Paul the Apostle

Before he was Paul, he was Saul, and he was the most dangerous enemy the young Church had. He was a Pharisee, brilliant and zealous, trained under the finest teacher in Jerusalem, and he was certain the followers of Jesus were blasphemers who had to be stopped. He stood by approving while the first Christian martyr, Stephen, was stoned to death. Then he got authority to hunt down more of them, and set out for Damascus to do it.

He never arrived as the man who left. On the road, a light knocked him to the ground, and a voice he did not recognize asked him why he was persecuting him. He asked who was speaking. The answer was the name he had been trying to erase: Jesus. He got up blind, and was led into the city by the hand, and three days later a Christian he had come to arrest laid hands on him and baptized him.

That was the hinge of his life and, arguably, of Western history. The man with the sharpest mind and the hardest will in the early Church was turned, in an afternoon, from its destroyer into its greatest missionary. He spent the next thirty years crossing the Roman Empire on foot and by ship — beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, stoned and left for dead — planting churches in city after city and writing them letters that became a third of the New Testament.

He died in Rome, beheaded under Nero, in the same persecution that killed Peter. The persecutor of the Church became, with Peter, one of its two great pillars.

He was born in Tarsus, a wealthy university city in Cilicia, on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. Three things about his background shaped everything he did.

He was a Jew — a Hebrew of the Hebrews, he called himself, of the tribe of Benjamin, raised strictly in the Law and sent to Jerusalem to study under Gamaliel, the most respected rabbi of the age. He knew the Scriptures from the inside, the way only a lifelong scholar does.

He was a Roman citizen by birth, a rare and valuable status for a provincial Jew. It gave him rights most people in the empire did not have: he could not be flogged without trial, and he could appeal his case to the emperor in Rome. He used both rights. His citizenship is part of why he reached Rome at all.

And he was a Greek-speaker, at home in the cosmopolitan world of the eastern Mediterranean, able to argue philosophy with Athenians and write Greek prose of real power. He earned his living as a tentmaker, working with his hands so that he would never have to take money from the churches he served.

A Jew, a Roman, and a Greek, all in one man. There could hardly have been a person better equipped to carry a Jewish Messiah to the Gentile world — and he spent the first part of his life using all of it against the Church.

Paul's own account is honest because Paul was honest about himself. He never hid what he had been. He had persecuted the Church of God and tried to destroy it. He had gone house to house, dragging out men and women and handing them to prison. He had been present, holding the cloaks of the men who threw the stones, when Stephen was martyred — and he had approved.

He was not a thug. He was a believer. He was convinced that the followers of Jesus were a blasphemy against the God of Israel, and that stamping them out was holy work. That is what makes his story serious rather than sentimental: he was not a bad man who became good. He was a zealous man who was certain he was right, and he was wrong about the one thing that mattered most, and he did real harm because of it.

The risen Christ did not strike him down as an enemy. He stopped him as a man about to ruin his own life, and turned him around.

He was on the road to Damascus, carrying letters that authorized him to arrest any followers of Jesus he found there, when it happened. Around midday a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, flashed around him, and he fell to the ground.

A voice said: Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? He asked who was speaking. And the voice answered: I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. Acts 9:4-5, KJV

It is one of the most consequential conversations in history, and it is four lines long. In it, two things are revealed that Paul would spend the rest of his life unfolding. First, that Jesus is alive — risen, in glory, speaking from heaven to a man on a road. And second, that to persecute the Church is to persecute Jesus himself — that Christ so identifies with his people that what is done to them is done to him. The whole of Paul's theology of the Church as the Body of Christ is already there, in the question he was asked while lying in the dust.

He got up blind. They led him into Damascus by the hand. For three days he neither ate nor drank. Then God sent him a Christian named Ananias, understandably terrified since Saul's reputation had preceded him, who laid hands on him, restored his sight, and baptized him. The hunter was received by the hunted, and became one of them.

Paul was not one of the Twelve. He had not walked with Jesus in Galilee. He insisted, all his life, that his commission came directly from the risen Christ — that he was an apostle not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ. And the commission he was given was specific: to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles, the non-Jewish nations, the whole pagan world that had been outside the covenant.

This was the great question the early Church had to settle, and Paul was its sharpest voice. Did a Gentile have to become a Jew first, be circumcised and keep the whole Law, in order to follow the Jewish Messiah? Or was the Gospel for everyone, on equal terms, through faith in Christ? Paul argued, with everything he had, for the second. The door was open to everyone. In Christ, he wrote, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. The Council of Jerusalem agreed with him, and the Church became what it is: universal, catholic, for the whole world.

He spent the rest of his life proving it with his feet. Across three great missionary journeys he crossed and re-crossed the eastern Mediterranean, preaching in synagogues and marketplaces, arguing with philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens, planting a church and moving on, then writing back to hold it together. He was beaten with rods and with whips, stoned and left for dead, shipwrecked three times, imprisoned repeatedly, and he kept going.

The two pillars of the Roman Church were not always in agreement, and the New Testament does not pretend otherwise.

Peter was the rock, the leader of the Twelve, the first among the apostles. Paul was the late-coming outsider, the former persecutor, the apostle to the Gentiles. They were, between them, the two halves of the early Church — the mission to the Jews and the mission to the nations — and at Antioch they collided.

