Apostle Paul

Paul, called Saul in his earlier life, was a first-century Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia who became the principal missionary to the Gentiles and the most influential theologian of the nascent Christian movement. In his own letters he identifies himself as a Hebrew of Hebrews, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee according to the law, and, according to the Acts of the Apostles, a Roman citizen by birth. Acts further places his education in Jerusalem under the Pharisee Gamaliel. He describes a youth of exceptional zeal for the ancestral traditions, during which he persecuted the assemblies of Jesus' followers. While traveling to Damascus to continue that campaign he experienced a revelation of the risen Christ that reversed the direction of his life. Thereafter he understood himself as apostle to the nations, charged to announce the gospel among Gentiles without requiring them to take on the full yoke of the Mosaic law.

After time in Arabia and Damascus, and a later visit to Jerusalem in which he met Cephas (Peter) and James the Lord's brother, Paul worked in Syria and Cilicia and then, with Barnabas, in the mixed Jewish-Gentile church at Antioch. From Antioch he undertook journeys through Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia, founding or consolidating communities in cities such as Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus. He supported himself at least in part by the trade of tentmaking. His surviving correspondence—Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon, which the large majority of critical scholars accept as authentic—addresses conflicts over circumcision and table fellowship, the meaning of Jesus' death and resurrection, justification, the church as body of Christ, and the moral life expected of believers. Other New Testament letters traditionally ascribed to him (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1–2 Timothy, and Titus) are of disputed authorship in modern scholarship and are often dated later, though they belong to the Pauline tradition.

Paul's relations with the Jerusalem leadership were at times strained, especially over whether Gentile converts must be circumcised and keep the law. Galatians records both an agreement that he should go to the Gentiles while Peter went to the circumcised, and a subsequent clash with Cephas at Antioch over mixed table fellowship. He organized a collection from the Gentile churches for the poor in Jerusalem and delivered it on a final visit that, according to Acts, ended in his arrest in the Temple after a riot. As a Roman citizen he appealed to the emperor. Acts closes with Paul under house arrest in Rome, preaching for two years. Independent first-century testimony in the letter of Clement of Rome already implies that Paul, like Peter, suffered martyrdom after reaching the limit of the west. Later Christian tradition, widely received by the second century, holds that he was executed in Rome during the Neronian persecution, by beheading, a mode consistent with citizen status. The traditional site of burial lies on the Ostian Way; the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls stands over a sarcophagus long venerated as his tomb.

Precise years of birth and death are not recorded in contemporary sources. Scholarly estimates commonly place his birth early in the first century and his death in the mid-60s, within Nero's reign, but these remain inferences rather than documented dates. Paul was not Bishop of Rome, nor did he hold any later patriarchal see; he was not a member of a religious order in the later monastic sense. In 1 Corinthians he presents himself as unmarried and commends remaining as he is; no ancient source documents a wife or children. Formal papal canonization and beatification did not exist in the apostolic age; his public cult is among the oldest in Christianity. He is commemorated with the Apostle Peter on 29 June in East and West, and the Latin calendar also keeps 25 January as the Conversion of Saint Paul. His thought on faith, grace, the cross, and the inclusion of the nations has shaped Christian doctrine more than that of any other single New Testament writer, and he is invoked as patron of missionaries, theologians, tentmakers, and of places associated with his journeys, notably Malta and Rome.