Holy Apostle Paul

Era

First century, died at Rome in the 60s

Region

Tarsus, Damascus, Arabia, Antioch, Asia Minor, Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome

Category

Apostle to the nations, and martyr

Principal feast for this profile

June 29, with the Apostle Peter

About 12 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to Who He Said He Was The Road The Work Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

Who He Said He Was

Paul tells us a good deal about himself, and it is worth separating what he says from what Luke says about him, because the two are not the same list.

From his own hand: he was of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, and he persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it. He says it more than once and without softening. I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God. And there is one vivid detail he gives that Acts also gives: that at Damascus the governor under King Aretas set a watch on the city to seize him, and he was let down over the wall in a basket.

From Acts, and only from Acts: that he was born in Tarsus of Cilicia; that he was a Roman citizen from birth; that he studied in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel; that he made tents; and that he was standing there consenting when Stephen was stoned, with the witnesses’ coats at his feet.

That is not a debunking. Luke had sources and was probably a companion. It is simply where each detail comes from, and a reader is entitled to know.

The Road

Acts tells the Damascus road three times: once in Luke’s narration, once in Paul’s speech on the temple steps in Aramaic, once before Agrippa and Festus. The three do not match in every particular — in one the companions hear the voice and see nobody, in another they see the light and do not hear the voice; in one Paul falls alone, in another they all fall; Ananias is central in two accounts and absent from the third; and the proverb about kicking against the goads appears only in the version told to a Greek-speaking king.

The usual harmonisations are available and some are good. But a book that tells the same story three times in three different settings is doing something deliberate, and the differences are the sort of thing a careful reader will notice. Better to notice them first.

What Paul himself says about it is shorter and stranger. It pleased God, who set him apart from his mother’s womb, to reveal His Son in him. And then: I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia.

Arabia here means the Nabataean kingdom, whose capital was Petra and whose northern reach touched Damascus. He does not say what he did there. It is usually pictured as a retreat for contemplation, and it may have been. It is at least as likely that he was already preaching, since something he did made the Nabataean governor want him arrested.

Three years later he went up to Jerusalem, spent fifteen days with Peter, and saw no other apostle except James the Lord’s brother. He swears to this — before God, I do not lie — because the whole argument of Galatians depends on his Gospel not having come from Jerusalem.

The Work

Antioch sent him out, with Barnabas, and after that he did not stop.

Cyprus, then the hill country of Asia Minor. At Lystra they stoned him and dragged him out of the city thinking he was dead, and he got up and went back in. At Philippi he and Silas were beaten and jailed and sang hymns at midnight. At Athens he stood on the Areopagus and quoted their own poets at them. At Corinth he stayed eighteen months and worked with his hands. At Ephesus he stayed about three years, until a silversmith who made shrines of Artemis worked out what this teaching would do to his trade and started a riot.

Then Jerusalem, a riot in the temple, an arrest, and four years of custody — two of them at Caesarea, and then the appeal to Caesar, the voyage, the storm, fourteen nights adrift, and the shipwreck on Malta.

Acts ends with him in Rome under house arrest for two years, receiving everyone who came, preaching the kingdom of God without hindrance. It does not tell us what happened next. Everything after that comes from tradition or from the Pastoral Epistles.

Where the Record Comes From

The chronology. One inscription fixes one year, and everything else is counted forward and backward from it.

At Delphi, French archaeologists found fragments of a letter of the Emperor Claudius that names Lucius Junius Gallio as proconsul of Achaia, and the imperial titulature dates the letter to the first half of AD 52. Proconsuls served about a year, so Gallio was almost certainly in office from the summer of 51 — which places Paul’s appearance before him at Corinth, in Acts 18, in that window.

Everything else hangs off that, and off a second, less-used anchor: Aretas IV of Nabataea died about AD 40, so the escape in the basket, and therefore the conversion three years earlier, must be before that.

