Apostle Paul

Saul of Tarsus, later known as the Apostle Paul, was a first-century Jew born in Tarsus, a Hellenistic city in the Roman province of Cilicia. He belonged to the tribe of Benjamin and was a Pharisee. As a Roman citizen by birth he possessed legal privileges that later affected his trials. According to the Acts of the Apostles and his own letters, he was educated in Jerusalem under the rabbi Gamaliel. In zeal for the ancestral Law he opposed the early Jesus movement, consenting to the killing of Stephen and obtaining authority to arrest disciples in Damascus.

The turning point in his life, as narrated in Acts and alluded to in his epistles, occurred on the road to Damascus, where he reported a visionary encounter with the risen Jesus. Temporarily blinded, he was baptized by Ananias and thereafter proclaimed Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. After time in Arabia and Damascus he visited Jerusalem, where Barnabas introduced him to a still-wary community. He later worked in Tarsus and then Antioch, from which he and Barnabas were sent on missionary journeys through Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia. He founded or strengthened churches in Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, and elsewhere, often supporting himself by tentmaking.

Paul’s letters, written mainly in the 50s of the first century, argue that Gentiles are included in the people of God through faith in Christ without full observance of the Mosaic Law, and they place the death and resurrection of Jesus at the center of salvation. Conflict over Gentile inclusion was addressed at the gathering in Jerusalem described in Acts 15 and Galatians 2. Scholars generally treat Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon as authentic; other New Testament letters are attributed to him with less agreement. Arrested in Jerusalem after a Temple riot, he was held in Caesarea and, having appealed to Caesar as a citizen, was sent to Rome, surviving a shipwreck on Malta.

Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome, preaching openly. Later tradition, already reflected in 1 Clement at the end of the first century and in Eusebius, holds that he was beheaded in the Neronian persecution in the mid-60s. He is said to have been buried on the Via Ostiensis, the site of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. Venerated from the earliest period as apostle and martyr, he is commemorated with Peter on 29 June and remembered as Apostle to the Gentiles. His writings have shaped Christian doctrine across East and West, notably through Augustine and later Western reformers.