Justified True Belief

(●) The man who set out to destroy the church and ended up writing more of its Scriptures than anyone else. + Somewhere around the year 50, in a workshop in Corinth, a Jewish tentmaker from the provinces sat stitching cloth and arguing with whoever would listen. He worked with his hands on purpose, so that nobody could say he preached for money, and when the day’s work was done he went to the synagogue, and when the synagogue shut its doors to him he moved next door to a neighbor’s house. Nothing about the scene looked historically important. The letters he dictated in rooms like that one are now read aloud every Sunday on six continents. Paul is the reason the Christian faith did not stay a movement inside Judaism. He was a Pharisee, which meant a member of the strictest Jewish party of his day, the men who organized their whole lives around keeping the law of Moses down to the last detail, and he had been trained for it in Jerusalem. He considered the followers of Jesus a blasphemous sect and hunted them with official warrants. Then something happened on a road outside Damascus that he spent the rest of his life explaining, and the hunter became the traveling founder of churches from Antioch to Rome. He argued, against fierce opposition from inside his own movement, that Gentiles could belong to the God of Israel without first becoming Jews. Gentile was simply the Jewish word for everyone who was not Jewish, which in the first century meant almost everybody, and Paul won that argument. Almost every Christian alive is downstream of it. Here is the fact worth holding on to. Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry his name, more books than any other writer contributed, and the earliest of them were written around the year 50, roughly twenty years after the crucifixion and a decade or two before the first Gospel was set down. That makes his letters the oldest Christian documents that survive, written by a named man to named cities about events he claimed to have seen, while hundreds of other eyewitnesses were still alive to contradict him.

(●) c. 5 AD: Born in Tarsus, a Jewish boy who was also a Roman citizen, and sent to Jerusalem to study under the most respected rabbi of the age. + He was born Saul, in Tarsus, the chief city of Cilicia on the southern coast of what is now Turkey. Tarsus was a university town and a river port, proud of its schools, and Paul was proud enough of it to call it, years later in a speech recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, "no obscure city" (Acts 21:39). Acts is the New Testament book that tells the story of the church’s first thirty years, and since it follows Paul for most of that stretch it will come up on nearly every page of his life. His family were Jews of the diaspora, the scattered Jewish communities living outside the homeland, from the tribe of Benjamin, and strict about it: "a Hebrew of Hebrews," he wrote, "as to the law, a Pharisee" (Philippians 3:5). They were also Roman citizens, and Paul inherited the citizenship at birth. It is worth pausing on how unusual that was. Roman citizenship in a provincial Jewish family was rare enough that a tribune in Jerusalem, the officer commanding the garrison there, who had paid a large sum for his own, was startled to learn that his prisoner had been born with it (Acts 22:28). The status carried hard legal protections: exemption from scourging, which was flogging with a whip, without a trial first, and the right to have his case taken out of local hands and appealed to the emperor. Paul used both, and the second of them is why he ended his life in Rome. At some point in his youth he was sent to Jerusalem and was, in his own words, "educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers" (Acts 22:3). Gamaliel was the leading Pharisaic teacher of that generation, and he is the man whose advice in Acts 5 talked the Sanhedrin, the ruling Jewish council in Jerusalem, out of killing the apostles early. Apostle is a plain Greek word for someone sent out with authority to speak for the man who sent him, and in the New Testament it means the men Jesus commissioned to bear witness to him. Paul also learned a trade, which rabbinic teaching held every father owed his son. The Greek word Acts uses is skenopoios, "tentmaker," which probably means he worked in leather and in the coarse cloth woven from goat hair. It was ordinary manual work, and it paid for his travels for the next thirty years.

(●) c. 34 AD: He watched Stephen stoned to death, approved of it, and then went house to house arresting the rest of the believers. + The first time Saul appears in the story he is not doing anything at all. He is standing at the edge of a crowd outside Jerusalem, minding the coats of the men who are throwing the stones, while a Greek-speaking Jewish believer named Stephen is executed for saying that God does not live in houses built by hands. Luke, the author of Acts, adds one flat sentence and moves on: "And Saul approved of his execution" (Acts 8:1). What came next was not a mob. It was systematic. He carried letters of authority from the high priest, he went into private houses, and he arrested women as well as men and had them jailed (Acts 8:3, 9:1–2, 22:4–5). Years later he still could not talk about it without flinching. He called himself the least of the apostles, "unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God" (1 Corinthians 15:9), and he told the Galatians plainly that he had set out to destroy it (Galatians 1:13). The thing to understand about all this is that he was not a cynic. He was a devout young man doing what he sincerely believed God required of him. To a serious Pharisee, a movement announcing a crucified Messiah was not merely mistaken but obscene. Messiah, from the Hebrew for anointed one, was the title of the king God had promised to send Israel, the deliverer his people had been waiting centuries for, and the last thing anyone expected of that king was that he would be nailed up by an occupying army. Worse, the law said that anyone hanged on a tree was under God’s curse (Deuteronomy 21:23), and here were Jews claiming that the cursed man was the Lord. Zeal for God was the virtue that drove Saul, and it drove him to violence. He never afterward pretended otherwise, and what he had done shaped everything he later said about grace.

