Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Paul does not quote Jesus’s prayer for God’s kingdom to come “on earth as in heaven,” the whole of his career and thought was built on the assumption that this was always God’s intention and that this new heaven-and-earth historical reality had come to birth in Jesus and was being activated by the spirit.

Kyrios ho theos, Kyrios heis estin, “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

“Exile” wasn’t just geographical. It was a state of mind and heart, of politics and practicalities, of spirit and flesh. As long as pagans were ruling over the Jews, they were again in exile.

Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled. He had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel’s vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah itself.

There was nothing called “Christianity” in the first century, only groups of people who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord. There was nothing corresponding to what we now call “Judaism” in the first century (the word then, as we saw, had an active force meaning “the zealous propagation of the Jewish way of life”), only the many communities of Jews around the world, praying to Israel’s God, studying the scriptures, focusing on Temple and Torah.

Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person.

Jesus was, and is, the Messiah that the Jews had hoped for, for so long. Other sources show how they missed him but today there is a groundswell amongst Jews recognising Yeshua as the true Messiah.

For Paul, the word meant all of that but also much more. For him, this “believing allegiance” was neither simply a “religious” stance nor a “political” one. It was altogether larger, in a way that our language, like Paul’s, has difficulty expressing clearly. For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not. That was already the position that Barnabas was taking.

Pistis the Greek word Paul used for Faith means faith as in belief but also following and allegiance and trust

As Paul would later explain, the bodily marks of identification that mattered to him were not the signs of circumcision, but “the marks of Jesus”—in other words, the signs of the suffering he had undergone.

Paul’s vision, Jewish to the core but reshaped around the messianic events involving Jesus, was a hundred percent theological and a hundred percent about the formation and maintenance of a new community. And that meant trouble.

Generations of Christians who have read Galatians as part of holy scripture have to remind themselves that, if Galatians is part of the Bible, it is Galatians as we have it that is part of the Bible—warts and all, sharp edges and sarcastic remarks included. 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.

If the Bible does not challenge you, you are not reading it right!

What matters is being part of the covenant family, and the covenant family is not defined by Jewish law, but “through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.”

Jesus said that he fulfilled the Law and the Prophets, that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord your God with all your heart all your mind and all your soul and the second, to love your neighbour as yourself. In these all the Law is fulfilled and we have the faithfulness of Jesus to thank for that.

If, in other words, it’s loyalty to God and the law that you want, then the Messiah’s death and resurrection has defined for all time what that actually looks like. When someone comes to be part of that messianic reality, then this, rather than their previous standing as “Jew” or “Gentile” (along with any outward marks of that standing), is the only thing that matters.

In other words, if Peter and, by implication, those who have come from James try to reestablish a two-tier Jesus movement, with Jews at one table and Gentiles at another, all they are doing is declaring that the movement of God’s sovereign love, reaching out to the utterly undeserving (“grace,” in other words), was actually irrelevant. God need not have bothered. If the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, was sufficient for all time to define the people of God, then there is no need for a crucified Messiah. Or to put it the other way, if God has declared, in the resurrection, that the crucified Jesus really was and is the Messiah, then God is also declaring that Moses could only take them so far. He pointed to a promised land, an “inheritance,” but could not himself take the people into it. Galatians is all about the ultimate “inheritance” that God had promised. And, as we shall see presently, Paul insisted that the “heirs”of this “inheritance”could not be defined by the Torah,but only by the Messiah himself, the ultimate “heir.”

There had never been a moment when Paul had not been out-and-out loyal to the One God. But the One God had unveiled his age-old purpose in the shocking form of the crucified Messiah, and that changed everything.

Acts 17:22-32 Paul Addresses the Areopagus 22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ 29 Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. 30 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” 32 Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.”

He would speak not from the defensive position that unless one retreats into “pure” Jewish culture, everything will fall apart, but from the positive high ground that idolatry and the false thinking it engenders are perversions,distortions of the truth,and that when one pulls hard on the truth, the knots and tangles farther down the rope will eventually come loose.

Paul is not trying to begin with Athenian cultural symbols and build up a philosophical argument that will arrive at Christian truth. He is managing at one and the same time to rebut the charge of “proclaiming foreign divinities” and to sketch a

worldview, a metaphysic, in which it might just make sense to say that the One God has unveiled his purpose for the world by raising Jesus from the dead.

at the heart of it he is teaching non-Jews to think Jewishly and teaching both non-Jews and Jews to think in the Jewish way as radically modified by Jesus.

The 2000 years of the Christian Church has disregarded this and made Jesus a westernised version of the Messiah which is not recognised through the OT. To a degree only Lip-service is paid to the links between the OT and Jesus by many believers but as NT Wright and others are revealing the link is much more fundamental than that!

“We are the ‘circumcision’” is a breathtaking claim, but utterly consistent with Paul’s whole stance, ever since the road to Damascus. Once again, this is not about comparative religion. He is not saying, “We Jesus-followers have found a better sort of religion than the old Jewish one.” It is about messianic eschatology.

This is not disloyalty to Israel’s God. It is the contested messianic loyalty that has characterized Paul throughout.

Paul, having himself recently faced despair and death and having seen Onesimus’s master Philemon come to faith on a visit to Ephesus, found himself in a complex little situation that would have made a fascinating seminar in moral philosophy, had not so much immediate danger been riding on it. What to do?

It isn’t that he is “anti-law” in Galatians and “pro-law” in Romans. That kind of shallow analysis has long had its day. It is, rather, that he can see one kind of danger in Galatia and realizes that it must be headed off immediately. He can see another, more long-term danger in Rome, and he decides to draw on his entire lifetime of biblical and pastoral reflection to construct a work that ought to ward off what to him would be the utter nonsense of a Jesus movement that was now eager to leave its Jewish and scriptural roots behind. He knew only too well from personal experience that Jews would regard him as a traitor, no better than a pagan, and that pagans might regard him as one of those annoying Jews, with some extra irritating bits of his own.

The resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of a genuinely Pauline political and social theology—as well as of everything else that Paul believed about him.

He wants the members of the Roman churches to respect one another across these differences. (We note, to ward off a very different problem in today’s contemporary Western churches, that this supposed “tolerance” does not extend to all areas of behavior, as the closing lines of chapter 13 and the equivalent sections of other letters make abundantly clear.)

In other words, the collection was designed to remind the (largely) Gentile churches of their deep and lasting obligation to the Jewish people in general and the Jerusalem church in particular. And it was designed to communicate to the Jerusalem church, and perhaps to a wider Jewish audience, the fact that the Gentile churches did not see themselves as a “new religion” and had no intention of cutting loose and creating a different kind of community. They were part of the same family and as such were doing what “family” always did—helping one another out as need arose.

it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Paul would have continued, as a Jesus-follower, with various Jewish devotional practices designed to direct the mind and heart toward worship, humility, and service.

despite the repeated accusations, Paul was not trying to overthrow the Jewish tradition, culture, and way of life. It was just that, as other loyal Jews have supposed from time to time, he believed that Israel’s Messiah had appeared, that he knew the Messiah’s name and his qualifications, and that this Messiah had done something much more powerful than merely defeating a pagan army. He had overthrown the dark powers that had kept the nations in captivity; he had built a new “Temple,” a worldwide community in which the divine glory had come to dwell by the spirit; and he had now sent out messengers to tell the nations what devout Jews had wanted to tell them all along, that they should turn from idols to serve the living God.

Amen!

Scholars over the last generation have wrestled with the question of whether the focus of Paul’s gospel was either personal forgiveness or the inclusion of the Gentiles. This verse, true to what Paul says in every letter from Galatians right through to Romans, indicates that it is both—and that the two are mutually defining.

He believed in a new creation already begun and to be completed in the future.

Paul was conscious of living in the first days, the opening scenes of the new drama of world history, with heaven and earth now held together not by Torah and Temple, but by Jesus and the spirit,

For Paul, therefore, questions of “sin” and “salvation” are vital, but they function within a worldview different from the one Western Christians have normally assumed. For Paul, as for all devout Jews, the major problem of the world was idolatry. Humans worshipped idols and therefore behaved in ways that were less than fully human, less than fully image-bearing. That was a core Jewish belief, and Paul shared it. What he did not share, as he thought through his tradition in the light of Jesus and the spirit, was the idea that the people of Israel, as they stood, constituted the answer to this problem—as though all one had to do was to become a Jew and try to keep the Torah, and all would be well not only with Israel, but with the world. Paul knew that view, and he firmly rejected it.

Idolatry was the constant sin that the Jews fell into and were eventually exiled for.

When the reality has come, the signposts are no longer needed, not because they were misleading, but because they have done their work. One does not put up a sign saying, “This way to London” outside Buckingham Palace.

The gospel itself was designed to generate a new kind of people, a people “who would be eager for good works”; in fact, the new kind of humanity that was brought to birth through the gospel was created for the specific purpose of “good works.”21 This point has often been missed when people have read the phrase “good works” as meaning simply “the performance of moral rules,” especially when that in turn has been played off against “justification by faith alone.” Morals matter, faith matters, but that isn’t the point here. Paul’s emphasis here is all about communities through whose regular practice the surrounding world is made a better place.