Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 7

1. Luke does not spare Paul’s blushes. The apostle to the Gentiles may be the main subject of Acts, at least in its second half, but there is a tale now to be told from which nobody comes out well. Paul will later characterize his vocation as “the ministry of reconciliation.” His whole theme in Galatians and in all the activity that surrounded it had been the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in the single messianic family. But when it came to reconciliation, Paul must always have had a sense of shame and failure. He and Barnabas had a falling-out.

- What details do you recall of this event?

2. Timothy was the son of a believing Jewish woman and a Greek father. So, says Luke, Paul circumcised him “because of the Jews in those regions, since they all knew that his father was Greek.”5 Paul’s action here has perplexed many readers. We cast our minds back to the time when Paul and Barnabas, going to Jerusalem with famine relief, took Titus with them. Despite intense pressure from the hardline Jerusalem activists who wanted to have Titus circumcised, Paul stood firm. Paul stressed this point when writing to the Galatians. In his mission in Galatia and then back in Antioch, Paul had stoutly resisted any suggestion that Gentile converts should be circumcised. 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?”

3. I think Luke knew that when Paul, Silas, and Timothy reached Troas, they were weary, disheartened, and puzzled. And I think that the reason Luke knew this was because this was the point at which he joined the party himself. This is far and away the simplest explanation for the fact that his narrative suddenly says “we” instead of “they.” Paul had a vision in the night (as so often, one receives guidance when it’s needed rather than when it’s wanted). A man from Macedonia was standing there, pleading, “Come across to Macedonia and help us!”

(This itself strengthens my view that Paul had not previously thought of doing this, but had hoped to this point to plant more churches throughout what we now call Turkey.) So, says Luke: When he saw the vision, at once we set about finding a way to get across to Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the good news to them. Luke turns up among those sending greetings in three Pauline letters (Colossians, Philemon, and 2 Timothy). We cannot be certain, but the signs suggest that the person who joined the party at Troas was the same person who later on wrote the story down.

- What do you surmise to be the value of Luke’s participation here?

4. One might think that there was little harm in this poor girl shouting after the group day after day, but it was not the kind of attention Paul and his friends wanted. Eventually, as with the magician in Cyprus, Paul turned to the girl and, in the name of Jesus, commanded the spirit to leave her, which it did then and there. One can imagine the looks passing between Silas, Timothy, and Luke. Was this another case of Paul blowing his short fuse and getting himself and everyone else into trouble? So it seemed. It didn’t take the girl’s owners long to realize that their line of business was finished. She wasn’t going to be giving any more oracles or telling any more fortunes; they wouldn’t be making any more money from her special ability. But instead of complaining that Paul had taken away their livelihood, the girl’s owners jumped straight to a charge that was, in our terms, both “civil” and “religious,” though with the emphasis on the first. They grabbed hold of Paul and Silas (why them; did Timothy and Luke melt into the crowd at that point?), dragged them into the public square, and presented them to the magistrates. “These men,” they said, “are throwing our city into an uproar! They are Jews, and they are teaching customs which it’s illegal for us Romans to accept or practice!” Without waiting for any formal process—an omission that would come back to haunt them—the magistrates had Paul and Silas stripped, beaten with rods, and thrown into prison.

- Describe what happens next and to what end.

5. These short references, an intimate exchange very soon after Paul’s initial visit, tell us a great deal about Paul’s way of life, his style of teaching and pastoral engagement—and also perhaps about his own personal needs. The split with Barnabas, the long and apparently aimless journey through central Anatolia with all its nagging uncertainties, the sense of arriving in a new culture, the shock of public beating and imprisonment—all this would have left him vulnerable at quite a deep level. In that context, to sense the genuine, unaffected love and support of people he had only just met, to discover through the work of the gospel a deep bond for which the language of “family” was the only appropriate description—all this must have given him comfort and strength.

Can you relate to a similar time in your life?  What happened for you?