(●) c. 34 AD: A light on the Damascus road knocked him down, and the voice that spoke named itself as the Jesus he was hunting. + He was traveling north to Damascus, about a week’s journey, carrying warrants to arrest believers there and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. Near the city, around midday, a light brighter than the sun put him on the ground, and a voice said, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" He asked who was speaking. The answer was, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting" (Acts 9:4–5, 26:13–15). He got up blind, was led into Damascus by the hand, and sat in the dark for three days until a frightened local believer named Ananias, who had to be told twice to go, laid hands on him. Luke tells that story three times over, in Acts 9, 22 and 26, and he does not repeat himself like that for anything else in the book. Paul tells it himself far more briefly and with none of the drama, as the moment God "was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles" (Galatians 1:15–16). What he does with it afterward is the striking part. He files it in the same list as the resurrection appearances to Peter and the Twelve, meaning the inner circle of disciples Jesus had chosen and sent out, and puts himself at the end of that list, "last of all, as to one untimely born" (1 Corinthians 15:8). Whatever happened on that road, he did not think it was a vision of the ordinary kind. He thought he had seen a living man. Then he vanishes for roughly a decade. He went into Arabia, he says, and then back to Damascus, and only after three years did he go up to Jerusalem, where he spent fifteen days with Peter (Galatians 1:17–18). Arabia here does not mean anything we would call Arabia now; it was the Nabatean kingdom, the desert territory running south and east of Damascus. Its ruler is the reason for one of the odder scenes in his life. Paul left Damascus over the city wall in a basket, let down at night, because the governor under King Aretas, the Nabatean monarch whose reach extended to the city, was watching the gates for him (2 Corinthians 11:32–33). Then home to Tarsus, where he seems to have stayed for years, until Barnabas came looking for him and brought him to the mixed Jewish and Gentile church at Antioch (Acts 11:25–26). Barnabas was among the most trusted men in the Jerusalem church, and he was the one person willing to vouch for Paul back when the apostles were still, understandably, afraid of him. It was at Antioch, Luke notes in passing, that the disciples were first called Christians. The most famous convert in history spent his first decade in obscurity, and we know almost nothing about what he was doing.

(●) c. 46–49 AD: A first journey carried the gospel into Gentile cities, and in Jerusalem the church agreed those converts need not become Jews. + The church at Antioch sent Barnabas and Saul out together, and they sailed for Cyprus and then inland across the mountains of southern Asia Minor: Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe. The pattern set on that first journey held for the rest of his life. He went to the synagogue first, preached that the Messiah Israel was waiting for had come and been raised, gathered whoever believed him, appointed local leaders, and moved on. Sometime around here the name changes in Luke’s account from Saul to Paul, his Roman name. It went badly as often as it went well. At Lystra the crowd first tried to sacrifice bulls to him and Barnabas as gods in disguise, and then, when visitors from the previous towns arrived, stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city supposing he was dead (Acts 14:11–19). He got up and walked back in. The crisis that came next had nothing to do with persecution. It was a fight about the terms of membership. Believers from Judea were telling the new Gentile converts that to be saved they had to be circumcised, which meant taking on in their own flesh the physical mark God had given Abraham as the sign of the covenant, and then keep the whole law of Moses besides. Paul saw at once where that led. It meant two churches instead of one, a first-class and a second-class, and a gospel in which Christ was not quite enough on his own. So the question went up to Jerusalem, in about 49, before the apostles and elders, with Peter and James and Paul and Barnabas all speaking to it (Acts 15). The decision came back that Gentiles were in, on faith, without circumcision, and were asked only to avoid a short list of things that would have made it impossible for Jewish and Gentile believers to sit at the same table. It is the single most consequential administrative decision in Christian history, and Paul had argued for it at the cost of nearly every friendship he had.

(●) c. 49–57 AD: Two more journeys took him across the Aegean world, and the letters were written from the road. + He set out again, this time without Barnabas, after the two of them fell out over whether to take John Mark, who had abandoned them once already. Luke does not soften the quarrel; he records it as a sharp one (Acts 15:39). Paul took Silas instead, a leading man of the Jerusalem church who, like Paul, held Roman citizenship, picked up a young man named Timothy in Lystra, and crossed into Europe. What follows reads like a travel diary kept by someone with bad luck and no sense of self-preservation. In Philippi he was stripped, beaten with rods and jailed without trial, and then, the next morning, refused to leave quietly once the magistrates discovered they had flogged a Roman citizen. In Thessalonica and Berea he was run out of town. In Athens he stood on the Areopagus, the rocky hill where the city’s council met to hear out anyone with a new idea, and quoted Greek poets to Greek philosophers, and was politely laughed at the moment he got to the resurrection (Acts 17:32). Then he came down to Corinth, a rough port city, and stayed eighteen months. There he met Priscilla and Aquila, a married couple who had been expelled from Rome with the rest of the Jewish community and who worked the same trade he did, and there he was hauled before the proconsul Gallio, the Roman governor of the province, who threw the case out. That hearing gives us the firmest date in the whole story. An inscription found at Delphi fixes Gallio’s year in office to about 51 to 52 AD, and every other date in Paul’s life is calculated outward from that one fixed point. On the third journey he settled at Ephesus for the better part of three years, long enough that the trade in silver shrines of Artemis, the goddess whose temple there was counted one of the wonders of the world, fell off badly, and the silversmiths started a riot in the theater (Acts 19). Through all of it he was writing. The letters were not treatises composed at leisure in a study. They were dictated to a scribe, often in a hurry, to churches in trouble, and he would sometimes take the pen himself at the end to sign off in his own large handwriting (Galatians 6:11). Nearly everything the church knows about justification, which is his word for how God declares guilty people right with himself, about the Spirit, about the resurrection body and about the ordering of congregational life, was written in snatched hours by a working tradesman in transit who had no idea he was writing Scripture.

