Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

In Paul’s day, “religion” consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another. In the modern Western world, “religion” tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture, politics, and community life. For Paul, “religion” was woven in with all of life; for the modern Western world, it is separated from it. So when, in what is probably his earliest letter, Paul talks about “advancing in Judaism beyond any of his age,”1 the word “Judaism” refers, not to a “religion,” but to an activity: the zealous propagation and defense of the ancestral way of life.

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. (When Paul says, “We are citizens of heaven,” he goes on at once to say that Jesus will come from heaven not to take us back there, but to transform the present world and us with it.)

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul’s perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new “otherworldly” hope.

In the ancient world there was virtually no such thing as private life.

The tradition of “zeal” is part of the freedom story. Young Saul learned that story early on, that it was God’s people against the rest of the world, the nations, the goyim, and the goyim usually won. There were brief flashes of glorious history: David beating the Philistines, Solomon teaching wisdom to the whole world. That’s how it was supposed to be. But clinging to this story meant struggling to retain hope in the face of experience.

Paul’s teacher in Jerusalem would have made sure he was steeped in the ancestral traditions. Gamaliel was one of the greatest rabbis of the period. Under his guidance, Saul would have studied the scriptures themselves, of course, and also the unwritten Torah, the steadily accumulating discussions of finer points that would grow as oral tradition and be codified nearly two hundred years later in the Mishnah.

Gamaliel, at least as portrayed in Acts, advocated the policy of “live and let live.” If people wanted to follow this man Jesus, they could do so.9 If this new movement was from God, it would prosper; if not, it would fall by its own weight. If the Romans wanted to run the world, so be it. Jews would study and practice the Torah by themselves. This, broadly speaking, had been the teaching of Hillel, a leading rabbi of the previous generation.

But all the signs are that Gamaliel’s bright young pupil from Tarsus wasn’t satisfied with this approach. His “zeal” would have placed him in the opposing school, following Hillel’s rival Shammai, who maintained that if God was going to establish his reign on earth as in heaven, then those who were zealous for God and Torah would have to say their prayers, sharpen their swords, and get ready for action. Action against the wicked pagans; yes, when the time was right. Action against renegade or compromising Jews: yes indeed, that too. Remember Phinehas.

In that earlier Jerusalem a young man called Stephen had been stoned to death—illegally, since under Roman rule only the Romans could carry out the death penalty. Saul of Tarsus, a zealous young Torah student, had been there, watching, taking it all in, looking after the coats of the men throwing rocks, who were ceremonially cleansing the city of the poison that Stephen had been uttering. What was that poison? It had to do with the Temple, which meant it had to do with God himself.

History is not just about events, but about motivations. 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.

If I say that Saul of Tarsus was brought up in a world of hope, many readers may misunderstand me. “Hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. The optimist looks at the world and feels good about the way it’s going. Things are looking up! Everything is going to be all right! But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. 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. This God had made the world. This God had called Israel to be his people. The scriptures, not least the Psalms, had made it clear that this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end, to be true to his promises, to vindicate his people at last, even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering.

“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. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have

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. That was the ancient hope, cherished not only by Saul of Tarsus but by thousands of his fellow Jews.

Interim answers were given in various writings. Seers, mystics, and poets wrote of dreams and visions whose subject matter was the rescue of Israel and the final saving revelation of the One God. Often these took the literary form of “dream plus interpretation,” fused together to provide the “revelation” (in Greek apokalypsis) of things normally hidden.

Slowly, gradually, the prophet works his way up from the living creatures and the whirling wheels to the throne itself; then, from the throne to the figure sitting on the throne. Here he hardly dares say what he seems to see: “something that seemed like a human form.”13 The prophet falls on his face as though dead. He is, however, commanded at once to stand up to receive his prophetic vocation, though this in its way is just as frightening as the vision itself. Perhaps such a vocation can only be undertaken by someone who has seen such a sight.

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.

Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled. He had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel’s vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah itself. His lifelong loyalty was utterly right, but utterly misdirected. He had a zeal for God, but had not understood what the One God was up to.

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. It was just that . . . well, what had happened was . . . how could he put it? Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.”

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel’s God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel’s scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

As so often—it becomes a recurring theme in early Christian storytelling—when something has to be done, it will be done through an obedient, but quite likely nervous and worried disciple. So off he goes.

Saul had prayed all his life and was now praying with a new focus and a new perplexity.

Whatever was going on inside him, the outward evidence was clear: something like scales fell from his eyes (another proverbial phrase; had the blinding light caused some sort of a scab?), and he could see. We

He was making the all-time one-off announcement: Israel’s hope has been fulfilled! The King has been enthroned! He was declaring that the crucified Jesus was Israel’s long-awaited Messiah.

strongly reinforces our developing picture of the hotheaded young zealot suddenly stopped in his tracks. He went away, he says, to Arabia.

Knowing Israel’s scriptures as he did, he didn’t need anybody else to explain what it all meant. Start with the scriptural story, place the crucified and risen Jesus at the climax of the story, and the meaning, though unexpected and shocking, is not in doubt. That is the point he is making.

