Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Timothy’s arrival brought news from Thessalonica, and this resulted at once in the outpouring of relief and affection that we know as 1 Thessalonians. The letter is famous for many reasons, and those who date Galatians much later than I do see it as the first of Paul’s letters, or at least the first to survive. In any case, the tone is completely different from the frantic alarm of Galatians. Nothing has gone wrong in the Thessalonian church; they are holding fast in the face of persecution; and Paul is proud of them,

Sexual holiness is mandatory, not optional, for followers of Jesus.10 What that means in practice Paul will later spell out in his first letter to Corinth. But already the reason for this rule is made clear.

Sexual holiness isn’t just a “rule,” an arbitrary commandment. It is part of what it means to turn from idols and serve the true and living God. It is part of being a genuine, image-bearing human being.

Sex and money are important, but they are not to be worshipped. Sexual purity and financial generosity were to be built into the Christian DNA from the start.

We should not make the mistake of supposing that Paul thought “heaven” was literally “up there,” a place within our space-time continuum. Ancient Jews were quite capable of using the language of a “three-decker universe” without supposing it was to be taken literally. Heaven (we might say) is a different dimension of reality, not a location within our dimension.

because the ideals of revolutionary Europe, not least those associated with Karl Marx, were themselves echoes or even parodies of Jewish and Christian eschatology.

thwarted

Corinth incorporating Jesus into the central monotheistic prayer, the Shema: “For us there is one God, the father, . . . and one Lord, Jesus the Messiah.”

he did feel destroyed. It is only with hindsight that he looks back and says, “But I wasn’t, after all.”

The style is different. People have run all kinds of tests on Paul’s writing style, including using computer technology to analyze the way the sentences work and so on. That tells its own story—the variation across the complete collection of letters is not that great, despite what some have suggested. But these two letters, written to the same church and within two or three years of one another at most, are strikingly different to the naked eye.

The second, though it too can tease by the end, feels as if it is being dragged out of Paul through a filter of darkness and pain. In the second letter, he repeats himself like an old-fashioned gramophone record clicking on the same phrase: The God of all comfort . . . comforts us in all our trouble, so that we can then comfort people in every

The second one is much harder Greek, perhaps the hardest in the New Testament and certainly in Paul. It ties itself in knots.

So what had happened?

Other than Ephesus, the only places where we know Paul was in prison are Caesarea12 and Rome.

But it was also in Ephesus that Paul experienced

ascertain

several members declared that they didn’t regard Paul as their real leader. They preferred Peter (Cephas) or Apollos instead.

Meanwhile, Cephas himself—Peter, Jesus’s own right-hand man—had also been in Corinth. Some had decided that he was their man. People have often suggested that this may have involved a rerun of the clash in Antioch, as in Galatians 2, and that Peter might have again been trying to insist on a two-tier fellowship and a separation at mealtimes of Jewish and Gentile Jesus-followers. There is no evidence for this, but that doesn’t

mean that Paul would have been entirely happy to think of Peter coming in to teach, in his absence, a church Paul had planted and looked after through the first eighteen months of its life. Paul addresses all this in 1 Corinthians

Ephesus, even more than Corinth or the cities of northern Greece, was turning into a living example of what the gospel could do, not just in a few individuals here and there, but in an entire community.

For Paul, learning to be a Messiah person—learning to live within the great biblical story now culminating in Jesus and the spirit—was all about having the mind and heart, the imagination and understanding transformed, so that it made sense to live in this already/not-yet world.

This was not the easiest place to live, but it was certainly one of the most exhilarating. The Messiah has already been raised; all the Messiah’s people will be raised at his “royal arrival.”44 Christian

Anyone who ever supposed that Paul sailed through his apostolic work carrying all before him in a blaze of glory can never have studied 2 Corinthians.

This is where the biographer enters a dark tunnel, the tunnel between the cheerful Paul of 1 Corinthians and the crushed, battered Paul of 2 Corinthians; the tunnel between the Paul who believes that Jesus will come back during his lifetime and the Paul who now expects to die in advance of that glorious moment;

doubt it. That kind of so-called positive thinking was not Paul’s style. I think something more specific was at work.

