He never walked with Jesus through Galilee and never sat at the Last Supper — and yet almost half the books of the New Testament bear his name. Saul of Tarsus, a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, a Roman citizen by birth, "as to the law, a Pharisee," trained in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel. In Acts he first appears not as a preacher but as a keeper of coats: those who stone Stephen lay their cloaks at his feet, and Saul "approved of his execution." Then he himself, with letters from the high priest, sets out for Damascus to arrest Christians.
On the road a light blinded him and a voice asked: "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" Luke tells the story three times in Acts; Paul himself writes more briefly and more sternly: God "was pleased to reveal His Son to me." What matters here is what did not happen. There was no repentance of a sinner searching for peace — to the end Paul considered himself "as to righteousness under the law, blameless." It was something else: the One he had persecuted as a false messiah, handed over to the cursed death on a tree, turned out to be alive. If the crucified man had risen, then the Law by which he stood cursed was not God's last word. The whole of Paul's theology grew out of this single reversal.
Then came three decades of roads. Antioch, Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus; shipwrecks, beatings, prisons — he lists them himself to the Corinthians, almost annoyed at having to boast. He gathered communities out of Gentiles and did not require circumcision of them; for this he was challenged in Jerusalem, and Peter, by Paul's own account, he "opposed to his face" in Antioch. His line prevailed: the Council of the Apostles lifted the burden of the Law from the Gentiles, and the Church did not remain a Jewish sect. Paul carried that decision on his own back.
He wrote no treatises. His epistles are letters on an occasion: to the Corinthians over their quarrels, to the Galatians over circumcision, to Philemon over a runaway slave. Of the fourteen epistles that tradition signs with his name, seven are indisputably his; the Epistle to the Hebrews Origen already assigned to an author "known to God alone." But the seven contain all that is essential. A person is justified not by works of the Law but by faith; "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female"; love "does not boast; it is not arrogant... it does not insist on its own way"; and if Christ has not been raised, "your faith is futile." The hymn to love in the thirteenth chapter and the hymn to the resurrection in the fifteenth stand in one and the same letter, beside a discussion of whether one may eat food offered to idols.
Of the resurrection he speaks as a Pharisee, not as a Platonist. For Plato the body is a prison from which the soul goes out into freedom. In Paul it is not the soul that is saved out of the body but the whole person: "sown perishable, raised imperishable," a natural body — a spiritual body. His "flesh" and "spirit" are not two substances but two directions of the will. Yet the Church, reading him with Greek eyes, more than once turned this pair into contempt for the body, and Augustine would have to explain that the body is not a prison but part of the person, which God does not discard.
The law of history this site traces Paul knew on his own skin and described before anyone else. Of his former self he wrote: "as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless"; and of his people he said it in the same words: "they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge." The collapse came to him personally, on the road to Damascus; the captivity he called by its name — "wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"; the return was not to a new law but to a living Person. And of his people he did not say "rejected": the eleventh chapter of Romans is about how "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" and "all Israel will be saved." It is the hardest passage in Paul, and he himself closes it not with an answer but with astonishment: "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!"
His end is known only from tradition. Acts breaks off with him living two years in Rome under guard, preaching "with all boldness and without hindrance." Clement of Rome, at the end of the first century, writes that Paul "reached the limits of the West" and so "departed from the world"; Tertullian and Eusebius add the detail: beheaded under Nero, as befits a Roman citizen — around the year 64–67. His grave is shown beneath the basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura. What is beyond dispute is the inheritance. Augustine was converted by opening him at random; Luther began the Reformation with the Epistle to the Romans. Whenever Christianity remembers that it is not the Law that saves but grace, it is rereading Paul.