Story

Paul of Tarsus

c. 33-67 CE

Biblical Narrative

Saul of Tarsus was a Pharisee, a Jew of the diaspora, born in the Cilician city that Roman Mark Antony had granted free status, raised at the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem and zealous beyond his years for the traditions of his fathers. When the followers of the crucified Galilean began preaching in Jerusalem that he had risen, Saul threw himself into their suppression. He stood by approving while the witnesses laid their cloaks at his feet and stoned Stephen the Hellenist, and he extended the campaign — letters in hand from the High Priest — to the synagogues of Damascus, that any of the Way he found there, men or women, he might bring bound to Jerusalem.

And on the road, near Damascus, at noon, a light from heaven brighter than the sun struck him to the ground. And a voice said: Sha'ul, Sha'ul, why persecutest thou me? And he said: Who art thou, Lord? And the voice: I am Yeshua whom thou persecutest. He rose blind, was led by the hand into the city, and after three days the disciple Hananiah came and laid hands on him; and the scales fell from his eyes. The fiercest persecutor of the Jesus movement became its most untiring missionary, and he took for the Roman world the Roman form of his name: Paulos — Paul.

For some thirty years he criss-crossed the eastern Mediterranean. He preached in synagogues and in marketplaces; he was beaten with rods three times, scourged five times, shipwrecked three times; he founded congregations in Antioch, in Galatia, in Philippi, in Thessalonica, in Corinth, in Ephesus. Wherever the message was received, a quarrel followed: must the gentile believers be circumcised? Must they keep kosher? Paul's answer, fought out in his letters and at the council of Jerusalem, was no — the cross had abolished the wall between Jew and Greek, and faith in the risen Messiah was sufficient.

He wrote letters — to the Thessalonians, to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the Romans, to the Philippians, to Philemon — and the letters survived him, were copied and recopied, and became the earliest documents of the new religion, written before any of the four Gospels. Arrested in Jerusalem on a riot in the Temple courts, he appealed as a Roman citizen to Caesar; he was sent under guard to Rome; the book of Acts ends with him under house arrest in the imperial city, preaching ״with all confidence, no man forbidding him.״ Tradition holds that he was beheaded under Nero, around 64 or 67 CE, on the Ostian Way.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.Galatians 3:28

Archaeology · History · Genetics

Paul of Tarsus is, alongside Jesus, the most consequential figure in the formation of Christianity, and unlike Jesus he left a substantial documentary record in his own hand. The seven undisputed Pauline letters (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon), all dated between c. 50 and c. 58 CE, are the oldest surviving Christian documents and the only first-person testimony of any first-generation follower of Jesus. They predate the Gospels by twenty to forty years and provide the basic chronology — and theology — of the apostolic generation.

Paul's biography can be reconstructed from the letters themselves (the autobiographical sections of Galatians 1-2, 2 Corinthians 11, Philippians 3) and from the Acts of the Apostles, written c. 80-90 CE by the author of Luke. The two sources sometimes diverge — most famously on the number and purpose of Paul's visits to Jerusalem — and modern scholarship since the work of F. C. Baur in the 19th century has tended to privilege the letters as primary. E. P. Sanders's Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) revolutionised the field by reframing Paul not as a critic of Jewish ״legalism״ (a Reformation-era projection) but as a Jewish apocalyptic thinker convinced that the Messiah's death and resurrection had inaugurated the eschatological ingathering of the gentiles foretold by Isaiah and the prophets.

The infrastructure of Paul's mission was the Roman Empire of the mid-first century — the Pax Romana, the legal framework of Roman citizenship (which Paul claimed and which permitted his appeal to Caesar), and the network of paved Roman roads and Mediterranean shipping that made his itineraries possible. Paul travelled an estimated 10,000 miles, mostly along the great via Sebaste of Asia Minor and the Egnatian Way of Macedonia, founding congregations in cities — Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica — that were precisely the commercial and administrative hubs of the eastern empire. The new religion spread along the trade routes the empire had built.

Paul never met Jesus during his lifetime; his apostolic authority rested on the Damascus-road vision, which he describes as a revelation (apokalypsis) of the risen Christ. This claim was contested in his lifetime — by the ״superlative apostles״ at Corinth, by the Judaising teachers at Galatia, by James the Just and the Jerusalem leadership over table-fellowship at Antioch (Galatians 2:11-14). The decisive break with the Torah-observant Jewish-Christian movement based in Jerusalem came at the Council of Jerusalem (c. 49 CE) and was hardened by the destruction of the Jerusalem church in 70 CE. From that wreckage, the gentile churches that Paul had founded — and his letters that they preserved — emerged as the dominant trajectory of the new religion.

Paul, in short, is not the founder of Christianity in the sense of being the inventor of a religion that displaces Judaism. He is its first theologian — the man who works out, in real time and in pastoral correspondence, what it means that the God of Israel has acted in the cross and resurrection.N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (2018), paraphrased