Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

He was writing at a time when remaining unmarried—particularly for women—was next to scandalous. Who could tell what an unattached person might get into? The dominant cultural assumption was that an unmarried adult, particularly a woman, was a social and moral disaster waiting to happen. But Paul, as we shall see, was challenging the dominant culture with the news of new creation, a new creation with different values.

On the one hand, he insists (against any form of dualism that would regard the human body and its pleasures as shameful) that married sexual relations were a good gift from the Creator, to be celebrated. On the other hand, he insists that singleness, celibacy, was also a gift that pointed beyond the present world (with its need to propagate

He had plenty of female friends and colleagues later on, as we can see from the greetings in his letters, especially Romans. He seems to have treated them as equals in the work of the gospel, just as he insisted in a famous passage that gender distinctions were irrelevant when it came to membership in the Messiah’s family.25 But he had decided that, for him, marriage was now out of the question, not because he was a super spiritual man who had risen above that kind of shabby second-rate lifestyle (as some later Christians would try to pretend) or because he did not possess normal human desires, but because it was incompatible with his particular vocation.

He did not imagine that women and men were identical in all respects.

But he saw women as fellow members on an equal footing within the people of God, and also, it seems, within the public ministry of that people. He could be friends with women and work alongside them without patronizing them, trying to seduce them, or exploiting them.

No, the problem was severely practical. The gods mattered for the life and health of the community. If bad things happened, the obvious reason was that the gods were angry, probably because people hadn’t been taking them seriously and offering the required worship. People who didn’t believe in the gods were therefore placing the city, the whole culture, or the whole world at risk. The

pistis, regularly translated “faith,” but often carrying the overtones of “faithfulness,” “reliability,” and, yes, “loyalty.” The word pistis could mean “faith” in the sense of “belief”—what was believed as well as the fact of believing, or indeed the act of believing, which already seems quite enough meaning for one small word. But pistis could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief, in this case that Jesus was now “Lord,” the world’s rightful sovereign. Hence the term means “loyalty” or “allegiance.” This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.

For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not. That

Paul, the greatest theoretician of the new movement, was never merely a theoretician. Pretty much every idea he later articulated had been road-tested in the narrow, crowded streets of Antioch. Luke claims that it was in Antioch, in this period, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christianoi, “Messiah people.”2 That claim has been challenged by those who rightly point out that our word “Christian” implies an organized movement separate from the Jewish world and that there is no evidence of such a thing for at least a generation or

Fraternizing with pagans is what landed our ancestors in trouble! If the One God who has raised Jesus is going to fulfill his promises and establish his kingdom on earth as in heaven, setting us free from all enemies and earthly ills, he certainly won’t be doing so if we compromise on purity!

The early Christians did not focus much attention on the question of what happened to people immediately after they died. If that question came up, their answer might be that they would be “with the Messiah”1 or, as in Jesus’s remark to the dying brigand, that they might be “with him in paradise.” 2 But they seldom spoke about it at all. They were much more concerned with the “kingdom of God,” which was something that was happening and would ultimately happen completely, “on earth as in heaven.”

Paul’s “missionary” journeys were not simply aimed at telling people about Jesus in order to generate inner personal transformation and a new sense of ultimate hope, though both of these mattered vitally as well. They were aimed at the establishment of a new kind of kingdom on earth as in heaven. A kingdom with Jesus as king. The kingdom—Paul was quite emphatic about this—that Israel’s God had always intended to set up. Humanly speaking, this was of course a fragile project.

Like most Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus had long believed that the nations of the world had been enslaved by their own idols. They worshipped nongods, and in Jewish thought, rooted in the scriptures, those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization.

The ancient pagan gods might decide, for whatever reason, either to punish someone or not, as the case might be; but when a god decided not to punish someone, it wasn’t thought of as forgiveness as such. That would imply, apart from anything else, a far more intimate relationship between gods and mortals than was normally imagined.

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.

This then became the focal point of what we said before: people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out.

To pull back from all of that and to worship “the living God” instead was far more than the equivalent of, say, in the modern West giving up gambling and beginning to attend church once a week. It would mean different actions and patterns of life every hour of every day. Perhaps the only way we can imagine such a thing in today’s secular world is to think what it would be like to give up all our usual machines and conveniences: car, cell phone, cooking equipment, central heating, or air-conditioning. You would have to do everything differently, only much more so. The gods were everywhere and involved in everything. In the ancient world, whether you were at home, on the street, or in the public square; attending festivals great and small; or at moments of crisis or joy (weddings, funerals, setting off on a journey)—the gods would be there to be acknowledged, appealed to, pleased, or placated. Once the message of Jesus took hold, all that would have to go. The neighbors would notice. Atheists were socially undesirable.

It begins to look as though Paul’s geographical strategy had a quiet but definite political undertone.

Strong language like that is easy to utter, picking up traditions of invective and hurling them at an opponent. But these words are backed up with action in the form of a curse of temporary blindness. Suddenly the magician finds himself groping around in darkness—the story has an obvious flavor of just retribution, the spellbinder being himself spellbound—and the governor, confronted with a new kind of power, believes what the travelers have been saying.