(●) c. 57–62 AD: Arrested in the temple courts, he spent five years in Roman custody and appealed to Caesar. + He went back to Jerusalem carrying a large sum of money, a relief collection he had spent years gathering from his Gentile churches for the poor believers in Judea (Romans 15:25–26; 1 Corinthians 16:1–4). The collection mattered to him far beyond its cash value. It was proof, in coin, that the two halves of the church were one family. He was warned repeatedly not to go. He went. In the temple he was recognized, accused of bringing a Gentile past the barrier into the inner courts, and nearly torn apart before Roman soldiers pulled him out of the crowd. What followed was five years of legal limbo: two years in the governor’s palace at Caesarea under Felix, who kept him in hope of a bribe, then a new governor, Festus, who wanted to send the case back to Jerusalem where an ambush was waiting. So Paul used the last card a citizen holds. "I appeal to Caesar" (Acts 25:11). Once said, it could not be withdrawn. The voyage to Rome ran into the autumn storms and ended with the ship broken up on the coast of Malta and every one of the two hundred and seventy-six people aboard reaching shore alive (Acts 27). He wintered on the island and came up the road to Rome in the spring, met by believers who had walked more than thirty miles down the Appian Way to meet him. Acts ends with him under house arrest for two whole years, chained to a soldier, paying his own rent, and receiving anyone who came, "proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:31). It is a strange ending for a book, and it is one reason many scholars think Luke wrote before he knew how the trial turned out.

(●) c. 64–67 AD: He was executed in Rome, almost certainly in the persecution under Nero. + Acts does not tell us what happened, so the end has to be assembled out of the early Christian sources, and they agree on the shape of it while differing on the details. A letter sent from Rome to Corinth around 96 AD, known since antiquity as Clement’s, says Paul had been "seven times in bonds," that he taught righteousness to the whole world, that he reached the farthest bounds of the west, and that he bore his testimony before the rulers and then departed (1 Clement 5, Lightfoot’s translation). About a century after that, Tertullian, a North African convert who became the first great Christian writer in Latin, has Peter crucified at Rome and Paul winning his crown "in a death like John’s" (Prescription Against Heretics 36). His readers would have caught the reference at once: John the Baptist was beheaded, and beheading was a citizen’s death rather than a slave’s. Eusebius, the fourth-century bishop who wrote the first history of the church and preserved dozens of older documents inside it, places both deaths under Nero and quotes a Roman churchman named Gaius who offered to show anyone who cared to look the apostles’ monuments, Peter’s at the Vatican and Paul’s on the road to Ostia (Church History 2.25). Later tradition fills in more: a release from the first imprisonment, the journey to Spain he had told the Romans he was planning (Romans 15:24), a second arrest, and execution at a spot outside the walls on the Ostian Way where a basilica still stands. How much of that is history and how much is pious reconstruction cannot be settled from the evidence we have. What all of them agree on is that he died in Rome as a martyr, and from Tertullian onward they say it was by the sword, under Nero, in the years of the persecution that followed the fire of 64 AD. That puts his death between about 64 and 67. The last letter that carries his name is written by a man who expects it. He asks Timothy to bring the overcoat he left behind at Troas with Carpus, and the books, "above all the parchments" (2 Timothy 4:13). Then: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith" (2 Timothy 4:7). Whether Paul wrote those words himself or a disciple wrote them in his memory, they are the right epitaph, and the church has never used another.