Then the problems begin. Acts records five visits of Paul to Jerusalem; Galatians records two. Which Acts visit Galatians 2 describes is the hinge of the entire chronology, and there is no consensus — the identification with the council of Acts 15 is traditional, but it requires Paul, writing under oath about how rarely he consulted Jerusalem, to have silently skipped a visit. Reconstructions of Paul’s life differ by a year or two at almost every point, and by four or five years at the end.

The honest sentence: one stone at Delphi fixes one year, and the rest is reckoning.

The letters. Seven are undisputed by anyone: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.

Others are argued about, in roughly this order of confidence: 2 Thessalonians, which most scholars still accept; Colossians, where opinion genuinely splits; Ephesians, which a majority of critical scholars regard as written in Paul’s name by someone else; and the Pastorals — 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus — which are the most disputed, on grounds of vocabulary, church order, and the difficulty of fitting their travel into Acts.

Hebrews is a separate case, and the interesting one, because the Church itself noticed. The letter is anonymous; the title is a later addition; and the ascription to Paul is an inference. Origen, in the third century, said it about as well as it can be said. The style is not Paul’s — its diction is purer Greek, as anyone who can discern differences of phrasing will admit — but the thoughts are admirable and not inferior to the apostolic writings. His conclusion: if any church holds this epistle to be Paul’s, let it be commended for that, for the ancients did not hand it down as Paul’s without reason. But who wrote the epistle, in truth, God knows. Jerome reports the same doubt, and names Barnabas, Luke and Clement as proposed alternatives.

The Orthodox Church receives fourteen epistles as Scripture, Hebrews among them, and announces each in the lectionary as from the epistle of the holy Apostle Paul. That is settled. But canonicity is the Church’s judgement about which books are Scripture; authorship is a historical question; and a Father drew that distinction himself, in writing, in the third century. There is no conciliar definition binding an Orthodox Christian to a view about who held the pen for Hebrews.

The thorn in the flesh. Since everybody wonders: Paul says there was given him a thorn — the Greek word is nearer to stake than to thorn — a messenger of Satan to buffet him, and that he asked three times for it to go, and was told that grace was sufficient and strength is perfected in weakness.

He never says what it was, and the guesses have been going for eighteen centuries: eye disease, malaria, epilepsy, migraine, a speech impediment, a skin condition, spiritual temptation, demonic affliction, grief at Israel’s unbelief. Worth knowing on an Orthodox site: the Eastern reading is not illness at all. Chrysostom rejects that vigorously — the devil could not have been given power over the body of Paul, he says, since the devil submitted to Paul at a word — and reads the messenger of Satan as human adversaries: Alexander the coppersmith, Hymenaeus and Philetus, all the opponents of the word. The Latin West went the other way partly because the Vulgate’s rendering pushed it toward carnal temptation, which the Greek does not require.

A number of serious commentators conclude that certain identification is impossible, and some add that the vagueness is the point: name the affliction and every reader who does not share it is excused.

Rome and the beheading. The earliest witness is Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth around 96: Paul was seven times in chains, banished, stoned; he preached in the East and the West, taught righteousness to the whole world, came to the limit of the West, bore witness before rulers, and departed from the world. Clement does not say beheading, does not say Nero, does not name a city.

The first narrative account is the apocryphal Acts of Paul, from the later second century — the source of the detail, still in the hymnography and the icons, that milk rather than blood spurted onto the soldier’s cloak. There is a striking fact about this book: Tertullian says it was composed by a presbyter in Asia who was convicted and removed from office for it, and who pleaded that he had done it out of love for Paul. The earliest external notice of the book is a disavowal.

Tertullian himself, around 200, gives the manner: at Rome, Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s, and Paul wins his crown in a death like John’s — John the Baptist, that is, so beheading. Elsewhere he makes the logic explicit and ties it to citizenship: a Roman citizen condemned to death was executed by the sword, not crucified, since crucifixion was for slaves and provincials. That reasoning is early and coherent, though notice it depends on the citizenship, which is attested only in Acts.

Around the same time the Roman churchman Gaius points an opponent to the monuments: the Vatican for one apostle, the Ostian Way for the other. That is where the basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls stands. Dionysius of Corinth, a generation earlier, says the two taught in Italy and were martyred at the same time — which is where the joint feast comes from, though his phrase more likely means in the same period than on the same day.

