Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

It is, rather, that he can see one kind of danger in Galatia and realizes that it must be headed off immediately. He can see another, more long-term danger in Rome, and he decides to draw on his entire lifetime of biblical and pastoral reflection to construct a work that ought to ward off what to him would be the utter nonsense of a Jesus movement that was now eager to leave its Jewish and scriptural roots behind.

The temptation would then be for such a new generation to look at the powerful synagogue communities in Rome, up and running again after five years in abeyance, and to assume that the God of Jesus had finished with the Jews once and for all. The proud and vital word “Messiah” would just become a proper name. Worshipping Jesus would no longer be invested with the echoes of the Psalms and prophets, according to whom Israel’s Messiah would be the Lord of the whole world. The Jesus movement would turn itself into a kind of private spirituality, less concerned with the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven and more concerned with cultivating one’s own spiritual interiority. It would no longer be a movement based on messianic eschatology. It would become a “religion” that saw itself as different from “the Jewish religion,” a private religion that would no longer pose much of a threat to the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities.

In Rome it was different. The groups were already separate. They had already developed different codes of practice. They would now regard one another with suspicion. They would not be able to worship together.

He could not simply align himself with one or two of the Roman house-churches and ignore the rest. The unity he so passionately advocated was not just a pleasant ideal. It was vital for the coherence of his own mission. It was also, as he had said in Ephesians, the way in which God’s wisdom in all its rich variety would be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. If Caesar and the dark powers that stood behind him were to be confronted with the “good news” that there was “another king, Jesus,” the community that was living by that message had to be united.

But if it was all differentiation and no unity, Caesar need take no notice; they were just a few more peculiar eastern cults come to town.

The unity of the Messiah’s people across traditional divisions is part of the vital way in which the followers of Jesus will be a sign of his worldwide rule, already inaugurated.

The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of a genuinely Pauline political and social theology—as well as of everything else that Paul believed about him.

But something at least must be said as a start. God has done what he always said he would, Paul is saying, and this is what that means today.

But God has thereby unveiled his faithfulness to the covenant, the covenant with Abraham and Israel through which he always purposed to put the whole creation right at last. God’s creation has been spoiled by human idolatry and sin, and even his chosen people have appeared unable to do anything about it. But now (that’s one of Paul’s favorite phrases, for example, in Romans 3:21) God has revealed that what his covenant purposes had always involved was the “putting forth” of Jesus the Messiah as the means of establishing a new reality, a single family whose sins are forgiven, a Jew-plus-Gentile covenant family, as he always promised to Abraham. That is the thrust of the first part, chapters 1–4.

Maybe so, Paul now thinks, but according to Genesis 15:6 Abraham believed God—believed, that is, the promise that he would be the father of an uncountable family that would inherit the whole world—and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. This faith, this trust, this loyalty was Abraham’s covenant badge. A covenant, Paul saw, to which the One God had been faithful in the events of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. A covenant in which all who believed in “the one who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord” were now full members.

Now, therefore, the loyal faith by which a Jew or Gentile reaches out to grasp the promise, believing “in the God who raises the dead,” would be the one and only badge of membership in Abraham’s family.

The use of Romans 1–4 in popular teaching today to declare universal human sinfulness and “justification” by grace alone and through faith alone is fine as far as it goes. Sadly, it routinely shrinks what Paul is actually saying in these chapters and fails to see that they are only one part of a larger argument and do not make full sense without the material that then follows.

What was the point, after all, of being part of Abraham’s family? Simply this (as Paul had expounded it in one synagogue after another across Turkey and Greece): according to Genesis itself and to many subsequent Jewish traditions, the call of Abraham was the divine answer to the sin of Adam. What we have in Abraham is therefore the promise that God will deal once and for all with sin and with the death that it brings in its wake. That is how the first four chapters of Romans work.

Coming through the waters of baptism (chapter 6) is like going through the Red Sea, leaving behind slavery and discovering freedom. But then Israel arrives at Mt. Sinai and is given the Torah—which promptly declares that Israel has already transgressed. Indeed, as Deuteronomy made clear, the Torah simply brought Israel to the place of exile, of a new kind of slavery.

This is the complex problem—Adam’s problem, if you like, magnified enormously in the rebellion of God’s own people—to which Romans 8 is the matchless answer. The death of the Messiah and the gift of the spirit together do “what the law was incapable of doing,”30 that is, giving the life the law promised but could not bring about because of human (and Israelite) sin.

God’s covenant was always the bond of love and the promise of that love having its full effect. Now, in the Messiah and by the spirit, that covenant love is seen to be victorious. Romans 8 is the richest, deepest, and most powerfully sustained climax anywhere in the literature of the early Christian movement, and perhaps anywhere else as well.

At the vital point he insists, as he had done in synagogues from Antioch to Corinth, that the goal of the Torah, the aim and ultimate purpose of the whole great narrative, was the Messiah. Telos gar nomou Christos, “The Messiah is the goal of the law,”36 so that covenant membership may be available for all who believe.

Romans 11 then forms a sustained argument of its own, thinking forward into this new and unprecedented moment in the story of God and Israel. Paul here, we remember, is writing to head off any suggestion in the Roman church that it’s now time for the followers of Jesus to cut loose from their Jewish context and see themselves as simply a Gentile community.

“If they do not remain in unbelief, they will be grafted back in.”42 (We should note that “unbelief” here is more or less a technical term for “not recognizing Jesus as Israel’s Messiah”; Paul is well aware that the Jews of whom he speaks have a strong faith in and zeal for the One God, as he himself had had.)43

Paul is not trying to second-guess what God has in mind. He is saying, as strongly as he can, to a church in danger of Marcionism, of rejecting its Jewish heritage: “Don’t boast over the branches,”44 the branches that have been broken off from the original olive tree because of unbelief. God can graft them back again.

He is saying that Jews are always to be part of God’s faithful family and that God can and will bring “some of them” to that faith.46 But the point, as throughout Romans, is the faithfulness of God. God has been loyal to what he had promised. The messianic pattern now etched into history shows that “God has shut up all people in disobedience, so that he may have mercy upon all.”47 If the Roman church can hold on to that, they will be able to live with the true messianic mystery.

The death and resurrection of Jesus is, for Paul, not simply a historical reality that has created a new situation, but a pattern that must be woven into every aspect of church life. For Paul, what matters is the life of praise and worship that now, in the spirit, couples Jesus with God the father himself.

That passage, like Paul’s present speech, goes on at once to indicate that since the One God has unveiled his ultimate covenant purpose in this Messiah—this unexpected, unwanted, and indeed scandalous crucified Jesus—then the nations are to be summoned into a new kind of community. His death has defeated the dark powers that kept the nations captive, so that the stigma of idolatry, uncleanness, and immorality, which formed the wall between Israel and the Gentiles, can be done away. They can now have “forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith” in Jesus.36

Scholars over the last generation have wrestled with the question of whether the focus of Paul’s gospel was either personal forgiveness or the inclusion of the Gentiles. This verse, true to what Paul says in every letter from Galatians right through to Romans, indicates that it is both—and that the two are mutually defining. Since the pagan powers had been defeated, like Pharaoh at the Exodus, all people were free to worship the One God.

Since the defeat of the powers had been accomplished by Jesus’s death, through which sins were forgiven (the sins that kept humans enslaved to the powers in the first place), the barrier to Gentile inclusion in a new “sanctified” people had gone. “Forgiveness of sins” thus entails “Gentile inclus...

Or it might indicate that Luke knew Paul had been released by Nero and had been able to engage in other activity, but that his (Luke’s) own purpose had been served; that is, the gospel of God’s kingdom had now gone from Jerusalem and Judaea to Samaria and thence to the ends of the earth.16 The gospel itself, not Paul, is the real hero of Luke’s story. That, then, would be enough.

There are, of course, traditions that Paul was martyred in Rome; you can still see his chains, so it is claimed, by the tomb where he is supposed to lie, in the church of St. Paul Outside the Walls.

So the options divide, and then divide again. The first and most obvious is that Paul was killed in the persecution of Christians that followed the great fire of Rome in AD 64.

But even then, if Paul were killed in 64, that leaves two more years after the two that Luke mentions. Would that have been enough time for a visit to Spain?

I am inclined now to give more weight than I once did to the testimony of Clement, an early bishop of Rome.

“The farthest limits of the west” would of course mean Spain. Clement could have been simply extrapolating from Romans 15, and it would suit his purpose to give the impression of Paul’s worldwide reach. But he was a central figure in the Roman church within a generation of Paul’s day. He is writing at the most about thirty years after Paul’s death. It is far more likely that he knew more solid and reliable traditions about Paul than we, discounting him, can invent on our own.

So, as with Paul’s putative trip to Spain, I have become more open to the possibility of a return visit to the East after an initial hearing in Rome. The problem might then be that these two, Spain and the East, might seem to cancel one another out.

For Paul there was no question about the starting point. It was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfillment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God—so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism, one would worship and invoke Jesus as Lord within, not alongside, the service of the “living and true God.”

The goal? Yes, because Paul never wavered in his sense that Jesus would reappear. He would “descend from heaven,” though to get the flavor of that we have to remind ourselves that “heaven” is not “up in the sky,” but is rather God’s dimension of present reality. Jesus would come from heaven to earth not—as in much popular fantasy—in order to scoop up his people and take them back to “heaven,” but in order to complete the already inaugurated task of colonizing “earth,” the human sphere, with the life of “heaven,” God’s sphere.

By the time of his later letters he realized that, contrary to his earlier guess, he might himself die before it happened. But that the present corrupt and decaying world would one day be rescued from this state of slavery and death and emerge into new life under the glorious rule of God’s people, God’s new humanity—this he never doubted.

Insofar as there was a view we might label “apocalyptic” in Paul’s day, he shared it. He believed that Israel’s God, having abandoned the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile and never having fulfilled his promise to return in visible and powerful glory, had revealed himself suddenly, shockingly, disruptively, in Jesus, breaking in upon an unready world and an unready people. Paul believed that this had happened not only in the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the gift of the spirit, but in his own case, and perhaps in other cases, in a moment of blinding and life-transforming glory.

