Paul: A Biography

N. T. Wright, a New Testament scholar and former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, traces the life of the Apostle Paul from his upbringing as a zealous young Pharisee, a member of a strict Jewish movement devoted to observance of the Torah, the law of Moses, through his transformation on the road to Damascus, his turbulent missionary career, and his final journey to Rome as a prisoner. Wright organizes the biography around two central questions: what motivated Paul in his deepest convictions, and what was the nature of the change he underwent when he encountered the risen Jesus. Wright contends that Paul's hope centered not on souls escaping to heaven but on the renewal of all creation.

Wright begins by situating Paul within the Jewish world of the first century. Saul of Tarsus, as Paul was originally known, grew up in a strict Pharisaic household in the cosmopolitan city of Tarsus in Cilicia (modern southeastern Turkey). He absorbed from childhood the great narrative of Israel: God's chosen people had been exiled to Babylon for idolatry and had never fully experienced the restoration the prophets promised. The Jerusalem Temple was the symbolic meeting point of heaven and earth, and the Torah, the law of Moses, served as a portable Temple for Jews scattered across the wider world.

Saul modeled himself on scriptural heroes of "zeal," particularly Phinehas, who killed an Israelite and a Moabite woman for idolatry, and Elijah, who slaughtered the prophets of the Canaanite deity Baal. This tradition of violent loyalty drove Saul to persecute the earliest followers of Jesus. He was present at the stoning of Stephen, an early Jesus-follower, and set off for Damascus to arrest Jesus-followers there.

Wright proposes that on the road to Damascus, Saul may have been practicing a form of Jewish mystical meditation on the prophet Ezekiel's vision of the divine throne and came face-to-face with Jesus of Nazareth. This was not, Wright insists, a conversion from one religion to another; Saul never stopped believing in the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Rather, he discovered that this God had fulfilled his ancient promises in the shocking form of a crucified and risen Messiah, God's anointed king. Everything Saul had believed was simultaneously confirmed and overturned.

After a period in Damascus and a pilgrimage to Arabia, which Wright interprets as a journey to Mt. Sinai echoing Elijah's retreat, Paul returned to Damascus and visited Jerusalem briefly. The Jerusalem believers sent him back to Tarsus, finding his combative style disruptive. Wright argues that during a 10-year "silent decade" (c. 36-46), Paul worked as a tentmaker while developing through sustained scriptural reflection the theological framework undergirding his later letters. He came to see that Jesus was Israel personified but also Israel's God in person.

Barnabas, a Jewish believer from Cyprus, recruited Paul to help guide the mixed community of Jewish and Gentile (non-Jewish) Jesus-followers in Syrian Antioch, where an unprecedented transethnic community had formed. Paul and Barnabas carried financial relief to Jerusalem during a famine and secured agreement from the Jerusalem leaders that Gentile believers need not be circumcised.

Paul and Barnabas set out on their first missionary journey to Cyprus and southern Galatia, a Roman province in central Turkey. Wright argues that Paul deliberately targeted cities that were centers of the imperial cult, the system of public worship directed at the Roman emperor. A pattern emerged: Paul preached in local synagogues, winning some hearers and enraging others. He was stoned and left for dead in Lystra, but he and Barnabas left behind small communities of believers.

Agitators from Jerusalem soon arrived in both Antioch and Galatia insisting that Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep the Torah. When Peter, one of Jesus's original apostles, visited Antioch and initially ate with Gentile believers but then withdrew under pressure, Paul confronted him publicly, arguing that "a person is not declared 'righteous' by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah" (147). Paul wrote his first surviving letter, Galatians, arguing that Jesus's death and resurrection had launched a new creation in which the family promised to Abraham was marked by faith, not Torah observance. At a conference in Jerusalem (c. 48/49), the leaders agreed that circumcision was not required of Gentile converts.

After a bitter falling-out with Barnabas over their former companion John Mark, who had abandoned the first journey, Paul took Silas as his new partner and crossed into Europe. He founded churches in Philippi, where he was beaten and imprisoned before invoking his Roman citizenship, and in Thessalonica, where opponents accused him of proclaiming "another king, Jesus" (186). In Athens, Paul was brought before the Areopagus, the city's highest court, on a charge of introducing foreign divinities. He spent 18 months in Corinth, where the proconsul Gallio dismissed charges against him as an internal Jewish dispute, effectively granting the Jesus movement legal protection as a form of Jewish worship.

Wright identifies Paul's time in Ephesus (c. 53-56) as the site of his deepest crisis. Wright argues that Paul was imprisoned there, an event that Luke, the author of Acts, does not record. Imprisonment combined with a painful rejection by the Corinthian church brought Paul to despair; he later wrote that he "gave up on life itself" (236). Wright proposes that the christological poems in Philippians and Colossians, celebrating Jesus's sovereignty, grew out of this crisis. The letter to Philemon, written from the same imprisonment, shows Paul standing between the slave owner Philemon and his runaway slave Onesimus, enacting reconciliation.

After his release, Paul traveled through northern Greece, was reconciled with the Corinthian church, and wrote Romans from Corinth in 57. Wright argues that Romans is a targeted letter warning Gentile house-churches in Rome against severing their Jewish roots, tracing God's faithfulness from Abraham through the new Exodus in Jesus to the question of unbelieving Israel.

Paul then journeyed to Jerusalem carrying a financial collection from the Gentile churches to demonstrate the movement's unity. The plan went wrong: Jews from Ephesus accused Paul of defiling the Temple by bringing a Gentile into it, sparking a mob that nearly killed him. The Roman tribune rescued Paul and transferred him to Caesarea, where he spent two years in custody. When the new governor Festus proposed sending him to Jerusalem for trial, Paul invoked his right as a Roman citizen: "I appeal to Caesar" (364).

A harrowing sea voyage ended in shipwreck on Malta. Paul arrived in Rome in early 60 and lived under house arrest, freely teaching about Jesus. Wright considers several possible endings, giving weight to the testimony of Clement of Rome, an early Christian leader who wrote that Paul reached "the farthest limits of the west" (393), possibly indicating a journey to Spain before a final arrest and execution.

Wright closes by assessing why Paul's movement succeeded. He points to Paul's relentless energy, his deep bonds with his communities, and the power of his letters. The communities Paul founded offered a new kind of human society, united across ethnic, social, and gender lines, and caring for the poor. Wright imagines Paul at his death praying his adapted version of the Shema, the ancient Jewish loyalty prayer, with Jesus at its center, declaring his faithfulness one final time.