But, as often, the obvious answer is almost certainly wrong.

Phinehas is important for our understanding of Paul, for reasons to which we will return. Elijah is important for Paul not least because he gives us the clue to the journey to “Arabia.”

But one of the only other references to it in the New Testament—indeed, in the same letter, Paul’s letter to the Galatians—gives us a far more specific location: Mt. Sinai, in the peninsula to the south of the Holy Land and to the east of Egypt. Mt. Sinai was where God had come down in fire and had given Moses the Torah; it was the place of revelation, the place of law, the place where the covenant between God and Israel, established earlier with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was solemnly ratified. Sinai, the great mountain in Arabia, was, in that sense, the place of beginnings.

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.”

Saul wanted to be clear that the shocking new thing that had been revealed to him really was the fulfillment, the surprising but ultimately satisfying goal, of the ancient purposes of the One God, purposes that had been set out particularly in the law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

When he speaks of God setting him apart from his mother’s womb, he is deliberately echoing the call of Jeremiah.8 When he speaks of God “unveiling” his son in him, he is using the language of Jewish mystics and seers who spoke of that “unveiling” or “revelation” as constituting a divine commissioning.9 When he says that the Jerusalem church later “glorified God because of me,” he is echoing Isaiah, from one of his all-time favorite chapters, and claiming for himself the prophetic role of the “servant.”10 He continues to echo that chapter in Galatians 2 when he speaks of wondering whether he “might be running, or might have run, to no good effect.”

This, then, is why he went to Arabia: to hand in his former commission and to acquire a new one. His loyalty to the One God of Israel was as firm as it had always been.

Faced with a silent decade at a formative period of someone’s life, a novelist might have a field day; we must be more restrained. But if we send cautious historical and biographical probes into this blank period from either end, we may find at least three themes that need to be explored.

First, and most straightforwardly, we must assume that Saul set to and earned his own living in the family business.

Jewish teachers did not expect to make a living from their teaching; Saul,

His craft was hard physical labor, and his subsequent apostolic letters show that the apostle took a pride in supporting himself by manual work. Saul, by now perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, would be living and working alongside his family and in close contact with the rich mixture of people who passed through the great city of Tarsus.

We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the gospel were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop. Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus. His heart was still zealous, loyal to the One God.

“You shouldn’t be asking this kind of question and trying to rank me with other people and their ‘experiences.’ If you do, I will only say that yes, these things have happened, but that the real point was that I had to learn humility, to understand that ‘when I’m weak, then I am strong.’”13

This is the only window we have on the silent years at Tarsus, and Paul seems to have been determined that they would remain more or less silent. “Yes, something happened, but that’s not the point.” But here too we can see his mind at work: praying, puzzling things out, pondering.

This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day.

We glimpse, then, Saul at the workbench; Saul praying and thinking; and, third, Saul listening to the ideas all around him, in the philosophical and political as well as religious cultures of cosmopolitan Tarsus. He would be taking it all in, not simply as further evidence of pagan folly (though there would be plenty of that), but as signs that the One God, the creator of all, was at work in the world and in human lives, even if those lives and that wider world were twisted and flawed through the worship of other gods.

The default mode in Tarsus, and many other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world, would have been some kind of Stoicism, with its all-embracing vision of a united and divine world order in which humans partake through their inner rationality, or logos.

For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss. (If that sounds like much modern Western Christianity, that is our problem. It certainly wasn’t what Paul believed.)

Saul of Tarsus, thinking as a Jew while taking on board the theories of the wider world, would reflect on the similarity and dissimilarity between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of Israel.

When he writes, later, that he has learned to “take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah,”18 it seems highly likely that this was a conviction to which he had come in the silent decade in Tarsus. So too when he tells the church in Philippi to consider carefully “whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy,”19 he is recognizing that human society, even in the radically flawed non-Jewish world, could and did aspire to live wisely and well. All this is part of Saul’s monotheism, renewed and deepened by his belief in Jesus. Saul knew that the world needed redeeming. He also knew that it remained God’s world.

Saul then, I propose, spent the silent years in Tarsus laboring, studying, and praying, putting together in his mind a larger picture of the One God and his truth that would take on the world and outflank it.

Among other strong points that emerge again and again in his mature writing and that must have been hammered out on the anvil of these constant arguments, we find Paul’s vision of what Jesus had achieved in his death and resurrection. Every time he refers to these earth-shattering events in his later writings, he draws out different drafts from that deep well of earlier reflection.

And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil. The resurrection proved it. If he had overcome death, it could only be because he had overcome the forces that lead to death, the corrosive power of idolatry and human wickedness.

Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil.

Here, I believe, we have the root of the ongoing grief in the heart of the mature Paul as he looks at “his flesh-and-blood relatives.”20 The people over whom he is agonizing (with “great sorrow and endless pain in my heart”) are not a generalized mass of “unbelieving Jews.”