Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

We who live on the other side of centuries of puzzlement about “humanity” and “divinity” may sometimes be startled at how easily someone like Paul, believing that humans were made to reflect the divine image, could see the true human as the one who shared the glory that the One God had said he would not share with another.9

If others are saying they prefer the old house the way it was, they are missing the point: if Israel’s Messiah has come and has been raised from the dead, then those who follow him are the true people of God. This is blunt, but consistent.

Out of the many things one could say about this passage, there are three important points for our present purposes. First, Paul is following the messianic pattern set out in the poem of 2:6–11.

Second, this passage is focused not just on a belief or theory about the Messiah, but on personal knowledge.

Third, he has learned—perhaps he has learned this in new ways in the weeks and months before writing this letter—that this personal “knowledge” of the Messiah finds intimate expression in suffering.

Paul had come to the point where he was content to share the Messiah’s death in order that he might arrive with him at the ultimate hope of Israel, “the resurrection from the dead.” The ancient story of Israel had been fulfilled—in the Messiah. All Paul’s previous zeal for God and the Torah had had to be counted as “trash” by contrast.

Then comes the point of all this: the Philippians must learn to imitate him, as he is imitating the Messiah.15 But how can they imitate him? They have not been zealous Jews, eager for the Torah. No, but they all have their own status, their own personal or civic pride.

So whether they are Romans reverting to proud colonial ways or simply people who find themselves lured back into sensual indulgence,16 all must resist and find instead the way of holiness and unity that is shaped by the Messiah himself, by his choice of the way of the cross, by his status as the truly human one, the true embodiment of the One God.

What’s more, we must remind ourselves that slavery in Paul’s world had nothing to do with ethnic origin. All you had to do to become a slave was to be on the losing side in battle or even to fail in business.

Paul explains to Philemon that he is praying that their koinōnia will have its full, powerful effect, bringing them all together “into the king,” into the Messiah. From Paul’s other uses of this idea we see what he means: “the Messiah” is not only Jesus, but all those who are “in the Messiah.” It is an incorporative term, as it was in Galatians (“You are all one in the Messiah, Jesus”) and 1 Corinthians (“as the body is one, and has many members, . . . so also is the Messiah”).21 “We must,” he says in Ephesians, “speak the truth in love, and so grow up in everything into him”—that is, into the Messiah.

Philemon would be astonished and quite possibly angry to see him return; he would also realize the delicate balance both of what Paul had said and of what he was being asked to do. As a policy statement about slavery, the letter falls short of what we would want. As an experiment in a one-off, down-to-earth pastoral strategy, it is brilliant. And it seems to have worked. Fifty years later the bishop of Ephesus is a man called Onesimus. The young slave, now an elderly Christian leader? Or a name already respected within the early community?

Before we plunge into these two letters, Colossians and Ephesians, we need to say a word about Paul’s authorship. The present book is not the place to go into technical arguments, but a short explanation may be in order. Most modern Western critics still express doubts about Paul’s authorship of one or both of these letters.

As historians, we must not set up the artificial standards of contemporary moralizing and then construct a “Paul” to fit. Fashions come and go in the scholarly world. The fashion for rejecting Ephesians and Colossians—or perhaps we should say for helping the Protestant Paul to keep his distance from Judaism, on the one hand, and from Catholicism, on the other—has had a long run for its money. Because it appears “critical,” many are frightened to challenge it for fear of appearing “uncritical.” Once we place the letters in Ephesus, where I think they belong, these problems begin to look as though they are generated by ideology rather than historical study.

Colossians is written, it appears, to a young church. Paul has been informed of its existence by Epaphras, himself from Colossae, who seems to have been converted under Paul in Ephesus and to have returned home to spread the word.

“Wisdom” is in fact the subtext of much of Colossians. As always, Paul wants people to learn to think—not simply to imbibe rules and principles to learn by heart, but to be able to grow up as genuine humans, experiencing “all the wealth of definite understanding” and coming to “the knowledge of God’s mystery.”