6. It is worth laboring this point, because when people in our own day wonder what made Paul the man he was and ultimately why his project succeeded, it has been fashionable to suggest that he was a difficult, awkward, cross-grained customer who always disagreed with everyone about everything. There is no doubt that he could come across like that, especially when he could see straight through the fudge and muddle of what someone else was saying, whether a senior apostle like Peter or a local magistrate like those in Philippi. 

But—and it is perhaps important to stress this before we see him move on to southern Greece, where relations were not always so easy—all the signs are that in the northern Greek churches Paul quickly established a deep and lasting bond of mutual love and trust. He would say, of course, that this came about because of the gospel. The power of the spirit, through the message and the strange personal presence of Jesus, transformed not only the individual hearts, minds, and lives of those who received it, but also the relationships between speakers and hearers. “Sharing not only the gospel of God but our own lives”—that line tells its own story.

- How does the gospel allow us to share “our own lives?”

- What is the effect of such transformation relationally?

7. Yes, it is of course Paul himself who is saying this. But it is hard to believe that Paul could write that to a group he had been with only a few weeks earlier unless he knew that they would know it was true. When we wonder what most strongly motivated Paul, we must put near the center the fact that at a deeply human level he was sustained and nourished by what he came to call koinōnia. As we saw earlier, the normal translation of koinōniais “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 courseagapē, “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.

- How would you describe your experience of koinonia and agape in the church over your lifetime?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 6

1. It was still, of course, a Jewish identity. Like Paul in southern Anatolia, but very unlike him in the conclusions they were drawing, the early community in Jerusalem saw itself as the fulfillment of the ancient promises to Israel. This is not to say that the Jerusalem church was all of one mind. Acts reveals significant divisions. But anyone living in Jerusalem in the middle years of the first century was bound to face the challenge posed by the question: When is the One God going to do at last what he has promised and liberate his ancient people once and for all from the shame and scandal of Roman rule? And since Rome was widely seen as the ultimate form of monstrous pagan rule over the people of God, how and when was the One God going to overthrow the monsters and set up, on earth, his own unshakable kingdom?

- How did the Jerusalem Jesus-followers respond?

2. When we think of loyalty and of the ways in which a tight-knit community in an overheated political situation actually functions, we realize what was at stake. The Jesus-followers in Jerusalem faced trouble from the start. Many had dispersed following the early persecution, but there was still a tight core, focused particularly on James himself. From at least the time of Stephen’s killing they had been regarded as potentially subversive, disloyal to the Temple and its traditions. Now this disloyalty was showing itself in a new way: they were allied with a supposedly Jesus-related movement, out in far-flung lands, teaching Jews that they didn’t have to obey the Torah! That was the kind of movement, loyal Jews would naturally think, that would introduce one compromise after another until any Jews still attached to it would find themselves indistinguishable from pagans. Here in Jerusalem all loyal Jews knew that the pagans were the enemy whom God would one day overthrow, just as he overthrew Pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea. But out there in the Diaspora this new movement was, it seemed, treating pagans as equal partners.

- What kinds of tensions emerged out of this perceived disparity?

3. In any case, I do not think that when Paul began to dictate the letter (you can tell he’s dictating, because at the end he points out that he is writing the closing greeting in his own hand), he was thinking, “This will be part of ‘scripture.’” However, he believed that the One God had called him to be the apostle to the non-Jews, the Gentiles. He believed that Jesus had revealed himself to him and commissioned him with the news of Jesus’s victory over death and his installation as Lord. Paul believed that Jesus’s own spirit was at work through him to establish and maintain the life-changing communities of people whose lives had themselves been changed by the power of the gospel. And now he believed, as part of that, that he had a responsibility to state clearly what was at stake in the controversy in Antioch, in Jerusalem, in Galatia itself. His own obvious vulnerability throughout this process was part of the point, as he would later stress in another letter. His writing, just like the gospel itself, was part of a radical redefinition of what “authority” might look like within the new world that the One God had launched through Jesus.

- How does faith in Jesus provide “authority” to witness to him?

