Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

They were focused on what we might call messianic eschatology: the belief that the One God had acted climactically and decisively in, and even as, Israel’s Messiah. A shocking, blinding reality. The reality that would change the world.

And what if Israel’s God had done in person, in the person of this man, what he said he would do, defeating death itself and launching his new creation?

So then Ananias baptized the puzzled Saul. As in some of the other occasions in Acts, this happened at once, as soon as the person came to believe in the crucified Jesus as the risen Lord. There was no period of waiting, teaching, or preparation. That would come in due time. Baptism, looking back to Jesus’s own baptism and past that to the crossing of the Red Sea in the Passover story, marked out the new family, the new Passover people.

Paul’s powerful, spirit-driven proclamation of Jesus as “son of God” can hardly be called “preaching,” if by “preaching” we mean the sort of thing that goes on in churches week by week in our world. This was a public announcement, like a medieval herald or town crier walking through the streets with a bell, calling people to attention and declaring that a new king had been placed on the throne. This was, indeed, how the word “gospel” would be heard right across the Roman world of the day: as the announcement of a new emperor.

Paul is therefore insisting that his message was his own; he had gotten it from Jesus himself, not from other members of the movement. It had come, he says, “through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah.”2 “The message” in question was not, after all, a theory, a new bit of teaching, or even details of how someone might be “saved.” “The message” was the news about Jesus himself: he was raised from the dead, he was therefore Israel’s Messiah, he was the Lord of the world.

Start with the scriptural story, place the crucified and risen Jesus at the climax of the story, and the meaning, though unexpected and shocking, is not in doubt. That is the point he is making.

Elijah is important for Paul not least because he gives us the clue to the journey to “Arabia.”

But one of the only other references to it in the New Testament—indeed, in the same letter, Paul’s letter to the Galatians—gives us a far more specific location: Mt. Sinai, in the peninsula to the south of the Holy Land and to the east of Egypt.

Sinai was where Elijah had gone when it all went horribly wrong. Sinai was where Saul of Tarsus went—for the same reason.

When God finally answers, Elijah is told, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus,” where he is to anoint new kings for Syria and Israel and a new prophet, Elisha, to take his own place.

He wanted to go and present himself before the One God, to explain that he had been “exceedingly zealous,” but that his vision, his entire worldview, had been turned on its head. And he received his instructions: “Go back and announce the new king.”

In Acts 9:20–28, Paul announces Jesus in the synagogue in Damascus until a plot against his life forces him to leave town and go back to Jerusalem.

When he speaks of God setting him apart from his mother’s womb, he is deliberately echoing the call of Jeremiah.8 When he speaks of God “unveiling” his son in him, he is using the language of Jewish mystics and seers who spoke of that “unveiling” or “revelation” as constituting a divine commissioning.9 When he says that the Jerusalem church later “glorified God because of me,” he is echoing Isaiah, from one of his all-time favorite chapters, and claiming for himself the prophetic role of the “servant.”10 He continues to echo that chapter in Galatians 2 when he speaks of wondering whether he “might be running, or might have run, to no good effect.”11

He is also making it clear that his call and commissioning have placed him in the ancient prophetic tradition, whether of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Elijah himself.

This, then, is why he went to Arabia: to hand in his former commission and to acquire a new one. His loyalty to the One God of Israel was as firm as it had always been.

Saul’s time in Damascus, including his trip to Arabia and back, probably took three years, most likely from AD 33 to 36. (Questions of chronology always get complicated, but the main lines are clear.)

Announce Jesus as Messiah, and opposition will arise from Jews, offended at the idea of a crucified Messiah, and from pagan authorities, fearing a breach of the peace.

In any case, to Jerusalem Paul then goes, most likely in AD 36 or 37. Writing to the Galatians over a decade later, he explains that he stayed with Peter (whom he calls by his Aramaic name, Cephas) for two weeks, seeing no other Jesus-followers except James, the Lord’s brother, already acknowledged as the central figure in the new movement.

There follows a decade or so of silence: roughly 36 to 46 (like most dates in ancient history, including most of the ones in this book, we are dealing in approximations, with a year or so to be allowed either way).

Saul spent a silent decade deepening the well of scriptural reflection from which he would thereafter draw the water he needed.

First, there was Israel’s own story.

But second, there was God’s story—the story of what the One God had done, was doing, and had promised to do.

Saul came to see that these two stories, Israel’s story and God’s story, had, shockingly, merged together.

This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day.

But look again, and you will see, not least in the Psalms, not least in the royal predictions of Psalms and prophets alike, that when Israel’s true king arrives, he will be the king not only of Israel, but also of the whole world.

The default mode in Tarsus, and many other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world, would have been some kind of Stoicism, with its all-embracing vision of a united and divine world order in which humans partake through their inner rationality, or logos. The famous alternative, Epicureanism, was a minority, elite option that saw the gods, if they existed at all, as themselves a distant, happy elite who took no interest in human affairs and certainly didn’t try to intervene in the world.

When he writes, later, that he has learned to “take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah,”18 it seems highly likely that this was a conviction to which he had come in the silent decade in Tarsus.

What sense could it make that Israel’s Messiah would come to his own and that his own would not receive him?

It was, just as much, that the implications of all this for the ancestral way of life were either not clear or all too disturbingly clear. Paul’s own question, what it would look like if the One God created a new single family of “brothers and sisters” in the Messiah, had potentially revolutionary answers. And traditional societies do not welcome revolution.

Among other strong points that emerge again and again in his mature writing and that must have been hammered out on the anvil of these constant arguments, we find Paul’s vision of what Jesus had achieved in his death and resurrection.

At the heart of it, rooted in the Passover theme, which Saul had known from boyhood and which Jesus himself had made thematic for his own life and death, we find the idea of victory. Something had happened in Jesus’s death and resurrection as a result of which the world was a different place.

but humans had worshipped nongods, pseudogods, “forces” within the natural order, and had thereby handed over to those shadowy beings a power not rightfully theirs. The “forces” had usurped the proper human authority over the world.

And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil. The resurrection proved it. If he had overcome death, it could only be because he had overcome the forces that lead to death, the corrosive power of idolatry and human wickedness.

Paul believed that, through Jesus and his death, the One God had overcome the powers that had held the world in their grip. And that meant that all humans, not just Jews, could be set free to worship the One God.

Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil.

He was writing at a time when remaining unmarried—particularly for women—was next to scandalous.

The wall in question, the wall that had been breached, was the division between the Jew and the non-Jew.

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.

They claimed there was only one true Temple, the one in Jerusalem, but rumors abounded, going back to the time when the Roman general Pompey had marched into the Holy of Holies, that the Jews had no image, no statue of their god. Hence the charge of atheism.

But the Jews were clear about the fact that, if they compromised with the pagan world around them, however “compromise” might have been defined in any particular city or household, they would be giving up their heritage—and their hope.

So what would Jewish people, particularly in a diaspora community like Antioch or Tarsus, think of the suggestion that the One God had done what he promised by sending a crucified Messiah? What would this mean for Jewish identity? Was this good news simply for Jewish people, or might it be for everyone?

Here we run into the kind of problem that meets all serious readers of Paul. 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.” The word pistis could mean “faith” in the sense of “belief”—what was believed as well as the fact of believing, or indeed the act of believing, which already seems quite enough meaning for one small word. But pistis could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief, in this case that Jesus was now “Lord,” the world’s rightful sovereign. Hence the term means “loyalty” or “allegiance.”

For Paul, the word meant all of that but also much more.

For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not.

To say that this new project, this new community, was going to present a challenge is a gross understatement. The vibrant and excited group of Jesus-followers in Antioch was doing something radically countercultural.

One of the spirit-led “prophets” in Antioch, a man named Agabus, warned the community that there was a famine coming over the whole Mediterranean world. (Various pieces of evidence point to the occurrence of this in AD 46.)

The Jesus-followers in Antioch resolved at once not to do that. Instead, they would look out for those community members worse off than themselves. And that meant Jerusalem. Jerusalem was where Jesus’s first followers had sold their lands and pooled their resources and where now, after a decade or two of hostility from the authorities and probably their own wider communities, they were struggling to stay alive.

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 community with mutual responsibilities.

So Barnabas and Saul were sent from Antioch to Jerusalem with a gift of money for the Jerusalem believers. The date was probably AD 46 or 47.

One of the best-known things about Paul’s thought is his view that when a person has come to faith in Jesus as the risen Lord, that event is itself a sign of the spirit’s work through the gospel, and that, if the spirit has begun that “good work” of which that faith is the first fruit, you can trust that the spirit will finish the job. That is what he says in Philippians 1:6, and it coheres with his larger teaching elsewhere, particularly in Romans 5–8.