worshipping forces within the natural world without realizing that they owed their very existence and such charm and power as they possessed to the creator who had made them in the first place—and that to worship these forces was the quick route to slavery and dehumanization.

The “gods” the local people are invoking are lifeless idols, but they, the apostles, are bringing them news of a God who is alive.

And something has happened to make this message urgent: this living God, having for a long time allowed the nations to go their own way, has now done something to unveil his power and his purpose. That’s why it is time to turn away from all this playacting and experience the power and love of the God who puts all the gods to shame.

to deceive the nations have been overthrown. Zeus, Hermes, and the rest have been shown up as shams. They simply do not exist. Any “power” that they have comes not from their own quasi-divinity, but

from the fact that humans, worshipping them, have given to the malevolent forces that use their name as a cloak the authority that God always intended humans themselves to exercise.

At the heart of Paul’s message, teaching, and life was—to use a technical phrase—radical messianic eschatology. Eschatology: God’s long-awaited new day has arrived. Messianic: Jesus is the true son of David, announced as such in his resurrection, bringing to completion the purposes announced to Abraham and extended in the Psalms to embrace the world. Radical: nothing in Paul’s or Barnabas’s background had prepared them for this new state of affairs.

BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do.