Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

The Jesus-followers in Antioch resolved at once not to do that. Instead, they would look out for those community members worse off than themselves. And that meant Jerusalem. Jerusalem was where Jesus’s first followers had sold their lands and pooled their resources and where now, after a decade or two of hostility from the authorities and probably their own wider communities, they were struggling to stay alive.

The Antioch reaction to the famine in Jerusalem.

Just as Antioch was the first place where we see a genuine effort at a new kind of transethnic community life, so in this action Antioch was the first place to demonstrate that the followers of Jesus thought of themselves as a translocal community with mutual responsibilities. The only possible parallels are the network of synagogue communities (but they were not transethnic) and the Roman army and civil service (but they all, though incorporating non-Romans, bore the stamp of Caesar). What might it mean, farther on down the track, to belong to a new kind of worldwide community?

A genuine revolution in the makibg.

What would the Jerusalem leaders think of this brave new experiment? And if they didn’t like the look of it, what would that mean? Had Paul been wasting his time?

one koinōnia.

They had taken with them a young man, a non-Jew who had become an eager and much-loved follower of Jesus, a member of the fellowship in Antioch. His name was Titus.

Non-Jewish believers were full members of the family. But some other Jesus-followers in Jerusalem were not content. They realized that Titus was a Greek, a non-Jew. He had not been circumcised; he was not therefore a “proselyte,” a non-Jew who had fully converted (there were debates at the time as to whether even circumcision made someone a real Jew, but for most it would have been sufficient). They realized that Barnabas and Saul were insisting that Titus be treated on equal terms as a full member of the family, including sharing in the common meals. This group was horrified.

Barnabas and Saul stood firm. The problem was not so much the embarrassment and physical pain that circumcision would cause Titus. It was a point of theological principle.

In these days of Black Lives Matter it would be well for us to ponder this principle.

Barnabas and Saul returned to Antioch, their mission complete. We assume that Titus went back with them.

They had another young colleague in tow as well, John Mark, a youthful relative of Barnabas and also of Peter.

the ultimate restoration of the whole of creation,

The cosmic vision we see in the whole of Creation.

Whatever happened to people immediately after death was, by comparison, unimportant, a mere interim. And however much it might seem incredible, the early Jesus-followers really did believe that God’s kingdom was not simply a future reality, though obviously it had a strong still-future dimension. God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.

God's Kingdom fulfilled now.

They had to turn around, away from the enslaving idols, to worship and serve the living God.

Tom Holland makes this point as well.

The non-Jewish peoples were being invited to discover not just some blind fate to be cheated if possible and endured if not, but personal forgiveness from a living God. They were being summoned to understand themselves, for the first time, as humans who were personally responsible to a wise Creator.

new humanity,

He was inventing, and must have known that he was inventing, a new way of being human. It must have been a bit like the first person to realize that notes sounded in sequence created melody, that notes sounded together created harmony, and that ordering the sequence created rhythm.

Jesus had brought about a new humaniy, a humanity mirroring the kindness, love and holiness of God.

The change was bound to be dramatic. Worshipping “the gods”—the great pantheon of Greek and Roman gods with plenty of others added on here and there—permeated every aspect of life in Paul’s world. To pull back from all of that and to worship “the living God” instead was far more than the equivalent of, say, in the modern West giving up gambling and beginning to attend church once a week. It would mean different actions and patterns of life every hour of every day. Perhaps the only way we can imagine such a thing in today’s secular world is to think what it would be like to give up all our usual machines and conveniences: car, cell phone, cooking equipment, central heating, or air-conditioning. You would have to do everything differently, only much more so. The gods were everywhere and involved in everything. In the ancient world, whether you were at home, on the street, or in the public square; attending festivals great and small; or at moments of crisis or joy (weddings, funerals, setting off on a journey)—the gods would be there to be acknowledged, appealed to, pleased, or placated. Once the message of Jesus took hold, all that would have to go. The neighbors would notice. Atheists were socially undesirable.

This is Tom Holland territory as well.

suspect that Paul was deliberately finding ways to make the point: there is one “Lord,” one Kyrios, and it isn’t Caesar.

He was, after all, one of the half dozen most intellectually sophisticated first-century persons for whom we have evidence, up there with Seneca, Plutarch, and a select band of others. He was, after all, heir to the Psalms and prophets, which spoke of a coming king to whom the world’s rulers would have to owe allegiance. He and his communities were treading a dangerous line.

Wright consistently makes the point that Paul was one if the great minds of the ancient world, on a level with Seneca and Epictetus.

It was like a form of Judaism, particularly in its care for the poor, its strict sexual ethic, and its insistence on a monotheism that excluded the pagan divinities.

It was a new way of being human.

Pisidian Antioch

And the climax is that the long hope of Israel has been fulfilled. The law of Moses had ended in a puzzle. Deuteronomy had warned about Israel’s long-term covenant unfaithfulness and its results. But now there was a way through. Moses could only take them so far, but now God had broken through that barrier. “Forgiveness of sins” had arrived in space and time, a new reality to open a new world. But, as with Moses, would the present generation listen? Paul’s speech ends with another prophetic warning: something new is happening, and they might just be looking the wrong way and miss out on it entirely.

He was announcing the fulfillment of the long-range divine plan.

meant the opening up of a whole new world.

nobody had ever heard of a crucified Messiah,

If, according to Paul, this new world of forgiveness had opened up to embrace all alike, non-Jew as well as Jew, what would become of the settled but still fragile place of the Jewish communities in the Roman world? Everything was going to change.

This was in fact the main challenge for Paul’s hearers, the possibility that the carefully nuanced relationship between Jewish communities and the emerging Roman Empire would be upset. That was already the problem for Jesus in Jerusalem and caused his death.

zeal for Israel’s God, zeal for the Torah, zeal against anything that might appear to be overthrowing the ancestral order.

the nations as a whole would come into the promised blessing.

The vocation of Judaism fair Oaul is for Israel to bee a light to the nations (Isaiah 49).

any suggestion of strange new subversive teachings that might upset the delicate social and cultural status quo.

of a suffering apostle,

the new province of Galatia in 25 bc.

His message and mission remain firmly anchored in the traditions and hopes of Israel,

First, Paul’s message of a new age dawning, of new creation suddenly leaping into life, is dramatically symbolized by a burst of healing activity. When Paul writes to these churches later on, he refers to the powerful signs that had been performed and it seems were still being performed in their midst.13 We should be careful, by the way, about

The second feature of this part of the trip is suffering.

That, I think, is a case (and not the only one) of modern readers failing to spot a well-known first-century metaphor.

“the marks of Jesus”—

One such, reported by the Roman poet Ovid, tells of the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes wandering unrecognized in the region.

The deepest revulsion of the Jewish monotheist was reserved for this kind of thing and all that went with it. Jews from that day to this have accused Paul of compromising with paganism.

rooted in his belief in the One God as the creator of the world.

They, Paul and Barnabas, are not gods but ordinary humans, and the whole point of their visit is to tell everybody to turn away from such foolishness.

That could not be denied. But if he was not to be identified with one of the Greek pantheon, then who was he? Some kind of magician?

He explains that this kind of suffering is precisely the sign of two worlds clashing; they are on the cusp of the new world, and if this is what it costs, this is what it costs. So he will go on.

the creation of a new community in which Jews and Gentiles were able to live together because all that had previously separated them had been dealt with on the cross—

There is no suggestion that up to that point he had supposed that in order to get to “heaven,” one had to please Israel’s God by performing good moral works, and that he was now offering an easier way (“You just have to believe!”). Both of these suggestions—widely popular in Western thought over the last few centuries—are simply anachronistic. This is not how Jews or pagans of the time were thinking, and it certainly isn’t how Paul’s mind worked.

Why did this extraordinary movement, launched by this energetic and subversive man, spread in the way it did?

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.

Biography, as we said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul’s world is that kind of exercise.