Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 3

1. Paul, in other words, is not only making it clear in Galatians 1–2 that his “gospel” was given to him directly, not acquired secondhand through the Jerusalem leaders. He is also making it clear that his call and commissioning have placed him in the ancient prophetic tradition, whether of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Elijah himself. His opponents are trying to go over his head in their appeal to Jerusalem, but he is going over everybody else’s head by appealing to Jesus himself and to the scriptures as foreshadowing not only the gospel, but the prophetic ministry that he, Paul, has now received. This, then, is why he went to Arabia: to hand in his former commission and to acquire a new one. His loyalty to the One God of Israel was as firm as it had always been. Since many Christians, and many Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul’s life.

- What do you imagine Paul was searching for during this period?

2. In any case, to Jerusalem Paul then goes, most likely in AD 36 or 37. Writing to the Galatians over a decade later, he explains that he stayed with Peter (whom he calls by his Aramaic name, Cephas) for two weeks, seeing no other Jesus-followers except James, the Lord’s brother, already acknowledged as the central figure in the new movement. The meeting was set up by Barnabas; the Jerusalem leaders were understandably suspicious, but Barnabas assured them that Saul really had seen Jesus on the road, and that in Damascus he really had been boldly announcing Jesus as Messiah. So far, one might think, so good. But the pattern begins to kick in again. Saul, knowing his scriptures inside out and possessed of a quick mind and a ready tongue, is bound to get into public debate, and public debate is bound to get him into trouble. And trouble, coming just a few years after the stoning of Stephen, is something the Jesus believers can do without. So, they escort Paul down to the sea at Caesarea and put him on a boat back home to southern Turkey.

- How do you explain the tension and fear here?

3.There follows a decade or so of silence: roughly 36 to 46 (like most dates in ancient history, including most of the ones in this book, we are dealing in approximations, with a year or so to be allowed either way). Faced with a silent decade at a formative period of someone’s life, a novelist might have a field day; we must be more restrained. First, and most straightforwardly, we must assume that Saul set to and earned his own living in the family business. The secondthing we can be sure of is that he prayed, he studied, and he figured out all sorts of things. Saul spent a silent decade deepening the well of scriptural reflection from which he would thereafter draw the water he needed. 

- How might Paul have used that time to develop his theology?

4. These parallel lines are central to his mature thinking and foundational for what would later become Christian theology. First, there was Israel’s own story. According to the prophets, Israel’s story (from Abraham all the way through to exile and beyond) would narrow down to a remnant, but would also focus on a coming king, so that the king himself would be Israel personified. But second, there was God’s story—the story of what the One God had done, was doing, and had promised to do. (The idea of God having a story, making plans, and putting them into operation seems to be part of what Jews and early Christians meant by speaking of this God as being “alive.”) And this story too would likewise narrow down to one point. Israel’s God would return, visibly and powerfully, to rescue his people from their ultimate enemies and to set up a kingdom that could not be shaken. “All God’s promises,” Paul would later write, “find their yes in him.”

- How does God continue to rescue us in Christ today?

5. And all that was just the rough outline. There were many more themes and variations on themes, an endless round of discussions in the tentmaker’s cramped little shop, on the street, over meals with friends, at home. It was, we may suspect, fascinating and frustrating by turns. Like many other Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus, thinking as a Jew while taking on board the theories of the wider world, would reflect on the similarity and dissimilarity between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of Israel.

- Where does the Church’s mission intersect with today’s world?

6. Saul then, I propose, spent the silent years in Tarsus laboring, studying, and praying, putting together in his mind a larger picture of the One God and his truth that would take on the world and outflank it. If Jesus was the fulfillment of the ancient scriptural stories, that conclusion was inevitable. But all the while he must have been uncomfortably aware that this still thoroughly Jewish vision of the One God and his world, reshaped around the crucified and risen Messiah, was, to put it mildly, not shared by all his fellow Jews. Saul must already have come up against the social, cultural, exegetical, and theological tension that would stay with him throughout his career. 