The last few generations of students and clergy have often been taught, however, that Paul, and indeed Jesus and his earliest followers, believed two things about all this: first, that this coming great event would involve (in some sense or other) the end of the known world, and, second, that this coming event would take place within a generation. So, because the world did not end after the first Christian generation, it has been common coin, particularly among those who have wanted to distance themselves from early Christian ideas in general and Paul’s in particular, to say, sometimes with kindly and sometimes with patronizing intent, that “They expected the end of the world and they were wrong, so perhaps they were wrong about a lot of other things too.”

What, then, caused the urgent note in Paul’s eschatology? The main point is that the long-awaited event could occur at any time, not that it had to occur within a specific time frame. The event that was to occur within a generation was not the end of the world but, according to Mark 13 and the parallels in Matthew and Luke, the fall of Jerusalem.

But Jerusalem, and the Temple specifically, had always been seen as the place where heaven and earth met; so much so that when Isaiah speaks of “new heavens and new earth,” some commentators will now say, without the need for much elaboration, that this is referring to the ultimate rebuilding of the Temple, the heaven-and-earth building.3

Gentile Jesus-followers would say that God had finally cut off those Jews, leaving “the church” as a non-Jewish body. Christianity would become “a religion,” to be contrasted (favorably, of course) with something called “Judaism.” Conversely, Jewish Jesus-followers would accuse their Gentile colleagues—and particularly the followers of that wretched compromiser Paul—of having precipitated this disaster by imagining that one could worship the true God without getting circumcised and following the whole Torah. And Jews who had rejected the message of Jesus would be in no doubt at all. All this happened because of the false prophet Jesus and his wicked followers, especially Paul, who had led Israel astray.

He was therefore determined to establish and maintain Jew-plus-Gentile communities, worshipping the One God in and through Jesus his son and in the power of the spirit, ahead of the catastrophe.

Paul’s motivation and mindset, then, was shaped centrally and radically by Jesus himself as crucified and risen Messiah and Lord and by the new shape that the Jewish hope had as a result.

Paul had always believed that the One God would at the last put the whole world right. The Psalms had said it; the prophets had predicted it; Jesus had announced that it was happening (though in a way nobody had seen coming). Paul declared that it had happened in Jesus—and that it would happen at his return. In between those two, the accomplishment of the putting-right project first in cross and resurrection and then in the final fulfillment at Jesus’s return, God had given his own spirit in the powerful and life-transforming word of the gospel.

Our problem has been that we have set that powerful gospel reality in the wrong framework. The Western churches have, by and large, put Paul’s message within a medieval notion that rejected the biblical vision of heaven and earth coming together at last. The Middle Ages changed the focus of attention away from “earth” and toward two radically different ideas instead, “heaven” and “hell,” often with a temporary stage (“purgatory”) before “heaven.” Paul’s life-changing and world-transforming gospel was then made to serve this quite different agenda, that is, that believing the gospel was the way to escape all that and “go to heaven.” But that was not Paul’s point.

God has made us what we are. God has created us in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared, ahead of time, as the road we must travel.6 God has made us what we are; or, to bring out a different but equally valid flavor of the Greek, we are God’s poetry, God’s artwork. God has accomplished, and will accomplish, the entire new creation in the Messiah and by the spirit. When someone believes the gospel and discovers its life-transforming power, that person becomes a small but significant working model of that new creation.

The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world. As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image-bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world and to reflect the praises of creation back to God.

Here, then, is the point of Paul’s vision of human rescue and renewal (“salvation,” in traditional language): those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God’s mercy; they are also agents.

That is what Paul’s gospel and ethics are, at their heart, all about. God will put the whole world right at the last. He has accomplished the main work of that in Jesus and his death and resurrection. And, through gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does and agents of further transformation in God’s world. This is the heart of Paul’s famous “doctrine of justification,” which is so important in Galatians, Philippians, and Romans, though remarkably inconspicuous (until we realize how it is integrated with everything else) in the other letters.

But we will miss what Paul’s “justification” is really all about. It isn’t about a moralistic framework in which the only question that matters is whether we humans have behaved ourselves and so amassed a store of merit (“righteousness”) and, if not, where we can find such a store, amassed by someone else on our behalf. It is about the vocational framework in which humans are called to reflect God’s image in the world and about the rescue operation whereby God has, through Jesus, set humans free to do exactly that.

For Paul, as for all devout Jews, the major problem of the world was idolatry. Humans worshipped idols and therefore behaved in ways that were less than fully human, less than fully image-bearing. That was a core Jewish belief, and Paul shared it. What he did not share, as he thought through his tradition in the light of Jesus and the spirit, was the idea that the people of Israel, as they stood, constituted the answer to this problem—as though all one had to do was to become a Jew and try to keep the Torah, and all would be well not only with Israel, but with the world. Paul knew that view, and he firmly rejected it.