Christology and therapy go well together, even if, like Jacob, an apostle may limp, in style and perhaps also in body, after the dark night spent wrestling with the angel.

I THINK PHILIPPIANS was the first of the Prison Letters to be written (perhaps in 55?), and this is why. In the first chapter Paul is still quite uncertain how his trial is going to go.

It expresses many things Paul believed about Jesus himself—the truly human one, the ultimate Israelite, the Servant of the Lord, the embodiment of Israel’s God in person, the reality of which Caesar was a shallow parody:

Onesimus was a slave. He belonged to Philemon, a wealthy householder in the small city of Colossae, some 150 miles inland from Ephesus. He had run away, as slaves sometimes did, probably grabbing some money as he went.

Harboring or helping a runaway was also a serious crime. But Onesimus had come to Paul.

We wish Paul had said, “Free them all! It’s a wicked practice!” That would have been a futile gesture. Slavery in the ancient world did, more or less, everything that is done in our world by oil, gas, or electricity, everything that we accomplish through our

What’s more, we must remind ourselves that slavery in Paul’s world had nothing to do with ethnic origin. All you had to do to become a slave was to be on the losing side in battle or even to fail in business.

Paul knew that the God of Israel had defined himself in action as the slave-freeing God.

From Paul’s other uses of this idea we see what he means: “the Messiah” is not only Jesus, but all those who are “in the Messiah.” It is an incorporative term, as it was in Galatians (“You are all one in the Messiah, Jesus”) and 1 Corinthians (“as the body is one, and has many

Before we plunge into these two letters, Colossians and Ephesians, we need to say a word about Paul’s authorship. The present book is not the place to go into technical arguments, but a short explanation may be in order. Most modern Western critics still express doubts about Paul’s authorship of one or both of these letters.

In any case, three things have to be said about Pauline style. First, those who have done computer analysis of these things have tended to say that most of the letters come from him. Second, Paul’s surviving letters are in fact so short, by comparison with most literary products from the ancient world, that it is hard to be sure we have enough to make a valid comparison. Third, it is easy for critics to be too wooden in their view of how this or that person ought to write. It is perfectly possible for the same person to write, in the same week, a learned article for a journal, a speech for a political meeting, a children’s talk, and perhaps some scraps of poetry.

located within German liberal Protestantism. In that world, the remarkably “high” view of the church in these letters was thought to contrast with the more “protestant” view of Romans, Galatians, and the Corinthian letters.

This is in fact a straightforward mistake. Paul’s view of the church, though variously expressed, is consistent across the whole corpus,

Colossians is written, it appears, to a young church. Paul

The book of Genesis begins with “In the beginning,” which in Hebrew is a single word, bereshith

Ephesians has much in common with Colossians, so much so that some have thought that one letter was the model for the other.

how the “ministry of reconciliation” will go forward, with

Philippians, to be content with whatever comes. The final resolution of Paul’s long and complex relationship with Corinth reveals him as a man into whom the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord has burned like a brand. He is recognizable. Corinth and Ephesus themselves have done it to him. He is marked out, beyond any question, as the representative of the crucified Messiah.

There were specific reasons for writing Romans at that moment

But why write it like this? Romans is in a different category from Paul’s other letters for many reasons, but particularly because of its careful and powerful structure. It comes in four sections, each of which has its own integrity, underlying argument, and inner movement.

This does not happen by accident. Romans is not like, say, 1 Corinthians (the next longest letter), where, though there is a flow of thought, one thing follows another in something more like a list.

Some have suggested, naturally enough, that Romans was a deliberate “systematic theology,”

Galatians and Romans of course cover similar topics up to a point. But whereas Galatians is written in haste and heat to say, Under no circumstances must you get circumcised and take on the Torah, Romans is written at more leisure and with more compositional care to say, You must work out the gospel-shaped balance of Jew and Greek.

Romans is not written to explain how people may be saved. It describes that, to be sure, vividly and compellingly, but it does so in order to highlight the faithfulness of God and, with that, the

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