Saint Paul

Cilician religious leader

• Born: c. 10 c.e.
• Birthplace: Tarsus, Cilicia (now in Turkey)
• Died: c. 64 c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Paul spread the teachings of an obscure Jewish sect throughout the eastern Mediterranean region and eventually to Rome. As the educated apostle, he gave Christianity a measure of intellectual credibility and formulated much of what would later become doctrine.

Early Life

Saint Paul was born at Tarsus in Cilicia, a region in southeast Asia Minor, on the Mediterranean Sea. He was a Jew, known during his early years by the name of Saul. Little documentary evidence exists concerning these years, but certain things can be inferred from Paul’s status at the time that he appeared on the historical scene.

Paul was trained as a rabbi in the Pharisaic tradition. His background as a Pharisee indicates a close adherence to both the written law and the oral, or traditional, law. This stance would have been a source of constant tension between Paul and the Apostles who arose out of the village culture of Palestine. In the Gospels, the term Pharisee takes on connotations of self-righteousness and sanctimoniousness. Further, Paul was a product of the city and of the Diaspora, the settlements of those Jews who had been dispersed throughout Asia Minor. Certain awkward phrases in his writings, when he is trying to be simpler, indicate that he was never comfortable with agricultural or bucolic topics. He was exposed early in life to Greek language, mythology, and culture. In the Hellenistic synagogues where he worshiped as a youth, he would have heard the Jewish scriptures read not in Hebrew but in Greek translation. Paul is identified in the Acts of the Apostles as a Roman citizen, so rare a status for a Jew that his family must have been influential and highly connected. Finally, he was for a time a leading persecutor of the new sect, seeing the followers of Jesus as a grave threat to the Jewish legal tradition.

For all the reasons cited above, it is little wonder that after his conversion many of his fellow Jewish Christians viewed him with suspicion and even with hostility. However, Paul’s conversion was so total and the rejection of his past life so absolute that other writers have felt the need to dramatize it, even though Paul’s own letters do not describe it at all.

Life’s Work

Paul’s great achievement was to take Christianity from Jerusalem throughout the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire and finally to the capital itself. He possessed the vision to see that the new faith had a message and an appeal that were not limited to the Jews.

During the years preceding the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, the future of Christianity was not promising. Rome had imposed a political order on the eastern Mediterranean and had inculcated its attitudes of tolerance (for the times) and materialism. The relative peace and prosperity of the period, however, apparently proved insufficient to meet the spiritual and psychological needs of the subject peoples. The major ancient religions had ossified and were the source of very little spiritual energy. Among the Greeks and Romans, religious practice had become almost purely conventional, and the Jews awaited the great supernatural event that would revitalize them.

In response to this state of affairs, philosophical and religious sects sprang up everywhere, including Greek syncretism, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. The struggles of these and many other sects to win the minds and hearts of the people would continue for the next five hundred years (before Saint Augustine’s conversion to Christianity in 386-387, he experimented with virtually all of its competitors). At the middle of the first century after the death of Jesus, Christianity—a provincial religion under the leadership of a small group of unsophisticated and unlettered men—seemed unlikely to be the winner of this great competition. Thus, it is difficult to overstate the impact of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus.

He was a most unlikely Apostle of the crucified carpenter from Galilee. Far from being a man of the people, he was a member of the most learned Jewish party. He held Roman citizenship. He had not been personally associated with Jesus of Nazareth and viewed those who had been as a threat to the Jewish law, which he uncompromisingly supported. His nature was sometimes imperious, as his writings disclose. He did not leave a description of his conversion as Saint Augustine was later to do, but something in his thinking was leading him toward the profound change that would make him history’s archetypal Christian convert. He developed a sense of the frailty and corruption of the world’s institutions, a disgust for the secular materialism that surrounded him, and a conviction that humanity’s only hope lay in dying to all worldly things. He gave up a comfortable, settled life for that of an itinerant preacher and religious organizer. He changed from a defender of the legal tradition of Judaism to the most zealous opponent of those Jewish Christians who sought to retain any part of it.