- Wright asks, “What sense could it make that Israel’s Messiah would come to his own and that his own would not receive him?”

7. For Saul, this question cannot have been merely theoretical. Here we probe, with caution, into one of the most sensitive parts of the silent decade in Tarsus. He had gone back to his family. All we know of Saul indicates that he would have wasted no time in telling them that he had met the risen Jesus, that the scriptures proved him to be God’s Messiah, that the One God had unveiled his age-old secret plan in and through him, and that by the power of his spirit this Jesus was at work in human hearts and lives, doing a new thing and creating a new community.

- Again, Wright inquires, “How would his family have reacted?”

8. Clearly Paul was unmarried during the time covered by his letters. Most of the traveling early Christian teachers were married, and their wives accompanied them on their journeys, but Paul was different (so also, apparently, was Barnabas).23 That leaves us with four options. Either he had never married at all, despite the fact that most orthodox Jews would have been expected to marry, usually quite young. Or he had been married, presumably during the silent decade in Tarsus, but his wife had died early, as many did, and he had chosen not to marry again. Or maybe his wife had decided to break off the marriage when she realized he really meant all this dangerous new teaching about a crucified Messiah. (“In a case like that,” he writes, “a brother or sister is not bound.”)24 Or perhaps—and if I had to guess, this is the one I would choose—he had been betrothed early on, probably to the daughter of family friends. He had come back to Tarsus eager to see her again, but also wondering how it would now work out and praying for her to come to know Jesus as he had. But she or her parents had broken off the engagement when they found out that lively young Saul had returned with his head and heart full of horrible nonsense about the crucified Nazarene. Did Saul “get over her,” as we say? Who can tell?

- How might each of these scenarios have played out for Paul?

9. The decade or so in Tarsus was clearly formative for Saul. How much he then guessed at his future vocation we cannot begin to imagine. But somewhere in the middle 40s of the first century—still only fifteen years or so after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and when Saul was probably somewhere in his thirties—he received a visit that would take his life in a whole new direction. What motivated him was, at one level, the same as it had always been: utter devotion to the One God and “zeal” to work for his glory in the world. But by the end of the Tarsus decade Saul had worked out in considerable detail what it meant that the One God had revealed himself in and as the crucified and risen Jesus. That meant a new dimension to his devotion, a new shape for his “zeal,” a new depth to “loyalty.” And that new dimension, shape, and depth would produce a string of hastily written documents whose compact, explosive charge would change the world.

- What do you appreciate most about Wright’s knowledge and perspectives on this formative period in Paul’s young life?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 2

1. The historian and biographer can study, and should study so far as possible, the levels of motivation that are available, not least the implicit narratives that run through a culture or through the mind of a political leader or an isolated individual. Something like that was attempted before the buildup to the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces and their allies in 2003. Two enterprising American writers produced a survey of the popular cultural figures (in movies, TV shows, and comic strips) listed as favorites by presidents over the previous century.2 Again and again the presidents favored Captain America, the Lone Ranger, and similar characters’ scripts, in which heroes act outside the law to restore peace to beleaguered communities. The narrative seemed worryingly familiar. That wasn’t psychoanalysis, but it was a study of motivation. We can in principle inspect the implicit narratives that drive people to particular actions.

- Where have you witnessed such “narratives in action” of late?

2. If I say that Saul of Tarsus was brought up in a world of hope, many readers may misunderstand me. “Hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. The optimist looks at the world and feels good about the way it’s going. Things are looking up! Everything is going to be all right! But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God. This God had made the world. This God had called Israel to be his people. The scriptures, not least the Psalms, had made it clear that this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end, to be true to his promises, to vindicate his people at last, even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering.

- Where, in your life, are you optimistic and where are you hopeful?

3. “Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.

- Where are you currently practicing hope in your life? Why?

4. When the One God finally puts away the idolatry and wickedness that caused his people to be exiled in the first place, then his people will be free at last, Passover people with a difference. That was the ancient hope, cherished not only by Saul of Tarsus but by thousands of his fellow Jews. By no means were all of them as “zealous” as Saul was. Few, perhaps, had his intellectual gifts. But they were mostly aware, through scripture and liturgy, of the ancient divine promises and of the tension between those promises and the present realities. One way or another, it was a culture suffused with hope. Hope long deferred, but hope nonetheless. That is the great story in which Saul and his contemporaries were living. That is the narrative they had in their heads and their hearts. That story gave shape and energy, in a thousand different ways, to their aspirations and motivations. It explains both hope and action. This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

- How has this biblical ancient hope shaped your hope in Jesus?

5. To explain what this meant in the language of psychology would be like trying to copy a Titian with a child’s crayons. To understand the explosion that resulted, we need history, we need theology, we need a strong sense of the inner tensions of the first-century Jewish world and the zealous propagators of Jewish culture. This moment shattered Saul’s wildest dreams and, at the same split second, fulfilled them. This was—he saw it in that instant—the fulfillment of Israel’s ancient scriptures, but also the utter denial of the way he had been reading them up to that point. God the Creator had raised Jesus from the dead, declaring not only that he really was Israel’s Messiah, but that he had done what the One God had promised to do himself, in person. Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled. He had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel’s vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah itself. His lifelong loyalty was utterly right, but utterly misdirected. He had a zeal for God, but had not understood what the One God was up to. Everything was now focused on the figure from whom there streamed a blinding light, the figure who now addressed Saul as a master addresses a slave, the figure he recognized as the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Heaven and earth came together in this figure, and he was commanding Saul to acknowledge this fact and to reorient his entire life accordingly.

- What do you imagine went through Saul’s mind at this moment?

6. So when Christian tradition speaks of the “conversion” of Saul, we need to pause. In our world, as we saw earlier, we normally apply that term to someone who “converts” from one “religion” to another. That was not the point. Not for one second did Saul cease to believe in the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was just that...well, what had happened was...how could he put it? Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.” That was one way of putting it. There would be other ways too. This wasn’t about “religion,” whether in the ancient or the (very different) modern sense. It was about Jesus. About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.

- What is the difference between being religious and following Jesus?

7. Jesus himself had used the image of baptism to speak of his approaching death. Paul would later make it clear that this dramatic plunging into water and coming up again spoke in powerful and effective symbolic language about the dying and rising of Jesus and about the new world that had come to birth through those events. To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one. Insofar as it marked out members of the family, it functioned somewhat like circumcision for a Jew, except of course that women were included as well. Equally, it was a bit like a slave being branded (so that the slave was now under a new master), though of course slaves and free alike were baptized. The important thing was that, having been baptized, one now belonged to the Messiah. Saul was now a “Messiah man,” shaped in the pattern of the Jesus who had summed up the divine purposes for Israel.

- How does your baptism into Christ shape your present and future?

8. Something else happened at the same time: Saul received Jesus’s own spirit. The fourth and last point of immense significance in Ananias’s visit to Straight Street is that Saul was promised the gift of the spirit, and everything in his subsequent life and writings indicates that he believed this had happened then and there. The story in Acts doesn’t say that Saul spoke in tongues or prophesied. The idea that things like that had to happen for the spirit’s gift to be genuine is a much later fiction. What Acts offers instead is the remarkable statement that Saul went at once to the synagogue in Damascus and announced that Jesus was the son of God (a theme to which we shall return in due course). There was a new power coupled with a new sense of direction.

- How does your faith in Jesus provide a new sense of direction?

9. But what happens when half the people in the town don’t want this new king? Saul discovered the answer to that all too soon, not that he would have been particularly surprised. 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 would reach its climax in a crucified messiah. Not all Jews in this 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.

