Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Romans 5–8 (and indeed Romans 1–8) have often been allowed to stand by themselves as though they constituted “the gospel” and the rest of the letter was a mere succession of appendixes or “practical applications.”

Either Jesus was Israel’s Messiah—which means, as any first-century Jew would know, that God was reconstituting “Israel” around him—or he was an imposter and his followers were blaspheming.

event would precipitate the final day, the coming parousia

zealous

Sanhedrin.

Herod Agrippa.

This is an allusion to a well-known Greek proverb about humans trying to resist the divine will, which is exactly what Saul’s teacher, Gamaliel, had warned against.

Paul had always known that his message would be scandalous to Jews and madness to Gentiles.

“After all, these things didn’t happen in a corner.” So Paul puts him on the spot: “Do you believe the prophets, King Agrippa? I know you believe them.”44 This is a clever move. Agrippa, eager to retain such popularity as he has with the Jewish people, is not going to say he doesn’t believe the prophets.

He is of course a seasoned traveler and, according to 2 Corinthians 11, has already been shipwrecked three times, once ending up adrift at sea for a night and

even so, it must have been a nasty moment. His instant reaction was to shake the snake off his hand into the fire, but surely, thought the watchers, the poison would get into his system in a minute or two.

“Ah,” said the locals, “we were wrong. He isn’t a murderer. He must be a god.”

It is normally assumed that most of the Christian groups lived across the river in the poorer district of Trastevere. But from the indications that there were several house-churches in Rome, which might well not have had much to do with one another, it is quite possible that some were located in the main part of the city and that Paul would have been living close to one or more of them.

Second, what then happened after Paul’s two-year house arrest, when, we assume, he was brought before Nero?

Did Nero see the apostle in person, or did he delegate this unsavory and trivial task to a minor official? Again, we do not know.

More specifically, third, was Paul put to death then, or did he have a new lease on life—unrecorded in any contemporary sources—that allowed him more travel and perhaps more writing? If so, when and how did he ultimately die? It may seem strange to modern readers that we know so much about Paul, so much intimate detail of his thoughts, his hopes, his fears, his joys, but not how it all ended.

The book of Acts has focused, up to this point, on the way Paul was perceived in Jerusalem and on the charges that were brought against him in relation to undermining the Torah and defiling the Temple.

He was much more afraid of not being true to the gospel than of any consequences a “bold” proclamation might have had.

But what of Paul’s own death? If he arrived in Rome in AD 60, as seems the most likely, these two years of house arrest take us forward to 62. What happened then?

Two possible scenarios, very different from one another, follow from this point.

God’s

There are, of course, traditions that Paul was martyred in Rome; you can still see his chains, so it is claimed, by the tomb where he is supposed to lie, in the church of St. Paul Outside the Walls.

The first and most obvious is that Paul was killed in the persecution of Christians that followed the great fire of Rome in AD 64.

But even then, if Paul were killed in 64, that leaves two more years after the two that Luke mentions. Would that have been enough time for a visit to Spain?

the travel details in those most tricky of Pauline pieces, the so-called Pastoral Letters?

Second Timothy claims to be written from Rome in between two legal hearings; Paul has been lonely and bereft, though Onesiphorus,

me that if 2 Timothy is genuine, then it certainly implies some additional activity back in the East, despite Paul’s earlier plans, after an initial hearing in Rome. And it implies that this time, unlike the situation reflected in Philippians 1, Paul really does believe he is facing death at last:

putative

Perhaps. Paul had to live with a good many “perhaps” clauses in his life. Maybe it is fitting that his biographers should do so as well.

WHAT WAS PAUL trying to do? What made him do it? Why did he keep on going back to the synagogue, even though they kept on beating him?

Procrustean

Jesus was the starting point. And the goal. The goal? Yes, because Paul never wavered in his sense that Jesus would reappear. He would “descend from heaven,” though to get the flavor of that we have to remind ourselves that “heaven” is not “up in the sky,” but is rather God’s dimension of present reality.

God’s plan had always been to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Jesus, which meant, from the Jewish point of view, that Jesus was the ultimate Temple, the heaven-and-earth place.

He believed that a great transformation had taken place in the entire cosmos when Jesus died and rose again, and he believed that a coming great transformation would take place at his “return” or his “reappearing,” the time when heaven and earth would come together at last.

The last few generations of students and clergy have often been taught, however, that Paul, and indeed Jesus and his earliest followers, believed two things about all this: first, that this coming great event would involve (in some sense or other) the end of the known world, and, second, that this coming event would take place within a generation.

patronizing intent, that “They expected the end of the world and they were wrong, so perhaps they were wrong about a lot of other things too.” The irony of this position is that the idea of the “end of the world” is neither biblical nor Jewish nor early Christian. It comes from the secular world of nineteenth-century Europe fueled by dreams of revolutions past and still to come.

they were attuned not to the way such language worked in the first-century Jewish world, but to the way such language worked within current European ideologies.

What, then, caused the urgent note in Paul’s eschatology? The main point is that the long-awaited event could occur at any time, not that it had to occur within a specific time frame. The event that was to occur within a generation was not the end of the world but, according to Mark 13 and the parallels in Matthew and Luke, the fall of Jerusalem.

by and large,

The Middle Ages changed the focus of attention away from “earth” and toward two radically different ideas instead, “heaven” and “hell,” often with a temporary stage (“purgatory”) before “heaven.”

been saved by grace through faith,” he writes in Ephesians. “This doesn’t happen on your own initiative; it’s God’s gift. It isn’t on the basis of works, so no one is able to boast.”4 As it stands, that statement can easily be fitted into the going-to-heaven scheme of thought, but a glance at the wider context will show that Paul has very different ideas. In the first chapter of Ephesians he insists that the entire divine plan “was to sum up the whole cosmos in the king—yes, everything in heaven and on earth, in him.”

God has made us what we are; or, to bring out a different but equally valid flavor of the Greek, we are God’s poetry, God’s artwork.

When someone believes the gospel and discovers its life-transforming power, that person becomes a small but significant working model of that new creation.

The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world.

As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image-bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world and to refl...

Humans were therefore made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth—like an “image” in a temple, no less—and to be the conduit through which God’s life would come t...

Here, then, is the point of Paul’s vision of human rescue and renewal (“salvation,” in traditional language): those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents. They are poems in which God is addressing his world, and, as poems are designed to do, the...

That is what Paul’s gospel and ethics are, at their heart, all about. God w...

right at th...

And, through gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does and agents of further transformation in God’s world.