Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Unbridled, crazy, and inflamed lust is a sign that one does not know God. 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.

The presenting problem in Thessalonica was Paul’s teaching that Jesus, who had already defeated death, would return to complete the job. At least some of his hearers had gained the impression that none of them, having come to faith, would die before that time. So now that some of them had indeed died, they wondered if the whole thing was a mistake.

His ways of expressing things develops over time, no doubt partly as he discovers which lines of exposition his hearers can grasp easily and which ones they tend to misunderstand. But at the heart of it he is teaching non-Jews to think Jewishly and teaching both non-Jews and Jews to think in the Jewish way as radically modified by Jesus.

As I said when discussing the Epicureans and Stoics, the ancient non-Jewish world did not have much of an “eschatology,” a sense of time going somewhere, a sense of history having an ultimate purpose that would eventually be realized.

Speaking pastorally, Paul distinguishes between two different types of grief.13 He tells the Thessalonians that they do not have the hopeless kind of grief, the bleak, dark horror of loss with no mitigating circumstances or beliefs, but rather a hopeful grief, which, although there is still the tearing, wrenching sense of loss, has within it the strong and clear hope of reunion. Paul doesn’t say exactly when the reunion will occur, because that’s not where he wants the focus to be. The point is that all will in the end be together “with the Lord.”

The point is not that people will be snatched away from earth and end up in “heaven.” As we see frequently in his letters, that is never Paul’s view. The point is that heaven and earth will come together14 and those who belong to the Messiah will be part of it.

This is one of the greatest challenges Paul faced: how to teach people who had never thought eschatologically that time is going somewhere and they must learn how to reset their watches; how to teach Jews who had thought the ultimate kingdom was going to come all at once that the kingdom had already broken in to world history with Jesus, but that it was not yet consummated and wouldn’t be until his return and the renewal of all things.

But we note that Paul, writing to Thessalonica while living in Corinth, would have been very much aware that one of his prime tasks was to teach his churches to think of God’s coming kingdom in this two-stage way.

The question of when Jesus would return and what that event would look like is the main focus of the second letter to Thessalonica, probably written from Corinth not long after the first one.

It has been fashionable in modern times to imagine that the early Christians saw the coming judgment as the literal “end of the world,” the collapse and destruction of the planet and perhaps the entire cosmos as we know it. This letter, though full of lurid imagery, makes it clear that that cannot be right.

As so often in Jewish writing of roughly this period, what sounds to us like “end-of-the-world” language is used to denote and refer to things that we might call major world events, the sudden rise and fall of ruling powers and the like, and to invest those events with their inner, God-related significance.

So what was he really saying to the Thessalonians when warning them about the coming “day”? The best way of taking his strange, allusive language is to see it as the natural extension of what he says back in 1 Thessalonians 5. There, we recall, he had warned about those who say “peace and security,” but who would face sudden ruin. This can only be a coded reference to the imperial propaganda put out by Rome, which, claiming to have gained control over the whole world, offered its citizens an assurance of safety far beyond its power to deliver. Paul already knew—the whole Jewish world already knew—what that might look like in reality.

Paul’s purpose, in any case, was not to encourage the Thessalonians’ tendency toward lurid apocalyptic speculation, but to assure them that, despite fears and rumors, God was in charge. Jesus was indeed the coming world ruler, and they, as his people, were secure.22

This no doubt made the point at the time, but for us the important thing is perhaps what Paul and the Thessalonians were all taking for granted: that the followers of Jesus were to live as “family,” with all that this entailed in mutual support.

In Philippi, he had been accused of teaching Jewish customs that would be illegal for Romans; in Thessalonica, he was accused by the Jewish community of teachings contrary to Caesar’s decrees. Here things were less specific but still, in a proud Roman colony, potentially threatening. He was accused of “teaching people to worship God in illegal ways.”26

Gallio declared that the charges had nothing to do with actual illegal or vicious conduct. They were matters internal to the Jewish community, “a dispute,” he says, “about words, names, and laws within your own customs.”28

This was a momentous event in the history of the church, and one wonders if even Paul had seen it coming. What it meant was that, unlike the authorities in the other territories he had visited, the official Roman governor of southern Greece (“Achaea”) had declared that being a Jesus-follower was to be seen as a variation of the Jewish way of life.

