Apostle Paul

Paul the Apostle, also known as Saul of Tarsus and venerated as Saint Paul, was a first-century Jewish preacher whose missionary work and letters shaped the theology and expansion of early Christianity among the Gentile populations of the eastern Mediterranean. He was born in Tarsus, a major city of Cilicia, to a Jewish family belonging to the tribe of Benjamin. He was a Roman citizen by birth, a status he later used when appealing his case to the imperial tribunal. In the Acts of the Apostles he is described as having been brought up in Jerusalem and trained in the Law under Gamaliel, a leading Pharisee. Paul himself, in his letters, identifies as a Hebrew, an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, and as a Pharisee, and he acknowledges that he had persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. Acts depicts him as a young man at whose feet the witnesses laid their garments during the stoning of Stephen, and as subsequently obtaining letters from the high priest to the synagogues in Damascus in order to bind and bring to Jerusalem any who belonged to the Way.

The decisive change in his life is the Christophany that Christian tradition calls his conversion. Acts narrates that as he approached Damascus a light from heaven flashed around him, that he heard the voice of Jesus asking why he persecuted him, and that he was led blinded into the city, where a disciple named Ananias laid hands on him and baptized him. Paul himself, without the narrative detail of Acts, insists that he had seen the Lord and that his apostleship came not from men but through a revelation of Jesus Christ. After his conversion he spent time in Arabia and Damascus, then after three years went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and also saw James the Lord’s brother. He later worked at Antioch in Syria and, with Barnabas, was sent out on missionary journeys that took him to Cyprus, to the cities of southern Asia Minor, and subsequently, on further journeys, through Asia Minor into Macedonia and Achaia. He founded or consolidated communities at Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, and elsewhere, supporting himself at times by the trade of tentmaking. A central conviction of his mission was that Gentiles were to be received into the people of God without being required to undergo circumcision or to observe the full Mosaic law, a stance that provoked controversy with some Jewish Christians and that was discussed at the meeting in Jerusalem often called the Apostolic Council.

Paul’s letters are the earliest surviving Christian documents and a primary source for his thought. The epistles to the Romans, the Corinthians, the Galatians, the Philippians, the Thessalonians (at least the first), and Philemon are widely accepted as authentic; others in the Pauline corpus are disputed among scholars as to authorship. In them he develops a theology centered on the crucified and risen Christ, on justification apart from works of the law, on baptism as incorporation into Christ, on the church as one body with many members, and on an eschatological hope that the Lord would return. He collected a financial contribution from the Gentile churches for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem, a project that occupied him in the later phase of his Aegean ministry. On a visit to Jerusalem he was seized in the Temple after being accused of bringing Gentiles into the inner courts, and he was taken into Roman custody. After hearings before the procurators Felix and Festus and before Herod Agrippa II, he appealed to Caesar as a citizen and was sent by sea to Rome, surviving a shipwreck on Malta, an episode that later underpinned his patronage of that island.

Acts ends with Paul in Rome, living under house arrest and preaching for two years. Subsequent tradition, already audible in the letter of Clement of Rome near the end of the first century, holds that he gave his testimony in the capital and was put to death there. Later writers associate his martyrdom with the persecution under Nero in the mid-60s of the first century and state that, as a citizen, he was beheaded rather than crucified. The traditional place of burial is on the Via Ostiensis, south of the city walls; the basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, founded in the Constantinian period and rebuilt after a nineteenth-century fire, stands over that site, and a sarcophagus beneath the papal altar has been identified by church authorities with the apostle’s tomb. Paul was not bishop of Rome and did not occupy a patriarchal see; his title of apostle rests on his claim of a direct commission from the risen Christ. He presents himself in 1 Corinthians as unmarried and recommends that state for those who can accept it. He is commemorated on 29 June together with the Apostle Peter, and his conversion is celebrated on 25 January. He is widely invoked as patron of missionaries, theologians, tentmakers, writers, the apostolate to the Gentiles, the island of Malta, and, with Peter, the city of Rome.