St. Paul Quotes

“Paul had been doing his best to hasten the coming of the Messiah; that was the “good” that he was trying to do. But in an overwhelming moment of truth, he realized that Jesus’s followers were absolutely right and that his persecution of their community had actually impeded the arrival of the Messianic Age. As if this were not enough, his violence had broken the fundamental principles of the Torah: love of God and love of neighbor. In his excessive ardor for the law’s integrity, he had forgotten God’s stern command: “Thou shalt not kill.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“They were guilty of envy, treachery, ambition, arrogance, and insolence because of the chronic egotism that made them see themselves as the center of the universe rather than God.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Ever since Luther, this letter has been read as a definitive statement of Paul’s groundbreaking doctrine of justification by faith. But recent scholarship has shown that Luther’s interpretation does not correspond to Paul’s thinking at all, and that far from being central to Paul’s thought, this topic is mentioned only in Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Romans for “the specific and limited purpose of defending the right of gentile converts to be full heirs of the promises to Israel.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Some would have been tempted to respond aggressively to these accusations, but instead Paul merely amplified his claim that true power resided in powerlessness.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“In this letter, the “body” is always the community; those who do not recognize the sacred core of community, in which the Messiah is present in all members, have failed to acknowledge the Lord himself.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Again, Paul’s insistence on male authority in this disputed text is at odds with both his theory and practice of gender equality, and the rhetoric, with its insistence on traditional “practices,” is quite alien to Paul and has more in common with the second-century Deutero-Pauline letters to Titus and Timothy.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“But his overriding goal in this letter was to stop people from turning away from the community to enjoy a life of private contemplation”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“The cross had overturned all forms of power, dominance, and authority, showing that the divine manifested itself not in strength but in weakness.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Because faith in Christ was not a private quest but an experiment in living together, Paul passionately opposed the individualism promoted by the “spirituals,” urging them instead to focus on the unity and integrity of the whole ekklesia.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“the basis of his argument was the importance of community. To live “in Christ” was not a private affair; as he had always insisted, it was achieved when people put the needs of others before their own and lived together in love. Instead of exalting themselves as a spiritual aristocracy, the true followers of Jesus imitated his kenosis”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Apollos had been influenced by the Jewish Wisdom tradition that had been preached originally by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. It was based on a personal devotion to Sophia, “Divine Wisdom,” an attribute or emanation of God.24 This spirituality had enabled Jews who felt humiliated by living under imperial rule to recover a sense of dignity, because they had achieved a wisdom that was superior to that of their rulers.25 Thanks to Apollos, the despised artisans and laborers of Corinth had become intoxicated by similar fantasies, believing that because they were perfected human beings, they could now claim a noble lineage, worldly honor, and social distinction without being corrupted by these worldly attainments.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for you are one person in Christ Jesus”—were to become a social reality, there would have to be a fundamental reevaluation of the notion of authority and what was really sacred.16”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“The social unity, democracy, egalitarianism, and freedom extolled in Hellenistic ideology could not be achieved by any form of jurisprudence, because, despite its lofty idealism, in practice law always enslaved, denigrated, and destroyed.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“When God had exalted Jesus to his right hand, he had allied himself with the victims of oppression.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“When Paul heard the word dikaiosune, he immediately interpreted it in the light of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.15 For the prophets, justice had meant social equality; they had denounced rulers who failed to treat the pauper, the widow, and the foreigner with equity and respect. From what Paul had seen in his travels, Roman law had failed to implement justice in this sense; it favored only the privileged few and had virtually enslaved the vast majority of the population.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Before the twentieth century, the phrase pistis Iesou Christou was regularly translated into English as “the faith or loyalty of Jesus.” It did not refer to the faith of ordinary mortals, but only to the “trust” that Jesus had in God when he accepted his death sentence and his “confidence” that God would turn it to good; and God had indeed rewarded this act of faith by inaugurating a new relationship with humanity that saved men and women from the iniquity and injustice of the old order, ensuring that all people, whatever their social status or ethnicity, could become God’s children. But ever since the publication of the American Standard Version of the Bible in 1901, this phrase has regularly been translated as “faith in Jesus Christ,” equated with an individual Christian’s belief in Jesus’s divinity and redemptive act.11 Paul went on to argue that the Torah had not been revealed for”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Paul was writing in a literary form in which exaggeration, mockery, and even insults were expected.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Paul’s opponents in Galatia believed that Jesus’s heroic death and resurrection had inspired a spiritual renewal movement within Israel; they advocated continuity with the past. But Paul believed that with the cross something entirely new had come into the world.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“But by raising him to the highest place in Heaven, God had vindicated Jesus, cleared him of all guilt, and in the process declared Roman law null and void and the Torah’s categories of purity and impurity no longer valid. As a result, gentiles, hitherto ritually unclean, could also inherit the blessings promised to Abraham without becoming subject to Jewish law.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“In fact, Paul’s uncompromising stance on this issue was not typical. As a Pharisee, Paul had believed that once a person had been circumcised, he had to observe the entire Torah, including the mass of orally transmitted legal traditions of Israel that would later be codified in the Mishnah.4 But not many other Jews would have agreed with Paul, and the rabbis would eventually decide that circumcision was not necessary for salvation since “there are righteous men among the gentiles who have a share in the world to come.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Paul was horrified; yet again, the issue that had erupted so painfully in Antioch threatened his entire mission. He had always maintained that it was unnecessary for gentiles who committed themselves to the Messiah to observe the Torah, since they had received the Spirit without its help. The Torah was valuable to Jews, but it could only be a distraction to the Galatians; forcing them to adopt a wholly Jewish way of life would be as absurd as demanding that Jews take on the ancient Galatian traditions and start feasting like Aryan warriors, singing their drinking choruses, and venerating their warrior heroes.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul’s Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never really interested him in the first place. Far more important to Paul was Jesus’s death and resurrection, the cosmic events that had transformed history and changed the fate of all peoples, regardless of their beliefs or ethnicity. If they imitated Jesus’s kenosis in their daily behavior, he promised his disciples, they would experience a spiritual resurrection that brought with it a new freedom.5 The Messiah, he told the Galatians, had given “himself for our sins, to rescue us out of this present wicked age as our God and Father willed.”6”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“They may have supported a gentile mission but insisted that if pagan converts wanted to belong to the Messiah’s community, they must become full Jews. These Judeans regarded Paul’s mixed congregations of Jews and gentiles as seriously problematic: Could Jews really live, eat, and marry with gentiles without violating central precepts of the Torah and abandoning centuries of ancestral tradition?”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“In all premodern societies, the upper classes were chiefly distinguished from the rest of the population by their ability to live without working.11 The cultural historian Thorstein Veblen explains that in such societies, “labor comes to be associated . . . with weakness and subjection.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“At the heart of this proto-gospel is the Kingdom of God.20 This was not a fiery apocalypse descending from on high but essentially a revolution in community relations. If people set up an alternative society that approximated more closely to the principles of God recorded in Jewish law, they could hasten the moment when God intervened to change the human condition. In the Kingdom, God would be sole ruler, so there would be no Caesar, no procurator, and no Herod. To make the Kingdom a reality in the desperate conditions in which they lived, people must behave as if the Kingdom had already come.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“the true followers of Jesus imitated his kenosis. As the Christ Hymn had pointed out, Jesus had achieved his high status only by emptying himself and accepting death on a cross.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“There are many opinionated religious people who would do well to heed Paul’s warnings to the “strong” who were intimidating the “weak” with their overbearing certainty. Above all, we need to take seriously Paul’s insight that no virtue was valid unless it was imbued with a love that was not a luxurious emotion in the heart but must be expressed daily and practically in self-emptying concern for others.”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“In the official imperial theology, the titles “Son of God” and “Lord” usually applied to the emperor and the word “gospel” referred to his achievements. By speaking of Jesus in these terms, Paul was tacitly inviting the Roman community to declare its loyalty to the true ruler of the universe. Members were to become co-conspirators with him in acknowledging that, unbeknownst to the powers that be, a fundamental change had occurred when God had vindicated the crucified Messiah.49”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate

“Shortly after he had dispatched his “letter of tears,” Paul’s fortunes plummeted to a new low. Claudius’s last years had been clouded by court intrigues, and in October 54, he was poisoned by his wife and succeeded by Nero, his adopted seventeen-year-old son. The accession of the new emperor was hailed with relief and joy and an empire-wide resurgence of the imperial cult. But Rome was in trouble: The Parthians threatened the eastern frontier and there were uprisings in Judea. Scapegoats were needed, and Marcus Junius Silanus, governor of Asia, was murdered by Nero’s agents on suspicion of treason and, in a roundup of local malcontents, Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus. Luke, always the champion of Rome and reluctant to admit that Paul was ever regarded as an enemy of the empire, tells us nothing of this. Instead, he claims that Paul’s mission in Ephesus came to an end after a riot in the Temple of Artemis, when the silversmiths who crafted figurines of the goddess accused him of putting them out of business by undermining the cult.24”
― Karen Armstrong, St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate