Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor.

This, according to Luke’s report of Paul’s speech before Herod Agrippa, is what Jesus had said to him on the road to Damascus: I am going to establish you as a servant, as a witness both of the things you have already seen and of the occasions I will appear to you in the future. I will rescue you from the people, and from the nations to whom I am going to send you so that you can open their eyes to enable them to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of the satan to God—so that they can have forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith in me.

Perhaps, indeed, that is what “holy scripture” really is— not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.

Romans is not written to explain how people may be saved. It describes that, to be sure, vividly and compellingly, but it does so in order to highlight the faithfulness of God and, with that, the challenges facing the covenant people. Those were the themes the Roman church urgently needed to understand.

Romans 8 is the richest, deepest, and most powerfully sustained climax anywhere in the literature of the early Christian movement, and perhaps anywhere else as well.

Paul’s letters wait for us just around the corner, to take our arm and whisper a word of encouragement when we face a new task, to remind us of obligations and warn us of snakes in the grass, to show us from one angle after another what it might mean to live in the newly human way, the newly Jewish way, the way of Jesus, to unveil again and again the faithful, powerful love of the creator