Paul

I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.

— Philippians 3:8 (ESV)

Overview

Paul, called Saul before his conversion, was a Jewish Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin and a Roman citizen from Tarsus who became, after encountering the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, the apostle chiefly responsible for carrying the gospel to the Gentiles. Thirteen of the New Testament’s books are attributed to him, more than any other biblical author, and were already being copied and read together as a single collected corpus within a few generations of his death.¹

Life and Ministry

Saul was born a Roman citizen in Tarsus (Acts 9:11; 22:3, 25-28), an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin circumcised on the eighth day (Romans 11:1; Philippians 3:5). Brought up in Jerusalem and “trained in the school of Gamaliel according to the strict interpretation of our ancestral law” (Acts 22:3), he became a Pharisee (Acts 23:6) exceedingly zealous for his ancestral traditions, surpassing many of his own age and people (Galatians 1:14). By his own later account, he violently persecuted the church before his conversion, giving approval to the stoning of Stephen and dragging believers from their homes to prison (Acts 8:1-3; Galatians 1:13).

While still “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” and carrying letters authorizing the arrest of believers in Damascus (Acts 9:1-2), Saul encountered the risen Christ on the road there (Acts 9:3-8; 22:6-11; 26:12-18). One reconstruction of Paul’s chronology places this conversion in AD 34/35, anchoring the rest of his life to two fixed points: Christ’s crucifixion in AD 33, and Paul’s appearance before the proconsul Gallio at Corinth (Acts 18:12), whose term of office is independently dated to early summer AD 51 through early summer AD 52.² After a period in Damascus and Arabia, Paul returned to Jerusalem three years after his conversion, in the summer of AD 37, where Barnabas introduced him to the apostles (Galatians 1:17-18; Acts 9:26-28).²

From roughly AD 48 onward, Paul carried out three missionary journeys through Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia, planting and writing to churches in cities including Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, and Thessalonica before returning to Jerusalem a final time; the sequence and cities are traced in full in Paul’s missionary journeys. Arrested in Jerusalem, he was imprisoned in Caesarea and then transported to Rome for trial as a Roman citizen (Acts 21-28). Christian tradition holds that Paul was martyred in Rome under the emperor Nero; the same chronological reconstruction dates his death to AD 64-65, during Nero’s persecution of Christians following the great fire of Rome, though another estimate in the same source places it as late as AD 67.³

Theological Contribution

Paul’s letters argue at length that justification and eternal life come not through the law of Moses or any other system of works, but through faith in Christ alone, a doctrine that removed the ground for regarding Jewish and Gentile believers unequally: “since faith in Christ is the common ground of justification for Jews and Gentiles, both were to be admitted upon equal terms to all the rights and privileges of the Christian church.”⁴ Paul treats this equal standing as already settled in principle at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:1-29) and argued for its outworking, that the Mosaic law was consequently not to be imposed on Gentile believers, throughout his letters.⁴

Reformed scholarship continues to debate what organizes Paul’s theology at its center. Richard Gaffin holds that union with Christ functions as Paul’s central dogma, from which the twin benefits of justification and sanctification both flow; J. V. Fesko holds instead that justification, while not itself a “central dogma,” is central to Paul’s theology and logically prior to union with Christ, which he sees as undergirding the whole order of salvation without displacing the forensic verdict as its foundation.⁵ The wider case for each reading, and Paul’s teaching on union with Christ more fully, are treated in Pauline theology.

Historical Significance

Paul’s letters were gathered and copied as a collection early. All thirteen were already received as canonical Scripture by significant patristic witnesses, including Irenaeus and the Muratorian fragment, and a third-century manuscript such as P46 shows his letters already circulating together as a single codex rather than as separate, unrelated documents.¹

Centuries later, Martin Luther’s reading of Paul’s contrast between “faith” and “works of the law,” especially in Galatians, supplied the Reformation its central hermeneutical principle: Luther took the contrast as one between earning salvation through meritorious human effort and receiving it through faith alone, and turned it into “a powerful polemical weapon against the practices and teachings of the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Church.”⁶ That reading of Paul shaped how Protestant interpreters understood both Paul and first-century Judaism for the next four centuries, until E. P. Sanders’s 1977 study of Palestinian Judaism argued it rested on a caricature of Jewish belief and practice, launching what came to be called the “New Perspective on Paul.”⁶ That debate, over how Paul’s own argument relates to the Judaism of his day, continues among Pauline scholars and is treated in full in the site’s dedicated article on the New Perspective on Paul.

Related Doctrines

References

Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 7, “Manuscripts and Christian Book Production”: “all thirteen epistles of Paul were received as canonical prior to this time by significant Patristic witnesses like Irenaeus and the Muratorian fragment… P46 stands as an impressively early witness that Paul’s letters were grouped together as a unit by early Christians.” ↩ ↩²
J. Paul Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 4th ed. (September 23, 2010), 1-3. ↩ ↩²
Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 16 n.18: “Christian tradition says that Paul was martyred during the reign of Nero (r. AD 54 - June 9, 68). Carson (370) places Paul’s death in AD 64-65, though Finegan (401) puts it as June 29, AD 67.” ↩
Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. XXX, 446-447. ↩ ↩²
Carol Man Fen Chen, A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 24-25 n.57. ↩
Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Introduction,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 19-20. ↩ ↩²