Paul: A Very Brief History

by John M.G. Barclay

If his persecution of the Church, which he had thought 100 per cent right, was in fact 100 per cent wrong, and if God revealed Christ and called Paul despite such a fundamental sin, it was clear that God’s grace was not given on the basis of human worth. That was an unnerving discovery, since it was normally (and understandably) imagined that God’s best gifts were differentially distributed according to the worth of the recipients. But if God’s favour was given without respect for worth, it was not limited, Paul came to see, by any ethnic criteria.

What is more, throughout this history, past, present and future, Paul traced a pattern in God’s dealings with humanity that was Christ-shaped in its emphasis on God’s unconditioned grace. It was common in Judaism to celebrate the grace or mercy of God, but it was not so common to figure this mercy as given without regard to worth, since it would appear arbitrary or unfair for God to distribute the greatest benefits without some reference to the fittingness of their recipients.

Paul’s own experience and the experience of his Gentile converts was that God paid no regard to human systems of social, moral or ethnic worth, and this alarmingly unexpected behaviour by God, demonstrated in Christ, shaped all Paul’s convictions about history.

Paul seems radical in certain respects, but not ‘progressive’ in modern terms.