Paul the Apostle

Paul, known in his own time also by the Jewish name Saul, was a Jewish teacher from Tarsus who became the most influential missionary of the first generation of Christians. He never met Jesus during his lifetime, but after an experience that he understood as a vision of the risen Christ he spent some twenty-five years founding communities across the eastern Roman Empire. His letters are the oldest surviving Christian writings, and his arguments about faith, the Jewish law and the place of non-Jews in the new movement shaped Christianity more than those of any other early figure.

Almost everything known about Paul comes from two kinds of source in the New Testament: his own letters, written in the 50s, and the Acts of the Apostles, a narrative composed a generation or more later. Historians generally give the letters priority where the two disagree, since Acts has its own theological aims and sometimes smooths over conflicts that Paul describes openly. No independent Roman or Jewish source mentions him.

He was born, probably in the first decade of the first century CE, in Tarsus, a prosperous city of Cilicia on the south coast of today's Turkey. According to Acts he held Roman citizenship by birth, a status that later shaped his fate, and he earned his living as a tentmaker or leatherworker. He wrote fluent Greek and knew the Jewish scriptures in their Greek translation. In his letters he describes himself as a Hebrew of the tribe of Benjamin and a Pharisee, a member of the movement that stressed careful observance of the law of Moses. Acts adds that he studied in Jerusalem under the respected teacher Gamaliel, a claim many scholars accept.

Paul first appears as an opponent of the followers of Jesus, a small group within Judaism who proclaimed that the crucified Galilean was the Messiah. He writes that he persecuted this movement with zeal, and Acts places him at the stoning of Stephen, one of its early leaders. A few years after the crucifixion, probably in the mid-30s, he underwent the change that defined the rest of his life. Acts tells the story three times: on the road to Damascus he was struck by a blinding light and heard Jesus speak, and he was healed and baptised in the city. Paul himself says more briefly that God revealed his Son to him and called him to preach among the Gentiles, the non-Jewish peoples. Christians regard this as a genuine encounter with the risen Christ; historians treat it as a religious experience whose reality cannot be tested but whose consequences are clear.

After his conversion he spent time in Arabia, probably the Nabataean kingdom east of the Jordan, and in Damascus, and about three years later went to Jerusalem to meet Peter and James, the brother of Jesus. He then worked for years in Syria and Cilicia, and in Antioch, one of the largest cities of the eastern Mediterranean, where the mixed community of Jewish and Gentile believers became his base.

From the mid-40s to the mid-50s Paul travelled by road and sea through Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece, often with companions such as Barnabas, Silas and Timothy. Acts arranges these travels into three missionary journeys, a scheme modern scholars regard as a convenient simplification. His usual method was to begin in the synagogue of a city and then gather small house churches of Jews and, increasingly, Gentiles. He founded communities at Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth, spent around two years or more at Ephesus, and according to Acts addressed the philosophers of Athens with little success. A Greek inscription naming Gallio, the governor before whom Paul appeared at Corinth, dates that stay to around 50 to 52 CE, one of the few fixed points in his chronology.

The great question of these years was whether Gentile converts had to become Jews, through circumcision and observance of the food laws, in order to belong to the people of God. Paul insisted they did not. Around 48 to 50 CE he and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to defend this position before the leaders of the community there, a meeting usually called the Council of Jerusalem, which accepted that Gentiles need not be circumcised. The agreement did not end the dispute. Paul later describes a sharp public quarrel with Peter at Antioch over whether Jewish and Gentile believers could eat together, and his letters show rival teachers following him into his churches.

Paul kept in touch with his communities through letters, which they read aloud, copied and shared. Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry his name. Scholars agree that seven are certainly his: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Opinion is divided on Colossians and 2 Thessalonians, and most scholars think Ephesians and the so-called Pastoral Letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, were written by later followers in his name. The Letter to the Hebrews, once attributed to him, is almost universally regarded as the work of another author. 1 Thessalonians, written around 50 CE, is probably the oldest surviving Christian document.

The letters were practical, answering questions about marriage, food offered to idols, worship and quarrels, but they also contain the first sustained Christian theology. Paul taught that the death and resurrection of Jesus were the turning point of history, that believers were united with Christ and formed one body regardless of origin, and that people are put right with God through faith rather than through works of the Jewish law. He expected Christ to return soon. His hymn on love in 1 Corinthians and his long argument in Romans about the fate of Israel are among the most studied passages ever written.

Around 57 CE Paul travelled to Jerusalem with money collected from his Gentile churches for the poor among the believers there, a gesture of unity he considered important. According to Acts, a riot broke out in the Temple when he was accused of bringing a Gentile into it, and he was taken into Roman custody. He spent two years imprisoned at Caesarea, then used his right as a citizen to appeal to the emperor's court. On the voyage to Italy his ship was wrecked on Malta, and he reached Rome, where Acts leaves him living under guard for two years, still preaching.

What happened next is not recorded in the New Testament. Early Christian tradition, from the late first century onwards, holds that he was executed in Rome under the emperor Nero, by beheading as befitted a citizen, perhaps in the persecution that followed the great fire of 64 CE. A later tradition that he first travelled to Spain cannot be confirmed. The Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome stands over the place where he is believed to be buried.

Paul's work made Christianity a movement open to all peoples rather than a group within Judaism, and his letters, gathered into a collection by the early second century, became part of Christian scripture. Later thinkers repeatedly returned to him. Augustine of Hippo drew from Romans his ideas about grace and sin, and Martin Luther found in the same letter the doctrine of justification by faith that launched the Reformation. Christians of every tradition honour him as a saint and apostle. Critics, from ancient opponents to modern writers, have accused him of turning the teaching of Jesus into a different religion. Since the late twentieth century many scholars, under what is called the New Perspective on Paul, have stressed that he remained a Jew who saw his mission as part of Israel's story rather than a rejection of it.