Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

How did he come to be a world changer? He was, we may suppose, a surprising candidate for such a role. He was a teacher of Jewish traditions, perhaps; a reformer, quite possibly. But not the kind of activist who establishes in city after city little cells of unlikely people, many of them non-Jewish, and fires them with a joyful hope that binds them together. Not the kind of philosopher who teaches people not just new thoughts, but a whole new way of thinking. Not the kind of spiritual master who rethinks prayer itself from the ground up. How did it happen? And, beyond the initial impact, why was Paul’s movement so successful? Why did these little communities founded by a wandering Jew turn into what became “the church”?

I believe that in our diligent searching of the scriptures we were looking for correct biblical answers to medieval questions.

For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.

He had a zeal for God, but had not understood what the One God was up to.

A glance at Jewish history in this period will reveal that if someone were to claim that the

Messiah had arrived, this would not be merely what we would call a “religious” claim. It would mean that the One God was acting at last to fulfill his ancient promises, and the mode of that action would be to set up a new regime, a new authoritative rule.

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. They had to turn around, away from the enslaving idols, to worship and serve the living God.

Once again we must avoid oversimplifications, especially any suggestion (this has been common) that the Galatian Jesus-followers,

having been taught good Reformed theology, were now embracing Arminianism or Pelagianism and trying to add to their God-given salvation by doing some “good works” of their own. We should also, of course, avoid the equal and opposite suggestion, that Paul was simply trying to manipulate communities, putting forth a “sociological” agenda and using “theological” arguments as a smokescreen for his real purposes. Neither of these proposals will do. 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.

The challenge facing Paul and the others was how to live as an extended family without ties of kinship or ancestral symbols, without the geographical focus of Jerusalem and the Temple, and without a central authority like that of Caesar.

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.

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

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. Slaves were, of course, often exploited, abused, treated like trash, but they could also become respected, cherished, and valued members of a family.

That discipline, of reading straight through and then studying section by section, all bathed in the praying and worshipping life of the community, remains essential to this day.

Romans 5–8 (and indeed Romans 1–8) have often been allowed to stand by themselves as though they constituted “the gospel” and the rest of the letter was a mere succession of appendixes or “practical applications.” It is true that one can take these first two sections, perhaps especially 5–8, and let them have their own impact. Perhaps it is even good to do that from time to time to be sure that their full flavor has been realized. But if we are to understand Paul at this moment in his career, at an exciting but fateful transition, we are bound to conclude that, though these two opening sections have their own integrity, they are in fact designed as the foundations for a building of a very different sort.

Telos gar nomou Christos, “The Messiah is the goal of the law,”36 so that covenant membership may be available for all who believe.

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.” The irony of this position is that the idea of the “end of the world” is neither biblical nor Jewish nor early Christian. It comes from the secular world of nineteenth-century Europe fueled by dreams of revolutions past and still to come. When, toward the end of that century, some writers began to take seriously the Jewish contexts of the kingdom language of Jesus and his first followers, they were attuned not to the way such language worked in the first-century Jewish world, but to the way such language worked within current European ideologies. They projected that back onto Jesus, Paul, and the rest. It made a good story at the time, particularly when Europe then plunged into a horrendous, “apocalyptic” century with wars, rumors of wars, and worse. But this didn’t help with the essentially historical question of what motivated Paul.

Thus, for Paul one might say: Galatians, for the young reformer eager to defend the gospel and attack the heretics; 2 Corinthians, for the adult sadly aware that things are more complicated and disturbing than he had thought; Romans at last, to remind us, despite everything, that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord.”17

The man who could write Philemon and Romans side by side was a man for all moments.

The problem in Ephesus was not that people had stopped worshipping Artemis and so were ready for Paul’s message, but that Paul’s message about the One God had burst on the scene and stopped the worship of Artemis. Social and cultural conditions can help to explain the way things worked out, but they cannot explain it away.

Not for nothing does he repeatedly emphasize the unity and the holiness of the church. Nor is it irrelevant that he highlights, and even apparently celebrates, the suffering that he and others would and did endure because of their loyalty to Jesus.

But what Paul had been doing was undoubtedly “political” in the sense that he was founding and maintaining an interrelated network of communities for which the only analogies, as we saw earlier, were the synagogue communities, on the one hand, and the Roman army and civil service, on the other.

There may, in other words, have been a different kind of vacuum into which the Jesus message made its way. It was not so much a matter of people giving up an old “religion” and then finding a new one. Nor was it explicable as dissatisfaction with existing philosophies and the discovery of the new one that Paul was teaching. Rather, people who were used to one kind of political reality, albeit with its own history and variations, were glimpsing a vision of a larger united though diverse world—and then, as they looked around them, they were discovering at the same time that Rome, after all, could not really

deliver on its promises.

When the new communities spoke of a different Kyrios, one whose sovereignty was gained through humility and suffering rather than wealth and conquest, many must have found that attractive, not simply for what we would call “religious” reasons, but precisely for what they might call “political” ones. This l...

In particular, those who have studied the life of the church in the second, third, and fourth centuries have emphasized that, again against the expectations of our own day, the Christian message provided a much better prospect for women than the pagan world could. For a start, there would be more of them. Pagans routinely practiced infanticide for unwanted children in general and girls in particular, but the Christians followed the Jews in renouncing such behavior.