What He Taught

(T1) God declares guilty people right with him as a gift, on the basis of Christ’s death, received by trust rather than earned by performance. + Picture a courtroom where the verdict has already been reached. The evidence is in, the defendant has no case, and everyone in the room knows it. Then the judge announces an acquittal, and pays the penalty himself. That scene is roughly what Paul means by his central word, justification: a legal declaration, not a description of how nice someone has become. To justify is to pronounce righteous, the way a court pronounces a verdict, and Paul’s claim is that God pronounces this verdict over people who do not deserve it, on the ground of what Christ did rather than what they did. He builds to it slowly in Romans. First the case for the prosecution, and he runs it against everyone: the pagan world that suppressed what creation told it about God, and then, more painfully, his own people who had the law and broke it anyway. His verdict is that the whole human race stands in the dock together, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Only then does he say what God has done about it. Two words in the middle of his answer need unpacking, because that is where the weight sits. Redemption is a market word. It is the price paid to free a slave or ransom a prisoner, the sort of sum a family might spend years scraping together. Propitiation is a temple word, and it means the turning away of righteous anger by a sacrifice. Some translations render it "sacrifice of atonement," and others "mercy seat," which was the gold lid of the ark of the covenant, the chest that stood in Israel’s holiest room and on which the high priest sprinkled blood once a year on the Day of Atonement, the one day when the nation’s sin was formally dealt with. Put the market word and the temple word together and you have Paul’s answer to a question he takes with complete seriousness: how can a genuinely just God simply let the guilty off? His answer is that God did not let anyone off. The debt was paid, in public, at the cross, "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26). Two more of his words carry the rest of it. Grace, in his vocabulary, always means a gift given to someone with no claim on it whatsoever, never a reward and never a wage. And faith, for Paul, is not a work in disguise. It is not an achievement that earns the verdict; it is the empty hand that receives it. He hammers on the point until it cannot be missed, telling the Ephesians that grace saves through faith, that the whole of it is God’s gift rather than anyone’s doing, and that this is arranged precisely so that nobody can boast (Ephesians 2:8–9). A man who had once been blameless under the law, and who had used that blamelessness as a warrant to hunt Christians, knew better than most exactly how much boasting was at stake.

(Q) "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins." + Source: Romans 3:23–25 (English Standard Version). Paul has just spent two and a half chapters demonstrating that nobody, Jew or Gentile, can stand before God on their own record. This is the turn (T1). The letter was dictated from Corinth around 57 AD to a church in the capital that he had never met and hoped to visit on his way to Spain.

(Q) "but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." + Source: Romans 5:8 (English Standard Version). Paul has just conceded how rare it is for anyone to die even for a good man, and then turns the ordinary logic of love upside down (T1). Human affection waits to be earned; the timing of the cross is the proof that God’s did not.

(Q) "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." + Source: Ephesians 2:8–9 (English Standard Version). The chapter opens with people described as dead in their trespasses and turns on two words, "But God." This is where that turn lands (T1), and it is one of the sentences the Reformation was fought over.

(T2) A Christian is not merely a follower of Christ but is joined to him, so that his death and his resurrection count as the believer’s own. + If justification is Paul’s courtroom, this is his household. There is a small phrase he cannot leave alone: in Christ. He uses those two words more than eighty times, and their near relatives, "in the Lord" and "in him," push the total past a hundred and fifty. Once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it. In Christ there is no condemnation. In Christ there is a new creation. In Christ God chose, forgave, seated, blessed. It is not decoration. It is his way of saying that a believer is not a separate individual who has adopted a set of beliefs about Jesus, but someone who has been transferred into him the way a branch is grafted into a tree and starts drinking its sap. The consequences are strange and specific. Because the believer is in Christ, Christ’s death is counted as theirs: the old self was crucified with him, which is what Paul thinks baptism enacts, going down into the water as burial and coming up as resurrection (Romans 6:3–4). Because the believer is in Christ, his resurrection is theirs too, already in part and one day in full. This is why Paul can say two things that sound contradictory and are not. The verdict is already given and cannot be revoked, and for anyone who is in Christ Jesus there is now no condemnation at all (Romans 8:1). And the person is still being changed, slowly, with failures. Union also explains why he thinks morality follows from the gospel rather than competing with it. He almost never says "try harder." He says, in effect, become what you already are. You died to that; stop living in it. You were raised; start acting like it. And it is why he can describe the church as a body rather than a club, with Christ as the head and the members belonging to one another whether they like each other or not (1 Corinthians 12:12–27). And the one a believer is joined to is, for Paul, no mere teacher. In a hymn he quotes to the Philippians, older than the letter itself in the judgment of many scholars, Christ is the one "though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:6–7). To the Colossians he is "the image of the invisible God," in whom "all things hold together" (Colossians 1:15, 17). Whatever else union with Christ means, it means being joined to someone Paul was prepared to worship, within a generation of that man’s public execution.

(Q) "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." + Source: Galatians 2:20 (English Standard Version). He is in the middle of recounting a public argument with Peter at Antioch, where Peter had quietly stopped eating with Gentile believers under pressure from visitors out of Jerusalem. Paul’s answer runs from that dispute straight into this sentence (T2), and the "me" that comes three times over in it is unusually personal for him. "In the flesh" here carries none of the moral freight the phrase has elsewhere in his letters; it simply means in this body, in ordinary daily life.

(Q) "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." + Source: Romans 8:1 (English Standard Version). It opens the chapter that follows Paul’s account of the divided will, the passage where he describes doing the very thing he hates. The relief in the sentence is the relief of a man who has just stopped arguing with himself (T2).

(Q) "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." + Source: 2 Corinthians 5:17–21 (English Standard Version). The fullest single statement of what being in Christ does (T2), written to a church that had been questioning whether Paul was much of an apostle. An ambassador is someone who carries a ruler’s terms without inventing them, which is exactly the job Paul thought he had. The last sentence is the exchange the church has argued over ever since: the sinless one treated as sin, so that the guilty could be counted righteous (T1).

