A Biography

By N. T. Wright

…when Paul wrote the Greek word pneuma, he did not have the option of a distinction between upper and lower case. His letters were in any case written initially to be read out loud. The word pneuma had to make its way in a world where it had different shades of philosophical and religious meaning without the help of visible markings.

(Wright 2018, XII)

… The term “Damascus Road” has become proverbial, referring to any sudden transformation in personal belief or character, any “conversion,” whether “religious,” “political,” or even aesthetic.

… This contemporary proverbial usage gets in the way. It makes it harder for us to understand the original event. So does the language of “conversion” itself. That word today might point to someone being “converted” from secular atheism or agnosticism to some form of Christian belief, or perhaps to someone being “converted” from a “religion” such as Buddhism or Islam to a “religion” called “Christianity” – or, of Damascus Saul of Tarsus was “converted” from something called “Judaism” to something called “Christianity” – and that in his mature thought he was comparing these two “religions,” explaining why the latter was to be preferred. But if we approach matters in that way we will, quite simply, never understand either Saul of Tarsus or Paul the Apostle.

For a start, and as a sign that there are tricky corners to be turned, the word “Judaism” in Paul’s world (Greek Ioudaimos) didn’t refer to what we would call “a religion.” For that matter, and again to signal challenges ahead, the word “religion” has itself changed meaning. In Paul’s day, “religion” consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another. In the modern Western world, “religion” tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture, politics, and community life. For Paul, “religion” was woven in with all of life; for the modern Western world, it is separated from it.

So when, in what is probably his earliest letter, Paul talks about “advancing in Judaism beyond any of his age,” the word “Judaism” refers, not to a “religion,” but to an activity: the zealous propagation and defense of the ancestral way of life.

(Wright 2018, 3-4)

… I assumed without question, until at least my thirties, that the whole point of Christianity was for people to “go to heaven when they died.” Hymns, prayers, and sermons (including the first few hundred of my own sermons) all pointed this way. So, it seemed, did Paul: “We are citizens of heaven,” he wrote. The language of “salvation” and “glorification,” central to Romans, Paul’s greatest letter, was assumed to mean the same thing: being “saved” or being “glorified” meant “going to heaven,” neither more nor less. We took it for granted that the question of “justification,” widely regarded as Paul’s principal doctrine, was his main answer as to how “salvation” worked in practice; so, for example, “Those he justified, he also glorified” meant, “First you get justified, and then you end up in heaven.” Looking back now, I believe that in our diligent searching of the scriptures we were looking for correct biblical answers to medieval questions.

These were not, it turns out, the questions asked by the first Christians. It never occurred to my friends and me that, if we were to scour the first century for people who were hoping that their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and “go to heaven,” we would discover Platonists like Plutarch, not Christians like Paul. It never dawned on us that the “heaven and hell” framework we took for granted was a construct of the High Middle Ages, to which the sixteenth-century Reformers were providing important new twists but which was at best a distortion of the first-century perspective. For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world. (When Paul says, “We are citizens of heave,” he goes on at once to say that Jesus will come from heaven not to take us back there, but to transform the present world and us with it.) And this hope for “resurrection,” for new bodies within a newly reconstituted creation, doesn’t just mean rethinking the ultimate “destination,” the eventual future hope. It changes everything on the way as well.

Once we get clear about this, we gain a “historical” perspective in three different senses. First, we begin to see that it matters to try to find out what the first-century Paul was actually talking about over against what later theologians and preachers have assumed he was talking about.

… Secondly, when we start to appreciate “what Paul was really talking about,” we find that he was himself talking about “history” in the sense of “what happens in the real world,” the world of space, time, and matter. He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of “salvation” was about Israel’s Messiah “inheriting the world,” as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul’s perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new “otherworldly” hope.

…Third, therefore, as far as Paul was concerned, his own “historical” context and setting mattered.

… This is where Paul’s loyalty to the hope of Israel comes through so strongly. Paul believed that in Jesus the One God had acted “when the fullness of time arrived.” Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

So when we try to understand Paul, we must do the hard work of understanding his context – or rather, we should say, his contexts, plural. His Jewish world and the multifaceted Greco-Roman world of politics, “religion,” philosophy, and all the rest that affected in a thousand ways the Jewish world that lived within it are much, much more than simply a “frame” within which can display a Pauline portrait. Actually, as any art gallery director knows, the frame of a portrait isn’t just an optional border. It can make or mar the artist’s intention, facilitating appreciation or distracting the eye and skewing the perspective. But with a historical figure like Paul, the surrounding culture isn’t even a frame. It is part of the portrait itself. Unless we understand its shape and key features, we will not understand what made Paul tick and why his work succeeded, which is our first main question. And unless we understand Paul’s Jewish world in particular, we will not even know how to ask our second question: what it meant for Paul to change from being a zealous persecutor of Jesus’s followers to becoming a zealous Jesus-follower himself.

