Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Saul wanted to be clear that the shocking new thing that had been revealed to him really was the fulfillment, the surprising but ultimately satisfying goal, of the ancient purposes of the One God, purposes that had been set out particularly in the law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. He wanted to stay loyal. Saul was starting to come to terms with the possibility that, if the divine purposes had been completed in Jesus, it might mean that a whole new phase of the divine plan, hitherto barely suspected, had now been launched, a phase in which the Torah itself would be seen in a whole new light. And Saul, like Elijah, was told to go back and get on with the job.

If he has not usually been seen this way, that may be because we have not paid sufficient attention to the scriptural echoes he sets up in many places in his writings, but particularly in the very passage we have been studying.

Tom Wright is here explicitly saying that we may not have paid attention to the biblical echoes in Paul's account of his conversion. We need to hear the voice of Ezekiel. We need to see Paul as annointed and called to be a prophet, a teacher of Israel but now reaching out to the whole world.

the call of Jeremiah.

He is also making it clear that his call and commissioning have placed him in the ancient prophetic tradition, whether of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Elijah himself. His opponents are trying to go over his head in their appeal to Jerusalem, but he is going over everybody else’s head by appealing to Jesus himself and to the scriptures as foreshadowing not only the gospel, but the prophetic ministry that he, Paul, has now received.

Paul sees himself in the prophetic tradition. He is Jeremiah, Isaiah and Elijah.

Saul’s time in Damascus, including his trip to Arabia and back, probably took three years, most likely from ad 33 to 36.

avoiding the guards on the city gates by being let down the city wall in a basket.

Like C. S. Forrester's Hornblower or Jule Verne's The Count of Montecristo.

they escort Paul down to the sea at Caesarea and put him on a boat back home to southern Turkey.

Smart boys!

Tarsus.

His heart was still zealous, loyal to the One God.

A point that Tom makes consistently.

Saul spent a silent decade deepening the well of scriptural reflection from which he would thereafter

From 36 to 46

draw the water he needed.

the practices of prayer and meditation

soaking

One of Tom Wright's favourite words

He reread Genesis. He reread Exodus. He reread the whole Torah, and the prophets, especially Isaiah, and he went on praying the Psalms.

Great passage.

the infinite point where the parallel lines of Israel’s long narrative would eventually meet.

Great image

Saul came to see that these two stories, Israel’s story and God’s story, had, shockingly, merged together. I think this conviction must date to the silent decade in Tarsus, if not earlier. Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day. If you had asked Saul of Tarsus, before the meeting on the road to Damascus, where Israel’s story and God’s story came together, the two natural answers would have been Temple (the place at the heart of the promised land where God had promised to live) and Torah (the word of God spoken into, and determinative of, Israel’s national life). The Temple indicated that Israel’s God desired to live in the midst of his people; the Torah, that he would address his people with his life-transforming word. Saul now came to see that both these answers pointed beyond themselves to Jesus and of course to the spirit.

A Tom Wright sermon

But look again, and you will see, not least in the Psalms, not least in the royal predictions of Psalms and prophets alike, that when Israel’s true king arrives, he will be the king not only of Israel, but also of the whole world. Saul, in Tarsus, must have reflected on what it would mean for Psalm 2 to come true, where the One God says to the true king:

The Psalms disclose to us a Bigger God.

hope for a new world,

Philosophy wasn’t just for a small wealthy class, though there were schools where one could study Plato, Aristotle, and the various writers who had developed the great systems that flowed from their writings. The questions that drove philosophical inquiry were everybody’s questions. What made a city “just” or a human “wise” or “virtuous”? What constituted a good argument or an effective speech? What was the world made of and how did it happen? What was the purpose of life, and how could you know? These questions and the various standard answers were just as likely to be voiced at the barber’s or in the tavern as in a schoolroom with teachers and serious-minded students.

Tarsus as Athens

The puzzled uncertainties of the “Academy,” the successors to Plato (“We can’t be sure whether the gods exist, but we’d better keep the civil religion going just in case”) were giving way, in some newer teaching, to a vision of an upstairs/downstairs world such as the picture sketched by the biographer and philosopher Plutarch in the generation after Paul. For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss.

Plutarch and his philosophial vision

the long-awaited project of new creation,

Which we find in Romans

Paul’s own question, what it would look like if the One God created a new single family of “brothers and sisters” in the Messiah, had potentially revolutionary answers. And traditional societies do not welcome revolution.

This is what brotherhood means, living the new reality of a redeemed world and a redeemed humanity brought about in and by the mystery of theb Crucified Jesus.

the silent decade in Tarsus.

The Silent Decade in Tarsus from 36 to 46. What was happenibg for Paul during that time?

doing a new thing and creating a new community.

But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.

The Cataclysmic Event in his life.

Paul believed that, through Jesus and his death, the One God had overcome the powers that had held the world in their grip. And that meant that all humans, not just Jews, could be set free to worship the One God. The Jesus-shaped message of liberation included forgiveness for all past misdeeds, and this message of forgiveness meant that there could be no barriers between Jewish Messiah people and non-Jewish Messiah people. To erect such barriers would mean denying that Jesus had won the messianic victory. Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil. This translated directly into one of the great themes of his mature thought and particularly his pastoral efforts: the unity of all Messiah people across ethnic boundary lines. And this is one of the things that Saul’s own family must have found impossible to swallow.

This is the Pauline Message.

When we speak of love, and perhaps also grief, there is another silence hidden within the larger silence of the Tarsus years. Everyone who reads Paul asks this question sooner or later. Was there a girl? Had he been betrothed or even married?

Was there a girl?

But Paul, as we shall see, was challenging the dominant culture with the news of new creation, a new creation with different values.

Celibacy and the New Creation

Most of the traveling early Christian teachers were married, and their wives accompanied them on their journeys, but Paul was different (so also, apparently, was Barnabas).

I never knew this.

It is important before we launch into Paul’s public career, which we are nearly ready to do, to challenge the perennial idea that Paul was a misogynist. He did not imagine that women and men were identical in all respects. Nobody in the ancient world, and not many in today’s world, would think that. 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.

Paul was not a misogynist .

Barnabas.

the inner dynamic of Jewish life within its wider cultural setting.

An important concept.

As we noted earlier, the question of how high the wall between Jew and non-Jew should be and of what sort of dealings Jews ought to have with those on the other side was controversial then, just as it is today. Different people, and indeed different Jewish community leaders, would draw the line at different places.

The Wall between Jews and non-Jews.

the more deep-seated non-Jewish suspicion that the Jews were atheists.

This was a common suspicion in the Roman world of Christians.

the dark muddles of paganism.

True today as well if much contemporary religious belief.

So what would Jewish people, particularly in a diaspora community like Antioch or Tarsus, think of the suggestion that the One God had done what he promised by sending a crucified Messiah? What would this mean for Jewish identity? Was this good news simply for Jewish people, or might it be for everyone?

The Crucified Jesus remains a Scandal for our world today as well.

This Antioch stood on the river Orontes, about 250 miles north of Jerusalem, in the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. It was a major crossroads and trading center not far from the coast, poised between east and west, north and south, much like Venice in the high Middle Ages.

It wasn’t surprising that some of the early Jesus-followers found their way there. Everybody else had, after all.

The place to be like Lobdon today.

Good-hearted Barnabas

the Jesus believers in Antioch

This new community was not, then, defined by genealogy. It was defined by the Lord himself, and what counted as the sure sign of belonging to this Lord was “loyalty,” “faithfulness.” Here we run into the kind of problem that meets all serious readers of Paul.

Hence the term means “loyalty” or “allegiance.” This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.

Pistis is a bit like the knd of loyalty of a Brexiteer or a Trump follower.

That was already the position that Barnabas was taking. He saw a single community living a common life.

The Brexiteer faith of Barnabas.

A new kind of “family” had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus. Barnabas saw it, and he was glad.

Barnabas got the message. A new kind of community.

Only by going deeply into the scriptural story of Israel and the events concerning Jesus, reflecting from many different angles on its full significance, could such a community keep its identity, its integrity, and its nerve. Who did Barnabas know who had that kind of knowledge and the eager energy and the way with words that would communicate it? There was one obvious candidate.

Barnabas understood the value if beibg roited in a tradition.

the inner tensions within that movement

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.

Great turn of phrase here.

Herod Agrippa,

That odd sense of a new kind of life, as in all the very early Jesus communities, was heavily dependent (they would have said) on the powerful presence and guidance of the holy spirit. Whatever account we want to give of this phenomenon today, we cannot begin to understand Saul, Barnabas, and their colleagues without recognizing that as they prayed, sang, studied scripture, organized their community life, and (not least) went about talking to both Jews and non-Jews about Jesus, they were conscious of an energy and a sense of direction unlike anything they had known before. They had no hesitation in ascribing that energy and leading to the divine spirit, which had been promised in the scriptures and then again, only a few years before, by Jesus’s own forerunner, John the Baptist. These early Jesus-followers were not naive “enthusiasts.” Already within the first decades it became necessary to challenge some claims about the work of the spirit and to warn against the likelihood of deceit, and indeed of self-deceit. But we cannot understand the things that now happened unless we allow that Saul and the others really did believe they were being led and energized by the personal presence of the One God.

The work of the Spirit.

a famine coming over the whole Mediterranean world.

The COVID of their day.