Saul first appears in the book of the Acts of the Apostles at Jerusalem, as a witness to the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. His complicity in the execution is strongly suggested, for he is reported to have consented to the death (as if he had some say in the matter), and the witnesses laid their clothes down at his feet. His age at the time is not known, but he is described as a young man. Succeeding chapters paint him as a fierce oppressor of the Christians. His persecutions culminate in a trip to Damascus, where, under authority from the high priests, he is to harry all the Christians he can find. It is on this journey that he has his famous conversion experience: He hears the voice of Jesus challenging him, and he is struck blind. After three days, his sight is restored. He is baptized and almost immediately begins to preach in the synagogues that Christ is the Son of God. Scholars who do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of the scriptural account suggest that it results from Paul’s having left no account of his own. Presented with the sudden, total, and inexplicable change in Saul’s behavior, perhaps his first biographer could not resist romanticizing it.

The remainder of his story in Acts is replete with adventure and conflict. Saul is so skilled in disputation that both his Jewish and Greek opponents plot to kill him; he makes narrow and dramatic escapes. Still the Christians in Jerusalem cannot fully trust him; they remember the old Saul, and send him back to Tarsus. By chapter 13 of Acts, Saul (whose name means “asked of God” in Hebrew) has become known as Paul (meaning “small” in Greek). He has also become the missionary to the Gentiles. He travels widely: preaching, healing, organizing Christian communities, and suffering periods of hardship and imprisonment. The Scriptures hint at but give no account of his eventual martyrdom in Rome; legend would later supply one.

Much of Paul’s career as a missionary can only be the object of conjecture. Some of his work and the time of its accomplishment have been verified through seven of his letters whose genuineness is generally accepted—his epistles to the various fledgling Christian communities. The first letter to the church at Thessalonica, provincial capital of Macedonia, was written from Corinth, c. 51. At that time, Paul was in the company of Silvanus (known in Acts as Silas) and Timothy. About three years later, from Ephesus in western Asia Minor, he wrote a stinging letter to the Christians in Galatia. They had been entertaining rival missionaries, who apparently argued that pagan converts were subject to the Jewish law. In this letter, Paul defends his understanding of the Gospel and his teaching authority with occasionally bitter sarcasm.

The next year, near the end of his stay at Ephesus, he wrote the first of two extant letters to the church at Corinth, which he had founded c. 50. The church had developed several factions and incipient heresies (in the early church, it was largely Paul who delineated the orthodoxies and the heresies). In addition to responding to these matters, Paul offers sexual advice to husbands and wives, his famous pronouncement that the ideal Christian life is a celibate one, and his beautiful disquisition on love. A second letter to the Corinthians, written c. 56, asserts Paul’s credentials and questions with heavy irony those of false prophets who have been wooing the flock. The letter addresses a number of other issues in such a curious chronology that it may well be a composite of several fragments, the work of some ancient editor. Paul’s physical appearance is a mystery (early iconography seems based on little more than imagination), but in this letter he does allude to a “thorn in the flesh” from which three separate entreaties to the Lord have not relieved him. The nature of the illness is not known but has been the object of much speculation.

Around 57, during his last stay at Corinth, Paul wrote a long letter to Rome. It was both a letter of introduction and a theological treatise, written in anticipation of his preaching there. His letter to the church at Philippi was long held to have been written at Rome c. 62, during his two years of imprisonment there. Some scholars argue, however, that at least a part of it was written much earlier (c. 56) from a prison in Caesarea or Ephesus. Another letter from prison—a request that Philemon, a Colossian Christian, magnanimously take back a runaway slave whom Paul has converted—is also variously dated, depending on whether the missionary wrote from Rome or elsewhere. Other letters (such as Timothy and Titus) bear Paul’s name, but their authenticity has been disputed.

