The Apostle Paul: From Persecutor to Missionary

The apostle Paul wrote a substantial portion of the New Testament and is arguably the most consequential Christian after Jesus himself. He is also, by his own account, the least likely candidate for the job. He began as a man who approved of executing Christians, and he never stopped mentioning it.

Background and conversion

Paul introduces himself in his letters as a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, born in Tarsus in Cilicia and educated in the law. He was fluent in Greek, at home in the Hellenistic city, and, according to Acts, a Roman citizen, a status that later shaped his legal fate. His Hebrew name was Saul; Paul was his Roman name, and the New Testament switches between them without treating it as a religious renaming.

His zeal for the traditions of his ancestors led him to persecute the fledgling Jesus movement. Acts describes him approving the stoning of Stephen and traveling to Damascus with authorization to arrest believers. On that road he encountered the risen Christ, blinded by light and asked a question that reframed everything: why are you persecuting me? Acts tells the story three times, with variations. Paul himself describes it more briefly in Galatians as God revealing his Son to him.

It is more accurate to speak of a call than a conversion in the modern sense. Paul did not understand himself as leaving Judaism. He believed the God of Israel had acted decisively in Israel's Messiah, and that the promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed was now coming true. His specific commission, as he understood it, was to bring that message to Gentiles.

Missionary journeys

Acts organizes his career into a series of journeys spanning roughly two decades and thousands of miles across Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Greece. He typically arrived in a significant city, began in the synagogue, gathered a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles, worked as a tentmaker or leatherworker to support himself, and moved on, leaving behind a small household based congregation that he then kept in touch with by letter.

The travel was punishing. In 2 Corinthians 11 he lists imprisonments, five floggings of thirty nine lashes, three beatings with rods, a stoning, three shipwrecks, and a night and a day adrift at sea, along with hunger, cold, and, he adds pointedly, the daily pressure of anxiety for all the churches. He was helped throughout by coworkers who are easy to overlook, including Priscilla and Aquila, Timothy, Silas, Titus, and Phoebe, whom he commends to the Roman church as a deacon and benefactor. Yale's Dale Martin examines how this network actually functioned in his lecture on Paul as missionary.

His letters and theology

Paul's letters are occasional documents, written to address specific crises rather than as systematic theology, which is why reading them well requires reconstructing the situation on the other end. Nearly all scholars accept seven as undisputed: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. The authorship of Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles is debated, with many scholars regarding them as written by followers in his name, a recognized practice in antiquity, while others defend direct authorship.

Certain themes recur. God has acted in the death and resurrection of Jesus to reconcile the world. People are set right with God through faith rather than through works of the law, an argument Paul makes most fiercely in Galatians and Romans and which is aimed principally at whether Gentile converts must be circumcised. The church is a body with interdependent members, and in Christ the old dividing lines of ethnicity, status, and gender no longer determine standing. He also writes some of the most beautiful prose in the New Testament, including the hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13, which was composed to shame a congregation that was fighting.

Not everything in the letters sits comfortably today, particularly passages on women, slavery, and sexuality, and readers across the theological spectrum wrestle with them. Yale's Dale Martin works through these pastoral tensions in his lecture on Paul as pastor.

Legacy

Paul was taken to Rome under guard and, according to early tradition, executed there under Nero in the mid 60s. Acts ends before that, with him under house arrest still teaching. His influence has been enormous: Augustine, Luther, Wesley, and Barth all read Paul at moments that redirected church history. Recent decades have also brought a major scholarly reassessment, often called the New Perspective on Paul, which reads him more firmly within Judaism than earlier interpreters did. Academic overviews of Paul summarize how his portrait has shifted. Through it all, his own summary of himself remains disarming: by the grace of God, he wrote, I am what I am.