We are not told. Paul himself never mentions this trip. Luke describes it in a single verse: “Then he went up to Jerusalem, greeted the church, and went back to Antioch.”32

WE DON’T WANT to keep you in the dark,” Paul wrote to Corinth, probably in AD 56, “about the suffering we went through in Asia.”1 Our problem is that though Paul wanted the Corinthians to know about what a bad time he had had, he doesn’t say what exactly had happened.

Yes, but the point of what he said in the first chapter was that at the time he had felt that he was crushed completely; he did find himself at his wits’ end; he did feel abandoned; he did feel destroyed. It is only with hindsight that he looks back and says, “But I wasn’t, after all.”

How did that happen? Paul being Paul, he interprets this entire sequence of events as part of the meaning of being the Messiah’s man: “We always carry the deadness of Jesus about in the body, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our body.”6

When we read 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians in quick succession—especially in Greek, though I think the point still comes through in translation—we are aware at once that something has happened. The style is different.

The best guess—it remains a guess, but it’s the best one—is that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus and put on trial for his life. And that made a “perfect storm,” because it followed hard on the heels of a nasty shock from Corinth. The church there had turned against him.

The fact that Luke doesn’t mention this then becomes significant in itself, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that failed to bark in the night. Luke is content to report Paul’s stoning, beatings, and other attacks and legal charges. He tells us about the imprisonment in Caesarea and the house arrest in Rome. Ephesus must have been a darker moment.

I therefore agree with the several scholars who have insisted that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, and I suggest that this makes best sense of all the evidence—as well as providing a location from which he wrote not only his letter to Philemon but also the other Prison Letters, including Ephesians itself. That letter, as I shall suggest presently, is a circular written to churches in the area and is therefore couched in more general terms than normal. But it was also in Ephesus that Paul experienced what we might call the “Corinthian crisis.”

For our purposes, what really matters is the effect all this had on Paul himself and the way he responded to it. Because these two things are going on at the same time—trouble in Ephesus itself and trouble in relation to Corinth—we will have to move backward and forward between the two in order to understand why Paul felt as if he had received the death sentence.

When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, probably around AD 53, he had to deal with many problems in the church, and two of these in particular may have been part of the larger crisis that then ensued.

Apollos was a powerful scripture teacher, originally from Alexandria, who had been in Ephesus just after Paul’s initial visit and had then gone on to Corinth. While Apollos was in Ephesus, it had become clear to the small group of believers that though he knew the basic facts about Jesus, he was thinking of Jesus as the extension and application of John the Baptist, rather than of Jesus as the Messiah whose death and resurrection had accomplished what John could only foresee.

Opposition, however, grew as the disturbing implications of Paul’s way of reading the familiar story dawned upon the puzzled hearers. Resistance hardened. This may have been one of the occasions when, submitting to synagogue discipline, Paul received the official Jewish beating of forty lashes.

But the dark powers do not give up so easily. Something terrible happened that resulted not only in imprisonment, but in crushing despair. Since Luke has foreshortened his account here as elsewhere, we cannot be sure exactly when this took place.

On balance, though, I think it more likely that the catastrophe happened after the riot that Luke so graphically describes in Acts 19:23–41. Luke says that Paul was able to leave town “after the hue and cry had died down,”28 but that hue and cry might well have included not only the riot he describes, one of his splendid set pieces, but also the time that he does not describe, the disaster that struck, perhaps in the aftermath of the riot, just when Paul thought he had once again escaped real trouble.

The issue seems to be quite different. It has to do with style. Paul’s rebuttal of the party spirit in Corinth has very little to do with Jewish law and everything to do with “the wisdom of the world.”

Here and throughout the letter Paul is teaching the Corinthians, as he had surely been teaching them in person earlier, to think eschatologically, that is, to imagine a world quite unlike the world of ordinary Greco-Roman paganism, a world in which the One God was living and active and had started up something quite new, something that would be complete on the coming day.

And if they all belong to the Messiah—the crucified Messiah, as Paul never lets them forget—then they should expect the world’s standards to be stood on their heads.

In particular (a point Paul will develop in the second letter) apostles are precisely not supposed to be people of great standing in the wider community.

