Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

The word pneuma had to make its way in a world where it had different shades of philosophical and religious meaning without the help of visible markings. This itself makes an important point about Paul, who told and lived a Jesus-shaped Jewish message in a confused and contested world.

explosive charge

what it meant to be genuinely human,

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.

the kind of activist who establishes in city after city little cells of unlikely people, many of them non-Jewish, and fires them with a joyful hope that binds them together.

early Jesus movement.

But once you say you’re looking for original meanings, you will always find surprises. History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves. And ancient history in particular introduces us to some ways of thinking very different from those of the sixteenth or the twentieth century. I

These were not, it turns out, the questions asked by the first Christians.

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,”

Tom Wight speaks consistenty of Paul's theology being about an invitation to participate in the renewal if humanity as part of God's transformation of the Cosmos.

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.

Paul saw Jesus as the one to renew God's Creation.

Paul believed that in Jesus the One God had acted “when the fullness of time arrived.”5 Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

Paul had an eschatological vision of a renewed humanity within the divine cosmic economia; a plan intended but hiddenn from the beginning of time. God, the God of Israel, is at work in our little shoddy world.

The Jewish world in which the young Saul grew up was itself firmly earthed in the soil of wider Greco-Roman culture.

Understanding the context for Paul's world is key for our answers to many of our questions about Paul. Whatn made him the person nhe was? What shaped his beliefs? What made him change? This is also a context nwhich Tom Wright nalso explores.

But the Jews were relentless. They wouldn’t go along with it. They could and would worship and pray to only one God, the God of their ancestors, whom they believed was the only “god” worthy of the name.

Faithful then s now. They are the keepers of the memory.

The rabbis of the third and fourth centuries ad looked back to the Pharisees as their spiritual ancestors and so tended to project onto them their own questions and ways of seeing things.

This interesting. Our knowledge of what the Pharisees were about was shaped by the Judaism nof the third and fourth centuries.

Strict adherence to ancestral tradition did not mean living a sheltered life, unaware of how the rest of the world worked, spoke, behaved, and reasoned.

He read biblical Hebrew fluently. He spoke the Aramaic of the Middle East (the mother tongue of Jesus and quite possibly Saul’s mother tongue as well) in addition to the ubiquitous Greek, which he spoke and wrote at great speed. He probably had at least some Latin.

It is important for us to realise just how intelle ctually gifted Paul of Tarsus was. A cosmopolitan of his day he clung to the traditions of his ancestors.

He gives every impression of having swallowed the Bible whole.

But if someone in the tentmaker’s shop were to start expounding Cicero’s ideas, Saul would know what the conversation was about.

A man of his time withb an agile brain.

The “good news” of the Messiah opens up for him the vision of a whole new creation in which everything “true, attractive, and pleasing”7 will find a home.

This vision which I discovered in my youth in Romans is cosmic and open to the world. Paul has that kind of intelligence that sythesises and inspires one to seek further.

The story was the story of Israel as a whole, Israel as the children of Abraham, Israel as God’s chosen people, chosen from the world but equally chosen for the world; Israel as the light to the Gentiles, the people through whom all nations would be blessed; Israel as the Passover people, the rescued-from-slavery people, the people with whom the One God had entered into covenant, a marriage bond in which separation might occur but could only ever be temporary.

This is Paul's grand narrative.

A covenantal separation had therefore taken place. Prophet after prophet said so. The One God had abandoned the Jerusalem Temple to its fate at the hands of foreigners.

This sense of tragedy is probably what inspires Paul. The Covenant has been betrayed. But the God of Israel still reigns as a merciful God who has in Jesus reshped and recast the Cosmos .

Daniel 9, picking up from Deuteronomy’s promise of restoration, announces precisely that idea of an extended exile: the “seventy years” that Jeremiah said Israel would stay in exile have been stretched out to seventy times seven, almost half a millennium of waiting until the One God would restore his people at last, by finally dealing with the “sins” that had caused the exile in the first place. The scheme of “seventy sevens” resonated with the scriptural promises of the jubilee—this would be the time when the ultimate debts would be forgiven.10 Devout Jews in the first century labored to work out when the 490 years would be up, often linking their interpretations of Daniel to the relevant passages in Deuteronomy. This was the long hope of Israel, the forward-looking narrative cherished by many who, like Saul of Tarsus, were soaked in the scriptures and eager for the long-delayed divine deliverance. And many of them believed that the time was drawing near.

This section presents elements of the book of Daniel as the frame for the existential questions that troubled devout Jews of Paul's time.

The Temple was like a cultural and theological magnet, drawing together not only heaven and earth, but the great scriptural stories and promises.

This is a fantastic quotatin from Wright that underscores centrality of the Torah for devout Jews.

ultimate divine return

But this rather obvious piece of propaganda for the aristocratic high-priesthood of the time cut little ice after the various crises that then followed. No, the point was that it hadn’t happened yet. The God of Israel had said he would return, but had not yet done so.

Today, “religion” for most Westerners designates a detached area of life, a kind of private hobby for those who like that sort of thing, separated by definition (and in some countries by law) from politics and public life, from science and technology. In Paul’s day, “religion” meant almost exactly the opposite. The Latin word religio has to do with “binding” things together. Worship, prayer, sacrifice, and other public rituals were designed to hold the unseen inhabitants of a city (the gods and perhaps the ancestors) together with the visible ones, the living humans, thus providing a vital framework for ordinary life, for business, marriage, travel, and home life. (A distinction was made between religio, official and authorized observance, and superstitio, unauthorized and perhaps subversive practice.)

Any who prayed or sang the Psalms regularly would find themselves thinking this, hoping this, praying this, day after day, month after month.

“we perushim, we Pharisees”

Young Saul knows precisely what this means.

I find it very inspiring that God's revelatory encounter wth us in the circumstance of history included the young precocious Jewish boy in Tarsus, a youngster zealous for God's word and worship.

The resonances between Abraham and Phinehas are obvious to anyone who knows the texts well, but this isn’t just a matter of our saying so. The two passages occur in close proximity in one of the primary “zeal” texts of Saul’s day, 1 Maccabees.5 We imagine the young boy, eager for God and the law, storing all this away for future reference. He will be zealous for God and Torah.

Wright constantly references this story in his commentaries.

The books of the Maccabees tell of zeal for Israel’s God, zeal for God’s Torah, zeal for the purity of Israel, and all of it rooted in the story that stretched back to Abraham and included Phinehas and Elijah among its key moments.7 If this was Israel’s story, this is how a loyal Israelite should now behave when faced with the same problem. Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers went to work, a little revolutionary group against the powerful pagan empire. Against all probability, they succeeded. They beat off the Syrians, reconsecrated the Temple, and established, for a century or so, an independent Jewish state. Zeal worked. It demonstrated utter loyalty to the One God. It brought freedom. And for those who suffered or died in the struggle, a new vision of the future shimmered on the horizon: resurrection.

This story if violence is the context for zeal. Many recoil at the violence in the bIble. Understandably so. But here we can see that a story of violence can disclose God's action.

A new creation. A new Eden.

This is a consistent theme. God is creating a new world, a new heaven and a new earth.

particularly the book of Daniel,

This Is a constant motif, the reference yo the Book of Danial.

Saul therefore set off as a new Phinehas, a new Elijah. The scriptural models were clear. Torah and Temple—the One God himself—were under attack from this new movement. With his Bible in his head, zeal in his heart, and official documents of authority from the chief priests in his bag, young Saul set off in the firm hope that he too would be recognized as a true covenant member. “It was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Phinehas then; Saul

Phenehas again

One way or another, it was a culture suffused with hope. Hope long deferred, but hope nonetheless.

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. When the Temple was destroyed, this vision was shattered, but the prophets declared that God would one day return. Malachi, one of the last of the ancient prophets, several generations after the return of some Jews from Babylon, insists to the skeptics that “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come

to his temple.”8 Rumors of an endless absence were wrong. He would return. But the people had better be prepared

In one of the strangest scenes in all scripture, the prophet sees the heavenly throne-chariot upon which the One God goes about his business. He describes it with immense caution, starting down below with the whirling and flashing wheels and the strange four-faced creatures (angels? who can say?) that inhabit them. (Even reading the text can make you giddy. Some of the later rabbis tried to keep people from reading it until they were at least forty years old.) 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.

This is the Throne Chariot passage in Ezekiel

experience.”A throne vision, a Temple vision, would be about heaven and earth coming together; in other words, it would have to do with the long-awaited renewal of creation itself—the ultimate prophetic vision.

The Apocalyptic Vision of God's Return

Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.”14 That was one way of putting it. There would be other ways too. This wasn’t about “religion,” whether in the ancient or the (very different) modern sense. It was about Jesus. About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.

glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus. Paul remained to his dying day fiercely loyal to Israel’s God, seen in fresh and blinding focus in Jesus.

messianic eschatology:

Ananias recognizes him as part of what anthropologists call a “fictive kinship group.” Of course, at this point all the Jesus-followers were Jews, so there was already a sense of extended kinship within which this new reality had come to birth.

This fictive kinship group is what we understand as Brotherhood.

“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no ‘male and female’; you are all one in the Messiah, Jesus.”15 Paul wrote those words at least fifteen years later. But the truth they express was already contained within Ananias’s opening greeting.

So then Ananias baptized the puzzled Saul. As in some of the other occasions in Acts, this happened at once, as soon as the person came to believe in the crucified Jesus as the risen Lord. There was no period of waiting, teaching, or preparation. That would come in due time. Baptism, looking back to Jesus’s own baptism and past that to the crossing of the Red Sea in the Passover story, marked out the new family, the new Passover people.

He certainly wasn’t telling people how to go to heaven when they died. 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.

This is what we call the Kerygma, a word I heard for the first time back in 1967 in college.

at the suggestion that Israel’s history would reach its climax in a crucified messiah.

This xthe scandal of a Crucified Christ.

Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. No, I went away to Arabia, and afterward returned to Damascus.

Paul spends time in the desert

Sinai was where Elijah had gone when it all went horribly wrong. Sinai was where Saul of Tarsus went—for the same reason.

“a still small voice.”