Paul the Apostle

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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, and the questions it would not stop asking.

Tarsus, the Pharisee, and the road

Tarsus, in Cilicia on the southeastern coast of Anatolia, was a city of the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, a place of schools and trade under the Roman Empire. Paul was a Jew of the dispersion, fluent in the Greek of his letters and, by the report of Acts of the Apostles, a Roman citizen — a status that would later route the last act of his life to Rome itself. By his own account he was a Pharisee, schooled in the law and zealous for the ancestral tradition of Second Temple Judaism, and he names his zeal as the engine of what he did next: he took part in suppressing the followers of Jesus, persecuting the assembly of God, as he phrases it without softening.

Then something on the road to Damascus reversed him. Paul describes it only obliquely, never as a scene. In the letter to the Galatians he calls it a revelation in which God was pleased to disclose his Son to him, and insists that the gospel he received came through no human teacher; in the first letter to the Corinthians he places it last in a list of resurrection appearances, the risen Christ seen by him as by one untimely born. He stresses that he did not at once go up to Jerusalem to consult the apostles there, but went into Arabia and back to Damascus, and that three years passed before he met Cephas — Peter — and James the brother of Jesus. The book of Acts, written later by another hand, recasts the episode three separate times as a public catastrophe: a blinding light at midday, a voice from heaven, the persecutor struck down and led into the city, and a disciple named Ananias sent to restore his sight. The two versions agree on the outcome and diverge on the scene — Paul’s a direct disclosure with no intermediary, Acts’ a drama of light and voice and a human messenger — a divergence that has occupied readers ever since, and that historical-critical scholarship declines to harmonize into a single picture. The consequence is not in dispute: the persecutor became the self-described apostle to the Gentiles, carrying his message across Anatolia, Greece, and the Aegean to the synagogues and the God-fearers at their margins, and beyond them to pagans who had never kept the law at all.

The letters

The letters were occasional. Each was written into a specific quarrel or crisis in a congregation Paul had founded or hoped to visit, dictated to a scribe and carried by hand, and meant to do work at a distance that he could not do in person. Their theology is hammered out under pressure rather than laid down as a system — arguments improvised against named opponents, not articles composed for posterity. The earliest, the first letter to the Thessalonians, dates to around 50 CE, a full generation before the first Gospel was written; the letter to the Romans, the longest and most sustained, comes near the end of his free movement, before 60. Between them stand the letters to the Galatians, the two to Corinth, the letter to the Philippians, and the brief private note to Philemon about a runaway slave. These seven are the bedrock — the only first-person voice of the first Christian generation, and the oldest texts in the Bible’s New Testament half.

Six further letters carry his name and are treated by scholarship as contested. Ephesians, Colossians, and the second letter to the Thessalonians sit in a debated middle ground; the three Pastoral Epistles — the two to Timothy and the one to Titus — are judged by most critical readers to be pseudonymous, written in Paul’s name by later hands. The grounds are internal: shifts in vocabulary and sentence rhythm, a settled church order with bishops and deacons that fits a later decade, a doctrine cooled from argument into deposit. Writing in the name of a revered teacher was a recognized practice of the ancient world, not a fraud in the modern sense, and the distinction between the undisputed seven and the disputed six is one of the firmest results of the modern study of the corpus — not a verdict on the value of the later letters, but a map of which voice is hearing what.

What Paul argued

Several convictions recur across the undisputed letters, each forged in a particular fight. The first concerns the law and the Gentiles. Paul taught that a person is set right with God — justified — 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 practical edge of this was circumcision and the food laws: whether a pagan who turned to the God of Israel through Christ had to take on the marks of Israel. Paul said no, and said it with a vehemence that strained his relations with the other leaders of the movement, including men who had known Jesus in the flesh.

The crisis came to a head twice. At a meeting in Jerusalem around 48 to 50 CE — the apostolic council — the question of the Gentile converts was put directly to the Jerusalem leadership: Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and the older apostles. Paul’s own account in Galatians and the account in Acts agree that the demand to circumcise the Gentile believers was set aside, and disagree on nearly everything else about the meeting’s terms. Soon after, at Antioch, the fragile settlement broke down over a humbler matter — who would eat with whom. Paul records that he opposed Cephas to his face when Peter, under pressure from emissaries of James, withdrew from sharing a table with Gentile believers. The table, for Paul, was the doctrine made visible: if the covenant was truly open, then Jew and Gentile sat down together, and any flinching from that was a betrayal of the gospel he preached. The scene is one of the rare moments where his letters let a reader watch the early movement quarrel with itself in real time.

Beneath the dispute over the law lay a deeper claim. Paul held that the crucified and risen Christ had inaugurated a new age, breaking the present order of the world, and that those baptized into him were joined to his death and his life — buried with him, raised with him, carried by his Spirit. The phrase that recurs is in Christ: not chiefly a metaphor but, in Paul’s usage, a real incorporation, a transfer of the self into a new corporate body that has already passed through death. From this followed his account of sin as a power that ruled the old age and from which the believer had been set free, and his conviction that the end of all things was near. Justification by faith and union with Christ are the two poles of the letters, and the relation between them — whether the courtroom language of acquittal or the participatory language of incorporation is the deeper layer — is one of the standing problems of reading Paul.

Whether any of this owes a debt to the Greek-speaking Judaism of the diaspora is a live question. Philo of Alexandria, Paul’s near-contemporary in the great Jewish city of Egypt, read the Torah through the categories of Middle Platonism and built from it a contemplative theology of the divine Logos; Paul, working in the same Hellenistic-Jewish world and the same Greek, reasons very differently — from the death and resurrection of a specific crucified man — but the shared atmosphere of allegory, mediation, and a God addressing the nations is unmistakable, and links Paul to the broader currents of Jewish philosophy in their Hellenistic phase.