The foolish gospel of the crucified Messiah is God’s power; God’s weakness is stronger than human strength; their faith, as evoked by Paul’s preaching, did not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power; and now, dramatically and with a somewhat shocking threat, “the kingdom of God isn’t about talk—it’s about power,” the “power” in question being the power Paul thinks he may have to use in confronting those who are “puffed up” with their own sense of worth and importance.

For us there is one God, the father, From whom are all things, and we live to him and for him; And one Lord, Jesus the Messiah, Through whom are all things, and we live through him.35

This translation is a bit wooden, but longer paraphrases do not bring out the remarkable way in which Paul has adapted the Shema (“Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one”) by making “Lord” refer to Jesus and “God” refer to “the father.” This prayer contains, in compressed form, a wealth of theology, but Paul’s point in quoting it here is to emphasize the practical outworking of creational monotheism.

Paul was not as fixated on the idea of “identity” as we are in our contemporary culture. But, if the question had been asked, this passage offers a sharp answer. “I became like a Jew.” “Why, Paul,” we want to say, “you are a Jew.” “Not in that sense,” he replies. “I am not ‘under the law.’” If he were, he could never have quoted Psalm 24:1 as meaning that all foods are now acceptable. He has a different identity, the messianic identity. He is “under the Messiah’s law”; he is “in the Messiah.” The Messiah’s people, as he says in a climactic passage in Galatians, have died; they have left behind the old identities and have come into a new identity, the messianic identity.38

Love is not just a duty. Paul’s point is that love is the believer’s destiny. It is the reality that belongs to God’s future, glimpsed in the present like a puzzling reflection, but waiting there in full reality for the face-to-face future. And the point is that this future has come forward into the present time in the events involving Jesus and in the power of the spirit. That is why love matters for Paul—more even than “faith,” which many have seen as his central theme. Love is the present virtue in which believers anticipate, and practice, the life of the ultimate age to come.

Victory has already been won over the dark powers of sin and death that have crippled the world and, with it, the humans who were supposed to be God’s image-bearers in the world. This victory will at last be completed when death itself is destroyed. 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 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; the black night when, ahead of any actual judicial decision, Paul heard, deep within himself, the sentence of death. We have no idea what precisely occurred. But he got to the point where he despaired of life itself.

For reasons that will become clear, I think Paul interpreted his imprisonment as the revenge of the powers into whose world he had been making inroads.

But in this case he had sensed that something else was going on. The forces ranged against him were not simply human. He had stirred up a hornets’ nest with his powerful ministry in Ephesus.

So if Paul had these prayers forming and taking shape in his mind and if, as we know, he had an enviable gift for vivid and fluent language, we might not be surprised if his prayers from the depths of despair began to develop from biblical roots into Jesus-shaped expressions, and from Jesus-shaped expressions into more formal and shaped invocations and celebrations that, recalling the ancient biblical celebrations of God’s sovereignty and victory, now placed the sovereign lordship of Jesus himself at the center. I think that, like a plant in harsh winter, Paul in prison was forced to put his roots down even deeper than he had yet gone into the biblical tradition, and deeper again, still within that tradition, into the meaning of Jesus and his death. The roots slowly found moisture. From the depth of that dark soil, way below previous consciousness, he drew hope and new possibilities. The fruit of that labor remains to this day near the heart of Christian belief.

I think, in other words, not only that the four Prison Letters were all written from Ephesus, but that the writing of them grew directly out of the struggle Paul had experienced.

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. The Messiah is going to be honored one way or another, he says. He “is going to gain a great reputation through my body, whether in life or in death.”

But how? The central appeal of the first half of the letter explains. Unity and holiness will come, and will only come, as the mind of the community and of the individuals within it are transformed to reflect the mind of the Messiah himself.4

Learning how to think as the Messiah had thought, Paul insisted, was the only way to radical unity in the church, and it was also the secret of how to live as “pure and spotless children of God in the middle of a twisted and depraved generation.”6

And Paul, I suggest, came to this extraordinary expression of the Messiah’s mind not least through the combination of his Jesus-focused scriptural meditation, on the one hand, and his own involuntary imitation of the Jesus pattern, on the other. He too had been humbled under the weight of suffering. He had pondered the fact that this was the means by which Jesus had attained his exaltation as Lord.