Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

This gift of money, he would be implying, demonstrates that they are part of one family, one partnership, one 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. Paul would be asking them, at least by implication, to realize that this koinōnia is what it is because in Jesus the One God has done a new thing. He would be asking them to recognize that through Jesus the One God has created a new sort of family, a community that leaps across the walls our traditions have so carefully maintained, as it has now spanned the miles between Antioch and Jerusalem.

They realized that Barnabas and Saul were insisting that Titus be treated on equal terms as a full member of the family, including sharing in the common meals. This group was horrified. “This is precisely the kind of pollution,” they said, “that the One God wants us to avoid! Fraternizing with pagans is what landed our ancestors in trouble!

But now, with the new “Passover” of Jesus’s death and resurrection, a new sort of “freedom” had been born. 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.

What Barnabas and Saul had glimpsed, and what (according to Acts) Peter himself had already glimpsed in the house of the non-Jew Cornelius, was a new kind of purity coming to birth. A new freedom. A new Temple. A new kind of purity.

The whole episode, with its swirling theological, personal, and inevitably also political currents, alerts us to the overlapping complexities and challenges that the young movement was facing.

It never occurred to me at that stage to ask what exactly Paul thought he was doing, or why. Why did he go in the first place? Why did he go to those places rather than anywhere else?

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. Yes, but this fails to address the underlying questions. 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” and “go to heaven when they died.” But this was not the concern that drove Paul and Barnabas.

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.” What mattered was the ultimate restoration of the whole of creation, with God’s people being raised from the dead to take their place in the running of this new world.

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.

When Rabbi Akiba declared in AD 132 that Simeon ben Kosiba was God’s Messiah, this meant that Simeon was now the ruler of a small Judaean state in rebellion against Rome. (That “kingdom” lasted for three years before the final disaster, but it shows how the logic works.)

If someone went about the communities of diaspora Jews declaring that God had at last sent Israel’s Messiah, this would not have seemed at the time to be a message either about “religion” (the Messiah was never supposed to start a new “religion”!) or about “life after death” (devout Jews had long believed that God would take care of them hereafter).

It would be what we would call “political,” though as always for the Jews of the day this would al...

Paul’s “missionary” journeys were not simply aimed at telling people about Jesus in order to generate inner personal transformation and a new sense of ultimate hope, though both of these mattered vitally as well. They were aimed at the establishment of a new kind of kingdom on earth as in heaven. A kingdom with Jesus as king. The kingdom—Paul was quite emphatic about this—that Israel’s God had always intended to set up.

Like most Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus had long believed that the nations of the world had been enslaved by their own idols. They worshipped nongods, and in Jewish thought, rooted in the scriptures, those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization. This is what Paul means by “the power of the satan”—the word “satan” is the Hebrew term for “accuser,” used popularly and often quite vaguely to refer to the dark power that appears to grip, distort, and ultimately destroy human societies and individuals. And Paul believed that in his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth had overcome the power of darkness.

Paul’s mission was not, then, simply about persuading people to believe in Jesus, as though starting from a blank slate. It was about declaring to the non-Jewish nations that the door to their prison stood open and that they were free to leave.

Being free from the consequences of the past means, of course, being forgiven, as Paul emphasizes in this passage in Acts. Forgiveness is not something the non-Jewish world had thought much about.

That would imply, apart from anything else, a far more intimate relationship between gods and mortals than was normally imagined.

They were being summoned to understand themselves, for the first time, as humans who were personally responsible to a wise Creator.

What emerges from this, as the positive side of the point about the dark forces being overthrown, is the idea of a new humanity, a different model of the human race. If Jesus had defeated the powers of the world in his death, his resurrection meant the launching of a new creation, a whole new world.

First, if Paul believed and taught that with Jesus and his death and resurrection something had happened, a one-off event through which the world was now irrevocably different, so he also believed that, when he announced the message about Jesus (the “good news,” the “gospel”), a similar one-off event could and would take place in the hearts, minds, and lives of some of his hearers. Paul speaks about this one-off event with the term “power”: the power of the gospel, the power of the spirit in and through the gospel, or the power of “the word of God.”

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 change was bound to be dramatic. Worshipping “the gods”—the great pantheon of Greek and Roman gods with plenty of others added on here and there—permeated every aspect of life in Paul’s world. To pull back from all of that and to worship “the living God” instead was far more than the equivalent of, say, in the modern West giving up gambling and beginning to attend church once a week.

Perhaps the only way we can imagine such a thing in today’s secular world is to think what it would be like to give up all our usual machines and conveniences: car, cell phone, cooking equipment, central heating, or air-conditioning. You would have to do everything differently, only much more so.

It 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.

Connecting the dots of Paul’s journeys, actual and planned, is like mapping a royal procession through Caesar’s heartlands.

I suspect that Paul was deliberately finding ways to make the point: there is one “Lord,” one Kyrios, and it isn’t Caesar. The communities of those loyal to Jesus (pistis again) that grew up as a result of his gospel announcement were marked by a confession of that loyalty that was extremely simple and extremely profound: Kyrios Iēsous Christos, “Jesus Messiah is Lord.”

These communities, small at first but growing, were an experiment in a way of being human, of being human together, that had never been tried in the world before.

Luke tells the story of Paul’s first journey in Acts 13–14. Like much of Acts, these chapters are page-turners. One thing tumbles out after another, with Paul and Barnabas hurrying from city to city and stirring up excited and/or hostile crowds.