4. Here again we meet the powerful and many-sided word “faithfulness,” pistisin Greek. As we have seen, that same Greek word can mean “faith” in its various senses and also “faithfulness,” “loyalty,” or “reliability.” Here and elsewhere, Paul seems to play on what seem to us multiple meanings; they may not, of course, have looked like that to him. The point is that, in a world where the key thing for a zealous Jew was “loyalty” to God and his law, Paul believed (1) that Jesus the Messiah had been utterly faithful to the divine purpose, “obedient even to the death of the cross” as he says elsewhere; (2) that following Jesus, whatever it took, had to be seen as itself a central expression of loyalty to Israel’s God; (3) that the followers of Jesus were themselves marked out by their belief in him, confessing him as “Lord” and believing that he was raised from the dead; and (4) if this Jesus-shaped loyalty was the vital thing, then nothing that the law could say was to come between one Jesus-follower and another. In other words (continuing Paul’s description of what he said to Peter): That is why we, too, believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared “righteous” on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the Jewish law. On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared “righteous.”

- How does faith in Jesus lead to acts of loyalty?

5. Paul, therefore, had a complex and challenging task. He would understand only too well the different anxieties, the complex web of social, cultural, religious, and theological pressures and agendas. He would see the communities he had founded caught in the middle—and would be shocked at how easily they, or some of them, had succumbed to the teaching of whoever it was who was “troubling” them. He would be personally hurt (this comes through at various points in the letter) that they would be disloyal to him after all that they had seen him go through on their behalf. But above all he would be shocked that they seemed not to have grasped the very center of it all, the meaning of Jesus himself and his death and resurrection and the fact that through him a new world, a new creation, had already come into being. They were in serious danger of stepping back from that new reality into the old world, as though the cross and resurrection had never taken place, as though the true and living God had not revealed his covenant love once and for all not only to Israel but through the personification of Israel, the Messiah, to the world.

- Where have you witnessed pressure on the Church to give in?

6. It is always risky to summarize, but part of the point of the present book is to invite readers to so live within Paul’s world that they will be able to read the letters in their original contexts and so grasp the full import of what was being said. So, for Galatians, we may simply note five pointsthat come out again and again. First, to repeat, Paul is offering a reminder that what has happened through Jesus is the launching of new creation. Second, what has happened in the gospel events, and what has happened in Paul’s own ministry, is in fact the fulfillment of the scripturally sourced divine plan. This leads Paul, third, to the vital point. All this has effectively bypassed the problem posed by Moses. Fourth, this has been accomplished through the long-awaited “new Exodus.” So, finallyand decisively, the living God has created the single family he always envisaged, and it is marked by faith, pistis.

- How do each of these 5 points provide a picture of Paul’s world?

7. Barnabas and Paul allow themselves a quiet smile of gratitude. This is what they have been hoping for. The crisis has been averted. The main point at issue had thus been dealt with—though we should not imagine that everyone meekly acquiesced. Things do not work like that in real communities. Just because an official pronouncement has been made, that does not mean that all churches will at once fall into line. However, there was an important pragmatic consequence. Just because they did not need to be circumcised, that didn’t mean that Gentile Jesus-followers were free to behave as they liked. They were to be careful to avoid giving offense to their Jewish neighbors, including their Jesus-believing Jewish neighbors. For that reason, there were certain areas where their freedom would need to be curtailed. There was to be no sexual immorality (one of the major differences between Jewish and pagan lifestyles) and no contact with what has been “polluted by idols” or “sacrificed to idols” or with meat that has been slaughtered in a non-kosher way, so that one would be eating blood, the God-given sign and bearer of life. There were, then, some typically Jewish taboos that were still to be observed, at least when in close contact with Jewish communities; the Jesus-followers were to take care when surrounded with Jewish sensibilities. 

