Paul the Apostle

← Encyclopedia

Paul the Apostle, born Saul of Tarsus and active in the middle decades of the first century, was a Greek-speaking Jew who began as an enemy of the early Jesus movement and became its most consequential missionary. Thirteen letters in the New Testament bear his name, and seven of these are accepted by nearly all scholars as genuinely his — the earliest surviving Christian documents, written before any of the Gospels. More than any other single figure, he gave the new movement the vocabulary in which it would think about itself.

By his own account he was a Pharisee, zealous for the ancestral law, who took part in suppressing the followers of Jesus until something on the road to Damascus reversed him. He describes it only obliquely, as a revelation in which the risen Christ was disclosed to him; the book of Acts, written later by another hand, recasts the episode as a blinding light and a voice from heaven. The two accounts agree on the outcome and differ on the scene — a divergence that has occupied readers ever since. What is not in dispute is the consequence: the persecutor became the self-described apostle to the Gentiles, carrying his message across Anatolia, Greece, and the Aegean.

The letters were occasional, written into specific quarrels and crises in the congregations he had founded or hoped to visit, and their theology is hammered out under pressure rather than laid down as a system. Several convictions recur. Paul taught that a person is set right with God through faith in Christ rather than through observance of the Jewish law, and that this opened the covenant to non-Jews without requiring them to become Jews first — the issue that drove his sharpest disputes with other leaders of the movement, including those who had known Jesus in life. He held that the crucified and risen Christ had inaugurated a new age, and that those baptized into him were joined to his death and his life. These claims, argued in the heat of the moment, were later read as the foundation of Christian doctrine, and the history of that reading — from Augustine to Luther to the present — is in large part the history of Western theology arguing with Paul.

Scholarship treats the undisputed letters as firm evidence for his thought and the remaining six as contested, probably written in his name by followers after his death, a common practice of the period. The events of his life come mainly from Acts, which has its own purposes and cannot simply be harmonized with the letters. The traditional account of his end — execution in Rome under Nero — is early and widely held, though it rests on tradition rather than on his own record. His correspondence outlived the controversies that produced it, and the arguments he raised against named opponents have been read for two thousand years as if addressed to everyone.

→ Related: Christianity · New Testament · Gnosis · Bible · Sin