We may assume that the substantial set piece later in Acts 13, where Paul speaks at length in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, represents Luke’s summary of the kind of thing that Paul (who turns out to be the main speaker in the party) would say in synagogue after synagogue, though as we shall see with varied reactions.

Why, wonder readers, the “teaching,” not the “power”? Presumably because, though many people could perform strange tricks, the power of the travelers seemed to come not from themselves, but from the one about whom they were “teaching,” the one whose death, resurrection, and enthronement had revealed him as the true Kyrios.

They land at the port of Perga, whereupon John Mark leaves them and returns to Jerusalem. This leaves Paul with a lasting sense of betrayal and suspicion: later on, when Barnabas tries to launch another trip and wants to give Mark a second chance, Paul refuses point-blank to take someone so obviously unreliable.

Paul must have felt that he’d been preparing for this kind of moment all his life. He was going to tell the story of ancient Israel in a way that everybody would recognize, but with a conclusion nobody had seen coming.

This was, of course, dramatic and revolutionary. Paul had sat through many synagogue addresses in his youth, and he must have known that people simply didn’t say this kind of thing. He wasn’t giving them a new kind of moral exhortation. He certainly wasn’t offering a new “religion” as such. He was not telling them (to forestall the obvious misunderstanding about which I have spoken already) “how to go to heaven.” He was announcing the fulfillment of the long-range divine plan.

privilege? The visit to New Rome thus ends with the start of Paul’s new life: that of a suffering apostle, a visible symbol of the crucified Lord he was proclaiming.

First, Paul’s message of a new age dawning, of new creation suddenly leaping into life, is dramatically symbolized by a burst of healing activity.

We should be careful, by the way, about the modern word “miracle” in this connection. People often think of “miracles” as the “invasion” of the natural order by a force from outside. That wasn’t how the early Christians saw it. For them, dramatic and otherwise inexplicable healings were seen as evidence of new creation, of the Creator himself at work in a fresh way.

I think it far more likely that the poor physical condition to which Paul refers is the result of the violence to which he had been subjected.

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.

For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences. And if that had now happened, if the Messiah’s death had dealt with the “powers” that had held Jew and Gentile alike captive and his resurrection had launched a new world order “on earth as in heaven,” then the non-Jewish nations were not only free to turn from their now powerless idols to serve the living and true God, but their “uncleanness”—the idolatry and immorality that were always cited as the reason Jews should not fraternize with them—had itself been dealt with. The radical meaning of the Messiah’s cross was the reason, on both counts, that there now had to be a single family consisting of all the Messiah’s people.

All these questions need as their central point the recognition that this was neither a new “religion” nor a new system of otherworldly salvation. 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.

The events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the powerful gift of the divine spirit meant that the “powers” that had held the pagan world captive had been overthrown and that pagans who now came to believe in the Messiah were free from the defilements of idolatry and immorality.

But anyone living in Jerusalem in the middle years of the first century was bound to face the challenge posed by the question: When is the One God going to do at last what he has promised and liberate his ancient people once and for all from the shame and scandal of Roman rule? And since Rome was widely seen as the ultimate form of monstrous pagan rule over the people of God, how and when was the One God going to overthrow the monsters and set up, on earth, his own unshakable kingdom?

We know about the situation in Jerusalem through the detailed and colorful accounts of Josephus, a younger contemporary of Paul’s. He was anything but a neutral observer. 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.

The scriptures were quite clear that utter loyalty to the One God meant refusing all compromise with the pagan world. The social and cultural pressure to affirm that ancient loyalty and to be seen to abide by it was intense. Now think what it would have been like to be a follower of Jesus in that world. You would face a very different challenge from those faced by Jesus-followers in Syria or Turkey.

But they all believed in the hope of Israel—the hope for a great divine rescue, which for the Jesus-followers had already been launched though obviously had not yet been fully implemented. They all believed in utter loyalty to Israel’s One God. Fierce division existed over what precisely that loyalty should mean, but it would have taken a bold maverick to suggest that there might be forms of loyalty in which Israel’s ancestral traditions, focused on the Torah, would not play a central role.

Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.” Some types of Protestantism have imbibed this deeply, supposing that “the gospel” is all about inner feeling, a disposition of the heart, and not at all about outward reality or actions, whether moral or “religious.” Sometimes people have thought that this is the one and only meaning of Paul’s teaching about “justification by faith not works.” But things were not nearly so simple.

His writing, just like the gospel itself, was part of a radical redefinition of what “authority” might look like within the new world that the One God had launched through Jesus.

Peter came to Antioch, perhaps in early 48. His arrival is unexplained, but then all Peter’s movements are unrecorded after his surprising escape from prison in Acts 12:17; all we know is that he worked as a traveling missionary. The key point is that he had initially been happy to go along with the practice of the local Jesus-followers, having Jewish believers and Gentile believers living together as “family,” sharing the same table. This was, after all, the principle that he, Peter, had himself embraced in Acts 10–11, when he visited Cornelius, justifying his actions to critics in Jerusalem. “What God made clean,” he had been told, “you must not regard as common.”5 Peter had acted on that principle, reckoning that the power of the gospel had “cleansed” the Gentiles of the ritual or moral defilement that they possessed in Jewish eyes, defilement that would normally be seen as a barrier to the intimacy of table fellowship.

Some people—we don’t know who they are, but Paul says they “came from James” in Jerusalem—arrived in Antioch and insisted that if these Gentiles wanted to be part of the true family, to share in the great rescue operation that the One God had now set in motion, they would have to be circumcised.