Apostle Paul

Paul the Apostle, known in his earlier life as Saul, was a first-century Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia and a Roman citizen by birth. He belonged to the tribe of Benjamin and was trained in the Pharisaic interpretation of the Jewish law. The Acts of the Apostles states that he studied in Jerusalem under the respected teacher Gamaliel. In his own letters he emphasizes his zeal for ancestral traditions and his former life as a persecutor of the church. Acts depicts him as present at the stoning of Stephen and as obtaining authority to arrest followers of Jesus in Damascus. These claims cannot be independently corroborated outside the New Testament, but they form the consistent early Christian picture of his origins and first career.

According to Acts, while traveling to Damascus he experienced a revelatory encounter with Jesus, was temporarily blinded, and after his sight was restored was baptized. He later wrote that God had revealed his Son in him so that he might preach among the Gentiles, and that he did not immediately consult with the Jerusalem apostles. A period in Arabia and a subsequent return to Damascus and then Jerusalem are mentioned in Galatians. Thereafter he worked in Syria and Cilicia and, together with Barnabas, in Antioch, which became a major center of the Gentile mission. From Antioch he undertook journeys through Cyprus and Asia Minor, and later into Macedonia and Achaia, founding or strengthening communities in places such as Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus. He supported himself by the trade of tentmaking, as Acts and his own remarks about working with his hands indicate.

A substantial body of letters circulated under his name. Seven—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon—are widely accepted by historians as authentic compositions of Paul in the middle decades of the first century. Other New Testament letters attributed to him (Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles) are of disputed authorship. The undisputed letters address concrete problems in mixed Jewish-Gentile congregations: the status of the Mosaic law, the inclusion of uncircumcised Gentiles, internal divisions, sexual ethics, the collection for Jerusalem, and the expected return of Christ. They also contain some of the earliest surviving statements about Jesus’s death, resurrection, and significance. Paul’s insistence that Gentiles need not become Jews in order to belong to the people of God brought him into conflict with some Jewish Christians; Galatians and Acts 15 preserve differing accounts of how that conflict was handled in Jerusalem.

Acts reports that after bringing a collection to Jerusalem he was accused of violating the Temple, arrested, detained at Caesarea under successive Roman governors, and finally sent to Rome after appealing to the emperor as a citizen. The narrative of Acts ends with him living under house arrest in Rome and teaching for two years. The New Testament does not record his death. Early extra-biblical witnesses, including the First Letter of Clement from the late first century, speak of Paul’s martyrdom after he had preached in the east and the west. Later tradition, attested by the second century and thereafter, locates his execution in Rome during Nero’s persecution, typically by beheading on account of his citizenship, and associates his burial with a site on the Via Ostiense. That site became the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. Precise years for his birth and death are not recorded in contemporary sources; scholarly estimates generally place his activity in the 30s through the 60s of the first century.

Paul was not bishop of Rome and did not hold a patriarchal office. His authority rested on his claim to have been called as an apostle to the Gentiles and on the subsequent canonical status of his letters. In 1 Corinthians he presents himself as unmarried and commends remaining as he is. He is commemorated in the Western and Eastern churches on 29 June together with the Apostle Peter, and his conversion is observed on 25 January. He is invoked as a patron of missionaries, theologians, tentmakers and related crafts, Malta (from the shipwreck narrative in Acts), and Rome jointly with Peter, among other causes. His writings have remained central to Christian doctrine, liturgy, and controversy from antiquity to the present.