But the main point at issue—circumcision—was conceded. A letter was agreed upon, from the whole church to “our Gentile brothers and sisters.” That already made the point that the uncircumcised believers were indeed part of the family. The letter was sent to Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia (Cilicia, the broad swath of southern Turkey, had by this time been divided between the Roman provinces of Galatia and Syria, but the name was still in common use for the area as a whole). In addition to its main points, the document also made it clear that, although the people who had arrived in Antioch and in Galatia had come from Jerusalem, they had not been authorized by James and the others. A delicate diplomatic solution all around.

- Why were they successful?

- How did this arrangement set the stage for future decisions?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 5

1. The early Christians did not focus much attention on the question of what happened to people immediately after they died. If that question came up, their answer might be that they would be “with the Messiah” or, as in Jesus’s remark to the dying brigand, that they might be “with him in paradise.”  But they seldom spoke about it at all. They were much more concerned with the “kingdom of God,” which was something that was happening and would ultimately happen completely, “on earth as in heaven.” What mattered was the ultimate restoration of the whole of creation, with God’s people being raised from the dead to take their place in the running of this new world. Whatever happened to people immediately after death was, by comparison, unimportant, a mere interim. And however much it might seem incredible, the early Jesus-followers really did believe that God’s kingdom was not simply a future reality, though obviously it had a strong still-future dimension. God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.

- How might Paul have envisioned this final restoration of creation?

2. It would be easy, in the midst of that dense summary, to miss a central point. Like most Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus had long believed that the nations of the world had been enslaved by their own idols. They worshipped nongods, and in Jewish thought, rooted in the scriptures, those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization. This is what Paul means by “the power of the satan”—the word “satan” is the Hebrew term for “accuser,” used popularly and often quite vaguely to refer to the dark power that appears to grip, distort, and ultimately destroy human societies and individuals. And Paul believed that in his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth had overcome the power of darkness.Something happened when Jesus died as a result of which “the satan”—and any dark forces that might be loosely lumped together under such a label—no longer had any actual authority. (Paul explains at various places in his writings how this had been achieved; but what matters for our understanding of his mission is thatit had happened, that the dark power had been defeated.) Paul’s mission was not, then, simply about persuading people to believe in Jesus, as though starting from a blank slate. It was about declaring to the non-Jewish nations that the door to their prison stood open and that they were free to leave. They had to turn around, away from the enslaving idols, to worship and serve the living God.

- What was the false power of idolatry then...and now?

3. First, if Paul believed and taught that with Jesus and his death and resurrection something had happened, a one-off event through which the world was now irrevocably different, so he also believed that, when he announced the message about Jesus (the “good news,” the “gospel”), a similar one-off event could and would take place in the hearts, minds, and lives of some of his hearers. Paul speaks about this one-off event with the term “power”: the power of the gospel, the power of the spirit in and through the gospel, or the power of “the word of God.” These seem to be different ways of saying the same thing, namely, that when Paul told the story of Jesus some people found that this Jesus became a living presence, not simply a name from the recent past. A transforming, healing, disturbing, and challenging presence. A presence that at one level was the kind of thing that would be associated with a divine power and at another level seemed personal—human, in fact. This then became the focal point of what we said before: people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out.

- How does this life-changing power resonate with your life?

4. And, with this, Saul appears to come of age. He is not now simply a teacher or prophet working within the church as in Antioch. He is out on the front line and finding sudden energy and focus to meet a new kind of challenge. He emerges not only as the new spokesman, but with a new name. Luke changes gear effortlessly: “Saul, also named Paul.” From now on this is how he will be referred to and, in Acts and the letters, how he will refer to himself. Why the change? “Saul” is obviously a royal name, that of the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin. Saul of Tarsus, conscious of descent from the same tribe, seems to have reflected on the significance of the name, quoting at one point a passage about God’s choice of King Saul and applying it to his own vocation. Some have speculated that he deliberately set aside this name, with its highborn overtones, in order to use a Greek word connected to the adjective paulos, “small, little”—a sign, perhaps, of a deliberate humility, “the least of the apostles.” Well, perhaps. Others have supposed that he simply chose a name better known in the wider non-Jewish world, shared even by the governor in the present story. Like most Roman citizens, Saul/Paul would have had more than one name, and it is quite possible that he already possessed the name “Paul” and simply switched within available options. It is worth noting as well, however, that in Aristophanes, known to most schoolboys in the Greek world, the word sauloswas an adjective meaning mincing, as of a man walking in an exaggeratedly effeminate fashion. One can understand Paul’s not wishing to sport that label in the larger Greek-speaking world. One way or another, Paul he would be from now on.