Peter had been eating freely with Gentile converts, as the Gospel allowed. Then some stricter Jewish Christians arrived, and Peter, not wanting to offend them, drew back and stopped sharing the table with the Gentiles. Paul saw it as a betrayal of the whole principle they had fought for — that the Gospel makes Jew and Gentile equal — and he confronted Peter to his face, in public, and told him he was wrong.

It is a remarkable thing for Scripture to record: one apostle publicly correcting another, and the greater of the two accepting the correction. The Church has never been embarrassed by it. It does not undermine Peter's office; it shows that the office is held by real men who can be wrong about how to apply the truth, and that even Peter could be told so. Peter and Paul are honored together, on the same day, June 29 — not because they always agreed, but because each gave his life for the same Lord, and the Church was built on both of them.

Paul's letters are the oldest Christian writings we have — older than the Gospels. He wrote them to specific churches with specific problems, never imagining they would become Scripture, and they became the foundation of Christian theology.

From them the Church drew some of its deepest teaching. That we are justified, set right with God, by grace through faith in Christ, and not by our own earning. That the Church is the Body of Christ, with Christ as the head and every believer a member, so that no one is saved alone. That the gifts of the Spirit are many but the Spirit is one. That love is greater than faith and hope, and outlasts everything — the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, read at half the weddings in the Western world, is Paul.

And running through all of it is the single discovery that reorganized his life: that he could not save himself, that no amount of zeal or law-keeping had ever made him righteous, and that what he could not do, Christ had done for him. The man who had been the most rigorous keeper of the Law in his generation became the apostle of grace — precisely because he knew, from the inside, that the Law had never been able to make him good.

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Galatians 2:20, KJV

There is one more thing Paul tells us about himself that the Church has never let go of.

He had been given, he says, extraordinary revelations — visions, a being caught up to the third heaven. And to keep him from pride, he was also given what he calls a thorn in the flesh: some affliction he never names, a weakness or a suffering that would not leave him. He begged God three times to take it away. The answer he got is one of the most important sentences in the New Testament:

"My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:9, KJV

Paul drew from it the lesson that runs against everything the world believes: that God's power does not work around our weakness but through it; that a man at the end of his own resources is exactly where grace does its best work. When I am weak, then am I strong. The most capable man in the early Church built his whole spirituality on the discovery that his capability was not the point.

The end of Paul's life passes partly out of the clear light of Scripture and into the Church's tradition. Acts leaves him under house arrest in Rome, still preaching. The constant tradition of the Church holds that he was released, traveled and preached further, perhaps as far as Spain, which he had hoped to reach, and was then arrested a second time and brought back to Rome under Nero's persecution.

There, by the same tradition, he was condemned and executed. Because he was a Roman citizen, he was not crucified, as Peter was, but beheaded, the citizen's death, at a place outside the city now called the Three Fountains. He was buried nearby, on the road to Ostia, and the great basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls stands over his grave today, his relics beneath its high altar, as Peter's are beneath the basilica on the Vatican hill.

The two of them died in the same city, in the same persecution, within a few years of each other — the fisherman and the scholar, the rock and the apostle to the nations — and the Church has buried them at its two poles and honored them together ever since.

He matters now because he is the proof that no one is past saving — not even the person actively trying to destroy the faith.

Paul was not a seeker who drifted toward God. He was an enemy, sincere and effective, doing real damage, certain he was right. The risen Christ did not wait for him to come around. He stopped him on the road and turned him into the greatest missionary in history. For anyone who believes they have gone too far, done too much harm, been on the wrong side too long to be of any use to God — Paul is the answer. The Church's greatest evangelist began as its most dangerous persecutor. Grace reached him mid-stride, mid-error, on the way to do more damage.

He matters, too, because of the weakness. We live in a culture that worships competence and hides its cracks. Paul — brilliant, tireless, the most gifted man in the early Church — staked everything on the opposite claim: that he was weak, that he could not save himself, that the power at work in him was not his own, and that this was good news. That is a sentence for everyone who has hit the end of what they can do on their own.

And he matters because he finished. He was beaten, jailed, shipwrecked, betrayed, and finally killed, and he kept going to the end, and he died able to say he had kept faith. Most people do not need a saint who never struggled. They need one who struggled the whole way and did not quit. Paul is that saint.

Paul wrote a third of the New Testament. Start with the letters that show the man and the heart of his message.

1. Philippians — short, warm, written from prison, full of joy. The best place to meet Paul as a person.
2. 1 Corinthians 13 — the hymn to love. Read it slowly; it is more demanding than the weddings make it sound.
3. Galatians — the fighting Paul, defending the freedom of the Gospel; includes the confrontation with Peter at Antioch.
4. Romans — his masterwork, the fullest statement of his theology of sin, grace, and salvation. The hardest and the deepest.
5. 2 Timothy— his last letter, written facing death. "I have finished my course."

His story in Acts, chapters 9 and 13-28, is the narrative companion to the letters. Read them alongside each other.

He wrote this near the end, in prison, knowing he was going to be executed. It is not a boast; it is a runner's report at the finish line. He had been given a race no one would have chosen — beatings, shipwrecks, prisons, the constant near-certainty of a violent death — and he had run it all the way without stopping and without turning back to the life he had before. 2 Timothy 4:7

The man who began by trying to destroy the faith ended by keeping it, all the way to the block. That is the whole arc of grace in one sentence.