Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

At the heart of Paul’s message, teaching, and life was—to use a technical phrase—radical messianic eschatology. Eschatology: God’s long-awaited new day has arrived. Messianic: Jesus is the true son of David, announced as such in his resurrection, bringing to completion the purposes announced to Abraham and extended in the Psalms to embrace the world. Radical: nothing in Paul’s or Barnabas’s background had prepared them for this new state of affairs. The fact that they now believed it was what the One God had always planned did not reduce their own sense of awe and astonishment. They knew firsthand that such a program would meet stiff resistance and even violence. What they could not have foreseen, as they traveled back through the southern part of the province of Galatia and then sailed home to (Syrian) Antioch, was that the new reality they had witnessed would become a focus of sharp controversy even among Jesus’s followers, let alone that the two of them, Paul and Barnabas, would find themselves on opposite sides as that controversy boiled over.