(T3) The wall between Jew and Gentile is down, and the promise made to Abraham was always meant to reach the nations. + There was a literal wall. In the temple courts a stone barrier separated the outer court, where anyone could go, from the inner courts, where only Jews could go, and inscriptions on it warned Gentiles that anyone crossing it had only himself to blame for his death. Josephus, the Jewish historian who knew the temple before the Romans destroyed it, says the warnings stood there in Greek and in Latin. Two of them have actually been dug up, one complete and one a fragment, and both are Greek; you can read the warning today. Paul was arrested on the charge of taking a Gentile past it. So when he writes that Christ "has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall" (Ephesians 2:14), his readers had a specific piece of masonry in mind. The argument that got him there is not sentimental in the least. It is exegetical, which is the word for reasoning that turns on the close reading of a text, and the text he reads closely is the story of Abraham. God promised Abraham that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed, and Paul fastens on the sequence of events. Abraham was counted righteous because he believed God, and the circumcision came afterward, as a sign of a righteousness he already had (Romans 4:9–12; Genesis 15:6). Faith, in other words, was the entry point before the law even existed. Gentiles who believe are not gatecrashers at Israel’s table. They are the point of the promise, arriving late. He is careful about what he is not saying, and modern readers miss this constantly. He is not saying Israel was a mistake, or that the law was a bad idea. The law is "holy and righteous and good" (Romans 7:12); it was a guardian, doing an honest job for a limited time, the way a tutor is not a failure for handing a grown pupil over to adult life. Nor is he saying that God is finished with the Jewish people. He spends three chapters of Romans in visible grief over his own nation and insists that God has not rejected them (Romans 11:1–2). What he is saying is that the door was always wider than anybody had realized, and that pulling it shut again after Christ has pushed it open is a denial of the gospel itself. This is the teaching that cost him most. It got him beaten in synagogues, opposed by fellow believers, and finally arrested. It is also the reason there is a church made of every nation rather than a Jewish sect with sympathetic outsiders on the porch.

(Q) "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." + Source: Galatians 3:28 (English Standard Version). Written in anger, to churches in Asia Minor being told by visiting teachers that Gentile believers must be circumcised. Paul is not abolishing the differences between people; he is denying that they determine who belongs to God (T3). The three pairs he names were the standard divisions of the ancient world. A rabbinic blessing first recorded in the century after him has a Jewish man thank God daily that he was not made a Gentile, a slave, or a woman, and whether Paul knew some form of it is debated.

(T4) Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, and if he was not, the whole thing is a waste of time. + Most founders of religions protect their central claim. Paul does the opposite. He tells the Corinthians exactly what would destroy his life’s work: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins... If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:17, 19). Not "we would still have the ethics." Pitied. What makes the chapter historically remarkable is the way it opens. Paul says he is passing on something he received, and then recites what reads like a fixed formula, four clauses in a row: died, buried, raised, appeared, followed by a list of witnesses. Handing on received tradition was a technical activity in Jewish teaching, with its own set vocabulary, roughly the way a lawyer today has a set way of saying that a document is being entered into the record, and Paul reaches for exactly that vocabulary. So this is not Paul’s composition. It is something he was taught. He was writing around 55 AD about a formula he had already received years before that, plausibly during the fifteen days he spent with Peter in Jerusalem, where he also met James, which puts the wording itself within a very few years of the crucifixion. Scholars with no sympathy at all for the claim reach the same conclusion about the dating. Gerd Lüdemann, a German New Testament scholar who did not believe Jesus rose, dated the traditions gathered in this passage to the first two or three years after the crucifixion. That is why the list matters so much: it stands far too close to the events for legend to have had time to grow. Then Paul does the thing a careful liar would never do. He names names, Peter and James among them, and says more than five hundred people saw Jesus at once, "most of whom are still alive," which amounts to an open invitation to go and check with them. He puts himself dead last, and calls himself the runt of the litter. Notice, too, who is missing. The Gospels put women at the empty tomb first, and this list does not mention them at all. You might well think that looks like a cover-up, a tidy list with the inconvenient witnesses quietly dropped. It reads better the other way around. Nobody fabricating a resurrection story in the first century would have put women in it in the first place, because a woman’s testimony carried little legal weight and naming her as your lead witness weakened your case rather than strengthening it. The Gospels put them there anyway, and kept them there, which is a good sign that the writers were stuck with what actually happened. What Paul is reciting, by contrast, is a short formal creed built to be quoted in public argument, and it names the witnesses whose names would carry in that setting. The two things fit together without strain. Paul is also specific about what kind of resurrection he means, because the Corinthians, being Greeks, wanted a spiritual survival without the embarrassment of a body. He will not have it. He describes a body that is transformed, not discarded: sown perishable, raised imperishable, the same seed and a different plant. Christian hope, for Paul, is not escaping the material world but the redemption of it, "the redemption of our bodies," with the whole groaning creation waiting on the same day (Romans 8:21–23).

