Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Later generations have sometimes tried to flatten this out into abstract theology. Some in our own day have tried it the other way, seeing only sociology. But these are oversimplifications. Paul’s vision, Jewish to the core but reshaped around the messianic events involving Jesus, was a hundred percent theological and a hundred percent about the formation and maintenance of a new community.

Peter and John, the two remaining members of the three who were closest to Jesus in his last days (John’s brother James had been killed by Herod Agrippa in the early 40s),

things were not so easy. We know about the situation in Jerusalem through the detailed and colorful accounts of Josephus, a younger contemporary of Paul’s.

He himself was a wealthy Jewish aristocrat who claimed to have tried out the various Jewish “schools of thought” and who had served as a general in the army at the start of the war against Rome (AD 66–70) before switching sides and ending his days on an imperial pension in Rome.

Josephus records sorrowfully that more Jews were in fact killed by other Jews than by the Romans themselves.

(the wealthy, aristocratic Sadducees, including the high-priestly family)

circumcision by pointing out its moral effects, suggesting that cutting off the foreskin would reduce lust. I know of no evidence that this actually worked, though the strong Jewish taboos against sexual immorality certainly had a restraining effect by contrast with the normal non-Jewish approach.

Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: “science” deals only with “hard facts,” while the “arts” are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings.

cantankerous

But Peter had been already “living like a Gentile”—not in the sense that he had been worshipping idols or indulging in sexual immorality, but in the sense that he had been in the habit of eating with people without regard for the Jew/Gentile distinction.

We are Jews by birth, not “Gentile sinners.” But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.8

This is where, traditionally, interpreters have jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Now, Paul clearly believes in the importance of sin and of being rescued from it. But that is not what is at stake in Jerusalem, Antioch, or Galatia. What matters is status within the covenant family. The word “righteous,” like the Greek and Hebrew words that term often translates, refers here to someone “being in a right relationship” with the One God, and the “relationship” in question is the covenant that God made with Abraham.

The point is that, in a world where the key thing for a zealous Jew was “loyalty” to God and his law, Paul believed (1) that Jesus the Messiah had been utterly faithful to the divine purpose, “obedient even to the death of the cross” as he says elsewhere;9 (2) that following Jesus, whatever it took, had to be seen as itself a central expression

of loyalty to Israel’s God; (3) that the followers of Jesus were themselves marked out by their belief in him, confessing him as “Lord” and believing that he was raised from the dead; and (4) if this Jesus-shaped loyalty was the vital thing, then nothing that the law could say was to come between one Jesus-follower and another. In other words (continuing Paul’s description of what he said to Peter):

That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the Jewish law. On that basis...

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

We should also, of course, avoid the equal and opposite suggestion, that Paul was simply trying to manipulate communities, putting forth a “sociological” agenda and using “theological” arguments as a smokescreen for his real purposes. Neither of these proposals will do.

Paul here affirms the well-known and widespread ancient Jewish belief that world history is divided into two “ages,” the “present age” of sorrow, shame, exile, and death and the “age to come,” when all things will be put right.

That belief was common for centuries before Paul, and it remained the norm all the way through the much later rabbinic period.

for Galatians, we may simply note five points that come out again and again. Each could be spelled out at length.

First, to repeat, Paul is offering a reminder that what has happened through Jesus is the launching of new creation.

Second, what has happened in the gospel events, and what has happened in Paul’s own ministry, is in fact the fulfillment of the scripturally sourced divine plan.

kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. This leads Paul, third, to the vital point. All this has effectively bypassed the problem posed by Moses.

Phinehas,

Fourth, this has been accomplished through the long-awaited “new Exodus.”

Paul retells that story in Galatians 4:1–7 with Jesus and the spirit at the heart of it.

So, finally and decisively, the living God has created the single family he always envisaged, and it is marked by faith, pistis.

Paul never mentions the “Jerusalem Conference” described in Acts 15, so we cannot be sure what

he thought of it all.

Paul would now be somewhat uneasy after Barnabas’s (I assume temporary) change of stance in Antioch.

It is not particularly remarkable that some found Paul’s letters hard to understand and open to misinterpretation. What is remarkable is that Paul’s writings were already being referred to as “scriptures.”

blushes.

Perhaps it was the long-term result of that shocking moment in Antioch when Peter had separated himself from the non-Jewish believers and “even Barnabas” had been led astray by their “hypocrisy.” They had made up then, it seems. They had gone together to Jerusalem and, side by side, had argued the case for Gentile inclusion.

specific flash point concerned Barnabas’s nephew, John Mark (normally reckoned to be the Mark of the Gospel that bears his name).

Paul knows of Barnabas’s continuing work, but they never team up again.3 Paul now chooses a different companion, Silas (or Silvanus),

Paul was by this time in his late thirties or early forties (assuming he was born by AD 10 at the latest). Timothy, most likely in his late teens or early twenties, must have seemed like the son that Paul never had. Certainly

There are other theories, of course. There always are. But Occam’s razor is still helpful: always go for the hypothesis requiring the fewest extra assumptions.

THE PARTHENON IS probably the only building of its period to be instantly recognizable today.

Built to celebrate the goddess Athene after the victory over the Persians in the fifth century BC, the brilliantly designed marble structure, perfect in its proportions and dazzling in its location on the Acropolis, functioned for centuries as the main focal point for worship in Athens.

So when Paul was brought to the Areopagus, probably in late 50 or early 51, and when he began by declaring that temples to the gods were a category mistake, we should not suppose that he was engaging a philosophers’ debating society.

Paul’s “Areopagus address” in Acts 17:22–31,

Athens itself had staged the trial of Socrates (399 BC), seen from that day to this as one of the most important events in the history of philosophy. What was Socrates’s crime? Corrupting the young and introducing foreign divinities.

But the Epicureans, the most famous of whom at the time was the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Stoics, among whom were Paul’s near contemporaries Seneca and Epictetus, were the main contenders. Of the two, Stoicism was the more popular.

“Anastasis”—the Greek word for “resurrection.” They assumed “Jesus and Anastasis” were a new pair of divinities, and “Anastasis,” a feminine noun in Greek, was Jesus’s consort; the two were a divine couple, rather like Isis and Osiris (though there the female

His denunciation of idols and temples in his Areopagus speech is not simply Jewish-style polemic,

It is the position of someone who believes that all the would-be divine powers in the world have been dethroned, shamed, led in someone else’s triumphal procession as a defeated rabble. The victory of Jesus on the cross, as we have seen, has a deeply intimate meaning for Paul: “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me.”

THANKS TO PAUL, we know more about life in Corinth than we do about life in any other first-century city in Greece.

made in such an ideal trading and transport post. Like every other city in the ancient world, Corinth had a huge social imbalance, with few rich, many poor, and at least half the population in any case enslaved.

fact remains that Paul had, to this point, made a career out of telling people things he knew they would find either mad or blasphemous or both. He had grown used to it. This was what he did.