THE APOSTLE PAUL is one of a handful of people from the ancient world whose words still have the capacity to leap off the page and confront us. Whether we agree with him or not—whether we like him or not!—his letters are personal and passionate, sometimes tearful and sometimes teasing, often dense but never dull. But who was he? What made him tick? And why did his seemingly erratic missionary career have such a profound influence on the world of ancient Greece and Rome and thereby on the world of our own day?
Any worthwhile answer must presuppose the detailed historical and theological study of his letters in debate with ongoing scholarship. I have tried to do this in The Climax of the Covenant (1991/1992), Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013), the collection of essays entitled Pauline Perspectives (2013), and the survey of modern (largely Anglophone) research Paul and His Recent Interpreters (2015).1 But the biographer’s questions are subtly different. We are searching for the man behind the texts.
Like most historians, I try to include all relevant evidence within as simple a framework as possible. I do not regard it a virtue to decide ahead of time against either the Pauline authorship of some of the letters or the historicity of the Acts of the Apostles (on the grounds, perhaps, that Luke was writing long after the events, inventing material to fit his theology). Each generation has to start the jigsaw with all the pieces on the table and to see if the pieces can be plausibly fitted together to create a prima facie case. In particular, I make two large assumptions: first, a South Galatian address for Galatians; second, an Ephesian imprisonment as the location of the Prison Letters. In the former I am following, among many others, Stephen Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. 2, The Rise of the Church.2 In the latter I am indebted to many, including an older work by a St. Andrews predecessor, George S. Duncan, Paul’s Ephesian Ministry: A Reconstruction.3 I have found that these hypotheses make excellent sense of the historical, theological, and biographical data. References to primary sources are found in the notes at the end, but I have not usually cluttered things up with endless references to Acts itself.
A small note on style. Despite protests, I keep the lowercase s in “(holy) spirit,” because that conforms to my own translation, which I use here4 (translations of Old Testament quotations are either my own or from the NRSV), and particularly because when Paul wrote the Greek word pneuma, he did not have the option of a distinction between upper and lower case. His letters were in any case written initially to be read out loud. The word pneuma had to make its way in a world where it had different shades of philosophical and religious meaning without the help of visible markings. This itself makes an important point about Paul, who told and lived a Jesus-shaped Jewish message in a confused and contested world.
I am grateful to several friends and colleagues who have read all or part of this book in draft and have offered suggestions, corrections, additions, and clarifications. They are not responsible for the errors that remain. I think particularly of Simon Kingston, Scot McKnight, Mike Bird, Mike Gorman, Max Botner, Craig Keener, Andrew Cowan, John Richardson, and Jonathan Sacks. The publishers have been uniformly helpful and encouraging; I’m thinking of Mickey Maudlin, Noël Chrisman, and their coworkers at HarperOne, and Sam Richardson, Philip Law, and their coworkers at SPCK. I am once again grateful to my colleagues and students at St. Andrews for their encouragement and enthusiasm, and to my dear family for their unfailing support. The book is dedicated to the beloved memory of my late sister-in-law, Carey Wright, who like Paul gave love and joy unstintingly to those around her.
Tom Wright
Ascension Day, 2017
St. Andrews