That whole creation, second, was made by the One God through his wisdom. That was what Proverbs 8 had said, starting a line of thought that would be developed by Jewish thinkers down to Paul’s own day.

if you want to be a genuine human being, reflecting God’s image, then you need to be wise as well. You need to get to know Lady Wisdom.

The book known as Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, written around 200 BC, imagines Lady Wisdom wanting to come and live among humans and wondering where to establish her dwelling. There is no contest: the Temple, of course, is the answer.27

And the account of creation in Genesis 1 reaches its climax with the creation of the humans in the image of God. Creation as a whole is a Temple, the heaven-and-earth reality in which God wants to dwell, and the mode of his presence in that Temple (as anyone in the ancient world would have known perfectly well) was the “image,” the cult object that would represent the creator to the world and that wider world before the creator.

And now imagine Paul in his moment of crisis, of despair, feeling that the “powers” had overcome him after all, reaching down into the depths of this fathomless well of truth to find, in a fresh way, what it might mean to trust in the God who raises the dead. This is what he comes up with:

If this poem were less elegant, one might say that Paul was shaking his fist at the powers, the powers on earth and the powers in the dark realms beyond the earth, the powers that had put him in prison and crushed his spirit to the breaking point. But he is not. The theological effect is the same; he is invoking and celebrating a world in which Jesus, the one through whom all things were made, is now the one through whom, by means of his crucifixion, all things are reconciled.

The Messiah, indeed, is living within them, just as Paul had said to the Galatians. The ancient Jewish hope that the glory of the One God would return and fill the world is thus starting to come true.

There are stunning peaks and distant glimpses, but the point is that its author has stood back and tried to express it all at once. That is why some, even among those who are unsure whether Paul wrote it, have referred to it as “the crown of Paulinism,” the place where Paul’s ideas are put together in a single frame. A different kind of picture, indeed, but recognizable, I believe, as the work of the same man.

Ephesians is where we can, I think, see Paul’s own situation and understand why this was what he wanted to say from his prison cell to the churches in the province of Asia. The letter combines two apparently quite different things, but when we think of Paul and his Ephesian crisis it makes sense.

First, there is the cosmic and global vision of the divine purpose and of the church as the agent and representative of that plan.

The second chapter speaks of the act of grace and rich mercy whereby God has rescued Jew and Gentile alike from sin and from the “powers” that feed off human idolatry.

The first half of the letter is therefore all about power and unity—the power of God in the gospel and the unity of heaven and earth, of Jew and Gentile in the church.42

The second half of the letter is strongly and explicitly practical. The different gifts that God gives to the church are designed to bring it into a rich, variegated unity in which its members will be “growing up into the Messiah” as Paul had said to Philemon.

But with the end of chapter 6 comes the reminder of the continuing reality. Believers are locked in a power struggle, and it is dangerous and unpleasant, calling for vigilance and for all the defensive equipment the gospel can provide.

I think, in fact, that Ephesians 6:10–20, the passage on spiritual warfare, functions in relation to the whole of the rest of the letter much like 1 Corinthians 15, the long argument about the resurrection of the body, functions in relation to the earlier material in that letter.

The starting point must be the mingled sense of shock and relief when Paul was released from prison. (I date this to sometime in middle or late 56.)

And—even more troubling—what would now become of his great project, the collection for Jerusalem?

The normal modern perception of Paul as a strident, overconfident moralist will not do. Not only is he physically and emotionally battered; he doesn’t mind if the Corinthians know it. That, in a world where leaders were supposed to be socially respectable, exemplary characters, is exactly the point.

All of this sets the scene for us to look at the letter as a whole. As we have noticed, it moves jerkily between one theme and another. But the underlying topic is Paul’s own apostolic ministry. Whatever specific problems there had been, they stemmed from the Corinthians’ failure to understand what apostolic ministry really ought to be like.

Paul argues this point in chapter 3 by means of an extended comparison between Moses’s hearers and Paul’s own. Moses couldn’t speak plainly because his hearers’ hearts were hard, but Paul can and does speak plainly and boldly (to the Corinthians’ obvious discomfort), because their hearts have been transformed by the spirit.

