Paul

Paul, known in Hebrew as Saul, was a first-century Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a Hellenistic city of the eastern Roman Empire. The Acts of the Apostles and his own letters present him as a Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin and a Roman citizen by birth. He received a thorough education in the Jewish law, which Acts associates with study in Jerusalem under Gamaliel. In his early adulthood he became a fierce opponent of the Jesus movement, taking part in the persecution of believers in Judea and, according to Acts, standing by at the stoning of Stephen. His own letters confirm that he had violently persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.

According to Acts, while he was traveling to Damascus to arrest followers of Jesus, he was confronted by a vision of the risen Christ and temporarily blinded. After being received and baptized by a disciple named Ananias, he began to preach that Jesus was the Messiah. He spent time in Arabia and Damascus, later visiting Jerusalem, where he met Cephas (Peter) and James, the Lord’s brother, as he recounts in Galatians. He then worked in Syria and Cilicia before being brought by Barnabas to Antioch, which became a base for missions to the Gentiles. From there he undertook journeys through Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia, founding or strengthening communities in places such as Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus. He often supported himself by tentmaking and argued that Gentile converts need not take on the full yoke of the Mosaic law, a stance that produced sharp controversy with some Jewish Christians and was addressed at the meeting in Jerusalem described in Acts 15 and Galatians 2.

A large part of the New Testament consists of letters that bear his name. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon are widely accepted as authentic; other epistles attributed to him are of more disputed authorship among modern scholars. These writings treat justification apart from works of the law, the unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ, the church as one body with many members, and ethical life in the Spirit. Paul describes imprisonments, floggings, a stoning, shipwrecks, and constant danger. Acts portrays a final journey to Jerusalem, arrest, hearings before Roman officials, and transfer to Rome. Christian tradition holds that he was executed by beheading in Rome during Nero’s persecution, in the mid-60s of the first century, and that he was buried on the Ostian Way, where the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls later rose.

From an early date he was venerated as an apostle and martyr together with Peter. The Western church keeps their joint feast on 29 June and commemorates Paul’s conversion on 25 January. He is commonly called the Apostle to the Gentiles and is invoked as a patron of missionaries, theologians, and evangelists, as well as of Malta, associated in Acts with his shipwreck, and of tentmakers, his trade. His letters have shaped Christian doctrine, liturgy, and ethics across East and West more than those of any other single New Testament author.