(Q) "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep." + Source: 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 (English Standard Version). Written from Ephesus around 55 AD. "Delivered" and "received" are the standard words for passing on set tradition, which is why so much weight rests on this passage: Paul is quoting a creed older than the letter, not composing one (T4). Cephas is the Aramaic name of Peter.

(T5) The Spirit produces a changed life from the inside, and love is the shape it takes. + A gardener does not glue apples onto a tree. If the tree is healthy the apples come, and if it is not, nailing fruit to the branches fools nobody for long. That is Paul’s picture for Christian character. He calls the result "the fruit of the Spirit," and lists it: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22–23). Notice it is fruit, singular, not achievements, plural. These are not nine separate disciplines to work on. They are what one healthy life looks like from nine angles. By the Spirit, Paul means God himself present in the believer, the third of the three he names together without explanation when he blesses a church: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Corinthians 13:14). The Spirit is the down payment, Paul’s own commercial metaphor, a first installment that guarantees the rest (2 Corinthians 1:22). Which means the changed life is not the price of admission. It is the beginning of delivery. That is why he can be so relaxed about rules and so severe about behavior at the same time. He fought bitterly against the idea that Gentile converts must keep the law of Moses, and in the same letters he lists behaviors that have no place among people in whom God is living. The resolution is that he thinks love does what law was always aiming at, "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Galatians 5:14). A man who loves his neighbor will not need a rule against defrauding him. And when the Corinthians, a church rich in spiritual gifts and poor in kindness, started ranking each other by how impressive their gifts were, Paul stopped the argument with a description of love so plain that it has been read at weddings for centuries by people who have no idea it was written as a rebuke. He put it exactly where it would hurt: between the chapter on gifts and the chapter on how to run a meeting.

(Q) "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." + Source: 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (English Standard Version). Not a wedding poem. It sits in the middle of a long correction of a congregation that was suing one another, splitting into personality factions, humiliating the poor at the Lord’s Supper, and competing over who had the showiest gift (T5). Every quality listed is one the Corinthians were failing at.

(Q) "For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." + Source: Romans 8:38–39 (English Standard Version). The close of the chapter on life in the Spirit (T5), and Paul at his most deliberate: he assembles a list of everything a first-century reader might fear, from death and the unseen rulers and powers to whatever tomorrow holds, and rules out the lot. He was writing to Christians in the city that would later kill him.

(Q) "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." + Source: Philippians 1:21 (English Standard Version). Written in custody, in a letter of thanks to the church that had supported him longest. He is weighing out loud whether he would rather live or die, and concluding that he cannot lose either way. What union with Christ (T2) sounds like from inside a cell.

(Q) "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing." + Source: 2 Timothy 4:7–8 (English Standard Version). The last words under his name, written in the expectation of execution. The crown is the wreath given to the winner at the games, and the final clause is the characteristic turn: the prize is not his alone but goes to everyone who longed for the same thing.

(Q) "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek." + Source: Romans 1:16 (English Standard Version). The thesis sentence of the letter, written to Christians in a city where their message about an executed provincial was a joke in polite company. Of everything Paul dictated, this one letter has done the most to reshape the church that kept it, and the sentence that follows it is the one that changed Martin Luther.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The churches kept his letters, copied them, and were treating them as Scripture within living memory of his death. + Think about what normally happens to correspondence. A letter arrives, it is read, it deals with the crisis it was written about, and then it goes in a box and eventually it is gone. That is what should have happened to a set of scolding letters sent to small congregations in provincial ports. Instead the congregations copied them, swapped them with each other (Paul asks the Colossians to trade letters with Laodicea, Colossians 4:16), and collected them into a single volume within a generation or two of his death. The evidence is unusually good. A New Testament letter written in Peter’s name refers to "all his letters" as a known body of writing and puts them alongside "the other Scriptures," while adding, with feeling, that "there are some things in them that are hard to understand" (2 Peter 3:15–16). Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth around 96 AD, tells that church to go and reread the letter Paul sent them, which means the Corinthians still had it forty years on. In the generation after Clement, Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna, two bishops who both ended up dying for the faith, quote Paul constantly. And the oldest substantial manuscript of the letters that survives, a papyrus codex known as P46 and copied around 200 AD, is already a bound collection rather than a stack of separate rolls. The pressure to define the collection came, oddly enough, from an opponent. Around 144 AD a wealthy shipowner from Sinope named Marcion decided that the God of the Old Testament was a different and lesser deity than the Father of Jesus, and he drew up a canon to match. A canon is simply a fixed list of which books count as Scripture, and Marcion’s ran to a trimmed version of Luke and ten letters of Paul, with everything Jewish cut out of them. The church rejected him outright. But he had forced a question nobody had needed to answer before, which was what the church’s own list actually was. The answer that came back included Paul, in full, standing alongside the Old Testament he had spent his life expounding.