One point stands out of particular interest as we continue our quest to find out what drove him on. He still expects the return of Jesus, and with it the resurrection of the dead. But whereas in 1 Corinthians he had assumed he would be among those still alive at the time,10 he is now facing the prospect that he may well die before it all happens. This has been anticipated in Philippians11 and is now built into his thinking, no doubt as part of his having “received the death sentence” in Ephesus.

That is the kind of person the Corinthians were prepared to look up to. They would have been delighted with the “celebrity culture” in some parts of today’s Western church. That is what they were hoping Paul would be like, which is why they were so ashamed of his shabby presence, his awkward speaking manner, his blunt and direct teaching style.

It speaks volumes for Paul as a person, for what 2 Corinthians is all about, and for what (he would have said) the gospel is all about, that the climax of the letter is a glorious parody of this whole world of imperial boasting, achievements, going over the wall, and everything else. He boasts of all the wrong things.

Yes, obviously Paul has had extraordinary experiences, but that isn’t the basis on which he stands before them as an apostle of the crucified Messiah. The main thing is that Paul, at the end of it all, received “a thorn in the flesh.” Speculation has been rife. Was it an illness? A particular physical weakness? A special nagging temptation that kept coming back to bite him? A sorrowful conscience about his former violent life or his bitter public row with Barnabas? He doesn’t say.

There were specific reasons for writing Romans at that moment (probably in the spring or summer of 57). We will come to those presently. But why write it like this? Romans is in a different category from Paul’s other letters for many reasons, but particularly because of its careful and powerful structure.

Romans is not like, say, 1 Corinthians (the next longest letter), where, though there is a flow of thought, one thing follows another in something more like a list. Romans has a quality of literary artistry attempted nowhere else by Paul, or, one might add, by any of his contemporaries.

But not only are there significant omissions (no mention, for instance, of the Eucharist, which we know from 1 Corinthians was a vital focus of early Christian worship), but, despite the “divisions” and “headings” in some translations, the flow of thought in the letter is not a matter of moving from one “topic” to another. It is, to say it again, a sustained and integrated argument, in which Paul comes back again and again to similar topics, but each time (to continue the musical analogy) in a different key or with different orchestration.

The letter is not simply a summary of everything Paul had been teaching. It is designed to make vital points to the church in Rome.

He wanted to plant the flag of the messianic gospel in key points where another “gospel” was being flaunted, namely, the “gospel” of the Roman Empire, of Caesar and all his works. Rome itself was therefore the obvious target; but out beyond that, Spain, the western edge of the world so far as Paul’s contemporaries were aware, was a major center of Roman culture and influence.

We recall that Claudius, who became emperor in AD 41, had banished the Jews from Rome after riots in their community.

But with Claudius’s death in 54 and Nero’s accession to the throne, Claudius’s edict was revoked. Jews could once again be, if not exactly welcome, at least permitted back in town.

Underneath the ethnic prejudice there was always the theological suspicion, which would then be transferred in subsequent centuries to the Christians, that Jews didn’t worship the gods, so if bad things happened, people knew who to blame.

A century later, he was proved dramatically right. A leader called Marcion, originally from Sinope on the Black Sea shore of Asia Minor, arrived in Rome teaching a version of Christianity in which the God of Jesus was sharply distinguished from the God of the Jews. He produced a heavily truncated edition of the New Testament, with the Jewish and scriptural bits omitted or amended. The Christian faith as he taught it—and he became very popular—left no room for Jews and their traditions. It had become a completely Gentile phenomenon.

It is highly likely, and this is borne out by the greetings to the different house-churches in Romans 16, that there were many different groups in Rome all worshipping Jesus but not really in contact with one another and almost certainly with different local customs that would owe more than a little to the culture from which they had come.

Galatians and Romans of course cover similar topics up to a point. But whereas Galatians is written in haste and heat to say, Under no circumstances must you get circumcised and take on the Torah, Romans is written at more leisure and with more compositional care to say, You must work out the gospel-shaped balance of Jew and Greek.