(Wright 2018, 7-10)

… It seems improbable that a Jewish tentmaker in a city like Tarsus would be selling only to other Jews. We can safely assume, then, that Saul grew up in a cheerfully strict observant Jewish home, on the one hand, and in a polygon, multicultural, multiethnic working environment on the other. Strict adherence to ancestral tradition did not mean living a sheltered life, unaware of how the rest of the world worked, spoke, behaved, and reasoned.

(Wright 2018, 35)

… In the longer perspective of history, in fact, it is those who know only one language who the odd ones out.

(Wright 2018, 36)

… Upward again, then to the lower parts of what seems to be a figure on the throne, some kind of human form. Saul of Tarsus, head full of scripture, heart full of zeal, raises his eyes slowly upward once more. He is seeing now, eyes wide open, conscious of being wide awake but conscious also that there seems to be a rift in reality, a fissure in the fabric of the cosmos, and that his waking eyes are seeing things so dangerous that if he were not so prepared, so purified, so carefully devout, he would never have dared to come this far. Upward again, from the chest to the face. He raises his eyes to see the one he has worshipped and served all his life … And he comes face-to-face with Jesus of Nazareth.

(Wright 2018, 52)

… The local Jewish community in Damascus was shocked at the sudden turnaround of this hotheaded young man, transformed from persecutor to proclaimer. Not just shocked; they were deeply offended (as of course Saul himself had been) at the suggestion that Israel’s history period, so far as we can tell, believed in a coming messiah in the first place. Those who did hope for such a figure envisaged the messiah as a warrior hero. He would be a new David; he would overthrow the wicked pagans, restore the Temple to make it fit for Israel’s God to come back to at last, and establish a worldwide rule of justice and peace. Jesus of Nazareth, as everybody knew, had done none of those things. Saul of Tarsus could produce all the scriptural “proofs” he liked from his long years of study. But the synagogue in Damascus was not going to be convinced.

(Wright 2018, 59)

… He had gone to Jerusalem to argue for this principle and had won the day. But now he circumcises Timothy. Why? Is this not inconsistent? What is Paul’s justification?

Here we see the start of the tricky policy that Paul spells out in 1 Corinthians 9. Everything depends on motivation. If someone says that Titus has to be circumcised because otherwise he won’t be able to join the family at the table, Paul will object, saying Titus is a believer and he belongs there. But he wants to take Timothy with him on the next phase of his work, and that will involve going again and again into synagogues. It seems unlikely that synagogue officials would go to the lengths of making a physical check on whether newcomers had been circumcised, but Paul wants to be able to assure any doubters that all the members of the party are in fact officially Jewish.

(Wright 2018, 175-176)

As we saw earlier, the normal translation of koinonia is “fellowship,” but that coin has worn smooth with long use. It can mean “business partnership” too; that is part of it, but again it doesn’t get to the heart. And the heart is what matters. When our words run out, we need images: the look of delight when a dear friend pays an unexpected visit, the glance of understanding between musicians as together they say something utterly beautiful, the long squeeze of a hand by a hospital bed, the contentment and gratitude that accompany shared worship and prayer – all this and more. The other Greek word for which Paul would reach is of course agape, “love,” but once again our English term is so overused that we can easily fail to recognize it as it walks nearby, like a short-sighted lover failing to recognize the beloved; what we so often miss is that it means the world, and more than the world. “The son of God loved me.” Paul had written to the Galatians, “and gave himself for me.” What we see as Paul makes his way around the cities of northern Greece is what that love looks like when it translates into the personal and pastoral ministry of the suffering and celebrating apostle.

(Wright 2018, 191)

You can see the Acropolis to excellent effect, displaying the Parthenon, the Temple of Nike, and all the rest, from another steep hill a few hundred yards to the northwest. This is the Areopagus, the “Hill of Mars” – Mars was the god of war – where from early times the senior council of Athens used to meet. Athens was in that period ruled by “archons” (the word simply means “the ruling ones”), nine of whom were elected each year. When their term of office was over, they automatically became members of the Areopagus, the hill giving its name to the body that met there. Though the status and role of the body changed as political reforms came and went, it continued to be a powerful influence in Athenian public life, and it also functioned as a court to try serious offenses, including homicide, arson, and some religious cases.

