Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

It was not, then, simply a matter of teaching, of theoretical disagreements. It was about practice, the practice that revealed an underlying belief. The original practice in Antioch had reflected the belief that all Jesus believers, whether circumcised or not, belonged at the same table. The people who came from Judaea to Antioch were clearly saying that table fellowship with uncircumcised Gentiles was wrong and that Jewish Jesus-followers, as loyal Jews, should withdraw.

From the perspective of Paul, who had already thought through what it meant that God was bringing his kingdom through the crucified Messiah, it made no sense at all. Paul had come to believe that Jesus couldn’t simply be added on to the earlier picture of God’s rescuing kingdom. The shocking and unexpected events of the Messiah’s death and resurrection, coupled with the dramatic sense of personal renewal for which the only explanation was the outpoured divine spirit, meant that everything had changed. A new world had been launched.

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 question Paul has to address is: How can you tell who are the true children of Abraham? And his answer is focused firmly on Jesus. So Paul’s point to Peter is simple. What matters is being part of the covenant family, and the covenant family is not defined by Jewish law, but “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.”

Here and elsewhere Paul seems to play on what seem to us multiple meanings; they may not, of course, have looked like that to him. 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):

Let me explain it like this. Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive—but it isn’t me any longer, it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.12

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.

The law itself had envisaged a moment when it would be upstaged by a new reality, the messianic reality. Though Paul does not mention baptism in this passage—he will come to that a chapter later—the sequence of thought he describes here is exactly what, in his view, baptism is all about (as in Romans 6), which is leaving the old life behind and coming through “death” into a new life entirely.

If, in other words, it’s loyalty to God and the law that you want, then the Messiah’s death and resurrection has defined for all time what that actually looks like. When someone comes to be part of that messianic reality, then this, rather than their previous standing as “Jew” or “Gentile” (along with any outward marks of that standing), is the only thing that matters.

I don’t set aside God’s grace. If “righteousness” comes through the law, then the Messiah died for nothing.13 In other words, if Peter and, by implication, those who have come from James try to reestablish a two-tier Jesus movement, with Jews at one table and Gentiles at another, all they are doing is declaring that the movement of God’s sovereign love, reaching out to the utterly undeserving (“grace,” in other words), was actually irrelevant.

If the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, was sufficient for all time to define the people of God, then there is no need for a crucified Messiah.

Galatians is all about the ultimate “inheritance” that God had promised. And, as we shall see presently, Paul insisted that the “heirs” of this “inheritance” could not be defined by the Torah, but only by the Messiah himself, the ultimate “heir.”

All the signs are that Paul understood the scripturally rooted purposes of the One God to have been fulfilled in the Messiah, Jesus, and that he understood this to involve the creation of a particular type of community. As far as he was concerned, therefore, what we call “theology” and what we call “sociology” belonged firmly together.

Any Gentiles who wanted to be regarded as members of the true people of Israel, the family of Abraham, would have to be circumcised. God’s kingdom would indeed come, rescuing God’s people from the world and its wicked ways, but the only people who would inherit that kingdom would be the circumcised.

The elect, those who are in the right tribe.

Jerusalem, as we have seen, was awash with zealous speculation about the coming kingdom, in which “the Gentiles” were usually the wicked villains who would at last receive their punishment. People disagreed on what exactly it meant to keep the Torah, but everyone agreed that keeping the Torah mattered.

But above all he would be shocked that they seemed not to have grasped the very center of it all, the meaning of Jesus himself and his death and resurrection and the fact that through him a new world, a new creation, had already come into being.

The central point concerns the difference between “the present evil age” and the new day that has dawned. 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.

But for Paul something had happened. The living God had acted in person, in the person of Jesus, to rescue people from that “present age” and to launch “the age to come.” The two ages were not, as it were, back to back, the first stopping when the second began. The new age had burst upon the scene while the “present age” was still rumbling on. This was the direct effect of the divine plan by which Jesus “gave himself for our sins”; the power of the “present age” was thereby broken, and the new world could begin.

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

The messengers from Jerusalem and the local pressure groups are trying to put the hurricane of new creation back into the bottle of the old world. It can’t be done. The Messiah’s death has defeated the powers of the world. That is why non-Jewish idolaters have been set free from their former slavery. Paul’s analysis is sharp: “If you try to reverse this—as you would be doing, were you to get circumcised—you are saying you don’t believe in the new creation. You are saying that the Messiah didn’t need to die. You are saying you still belong in the old world.

This is all based on the significance of the Messiah being crucified, being put to death via a method the scriptures deemed cursed.

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.

In particular—and this forms the central theme of the letter—the divine promises to Abraham have been fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah. God promised Abraham a worldwide family. In the Psalms and Isaiah this was focused on the coming king, the son of David who would be the son of God. In Jesus, God has done what he promised, launching the movement through which the new creation is coming about, the 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.

Moses himself leaves Israel, at the end of Deuteronomy, with the warning of a curse, and the curse will culminate in exile, just as it had for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Moses’s Torah was given by God for a vital purpose, but that purpose was temporary, to cover the period before the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Now that this has happened, the Torah has no more to say on the subject.

Now Paul is reinterpreting both covenant and zeal. God has fulfilled his promises to Abraham, but this does not drive a wedge between holy Jews and wicked Gentiles; instead, it is establishing a Jew-plus-Gentile family of faith—as God always intended.

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

So, finally and decisively, the living God has created the single family he always envisaged, and it is marked by faith, pistis. God had not promised Abraham two families, a Jewish one and a non-Jewish one—which is what would have been implied by Peter’s behavior at Antioch, where Jewish and non-Jewish Jesus-followers were to eat at separate tables.

How can you tell, then, where this single family is? The only sure indication is pistis—faith, faithfulness, loyalty.

This, then, is Paul’s famous doctrine of “justification by faith.” It is not that “faith” in the sense of a “religious awareness” is somehow a kind of human experience that is superior to others, but that those who believed the gospel and who were loyal to the One God it unveiled were to be known, and were to know themselves, as the single worldwide family promised to Abraham. And that meant a new community sharing a common table despite all differences: neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no “male and female,” since “all are one in the Messiah, Jesus.”20

In addition, Paul was an upstart former persecutor, presuming to tell them about the meaning of Jesus’s work just because he knew his Bible rather well, whereas they had known Jesus personally!

But the One God had unveiled his age-old purpose in the shocking form of the crucified Messiah, and that changed everything. A contested loyalty.

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

But as I read Luke’s description of this whole sequence of events, I think something else was going on. I think Luke knew that when Paul, Silas, and Timothy reached Troas, they were weary, disheartened, and puzzled. And I think that the reason Luke knew this was because this was the point at which he joined the party himself.

We cannot be certain, but the signs suggest that the person who joined the party at Troas was the same person who later on wrote the story down.

But the most significant event in Philippi’s history came in the early stage of the Roman civil wars, when in the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC Mark Antony and the young Octavian Caesar defeated Brutus and Cassius, who had killed Octavian’s adoptive father Julius Caesar two years before.

One of the big differences between Philippi and the earlier cities of Paul’s mission was that there was no synagogue.

Paul and his friends were announcing and modeling in their own lives a different way of being human, a different kind of community, and all because there was a very different kind of “king.”

When we wonder what most strongly motivated Paul, we must put near the center the fact that at a deeply human level he was sustained and nourished by what he came to call koinōnia.

But all this is a misunderstanding. The Areopagus was a court. Paul was on trial. It was a dangerous moment. It could have gone badly wrong. He was all alone, or so it seems, still waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him.

The key question concerned the relationship between “God” or “the gods” and the world, particularly the lives of humans. The Epicureans held that, though the gods might well exist, they live in a world of their own entirely separate from the human world.

The Stoics, by contrast, were basically pantheists. “God” and the world are more or less the same thing, and the divine spark of life, the logos, exists within everything.

Few people who have studied the apostle would start with Acts 17 to explain who this remarkable man really was or what made him tick. But a strong case can be made for doing just that.

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.” But this is bound up tightly with its cosmic meaning: “He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor,” he writes to the Colossians, “and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him.”7 He is the Messiah’s man, and that includes all the other elements we have just listed.

God gives everything to everyone; what he is looking for is not initiative, whether theological or epistemological, but response. Nothing like that is found in Stoicism. Still less in Epicureanism.

But the reason this ancient Jewish message now had power to change pagan hearts and lives is because of what had happened through Jesus: the power of the idols had been broken. If we ask Paul the question historians always want to ask, taking the long view, as to why this unlikely message achieved such remarkable success, his own answer would undoubtedly include this point.

Through this victory, Jesus had established the new world order, and he would return to complete the work. Paul reminded his hearers that, as part of his message, he had explained that the One God would do what scripture had long promised and indeed what Paul had said to the surprised judges on the Areopagus: this God would sort the whole world out once and for all. On that day, when all human corruption and wickedness would face “anger and fury” and “trouble and distress,”6 those who had turned away from idols would be rescued by Jesus himself.

After two thousand years, most people in most cultures have at least a sketchy idea of what a Christian way of life might be, at least in theory and allowing for cynicism about actual Christian practice. But when Paul arrived in a new town, there was no expectation. Nobody had the slightest idea that there was a new way of life suddenly available, let alone what it might look like. Paul had to model it from scratch.

So when he looks back, he sees the church in Thessalonica, thriving now in the midst of suffering, as the great sign that the true and living God is indeed at work through the word of the gospel. It is one thing to believe that this happens, as Paul obviously had already believed for a long time by this time. It is another thing, out in strange territory, to discover it so obviously happening despite adverse circumstances.