The last of Paul’s many arrests occurred in Jerusalem, where he was attempting to promote unity within the Christian community (ironically, he himself had been one of the divisive factors there). As a citizen, he appealed to Rome and was transported to the capital. His lengthy period of imprisonment there is described in some detail in Acts. It is presumed that around 64 he was executed—legend has it that he was beheaded—just preceding Nero’s persecution of the Roman Christians.

Significance

While Saint Peter and the other Palestinian Apostles were at first content to limit Christianity to converted Jews, Saint Paul determined to take it to the Gentiles. As the other Apostles moved back and forth among the villages of their native region, Paul spread the faith to the bustling cities of Asia Minor and southern Europe. He tirelessly plied the trade routes of the Eastern Roman Empire, setting up church after church in the major population centers. In his second letter to the Corinthians, he catalogs his sufferings: imprisonments, beatings, floggings, a stoning, shipwreck, assassination plots, hunger, thirst, and—above all else—anxiety for the welfare of his churches.

He believed, as did the other primitive Christians, that he lived at the end of history, that the second coming of his Lord was at hand. Even so, he threw himself into every aspect of church organization—doctrine, ritual, politics. He fought lethargy here, inappropriate enthusiasm there. He constantly sought to make peace between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. His dictates on such subjects as Christian celibacy and the lesser role of women in the church continue to provoke controversy, thousands of years after they were written.

Paul has been called the man who delivered Christianity from Judaism. He has been called the man who furnished Christianity with its intellectual content. Because of his argument that the Crucifixion represents a covenant superseding the ancient law, he has been called the father of the Reformation, and it has been suggested that Protestantism derives from him as Catholicism derives from Saint Peter. He has been called a compulsive neurotic, whose works were instances of sublimation and whose thorn in the flesh was psychosomatic. Writer George Bernard Shaw characterized him as the fanatic who corrupted the teachings of Jesus. It would be extravagant to claim that Christianity would not have survived without Paul. It is safe to say that it would not have survived in its present form without him.

Bibliography

Bruce, F. F. Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983. This book, which is accessible to the general reader, focuses on Paul’s life, though there is also discussion of his writings. Well illustrated, with indexes of names and places, subjects, and references.

Davies, William David. Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Attempts to prove that Paul was in the mainstream of first century Judaism and that Hellenistic influences on him have been overestimated. The first of ten chapters assesses the degree of difference between Palestinian and Diaspora Judaism. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss Paul as preacher and teacher.

Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. This social history begins with the admission that great diversity existed within early Christianity. The author chooses to study Paul, his coworkers, and his congregations as the best-documented segment of the early Christian movement. The social level of Pauline Christians and the governance and rituals of their communities are discussed at length. Includes notes, indexes, and an extensive bibliography.

Meeks, Wayne A., ed. The Writings of Saint Paul. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. A critical edition containing the Revised Standard Version of the undoubted letters of Paul and the works of the Pauline school, heavily annotated. Also contains more than two dozen essays and excerpts evaluating, from diverse points of view, Paul’s thought, works, and influence on modern Christianity.

Schoeps, Hans J. Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish History. Translated by Harold Knight. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979. The author begins by sketching the several approaches to interpretation (for example, the Hellenistic approach and the Palestinian-Judaic approach); then he treats Paul’s position in the primitive church, his eschatology, his soteriology (theology of salvation), his views on the law, and his concept of history. Indexed to biblical passages and to modern authors. Heavily annotated.

Stendahl, Krister. The Bible and the Role of Women: A Case Study in Hermeneutics. Translated by Emilie T. Sander. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976. This slim volume is composed of Stendahl’s essay, a lengthy editor’s introduction and author’s preface, and a copious bibliography. The essay first appeared in 1958, growing out of a specific controversy over the proposed ordination of women as priests in the Church of Sweden (Lutheran). Part 2 of the essay, “The Biblical View of Male and Female,” is devoted largely to an exegesis of Paul’s pronouncements on the subject in his epistles.