The end in Rome

The traditional account of Paul’s end is execution in Rome under Nero. The Acts narrative carries him there as a prisoner who, as a Roman citizen, has appealed to the emperor’s court, and leaves him under house arrest awaiting trial; it does not narrate his death. The death itself rests on tradition that is early and strikingly uncontested. The letter known as 1 Clement, written from Rome around 95 CE, already speaks of Paul’s endurance and his witness before the rulers, without giving the time, place, or manner. By the time of Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, the tradition had hardened into a fixed scene, which Eusebius reports on the authority of earlier writers: that Paul was beheaded and Peter crucified at Rome in Nero’s reign — beheading the death befitting a citizen. The backdrop is the persecution that followed the great fire of Rome in 64. No rival tradition places his death elsewhere, and that he died a martyr in Rome under Nero, sometime in the middle 60s, is as close to a fixed external fact as anything in his biography reaches.

The history of reading Paul

The letters were occasional, but they did not stay occasional. The arguments Paul raised against particular opponents in particular cities were read, almost from the first, as the foundation of Christian doctrine, and the history of that reading is in large part the history of Western theology.

The first reader to make Paul the center of everything was an antagonist the wider church repudiated. Marcion of Sinope, active in Rome in the 140s, held the Creator of the Hebrew Scriptures to be a lesser god than the Father of Jesus, rejected those Scriptures entirely, and assembled the first known fixed Christian canon: an edited Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters, the apostle he judged the only one to have grasped the gospel uncorrupted. Marcion’s Paul — the apostle of a gospel utterly opposed to the law — was a sharpening of one strand of the letters past what the church would accept, and the orthodox reaction against him helped fix both a wider canon and the conviction that Paul could not be claimed against the God of Israel. Centuries later, on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire, a dualist movement took the apostle’s name directly: the Paulicians, who prized his letters and were charged by their accusers with reviving the old antithesis. To read Paul as the banner of a stark opposition between law and gospel was, for a long stretch of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to risk the charge of heresy, and the line between Paul rightly read and Paul read into dualism was drawn and redrawn for centuries.

The mainstream reception ran through two figures above all. Augustine of Hippo, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, took his decisive turn under the words of Romans, and from Romans built the doctrine of grace, the bondage of the will, and predestination that would shape Latin Christianity for a millennium. More than a thousand years after that, Martin Luther, reading the same letter and Galatians beside it, found in Paul’s justification by faith the lever that moved the Reformation, and recast the apostle as the witness against a religion of human achievement. Luther’s Paul — the herald of grace against works, conscience against law — became the Paul of Protestant Europe, and through Augustine and Luther together the apostle’s first-century quarrels were transposed into the master controversies of Western Christian thought.

That long Augustinian-Lutheran reading met its sharpest modern challenge in the study of Paul against his own Jewish world. The questions of how far Paul’s language of being in Christ amounts to a mysticism — a real union, not a figure of speech — and of what exactly he was arguing against when he set faith against the works of the law have reopened in the last century, and the answers have unsettled the inherited picture. Paul’s union-with-Christ language sources, but does not exhaust, the later tradition of Christian mysticism, just as the saving knowledge he sometimes invokes stands at a distance from the elaborate systems of gnosis that later teachers would build partly on his words. The apostle who wrote into specific crises in towns along the Aegean became the text on which each succeeding age of Christianity tested its own deepest convictions — and the seven letters, still occasional, still addressed to the Corinthians and the Galatians by name, kept yielding answers to questions their author never posed.

Scholarship and the texts

The modern study of Paul turns on two distinctions the casual reader often misses: between the seven undisputed letters and the rest, and between the Paul of the letters and the Paul of Acts. On the first, the standard survey of authorship and its criteria is set out across the introductions to the corpus; Bart D. Ehrman’s discussion of pseudonymity and the deutero-Pauline letters in Forgery and Counterforgery (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a representative critical account of why the Pastorals are read as written in Paul’s name by later hands (summary).

On Paul’s thought against its Jewish background, the watershed is E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Fortress Press, 1977), which argued that the Judaism of Paul’s day was not a religion of legalistic merit-earning but rested on what Sanders called covenantal nomism — election and grace first, with law-keeping as the response within an already-given covenant (overview). Sanders’ own Paul (Oxford University Press, 1991), a source for the present entry, is the compact statement of his reading, in which the participatory center of Paul’s religion takes priority over the courtroom metaphor. The movement Sanders touched off was named by James D. G. Dunn, whose The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Eerdmans, 1998), also a source here, gathers the new-perspective reading into a full account, treating the works of the law as the boundary markers — circumcision, food laws, sabbath — that divided Jew from Gentile rather than as a system of self-justification (Themelios discussion).

Behind both stands Albert Schweitzer, Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus — The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (1930) — which placed the being-in-Christ language, not justification, at the dead center of Paul’s religion, and read redemption as a real participation in Christ’s death and resurrection (account). The divergence between Paul’s letters and the Acts narrative, especially over the Damascus revelation and the Jerusalem meeting, is the subject of a continuing historical-critical literature that sifts the two rather than fusing them (conversion accounts). For the tradition of his death, the earliest narrative source is Eusebius, Church History II.25, which reports the beheading at Rome on the authority of still earlier writers (text).

The letters themselves remain the primary documents — the seven undisputed among them the closest thing the first Christian generation left to a self-portrait, dictated in haste, argued at the top of the voice, and never meant to last.

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