- What do you appreciate most about this name change?

5. This was, of course, dramatic and revolutionary. Paul had sat through many synagogue addresses in his youth, and he must have known that people simply didn’t say this kind of thing. He wasn’t giving them a new kind of moral exhortation. He certainly wasn’t offering a new “religion” as such. He was not telling them (to forestall the obvious misunderstanding about which I have spoken already) “how to go to heaven.” He was announcing the fulfillment of the long-range divine plan. The Mosaic covenant could only take them so far. The story that began with Abraham and pointed ahead to the coming Davidic king would, so to speak, break through the Moses barrier and arrive at a new world order entirely. No Jew who had been brought up on the Psalms (not least Psalm 2, which Paul quotes here and which other Jews of his day had studied intensively) could miss the point. If the new David had arrived, he would upstage everything and everyone else—including the New Rome and its great emperor over the sea. This was both exciting and dangerous. Small wonder that many of the synagogue members, both Jews and proselytes, followed Paul and Barnabas after the close of the synagogue meeting. Either this message was a complete hoax, a blasphemous nonsense, or, if it was true, it meant the opening up of a whole new world.

- What individuals & groups were most affected by this message?

6. I think it far more likely that the poor physical condition to which Paul refers is the result of the violence to which he had been subjected. In the ancient world, just as today, the physical appearance of public figures carries considerable weight in how they are assessed. Someone turning up in a city shortly after being stoned or beaten up would hardly cut an imposing figure. The Galatians, however, had welcomed Paul as if he were an angel from heaven or even the Messiah himself. As Paul would later explain, the bodily marks of identification that mattered to him were not the signs of circumcision, but “the marks of Jesus”—in other words, the signs of the suffering he had undergone. When, later on, he faces suffering at other levels as well—including what looks like a nervous breakdown—he will, through gritted teeth, explain that this too is part of what it means to be an apostle.

- Where are “the marks of Jesus” visible in your life and in others?

7. For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences. And if that had now happened, if the Messiah’s death had dealt with the “powers” that had held Jew and Gentile alike captive and his resurrection had launched a new world order “on earth as in heaven,” then the non-Jewish nations were not only free to turn from their now powerless idols to serve the living and true God, but their “uncleanness”—the idolatry and immorality that were always cited as the reason Jews should not fraternize with them—had itself been dealt with. The radical meaning of the Messiah’s cross was the reason, on both counts, that there now had to be a single family consisting of all the Messiah’s people.

- Where has the Church failed and succeeded at this agenda?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 4

1. The wall in question, the wall that had been breached, was the division between the Jew and the non-Jew. This division, from the Jewish point of view, was greater than any other social or cultural division, more important even than the other two distinctions that ran through the whole ancient world, those between slave and free, on the one hand, and male and female, on the other. As we noted earlier, the question of how high the wall between Jew and non-Jew should be and of what sort of dealings Jews ought to have with those on the other side was controversial then, just as it is today. Different people, and indeed different Jewish community leaders, would draw the line at different places. Business dealings might be fine, business partnerships perhaps not. Friendships might be fine, intermarriage probably not. Lines would be blurred, broken, and then drawn again, sometimes in the same place, sometimes not.

- Where do you witness such barriers and divisions at work today?