Jerome gives the traditional date: the fourteenth year of Nero, on the same day as Peter, beheaded and buried on the Ostian Way. That is AD 67, and it is where the synaxaria get it. Other scholars argue for 62, or for 64 and the persecution after the fire. No first-century source gives a date at all.

Spain. Paul wrote to the Romans that he intended to go to Spain, twice in one chapter, and he generally went where he said he would go. Clement, writing from Rome, says he came to the limit of the West — a phrase that, from a Roman writer to a Greek audience, most naturally means somewhere beyond Rome. The Muratorian Fragment, independently, refers to Paul’s departure from the city when he journeyed to Spain.

Against: Clement’s sentence sits in a passage of high rhetoric that also has Paul teaching righteousness to the whole world. Acts says nothing. And there is no Spanish tradition, no church in Hispania claiming Pauline foundation — which is odd, in a world where such claims were made eagerly and often.

The fair statement: that he intended to go is certain, from his own hand. That he went is a tradition attested within a generation or two of his death by two independent sources and contradicted by none — but never narrated, never localised, and leaving no trace in Spain itself.

The tomb. The site on the Ostian Way is the strong claim. Gaius pointed at a monument there around 200; the fourth-century Roman calendar already names the place; Constantine built a memorial and Theodosius a great basilica, which stood for fourteen centuries until a fire in 1823.

Excavation under the papal altar between 2002 and 2006 found a white marble sarcophagus, never opened, beneath a pierced fourth-century slab inscribed PAULO APOSTOLO MART — to Paul, apostle, martyr.

In 2009 Benedict XVI announced the result of a probe inserted through a small drilled hole: traces of purple linen with gold leaf, blue fabric, grains of red incense, and bone fragments which, radiocarbon-dated blind by a laboratory that did not know their provenance, belonged to someone who lived in the first or second century.

Note his own verb: this would seem to confirm the tradition. He did not say the bones are Paul’s; he said the result is consistent. Carbon dating narrows a field to a very large number of people. The sarcophagus was not opened, no full examination exists in the public record, no DNA work has been done, and there is nothing to compare it to. What the archaeology does establish is continuity of veneration at one site over eighteen centuries, which is a real and checkable thing, and quite enough.

Why the Church Remembers Him

Because of the size of the reversal. The Church’s first martyr died with a young Pharisee holding the coats of the men who killed him, and that Pharisee wrote something like half the New Testament.

And because of what he wrote. Almost everything a Christian says about grace, about justification, about the body of Christ, about love in 1 Corinthians 13, about the mind of Christ in Philippians 2, about nothing being able to separate us from the love of God — is his, dictated or written between journeys, often from custody, usually to a particular congregation with a particular problem.

The icon for 29 June has him embracing Peter. They are not an obvious pair. One was called at the beginning and denied Him at the end; the other was an enemy and was knocked off his feet. One was sent to the circumcision and one to the nations, and they had a public row at Antioch that Paul put in a letter that is now Scripture. The Church puts them on the same day and shows them embracing, without pretending the row did not happen.

What His Life Asks of Us

That nobody is out of reach. Paul is the standing argument against writing anybody off, including yourself, and he never let go of what he had been: I am the least of the apostles, because I persecuted the Church of God. He did not get over it, and he did not let it stop him.

That the work is mostly unglamorous. Read the list in 2 Corinthians — the beatings, the shipwrecks, the nights without sleep, the hunger, and then, at the end of the list of dangers, the daily pressure of my anxiety for all the churches. The hardest part of his ministry, by his own account, was worrying about people.

And the answer he was given, which was not the answer he asked for. He asked three times for the thorn to be taken away. He was told: My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness. That is not a promise of removal. It is a promise about where strength actually comes from, and it was given to the most capable man in the New Testament.

Holy Apostle Paul, pray to Christ our God that no one may be beyond His reach, that we may bear what is not taken away, and that His strength may be made perfect in our weakness.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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