Who was Paul?

In the letters he introduces himself as a Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, trained strictly within the Pharisaic tradition. Born in Tarsus, in Cilicia, a Greek city with an active intellectual life, and a Roman citizen — a status he invokes more than once in Acts to defend himself.

His first appearance in the New Testament is discreet and sinister: at the stoning of Stephen, the witnesses lay their clothes at the feet of a young man called Saul. In the chapters that follow he moves from bystander to enforcer — entering houses, making arrests, and heading for Damascus after more people.

The episode on the road is narrated three times in Acts, which is unique in the book: once by the narrator and twice by Paul himself, in speeches of defence. The three accounts agree on essentials — the light, the fall, the voice asking why he is persecuting — and differ on smaller details, such as what his companions heard or saw.

Worth noticing what the question is about. It is not about doctrine or the Law: it is about persecution, and it is phrased in the first person. All of Paul’s later theology about the body of Christ has its narrative seed here.

After that he is blind for three days and is healed by a Christian in Damascus who, according to the text, tries to argue his way out of the errand before accepting it — another detail an apologetic narrative would have cut.

A quick reading leaves the impression that Paul left Damascus converted and immediately began preaching across the world. The letter to the Galatians says something else, and says it in the first person: he did not go up to Jerusalem, he went into Arabia, returned to Damascus, and only after three years went to meet Peter — and stayed a fortnight.

That passage is written in a polemical setting: Paul is arguing that he did not receive the Gospel through human intermediaries. But the chronological datum still holds, and it changes the shape of the biography: there is a gap of years between the road and the public ministry, and nobody knows what happened in it.

Acts organises its second half into three long circuits around the eastern Mediterranean, with Antioch as the base. Paul founds communities, is expelled, returns, writes. The pattern repeats so often that the reader starts anticipating it.

One question runs through all of it: do the non-Jews who join have to take on the Jewish Law? The argument goes to a meeting in Jerusalem, narrated in chapter 15, and the decision is no — with a minimal set of practical recommendations. Peter’s speech at that meeting argues along the same line Paul defends in the letters.

Internal conflicts are not hidden. Paul and Barnabas split over a disagreement about taking John Mark along; Paul confronts Peter publicly at Antioch. And his letters are frequently written in the tone of an argument, because that is what they are.

A note about the letters. Thirteen carry his name. The letter to the Hebrews, which many people attribute to Paul, does not carry his name anywhere and does not present itself as his; the attribution is ancient and did appear in canonical lists, but today most scholars, Catholic and Protestant alike, take the author to be someone else and unknown.

No argument associated with Paul has generated more than this one, and it is usually staged as a duel between two verses: one in Romans, saying a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the Law; another in James, saying that works have a part in justifying a person and rejecting outright the formula that leaves faith on its own.

Both are set out below, side by side, and it is worth reading them whole before any explanation. Two observations help. First: the phrase Paul uses is "works of the law", and his immediate context is the question of circumcision and Jewish observance for non-Jews. Second: the example James picks is Abraham, and the verse from Genesis he quotes is exactly the one Paul quotes in Romans.

From there the Christian traditions organise their answers differently — and the note below sets out the readings without this page choosing between them.

In the second letter to the Corinthians, in the middle of a passage about revelations, Paul mentions something he calls a thorn in the flesh. He says he asked three times for it to be taken away, and that the answer was something else. He does not say what it was.

Acts ends oddly: with Paul under guard in Rome, two years in rented lodgings, receiving anyone who came and preaching without hindrance. There is no trial, no sentence, no death narrated. The author simply stops.

The tradition that he was executed in Rome is early and widely accepted, and it turns up already in Christian writers at the end of the first century. But the New Testament does not tell it, and the difference between those two things is worth knowing.