Apostle Paul

Paul, known in his earlier life as Saul, was a first-century Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia and, according to the Acts of the Apostles, a Roman citizen by birth. Acts presents him as educated in Jerusalem under the Pharisee Gamaliel and as a zealous adherent of Pharisaic Judaism. Before his conversion he was an active opponent of the nascent Jesus movement and took part in the persecution of its members; Acts associates him with the killing of Stephen. Paul’s own letters independently confirm that he had persecuted the church of God and had been exceptionally zealous for the ancestral traditions. His precise year of birth is not recorded in ancient sources and can only be estimated in broad terms to the early first century.

The decisive turning point in his life is described in Acts as a visionary encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, an event to which Paul himself refers in Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and Philippians as a revelation in which God disclosed his Son to him and called him to preach among the Gentiles. After a period in Arabia and Damascus, and a later visit to Jerusalem in which he met Cephas (Peter) and James the Lord’s brother, he undertook an independent apostolic mission. Over subsequent years he traveled widely through Syria, Cilicia, Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia, founding and nurturing communities in cities such as Antioch, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus. He insisted that Gentile converts need not take on the full yoke of the Mosaic law, a position he defended in Galatians and that, according to both Galatians and Acts, was a matter of sharp controversy with some Jewish Christians.

A substantial portion of the New Testament consists of letters bearing Paul’s name. There is broad scholarly consensus that Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon are authentically Pauline; Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles (1–2 Timothy and Titus) are disputed to varying degrees. These writings develop a theology centered on the crucified and risen Christ, justification by faith apart from works of the law, the inclusion of the Gentiles in God’s people, the church as the body of Christ, and the expected return of the Lord. They also show a pastor confronting factionalism, moral failure, and his own sufferings, including imprisonments, beatings, and shipwreck, which he catalogs in 2 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians he describes himself as unmarried and commends that state, and no ancient source that can be securely credited documents a wife or children.

According to Acts, Paul was arrested in Jerusalem after a riot in the Temple precincts, held for two years at Caesarea, and, having appealed to the emperor as a Roman citizen, was sent to Rome, where he spent further time under house arrest preaching the gospel. The New Testament does not record his death. Early Christian tradition, already reflected by the late first and second centuries and later reported by Eusebius and Jerome, holds that he was martyred in Rome during the reign of Nero, beheaded as befitted a citizen, and buried along the Via Ostiensis. That site is identified with the present Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. Together with the Apostle Peter he is commemorated on 29 June; the Conversion of Saint Paul is kept on 25 January. He was not Bishop of Rome, nor did he hold any later patriarchal see. His letters and the narrative portrait in Acts made him, after Jesus, the most influential figure in the formation of early Christianity, especially in its expansion beyond Judaism into the Greco-Roman world.