So when Paul was brought to the Areopagus, probably in late 50 or early 51, and when he began by declaring that temples to the gods were a category mistake, we should not suppose that he was engaging a philosophers’ debating society. Generations of readers, studying what has been called Paul’s “Areopagus address” in Acts 17:22-31, have supposed that he was trying to argue his way, on philosophical grounds, up to a statement of Christian way, on philosophical grounds, up to a statement of Christian belief. Many in the modern period who have wanted to construct what is sometimes called “natural theology” – arguing for the existence of God and perhaps the truth of Christianity by observation of the natural world alone, without appeal to special divine revelation – have hailed this speech as a forerunner of their efforts. And many who have wanted, for various reasons, to resist such “natural theology,” have looked at Acts 17 and declared that, whatever Luke may have thought, the Paul we know from the letters would never have gone in for that kind of discourse. That just wasn’t his kind of thing.

But all this is a misunderstanding. The Areopagus was a court. Paul was on trial. It was a dangerous moment. It could have gone badly wrong. He was all alone, or so it seems, still waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him. It appears that Timothy had come to him in Athens, but that Paul, anxious about the little church in Thessalonica, had sent Timothy back at once to see how they were getting on. He has important things on his mind; as he says on another occasion, there are barrels outside and fears inside. He has no leisure, physical or mental, to play the detached philosopher. It is, however, utterly characteristic of the man that he would seize the opportunity not merely to defend himself – though that is what he is doing throughout the speech – but to do so in such a way as to challenge, with considerable rhetorical skill, the basic assumptions of the Greek worldview.

I say, “with rhetorical skill,” but of course we have only a bare summary of what Paul said. If you read the Greek text of Paul’s speech as Luke reports it at the speed you might expect him to speak to a large gathering in the open air, it will take two minutes, or perhaps a little longer if you allow for a few well-judged rhetorical pauses. … Paul, of all people, would not want to pass up a chance like this to address the highest court in the proud capital of ancient culture, the home of philosophy, the cradle of democracy. I suspect that he spoke for two hours rather than two minutes. His speech would form a book in itself, but Luke has no space for such a thing within his own work. He has boiled it down to the bones.

… People often say that the ancient pagan world was tolerant of religious diversity, and there is a sense in which that is true.

… However, tolerance was limited and controlled. There is evidence that philosophers were banished from cities because of their teaching. In particular, Athens itself had staged the trial of Socrates (399 BC), seen from that day to this as one of the most important events in the history of philosophy. What was Socrates’s crime? Corrupting the young and introducing foreign divinities. Since there were political motives as well behind Socrates’s trial, we cannot be entirely sure what this mean, but the memory lived on. … He would have been a potential threat to society, to stability, to the worship of the divinities by whose beneficence the city lived, moved, and had its being. He had to be investigated.

Even before Paul gets to the Areopagus to face a charge of introducing novel theological ideas, Luke is insinuating that the whole city was eager for that kind of thing anyway. But you do not take someone to the highest court in the land unless there are serious questions to be addressed, with the undertones of a potential capital charge. The Areopagus, to repeat, was not a philosophers’ debating society.

The philosophers were more likely to debate in the marketplace, and that, as well as the synagogue, is where Paul had begun. We hear nothing of the local Jewish reaction; our attention is drawn to the debates with the Epicureans and the Stoics..

… The Epicureans and the Stoics were two of the main philosophical schools the time. There was also the “Academy,” the ancient school of Plato, which was making a comeback after years of cautious agnosticism. But the Epicureans, the most famous of whom at the time was the Roman poet Lucretius, and the Stoics, among whom were Paul’s near contemporaries Seneca and Epictetus, were the main contenders. Of the two, Stoicism was the more popular. The overlaps and differences between these two great systems can be seen on many fronts, but for Paul’s purposes what mattered was their view about “God” or “the gods.” What he was saying about the One God fitted with neither. Yet he could see that both schools were hinting at things that pointed beyond their own proposals.

The key question concerned the relationship between “God” or “the gods” and the world, particularly the lives of humans. The Epicureans held that, though the gods might well exist, they live in a world of their own entirely separate from the human world. The world inhabited by humans carries on under its own impetus. Its atoms (this view goes back to the fifth-century BC Democritus) move to and fro, “swerving” this way and that and thereby colliding with one another and producing different effects, different evolving life-forms. Everything in the world and human life thus has “natural” causes, and at death constituent atoms are dispersed beyond recall and the entire human person ceases to exist. This worldview remained the opinion of a small minority right up until the eighteenth century. Since then, it has become the dominant one in modern Western culture. Many imagine it to be a modern “discovery.”

