Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Paul’s letters, in a standard modern translation, occupy fewer than eighty pages. Even taken as a whole, they are shorter than almost any single one of Plato’s dialogues or Aristotle’s treatises. It is a safe bet to say that these letters, page for page, have generated more comment, more sermons and seminars, more monographs and dissertations than any other writings from the ancient world.

Everything possible had to be done to stamp out a movement that would impede the true purposes of the One God of Israel, whose divine plans Saul and his friends believed were at last on the verge of a glorious fulfillment—until, on the Damascus Road, Saul came to believe that these plans had indeed been gloriously fulfilled, but in a way he had never imagined.

They were speaking as if, by comparison with this Jesus, the ancient institutions of Israel were on a lower footing. The Temple itself, Stephen was saying, was only a temporary expedient.

This was the kind of action the Torah required. This was what “zeal” was supposed to look like.

Motivations, no doubt, float like icebergs, with much more out of sight than above the waterline. But there is often a good deal visible above the water, often including a strong implicit narrative. We can study that.

We must look carefully to see what emerges, not only about the event itself, whatever it was, but about the way in which the “zeal” of the eager young Torah student emerged in a different form as “zeal” for what he called the “good news,” the euangelion, the gospel, the message about Jesus—the fulfillment, shocking though it seemed, of the ancestral hope.

Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God.

Young Saul, as we saw, would easily have made the connection between Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden and Israel being exiled from the promised land.

And, since the exile was the result of Israel’s idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.

When the One God finally puts away the idolatry and wickedness that caused his people to be exiled in the first place, then his people will be free at last, Passover people with a difference.

Temples were built to hold together the divine realm (“heaven”) and the human realm (“earth”). Jerusalem’s Temple, like the wilderness Tabernacle before it, was designed as a small working model of the entire cosmos. This was where the One God of creation would live, dwelling in the midst of his people.

The more I have pondered what happened to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, holding together (as a historian must) the somewhat formalized accounts in the book of Acts and the brief, cryptic references in Paul’s own letters, the more I have wondered whether Saul had been practicing this kind of meditation. It was the kind of thing one might well do during the long, hot hours on the journey from Jerusalem to Damascus. In Caravaggio’s famous painting, Saul is riding a horse; historically, a donkey seems a good deal more likely. This would also produce an oblique echo of the story that began with Balaam on his donkey and ended up with Phinehas’s moment of zeal. As we reflect on what Paul the Apostle came to say about the incident much later, it would make perfect sense to suppose that he had been meditating upon Ezekiel’s vision and seeking, if he could, to glimpse for himself what the prophet had seen. (I assume he was well under the prescribed age of forty. But I also assume that the attempted prohibition was a later restriction, designed precisely to protect young hotheads from danger.) Perhaps Saul was praying the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one,” praying it as a mantra, repeating it to the rhythm of his breathing, to the steady movement of the beast beneath him. Pray and watch. Watch and pray. Stay loyal to Israel’s God. Stand up for his kingdom. Pray and watch. Start with the living creatures and the whirling wheels, and perhaps ascend fr...

This moment shattered Saul’s wildest dreams and, at the same split second, fulfilled them.

Heaven and earth came together in this figure, and he was commanding Saul to acknowledge this fact and to reorient his entire life accordingly.

So when Christian tradition speaks of the “conversion” of Saul, we need to pause. In our world, as we saw earlier, we normally apply that term to someone who “converts” from one “religion” to another. That was not the point. Not for one second did Saul cease to believe in the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Paul remained to his dying day fiercely loyal to Israel’s God, seen in fresh and blinding focus in Jesus. Neither Paul nor his communities were engaged in “comparative religion.” They were not saying, “We’ve tried one way of being religious, and now we think we have a better one.”