(†) More than once the Western church has been turned around by one man sitting down with the letter to the Romans. + In the summer of 386, in a garden in Milan, a thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric named Augustine was lying under a fig tree weeping, because he wanted to change his life and could not make himself do it. He heard a child’s voice from over the wall, singing a phrase in a game: take up and read. He went back to the bench, picked up the codex of Paul he had left there, and read the first lines his eye fell on, which told him to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and stop making provision for the flesh (Romans 13:13–14). He wrote later that he did not need to read further; light flooded in and the doubt was gone (Confessions 8.12). Augustine went on to become the most influential theologian the Western church has produced, and his account of grace, of sin, and of the divided will is Paul worked out at length. It happened again in Wittenberg, more than a thousand years later. Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar, a monk in an order that had taken Augustine’s name and his theology, and he was tormented by one phrase in particular, "the righteousness of God," which he heard as the impossible standard by which God would one day condemn him. He worked at Romans 1:17 until he concluded that the righteousness in question is one God gives rather than one God demands. He said afterward that he felt he had been born again and had gone through open gates into paradise. Whatever one makes of the Reformation that followed, its engine was a decision about how to read a single sentence of Paul. And it happened again, in a much smaller room. On the evening of 24 May 1738 an unhappy Anglican clergyman named John Wesley went "very unwillingly" to a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, where someone was reading aloud Luther’s preface to Romans. He wrote in his journal that his heart was strangely warmed, and that he felt he did trust in Christ alone for salvation. The revival that followed reshaped English-speaking Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic. Three men, spread across more than thirteen hundred years, three temperaments about as different as three men can be, and every one of them set going by the same letter, dictated in Corinth by a tentmaker who had not yet so much as seen the city he was writing to.

(†) The charge that Paul, not Jesus, is the real founder of Christianity is old, serious, and answerable. + Anyone who reads the Gospels and then reads Paul back to back is likely to feel the jolt, and the objection built on it goes something like this. Jesus was a Galilean prophet who preached the kingdom of God and the love of neighbor. Paul never met him in the flesh, and what Paul preached was a cosmic dying-and-rising Savior, the guilt of the whole human race, and justification, none of which Jesus is recorded as talking about in those terms. So the religion of Jesus was quietly replaced by a religion about Jesus, and the man who did the replacing was Paul. The German scholar William Wrede put it sharply in his 1904 study Paulus, calling Paul the second founder of Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century philosopher who regarded Christianity as a revolt of the weak, put it far more harshly than that. The popular version of the charge turns up regularly in documentaries and paperbacks, usually with an air of having just discovered something the church would rather keep quiet. It is a serious charge and it deserves a real answer rather than a wave of the hand. There are several, and they are cumulative. - He marks where his own authority stops. Giving instructions on marriage, Paul separates what he gives "not I, but the Lord" from what he says himself, "not the Lord," and on one question admits outright, "I have no command from the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:10, 12, 25). A man inventing a religion does not carefully flag the places where he is making it up. - He says he is passing on what he was given. The resurrection creed and the words at the Lord’s Supper both arrive with the language of received tradition (1 Corinthians 15:3, 11:23). He can even say of his message and the other apostles’ message, "Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed" (1 Corinthians 15:11). - He was checked by people who had known Jesus. He spent fifteen days with Peter and met James (Galatians 1:18–19), and went up to Jerusalem again to lay his gospel before the leaders, who "added nothing to me" and shook hands on it (Galatians 2:6–9). This is not a man operating at a safe distance from the eyewitnesses. - The disagreements are recorded, which is the point. Paul opposed Peter to his face at Antioch and wrote it down (Galatians 2:11–14). A fabricated harmony would not include the quarrel, and a Paul inventing his own religion would not need the approval he took the trouble to get. - The supposedly invented material is the earliest. The divine Christ of Philippians 2 and the atoning death of the Corinthian creed are the parts most scholars judge to be pre-Pauline, that is, older than Paul’s own writing. The high view of Jesus is not a late accretion he added; it is the tradition he inherited. What is genuinely his is the working out of what the death and resurrection of the Messiah mean for people outside Israel, and the argument that they may come in without becoming Jews. That is a development, and a huge one. It is not an invention, and the leaders who had walked with Jesus signed off on it in Jerusalem while Paul was still very much alive to be contradicted.