The Stoics, by contrast, were basically pantheists, “God” and the world are more or less the same thing, and the divine spark of life, the logos, exists within everything. This life consists of a fire or spirit that animates the whole universe and that will eventually blaze out in a great moment of conflagration. After that, like the phoenix, the whole world will begin all over again, and events will take exactly the same course as before. Wise and virtuous human life then consists in thinking and acting in accordance with the inner logos of the world. Many Stoics, however, of who Epictetus was a good example, enjoyed a flexible sort of pantheism in which, though they were themselves technically as much as part of “the divinity” as anything else, they could address the divine being in respectful and grateful worship.

(Wright 2018, 193-198)

If we make a list of three topics beginning with “sex” and “money”, we might expect the third to be “power,” but in this case it is the parousia, the “appearing” of Jesus. The first two are obvious, but need to be stressed. Sexual holiness is mandatory, not optional, for followers of Jesus. What that means in practice Paul will later spell out in his first letter to Corinth.

(Wright 2018, 217)

… As so often in Jewish writing of roughly this period, what sounds to us like “end-of-the-world” language is used to denote and refer to things that we might call major world events, the sudden rise and fall of ruling powers and the like, and to invest those events with their inner, God-related significance.

Classic examples are found in books like Isaiah, where the language of the sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven is deployed to denote the fall of Babylon and to invest that event with its “cosmic” significance, which is that the powers of the heavens are shaken! Or take the case of Jeremiah, who in his early days had prophesied that the world would return to chaos. Since the Temple in Jerusalem was regarded as the focal point of creation, of heaven and earth coming together, this was the appropriate language to use when speaking prophetically of a time when the Temple would be destroyed. Jeremiah spent many years worrying about whether he was after all a false prophet, not because the Temple had not fallen.

This is how such language was used across many centuries in the Israelite and Jewish culture, which had always believed in the close link of “heaven” and “earth” and found it natural to use the language of “natural disasters” to bring out the significance of what we might call major sociopolitical upheavals. Actually, we do the very same thing, speaking of a political “earthquake” or of an election producing a “landslide.” Our own metaphors seem so natural that we forget they are metaphors. Other people’s metaphors, alien to our way of speaking, are often misinterpreted as though they are not metaphors at all. No doubt Paul faced the same kind of problem, moving as he did within a complex and confusing range of cultures.

(Wright 2018, 224)

… This is a longer application of Galatians 2:19-20: “Though the law I died to the law . . . I am, however, alive.” “Realize,” he says, “who you really are. The Messiah died and was raised; you are in him; therefore, you have died and been raised – and you must learn to live accordingly. The day is coming when the new creation, at present hidden, will be unveiled, and the king, the Messiah, will be revealed in glory. When that happens, the person you already are in him will be revealed as well. Believe it, and live accordingly.” The instructions that follow – emphasizing sexual purity; wise, kind, and truthful speech; and unity across traditional boundaries – are crisp and basic. All comes back to thanksgiving.

(Wright 2018, 293)

[I Corinthians 8-10 and Romans 14-15]

But he has come to the conclusion, on good biblical grounds, that all meat is in fact “clean” and that nothing is “impure” unless someone’s bad conscience made it so. The “letter” had been well intentioned, but the realities on the ground meant that it could only ever be a starting position. 

(Wright 2018, 352)

Paul never wavered in his sense that Jesus would reappear. He would “descend from heaven,” though to get the flavor of that we have to remind ourselves that “heaven” is not “up in the sky,” but is rather God’s dimension of present reality. Jesus would come from heaven to earth not – as in much popular fantasy – in order to scoop up his people and take them back to “heaven,” but in order to complete the already inaugurated task of colonizing “earth,” the human sphere, with the life of “heaven,” God’s sphere. God’s plan had always been to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Jesus, which meant, from the Jewish point of view, that Jesus was the ultimate Temple, the heaven-and-earth place.

(Wright 2018, 401)

Thus, for Paul one might say: Galatians, for the young reformer eager to defend the gospel and attack the heretics; 2 Corinthians, for the adult sadly aware that things are more complicated and disturbing than he had thought; Romans at last, to remind us, despite everything, that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord!” Like the psalms he knew so well, Paul’s letters wait for us just around the corner, to take our arm and whisper a word of encouragement when we face a new task, to remind us of obligations and warm us of snakes in the grass, to show us from one angle after another what it might mean to live in the newly human way, the newly Jewish way, the way of Jesus, to unveil again and again the faithful, powerful love of the creator God.

(Wright 2018, 420)

References

Wright, N. T. 2018. Paul: A Biography. N.p.: HarperCollins.

ISBN 9780800637668