2. Some of the believers who had come to Antioch from Cyprus and Cyrene saw no reason for any such limitation. They went about telling the non-Jews too about Jesus. A large number of such people believed the message, abandoned their pagan ways, and switched allegiance to Jesus as Lord. One can imagine the reaction to this in the Jewish community; many Jews would naturally have supposed that these Gentiles would then have to go all the way and become full Jews. If they were sharing in the ancient promises, ought they not to share in the ancient culture as well? What sort of a common life ought this new community to develop? These were the questions that buzzed around Paul’s head, like large worried bees, for much of his public career.

- What is the difference between integration and conversion here?

3. For Paul, the word meant all of that but also much more. For him, this “believing allegiance” was neither simply a “religious” stance nor a “political” one. It was altogether larger, in a way that our language, like Paul’s, has difficulty expressing clearly. For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not. That was already the position that Barnabas was taking. He saw a single community living a common life. Saying that he recognized this as the result of divine grace is not simply the kind of pious fantasy some might imagine, since in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact. But there it was. A new kind of “family” had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus. Barnabas saw it, and he was glad.

- How has our church evolved into a new kind of “family?”

- What challenges does this present?

4. To say that this new project, this new community, was going to present a challenge is a gross understatement. The vibrant and excited group of Jesus-followers in Antioch was doing something radically countercultural. Nobody else in the ancient world was trying to live in a house where the old walls were being taken down. Nobody else was experimenting with a whole new way of being human. Barnabas must have realized this and must have seen that, in order even to begin to sustain such a thing, granted the enormous pressures that we might call sociocultural but that resonated also with philosophy, politics, religion, and theology, one would have to help people to think through what it all really meant. And that would mean teaching.

- What is the message of our teaching regarding inclusion?

5. It was out of such leading that Barnabas and Saul found themselves being commissioned for their first joint project. One of the spirit-led “prophets” in Antioch, a man named Agabus, warned the community that there was a famine coming over the whole Mediterranean world. (Various pieces of evidence point to the occurrence of this in AD 46.) The reaction to this news tells us a lot about the way the community instinctively thought. We might have imagined that a warning like this would have resulted in knee-jerk inward-looking anxiety. Should they stockpile food? Should they do what Joseph did in Egypt, storing grain in the good years to last through the bad? The Jesus-followers in Antioch resolved at once not to do that. Instead, they would look out for those community members worse off than themselves. And that meant Jerusalem. Jerusalem was where Jesus’s first followers had sold their lands and pooled their resources and where now, after a decade or two of hostility from the authorities and probably their own wider communities, they were struggling to stay alive.

- How was this assistance received then?

- How does our church seek to assist those in similar need?

6. Barnabas and Saul stood firm. The problem was not so much the embarrassment and physical pain that circumcision would cause Titus. It was a point of theological principle. It was, so Paul declared later, a matter of “freedom”—a loaded word, a Passover word, the slogan for so much that Jews such as Saul had hoped and prayed for. But now, with the new “Passover” of Jesus’s death and resurrection, a new sort of “freedom” had been born. The freedom for all, Jew and Gentile alike, to share membership in the new world, the new family, the new messianic and spirit-led life. And if that was the new “freedom,” then anything that challenged it was a form of slavery. These people want to enslave us, Saul concluded. They want to reverse the Passover moment, to take us back to Egypt. Titus was spared.

- Where does this new “freedom” in Christ continue to liberate us?

7. That makes it all the more remarkable that James, Peter, and John were able to agree with Barnabas and Saul. Temple meant purity; and purity (for a loyal Jew) would normally have meant extreme care over contact with non-Jews. What Barnabas and Saul had glimpsed, and what (according to Acts) Peter himself had already glimpsed in the house of the non-Jew Cornelius, was a new kind of purity coming to birth. A new freedom. A new Temple. A new kind of purity. No wonder confusion abounded, especially among those who were the most eager for God’s coming act of deliverance. No wonder some loyal Jews resented Barnabas and Saul for pushing the point so insensitively—and no wonder that the two friends held their ground.

- Can you identify the individual leaders among us who work together to implement a new vision for our church?

- How can we best support and encourage them to remain true to this vision of new freedom?

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