(†) Christians who take every word of him seriously have read him differently on justification, on election, and on how soon he expected the end. + Anyone who has sat in a room full of relatives while a grandfather’s letters were read aloud knows how the afternoon goes. Everyone there loved him. Everyone takes every line seriously. And before the coffee is cold, two of them are disagreeing about what he meant. Something of the sort has been going on around Paul almost from the beginning, and honesty asks that it be set down beside the praise. The man himself would not have minded. The New Testament says outright that parts of Paul are hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16), which is a remarkably candid thing for one book of Scripture to say about the man who wrote so much of the rest of it. None of the three questions is a place where he got it wrong. Each is a place where Christians who take every word of him seriously have come away reading him differently, and have done so for a very long time. - Faith and works. Paul writes that "we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law" (Romans 3:28). James writes that "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone" (James 2:24). Set the two sentences side by side and the pull between them is plain to anyone, and Christians have read that tension in genuinely different ways for five hundred years, since Luther’s day. The differences between Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant accounts of justification are real and should not be smoothed over. Still, there is a good deal of common ground. What all sides hold is that salvation originates in God’s grace, and that a faith producing no changed life is not what Paul meant by faith. Where they differ is on how three things fit together: the verdict (T1), the transformation of the person (T5), and the sacraments, which is the church’s word for rites like baptism and the Lord’s Supper. - Predestination. Election and predestination are two words for one question. Election is the church’s word for God choosing, and predestination looks at the same choosing from the far end, the destination: whether God has settled in advance where each person will arrive. Romans 9 is where the question comes to a head. Paul writes there that God "has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills" (Romans 9:18), and the objection every reader feels at that point is one Paul raises himself: if God is the one doing the hardening, how can he blame anyone for being hard? His answer is a question of his own rather than a proof. What is molded does not say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" (Romans 9:20). Three readings of what he meant have held the field, each with serious Christians behind it. The dispute is ancient, and it is not settled by any side declaring the others unbiblical. • Unconditional election. Augustinians, meaning those who read Paul as Augustine came to read him, stand on one side, and so do Calvinists, the Protestant tradition that follows John Calvin, the sixteenth-century reformer of Geneva. They read Romans 9 as saying that God’s choice of a person rests on nothing whatever in that person, not even on the faith he foresees. That is all the word unconditional means: no condition on the human side, not one. • Election in view of the response God foresees. Orthodox, Arminian and many Catholic readers have gone the other way. Arminian here means following Jacob Arminius, the Dutch theologian who argued that God’s choosing takes account of the response he foresees, so that God chooses knowing ahead of time how each person will answer him. Readers on this side also hear Romans 9 differently. They take the chapter as one stretch of an argument that runs on through chapter 11, and across that whole stretch, they point out, Paul’s subject is the destiny of Israel and the Gentiles as peoples rather than the eternal fate of named individuals. • Election by middle knowledge. A third set of readers objects to the word foresees itself. To foresee, in ordinary speech, is to find something out early, the way a forecaster learns tomorrow’s weather from today’s sky, and applied to God it pictures him looking down the years and discovering what his creatures will do, as if the information reached him from outside. On this view God discovers nothing. He is omniscient, which is the theologian’s word for all-knowing, and so he knows every true proposition, a proposition being simply a statement that is either true or false. The propositions about what you will freely do tomorrow are among them. He has known them from before you or the world existed, and he knows them from within himself rather than by watching. That raises the obvious question, and it is a fair one: how can God know what a free person will do without being the one who makes them do it? Answering it is the whole job of the theory of middle knowledge. The term belongs to Luis de Molina, a Spanish priest of the Jesuit order who wrote in the sixteenth century, and his idea begins simply enough: God knows what any free creature would freely choose in any circumstance he might place them in. Molina called that knowledge middle because of where it sits among the things God knows. On one side is his knowledge of what is necessarily so, the truths that hold whatever world he makes. On the other is his knowledge of what will actually happen, which follows from his decision about which world to make. In between sits his knowledge of what would happen, what each free creature would freely do in each circumstance he might set them in, and that is the middle. Scripture has a scene that looks very like it. David, hiding in the walled town of Keilah, asks God whether Saul will come down for him and whether the townsmen will hand him over, and the answers come back, "He will come down" and "They will surrender you" (1 Samuel 23:11–12). David leaves, Saul never comes, and nobody surrenders anyone. God had told him what would happen if he stayed. Molinists, as this school is called, hold that a God who knows every such if can plan the whole course of the world, election included, without either determining anyone’s free choices or waiting to learn them. So when Paul writes that "those whom he foreknew he also predestined" (Romans 8:29), they read the foreknowing in exactly that light: neither something God found out nor something God made happen, but what he had always known each person would freely do. The theory carries a standing objection of its own, the grounding objection. Saul never did come down to Keilah, so what was it, the objection asks, that made God’s answer true? What grounds a statement about a choice nobody ever actually makes? The argument goes on among Christian philosophers, with Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig among the theory’s best-known defenders. - How soon he expected the end. Picture a man who keeps a bag packed by the front door and still books the plumber for next spring. That is roughly how Paul reads on this question. Writing to Thessalonica he speaks of "we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:15), which many have heard as a man expecting to be standing there when it happens, and elsewhere he says the appointed time has grown very short (1 Corinthians 7:29). Some read this as the expectation of an imminent return, Christ coming back within Paul’s own lifetime, that did not happen. Others point out that the same man also plans a journey to Spain (Romans 15:24), writes instructions for the long haul, and says plainly that the day will come like a thief in the night, on no timetable anyone can read (1 Thessalonians 5:1–2). Both things are in the letters, which is why the question has never closed. That he lived leaning forward is not in dispute. None of this is a reason to think less of him, and he would have been the first to say so. He described himself as the foremost of sinners and the least of the apostles, and he said he had not yet obtained the thing he was straining toward. The church has never claimed he was easy. What it has claimed is that he was right about the ground he built everything else on: that God justifies the ungodly, and that the tomb was empty.