The story in Acts doesn’t say that Saul spoke in tongues or prophesied. The idea that things like that had to happen for the spirit’s gift to be genuine is a much later fiction. What Acts offers instead is the remarkable statement that Saul went at once to the synagogue in Damascus and announced that Jesus was the son of God

Already those with ears to hear may catch echoes of Paul in Galatians. He has been “exceedingly zealous for the ancestral traditions,” leading him to use violence in trying to stamp out heresy. Paul says that he “went away to Arabia”—just as Elijah did—and “afterward returned to Damascus”—again just like Elijah. So what is this all about? Why did Saul go to Arabia? The parallel with Elijah—the verbal echoes are so close, and the reflection on “zeal” so exact, that Paul must have intended them—indicates that he, like Elijah, made a pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai in order to go back to the place where the covenant was ratified. He wanted to go and present himself before the One God, to explain that he had been “exceedingly zealous,” but that his vision, his entire worldview, had been turned on its head. And he received his instructions: “Go back and announce the new king.”

The picture in Acts, it turns out, is oversimplified. (The longest histories ever written leave out far more than they put in, and Luke wants his book to fit onto a single scroll.)

Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion.

With a population of around a quarter of a million, it was widely regarded in antiquity as the third or fourth city of the East, after Alexandria and Seleucia and later Constantinople.

in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact.

He had a strong sense that Saul was the man for the job.

At his conversion God had told Saul this was his job

Just as Antioch was the first place where we see a genuine effort at a new kind of transethnic community life, so in this action Antioch was the first place to demonstrate that the followers of Jesus thought of themselves as a translocal community with mutual responsibilities.

The date was probably AD 46 or 47. Despite other traditional ways of putting the historical jigsaw together, I assume that this is the same visit that Saul, writing later as Paul, describes in Galatians 2:1–10. It makes sense. He went to Jerusalem, he says, “by revelation,” presumably referring to the prophetic warning of Agabus.

The three central Jerusalem leaders, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, and John, were content. Their view carried weight; they were known as the “pillars.” For us, that might be a dead metaphor. For them, in Jerusalem with the Temple still standing, it was making a polemical claim. The early Jesus-followers, it seems, already understood themselves as an alternative Temple with these three as its “pillars”: a new heaven-and-earth society, living and worshipping right alongside the old Temple, making the latter redundant.

What mattered was the ultimate restoration of the whole of creation, with God’s people being raised from the dead to take their place in the running of this new world. Whatever happened to people immediately after death was, by comparison, unimportant, a mere interim.

As I think of Paul launching this new venture, the image of the tightrope over the volcano doesn’t seem to go far enough. He was inventing, and must have known that he was inventing, a new way of being human. It must have been a bit like the first person to realize that notes sounded in sequence created melody, that notes sounded together created harmony, and that ordering the sequence created rhythm. If we can think of a world without music and then imagine it being invented, offering a hitherto undreamed-of depth and power to space, time, and matter, then we may have a sense of the crazy magnitude of Paul’s vocation.

Why, wonder readers, the “teaching,” not the “power”?

The reason Pisidian Antioch was thought of as “New Rome” had to do with its recent colonial history. The civil wars that had scarred the Roman world after the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC had left tens of thousands of military veterans in Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere. Many of them would in any case have been from countries other than Italy in the first place, but all of them, having signed on for active service, would expect to be rewarded. The last thing Rome wanted was such people coming to Italy, let alone to Rome itself; Rome’s population was already swollen, causing unemployment and a regular threat of food shortages. Augustus therefore founded colonies for these ex–service personnel well away from Italy. Pisidian Antioch was the most important such colony in the region, retaining its name (Antioch) from its earlier foundation, though now officially renamed Colonia Caesarea (“Caesar’s Colony,” a telling name in itself) when the province of Galatia, of which it formed the most substantial southern city, was founded in 25 BC.

If you traveled east from Antioch and followed the main road (the Via Sebaste) across the mountains southeast from Antioch, you would be heading ultimately for Syria via Paul’s home city of Tarsus. The first territory you would enter would be Lycaonia, and the first city you would meet there is Iconium, followed closely by Lystra, and then, a little farther, by Derbe.

