Paul the Apostle

Anyone asking who was Paul the Apostle must begin in Tarsus, a prosperous commercial city in Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey. He was born there around 5 CE into a Jewish family of the tribe of Benjamin, and the Acts of the Apostles records that he held Roman citizenship from birth, a status that later protected him during arrests and trials ^[1]. His Hebrew name was Saul; Paul was the Greco-Roman name he used in the wider Mediterranean world.

Tarsus sat on major trade routes and housed schools of Greek rhetoric and philosophy, so the boy grew up between two cultures. At home he learned the Scriptures and the trade of tentmaking, a craft he practiced throughout his life to support himself ^[2]. According to Acts, he traveled to Jerusalem as a young man and studied under Gamaliel, one of the most respected Pharisaic teachers of the age ^[1].

By his own account in the letter to the Philippians, he became a strict Pharisee, zealous for the law and blameless in its observance. That zeal first expressed itself in hostility toward the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, a movement he regarded as a dangerous deviation from Judaism ^[3].

The turning point of Paul the Apostle biography, and one of the most consequential events in religious history, came around 33 to 36 CE. Acts describes Saul traveling to Damascus with authority to arrest Christians when a blinding light stopped him and he heard a voice identifying itself as Jesus ^[1]. Paul himself, writing later to the Galatians, described the moment more simply: God revealed his Son to him so that he might preach among the Gentiles ^[3].

He was baptized in Damascus and, by his own testimony, spent time in Arabia before returning to the city. Three years passed before he went to Jerusalem to meet Peter (Cephas) and James, the brother of Jesus ^[3]. Scholars treat this chronology, drawn from Galatians, as one of the firmest anchors for dating his career ^[4].

The former persecutor now preached the faith he had tried to destroy. The reversal was so complete that early Christian communities in Judea, who knew him only by reputation, glorified God on his account, as he recalled in his own letters ^[3].

From roughly 46 CE onward, Paul undertook a series of long missionary journeys that Acts organizes into three great circuits. Working first from Antioch in Syria, he crossed Cyprus and southern Asia Minor with Barnabas, founding congregations in cities such as Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe ^[1]. Travel meant weeks at sea, mountain roads, bandits, and repeated beatings, hardships he catalogued frankly in his second letter to the Corinthians ^[3].

His second journey carried the movement into Europe. In Philippi he established the first Christian community on Greek soil, then moved through Thessalonica and Athens to Corinth, where he stayed about eighteen months ^[1]. An inscription from Delphi mentioning the proconsul Gallio, before whom Paul appeared in Corinth, allows historians to date this stay to about 50 to 52 CE, making it a rare fixed point in New Testament chronology ^[4].

The third journey centered on Ephesus, the great port of western Asia Minor, where Paul worked for more than two years and where his preaching provoked a riot among silversmiths who sold shrines of Artemis ^[1]. Throughout these years he insisted that Gentile converts did not need to be circumcised or keep the full Jewish law, a position confirmed at a meeting with the Jerusalem apostles around 48 to 50 CE, often called the Council of Jerusalem ^[2].

Among Paul the Apostle achievements, none proved more durable than his correspondence. Thirteen New Testament letters bear his name, and modern scholars regard seven as unquestionably authentic: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon ^[4]. Written between about 50 and 58 CE, they predate the Gospels and are the earliest surviving Christian documents ^[2].

The letters were working documents, dictated to secretaries and sent to real congregations wrestling with real problems: factions in Corinth, confusion about the return of Christ in Thessalonica, pressure to adopt Jewish law in Galatia. Yet within these practical pages Paul developed ideas that became foundations of Christian theology, above all the claim that people are justified by faith rather than by works of the law ^[3].

The letter to the Romans, his longest and most systematic, was written around 57 CE to a church he had not yet visited. Its arguments about sin, grace, and redemption later shaped Augustine in the fourth century and Martin Luther in the sixteenth, making it arguably the single most influential letter ever written ^[5].

Paul never married, and in his first letter to the Corinthians he commended the unmarried state for those able to accept it, given his conviction that the present age was passing away ^[3]. He supported himself by making tents or working leather, refusing payment from most of the churches he founded so that no one could accuse him of preaching for profit ^[2].

His letters reveal a vivid, sometimes combative personality: affectionate toward his converts, whom he addressed as his children, and fierce toward opponents. He mentioned a persistent affliction, a thorn in the flesh, without ever identifying it, and admitted that some found his letters weighty but his physical presence unimpressive ^[3].

He worked within a wide network of coworkers, including Timothy, Titus, Silas, and the married couple Priscilla and Aquila, and his greetings name women such as Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, showing that women held recognized roles in his communities ^[4].

Around 57 CE Paul returned to Jerusalem carrying a collection of money gathered from Gentile churches for the poor of the mother community. Accused of bringing a Gentile into the Temple precincts, he was seized by a crowd and taken into Roman custody ^[1]. He spent about two years imprisoned at Caesarea under the governors Felix and Festus, and, exercising his right as a Roman citizen, appealed his case to the emperor ^[1].

The voyage to Rome ended in shipwreck off Malta, an episode Acts narrates in unusual nautical detail. Reaching the capital around 60 CE, Paul lived under house arrest for two years, receiving visitors and preaching, and there the narrative of Acts breaks off ^[1].

The New Testament does not record his death. Early Christian tradition, attested by Clement of Rome near the end of the first century and by later writers, holds that Paul was executed in Rome during or shortly after the persecution under Nero, probably between 64 and 67 CE, and that as a citizen he was beheaded rather than crucified ^[6]. The Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome was built over the site venerated as his tomb, and excavations announced by the Vatican in 2009 dated remains in the sarcophagus there to the first or second century ^[7].

Basic Paul the Apostle facts only hint at the scale of his influence. He wrote a substantial share of the New Testament, and the letters attributed to him have been read aloud in Christian worship every week for nearly two thousand years ^[2]. His insistence that Gentiles could join the people of God without adopting Jewish law transformed a movement within Judaism into a faith open to every nation ^[5].

Theologians have returned to him at every turning point in Christian history. Augustine's account of grace, Luther's doctrine of justification by faith, and Karl Barth's commentary on Romans in 1919 all grew from close engagement with Paul's arguments ^[5]. Since the 1970s, scholars associated with the so-called New Perspective on Paul, notably E. P. Sanders and James D. G. Dunn, have reexamined his relationship to first-century Judaism, keeping his letters at the center of academic debate ^[4].

The churches he planted in Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth, and Thessalonica became anchors of Mediterranean Christianity, and the cities of his journeys draw pilgrims and historians alike. Both Catholic and Orthodox calendars honor him on 29 June together with Peter, and the year from June 2008 to June 2009 was observed worldwide as the Pauline Year, marking the two thousandth anniversary of his birth ^[7].