Paul

Paul, known before his conversion as Saul of Tarsus, was a first-century Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, a city of the eastern Roman Empire. The New Testament describes him as a Pharisee and as a Roman citizen by birth. According to the Acts of the Apostles he was brought up in Jerusalem and trained in the law; later Christian tradition identifies his teacher as Gamaliel the Elder. In his own letters he stresses his zeal for ancestral traditions and his former life as a persecutor of the church. Acts presents him as present at the stoning of Stephen and as obtaining authority to arrest followers of Jesus in Damascus. Precise years for his birth and early career are not preserved in the sources; he belongs to the first Christian generation and was active in the middle decades of the first century.

The accounts of his conversion, given three times in Acts and alluded to in Galatians and 1 Corinthians, describe a revelation of the risen Jesus on the way to Damascus, followed by temporary blindness, baptism by Ananias, and a call to preach among the Gentiles. Galatians states that he did not immediately consult the Jerusalem apostles but went into Arabia and later returned to Damascus, visiting Peter (Cephas) and James in Jerusalem only after three years. He then worked in the regions of Syria and Cilicia. From the church at Antioch he was sent, with Barnabas and later with companions including Silas, Timothy, and Luke, on journeys that established Christian communities across Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia. Conflicts over whether Gentile believers must be circumcised and keep the Mosaic law led to the meeting in Jerusalem described in Acts 15 and Galatians 2, after which Paul continued to defend the freedom of Gentile churches from full observance of the law.

A substantial body of letters circulated under his name. Critical scholarship generally accepts as authentic Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon; other letters in the Pauline corpus are disputed or regarded as later compositions in his tradition. These writings address the unity of Jew and Gentile in Christ, justification apart from works of the law, the church as Christ’s body, ethical life in the Spirit, and the expected return of Christ. They also reveal practical struggles: collections for the community in Jerusalem, opposition from rival teachers, and the social composition of urban congregations that included slaves, artisans, and household groups. Paul supported himself at least in part by tentmaking, a trade associated with Cilicia. In 1 Corinthians he presents himself as unmarried during his ministry; later speculation that he may once have been married is not established by the early sources.

Acts narrates his arrest in Jerusalem after a riot in the Temple, two years of custody under the procurators Felix and Festus at Caesarea, and a voyage to Rome to appeal to Caesar, including shipwreck on Malta. The book closes with Paul living under guard in Rome and preaching. Subsequent Christian writers of the late first and second centuries, including 1 Clement and later Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Eusebius, report that he was executed in Rome under Nero. Tradition specifies beheading, the form of capital punishment appropriate to a citizen, at a site later identified with the Abbey of the Three Fountains, and burial on the Via Ostiense. The Constantinian and later basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls marks the traditional tomb; excavations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have examined a sarcophagus beneath the high altar associated with that cult. The exact year of death is not certain; ancient notices cluster in the mid-60s of the first century, commonly associated with Nero’s reign, but the sources do not fix a single verified date.

Veneration of Paul is ancient and universal in East and West. He is commemorated with the Apostle Peter on 29 June, a date already important in fourth-century Rome; the Conversion of Saint Paul is kept on 25 January. He is invoked as apostle of the Gentiles and as patron of missionaries, theologians, evangelists, tentmakers, and numerous places, including Malta, Greece, and the city of Rome jointly with Peter. His influence on Christian doctrine, especially in the Latin West through Augustine and later through the Reformers, and on the self-understanding of missionary movements, has been continuous from late antiquity onward. Historical reconstruction of his life depends almost entirely on the New Testament and a thin layer of early extra-biblical tradition; many chronological details remain uncertain and should not be pressed beyond the sources.