I think it far more likely that the poor physical condition to which Paul refers is the result of the violence to which he had been subjected.

They remind them, with Paul’s battered body as the obvious evidence, that the ultimate “kingdom of God,” the sovereign rule of the One God on earth as in heaven, will come about “through considerable suffering.”

At the heart of Paul’s message, teaching, and life was—to use a technical phrase—radical messianic eschatology. Eschatology: God’s long-awaited new day has arrived. Messianic: Jesus is the true son of David, announced as such in his resurrection, bringing to completion the purposes announced to Abraham and extended in the Psalms to embrace the world. Radical: nothing in Paul’s or Barnabas’s background had prepared them for this new state of affairs.

But anyone living in Jerusalem in the middle years of the first century was bound to face the challenge posed by the question: When is the One God going to do at last what he has promised and liberate his ancient people once and for all from the shame and scandal of Roman rule? And since Rome was widely seen as the ultimate form of monstrous pagan rule over the people of God, how and when was the One God going to overthrow the monsters and set up, on earth, his own unshakable kingdom?

The early Jerusalem church seems to have lived in some ways like other groups who believed that God was ushering in “the last days”—whatever they may have meant by that. In the excitement of the early stages, they had shared their property communally; this eager social experiment may well have contributed to their later poverty. They lived a life of prayer, fasting, community, and care for the poor and widows.

According to Acts, it was Peter himself who first broke the taboo and went to preach to and to share table fellowship with non-Jews; he received strong divine validation for this radical move and persuaded his suspicious colleagues in Jerusalem that this had been the right thing to do.

It remained easy, then, for most of the Jerusalem-based Jesus-followers to see their movement as a Jesus-focused variation on the Jewish loyalist agenda.

Obviously, we think, he was interested in a person’s inner reality, over against those fussy legalists who thought you had to obey a string of ritual instructions! He believed, we say, in a message of love rather than law, of inward feeling rather than outward conformity, of faith in the heart rather than rule-book religion or liturgical performance. In particular, we suppose, Paul believed that God didn’t require a perfect moral obedience from people, because God in any case always preferred right feelings (including “faith”) to right actions (which might make you proud). And so we could go on.

The first occurrence is easy to understand. Peter came to Antioch, perhaps in early 48.

Circumcision was nonnegotiable because the purity of God’s people was essential. If God was indeed bringing in his kingdom, rescuing Israel and the world from the powers of darkness to which the pagan nations had given their allegiance, then of course a clean break was vital. If pagans were allowed into the covenant people, the people who would inherit God’s new creation, they would have to exhibit covenant loyalty too. And that meant circumcision.

Once you create a circle within a circle, you are sending a message to those in the outer ring that they should move into the inner one.

If Peter or anyone else starts by pulling down the wall between Jew and Gentile (as Peter had indeed done: “You’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a Gentile”) and then decides to rebuild it, all he is doing is pointing the finger back at himself. He is admitting that he was wrong to “live like a Gentile,” and he is invoking the law, which will simply remind him that he is in any case a lawbreaker.

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. That is one of the most extraordinary statements ever written by a Jew of the first or perhaps any century.

The law itself had envisaged a moment when it would be upstaged by a new reality, the messianic reality.

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.

“Who are these people,” they would ask, “who have suddenly stopped worshipping the gods? Are they Jews or are they not? We need to know!

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.

Every Jew knew the story: slavery in Egypt; divine victory over Pharaoh; Israel (as “God’s firstborn son”) redeemed and brought through the Red Sea; the gift of the Torah on Sinai; the glorious divine presence coming to dwell in the Tabernacle; Abraham’s children heading home to the “inheritance” of the promised land. Paul retells that story in Galatians 4:1–7 with Jesus and the spirit at the heart of it. The whole world is enslaved; God sent his son to redeem and his spirit to indwell; Abraham’s children are assured of their “inheritance.”

the sense of God’s intimate presence and love.