Apostle Paul

Paul, known in Hebrew as Saul, was a first-century Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia who became the most influential missionary and theologian of the early Christian movement. According to the Acts of the Apostles he was a Roman citizen by birth and was educated in Jerusalem under the Pharisee Gamaliel. In his own letters he identifies himself as an Israelite of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, and a Pharisee, blameless with respect to the righteousness of the law. Before his turn to Christ he was a violent persecutor of the church, a fact he himself acknowledges with regret in Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and Philippians. Acts places that activity against believers in Jerusalem and then on the road to Damascus.

The New Testament presents two complementary accounts of his conversion. Acts narrates a visionary encounter with the risen Jesus on the way to Damascus, followed by baptism under Ananias and an initial period of preaching. Paul’s own letters speak of God revealing his Son in him and of seeing the risen Lord, without repeating the Acts narrative in detail. After time in Arabia and a return to Damascus, he went up to Jerusalem three years later and stayed fifteen days with Cephas (Peter), also seeing James the Lord’s brother. A longer period in the regions of Syria and Cilicia followed. Barnabas later brought him to Antioch, which became a base for missionary travel among Gentiles.

From Antioch Paul undertook journeys, whether counted as the three journeys of Acts or reconstructed from the letters, through Cyprus, southern Asia Minor, Macedonia, Achaia, and the province of Asia, founding or strengthening communities in places such as Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus. He insisted that Gentile believers need not take on the full yoke of the Mosaic law, a position he defended in conflict with other Jewish Christians, most famously in the letter to the Galatians and in the Jerusalem meeting described in Galatians 2 and Acts 15. Seven letters are widely accepted as authentic: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles are disputed to varying degrees among scholars. These writings develop themes of justification by faith apart from works of the law, union with Christ in death and resurrection, the church as body of Christ, and expectation of the Lord’s return, and they form a large part of the New Testament canon.

Acts reports that Paul was seized in the Jerusalem temple, held by Roman authorities in Caesarea under Felix and Festus, and, having appealed to the emperor, was sent to Rome, where he spent two years under house arrest preaching. The canonical narrative ends there. Early extra-biblical tradition, already alluded to in 1 Clement near the end of the first century, holds that Paul died a martyr’s death in Rome in the time of Nero, in the mid-60s of the first century. As a Roman citizen he is said to have been beheaded rather than crucified. Later writers such as Eusebius locate the martyrdom on the Ostian Way. A tomb venerated as his has been associated since late antiquity with the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls.

Paul is commemorated throughout the Christian churches as Apostle to the Gentiles. The Latin Church keeps the Conversion of Saint Paul on 25 January and, together with Saint Peter, his principal feast on 29 June; Eastern calendars likewise honor him on 29 June. He is invoked as patron of missionaries, theologians, evangelists, tentmakers, and the island of Malta, among other causes, and with Peter as a patron of the city of Rome. His letters have shaped Christian doctrine in every century, notably in the thought of Augustine, in medieval scholasticism, in the Protestant Reformation, and in modern biblical scholarship, while remaining a central text for discussion of law, covenant, and identity.