- Where do you and other Christians today face such opposition?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

(See Chapter 1 Discussion Questions Below)

Meeting/Reading Schedule

January10 – Chapter 1

January 17 – Chapter 2

January 24 – Chapter 3

January 31 – Chapter 4

February 7– No Class 

February 14 – Chapter 5

February 21 – Chapter 6

February 28 – Chapter 7

March 7– No Class 

March 14 – Chapter 8

March 21 – Chapter 9

March 28 – Chapter 10

April 4 –No Class

April 11 – Chapter 11

April 18 – No Class

April 25 – Chapter 12

May 2– No Class

May 9 – Chapter 13

Mary 16 – Chapter 14

May 23 – Chapter 15

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 1

1. Saul drinks it all in. This is his story, the story he will make his own. It will happen again: a new, second Exodus, bringing full and final freedom. He will play his part in the long-running drama. The trouble was, of course, that God’s people seemed bent on wandering off in their own direction, again and again. That’s where the sex and the violence came in. It always seemed to go that way. They wanted to be like the goyim, the nations, instead of being distinct, as they had been summoned to be. And that is why some Jews, and he among them—one of the first solid things we know about young Saul—followed the ancient tradition of “zeal.” Violence would be necessary to root out wickedness from Israel.

- Where do you recall history repeating this cycle of violent zeal in the name of holy war?  Why does it appeal so strongly to Saul?

2. These stories would have resonated powerfully in Saul’s devout Jewish home. The Jewish communities in Turkey and in many other parts of the Roman Empire lived relatively peacefully alongside their goyischeneighbors. But they could never tell when the goyimwould try it again or what diabolical means they might find to undermine the covenant loyalty the Jews owed to the One God. They had to be ready. Saul came from a family who knew what that meant. It meant Ioudaïsmos: as we saw, not a “religion” called “Judaism” in the modern Western sense, a system of piety and morality, but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life, defending it against external attacks and internal corruption and urging the traditions of the Torah upon other Jews, especially when they seemed to be compromising.

- In what ways might you identify with the efforts of Saul’s family to preserve their way of life in the midst of corruptive secular influences?

3. I thought of the young Saul of Tarsus in November 1995, when the then prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a student called Yigal Amir. Rabin had taken part in the Oslo Accords, working out agreements toward peace with the Palestinian leadership. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his political rival Shimon Peres and with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He also signed a peace treaty with Jordan. All this was too much for hard-line Israelis, who saw his actions as hopelessly compromising national identity and security. The news media described the assassin as a “law student,” but in Europe and America that phrase carries a meaning different from the one it has in Israel today and the one it would have had in the days of Saul of Tarsus. Amir was not studying to be an attorney in a Western-style court. He was a zealous Torah student. His action on November 4, 1995, was, so he claimed at his trial, in accordance with Jewish law. He is still serving his life sentence and has never expressed regret for his actions. The late twentieth century is obviously very different from the early first century, but “zeal” has remained a constant.

- What do you remember of this tragic event?  

- Where have you since seen similar acts of violent zeal and what rationales were claimed?

4. As I watched the television broadcasts that November afternoon, my mind shuttled back and forth between modern Jerusalem and the Jerusalem of Saul’s day. In that earlier Jerusalem a young man called Stephen had been stoned to death—illegally, since under Roman rule only the Romans could carry out the death penalty. Saul of Tarsus, a zealous young Torah student, had been there, watching, taking it all in, looking after the coats of the men throwing rocks, who were ceremonially cleansing the city of the poison that Stephen had been uttering.

- As N.T. Wrights asks, “What was that poison?”

5. Saul approved. This was the kind of action the Torah required. This was what “zeal” was supposed to look like. From that moment, the young man saw what had to be done.Saul therefore set off as a new Phinehas, a new Elijah. The scriptural models were clear. Torah and Temple—the One God himself—were under attack from this new movement. With his Bible in his head, zeal in his heart, and official documents of authority from the chief priests in his bag, young Saul set off in the firm hope that he too would be recognized as a true covenant member. “It was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Phinehas then; Saul now.

- How does this description of Saul’s background provide a better appreciation and understanding of his extraordinary conversion and subsequent mission work in obedience to Jesus?