He emerges not only as the new spokesman, but with a new name. Luke changes gear effortlessly: “Saul, also named Paul.”6 From now on this is how he will be referred to and, in Acts and the letters, how he will refer to himself. Why the change? “Saul” is obviously a royal name, that of the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin. Saul of Tarsus, conscious of descent from the same tribe, seems to have reflected on the significance of the name, quoting at one point a passage about God’s choice

They land at the port of Perga, whereupon John Mark leaves them and returns to Jerusalem. This leaves Paul with a lasting sense of betrayal and suspicion: later on, when Barnabas tries to launch another trip and wants to give Mark a second chance, Paul refuses point-blank to take someone so obviously unreliable. The episode raises other questions too. What precisely did an assistant have to do on such a trip? Look after travel arrangements, accommodations, money? Slip out unnoticed to shop for supplies? Carry extra luggage containing scriptural scrolls? In any case, Paul does not forget, and this will be part of the later rift with Barnabas.

Pisidian Antioch was the home of a good many first-century senators and other high-ranking Romans, including the Sergius Paulus whom Paul and Barnabas had met in Paphos. As is the way with colonies, the city did its best to imitate Rome in its architecture as well as its style of government, its public holidays, and its entire ethos.

Rome was not noted for subtle political statements. The entire city of Antioch made the very obvious point about who was in charge and about the “religious” implications of the new imperial reality. Caesar and Rome were the central focus of worship, a worship that would bind together the city and the region and give it security by linking it so obviously to its ultimate patron.

He wasn’t giving them a new kind of moral exhortation. He certainly wasn’t offering a new “religion” as such. He was not telling them (to forestall the obvious misunderstanding about which I have spoken already) “how to go to heaven.” He was announcing the fulfillment of the long-range divine plan. The Mosaic covenant could only take them so far. The story that began with Abraham and pointed ahead to the coming Davidic king would, so to speak, break through the Moses barrier and arrive at a new world order entirely. No Jew who had been brought up on the Psalms (not least Psalm 2, which Paul quotes here and which other Jews of his day had studied intensively) could miss the point. If the new David had arrived, he would upstage everything and everyone else—including the New Rome and its great emperor over the sea. This was both exciting and dangerous.

If, according to Paul, this new world of forgiveness had opened up to embrace all alike, non-Jew as well as Jew, what would become of the settled but still fragile place of the Jewish communities in the Roman world? Everything was going to change.

The visit to New Rome thus ends with the start of Paul’s new life: that of a suffering apostle, a visible symbol of the crucified Lord he was proclaiming. Opposition turned to violence sufficient to cause Paul and Barnabas to leave town in a hurry, symbolically shaking the dust off their feet as they did so.11

modern word “miracle” in this connection. People often think of “miracles” as the “invasion” of the natural order by a force from outside. That wasn’t how the early Christians saw it. For them, dramatic and otherwise inexplicable healings were seen as evidence of new creation, of the Creator himself at work in a fresh way. This

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. In the ancient world, just as today, the physical appearance of public figures carries considerable weight in how they are assessed.

Someone turning up in a city shortly after being stoned or beaten up would hardly cut an imposing figure. The Galatians, however, had welcomed Paul as if he were an angel from heaven or even the Messiah himself.

As Paul would later explain, the bodily marks of identification that mattered to him were not the signs of circumcision, but “the marks of Jesus”—in other words,...

Paul, steeped in the Torah from boyhood, would never forget the threat posed by Balaam when he sent in the Moabite women to tempt the Israelite men to commit idolatry, the moment when Phinehas burned with the “zeal,” the moment when Elijah faced the Baal worshippers.

He reacts to finding himself in the middle of a pagan celebration like a man in a pit of snakes. This is not a good place for him to be. Nor was

“turning from idols to serve a living and true God,” Paul insists not only on that challenge but on the underlying narrative: that for a long time this God has allowed the nations to go their own way, but now something new has burst onto the scene.

Any “power” that they have comes not from their own quasi-divinity, but from the fact that humans, worshipping them, have given to the malevolent forces that use their name as a cloak the authority that God always intended humans themselves to exercise. That is why, as we have seen, if these “powers” are overthrown and if the long-awaited new creation has begun under the rule of the Davidic king, then the nations of the world are to be invited to join the people who worship the One God, just as the Jewish people themselves are invited to welcome their Messiah and to discover, as Paul insisted in Antioch, that the puzzling ending to Moses’s own words to Israel in Deuteronomy 27–32 has been dealt with.

One person’s miracle is another person’s magic, and someone performing powerful deeds without proper sanction may be a dangerous deceiver. Jesus himself had been accused of being in league with the devil. Deuteronomy had warned Israel about that kind of thing, and a puzzled pagan crowd would be ready for a similar explanation.

Suffering, it appears, is not simply something through which the faithful people must pass to get to their destination. It is in itself the way in which the dark powers that have ruled the world will exhaust themselves, the way in which the one-off victory won by the Messiah on the cross will be implemented in the world.

There is no suggestion that up to that point he had supposed that in order to get to “heaven,” one had to please Israel’s God by performing good moral works, and that he was now offering an easier way (“You just have to believe!”). Both of these suggestions—widely popular in Western thought over the last few centuries—are simply anachronistic. This is not how Jews or pagans of the time were thinking, and it certainly isn’t how Paul’s mind worked. For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences.