The Man and the Letters

Almost everything we know about Paul's early life comes from two sources that do not always sit flush with each other: his own scattered remarks in the letters, and Luke's account in Acts. A careful reader uses both and says which is which.

From the letters: he is an Israelite, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, and as to the law a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5). He severely persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it (Galatians 1:13). He was advancing in Judaism beyond many of his contemporaries, being extremely zealous for the traditions of his fathers (Galatians 1:14). From Acts we get more: born in Tarsus in Cilicia, brought up in Jerusalem, educated at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), a tentmaker or leatherworker by trade (Acts 18:3), and a Roman citizen by birth (Acts 22:28).

Two of those Acts details are argued about. Whether Paul studied under Gamaliel the Elder is unverifiable outside Luke, though nothing in the letters contradicts it. His Roman citizenship is questioned by a minority of scholars who note that he never mentions it in the letters and that he lists beatings in 2 Corinthians 11:25 that a citizen was in principle protected from. The majority accept it, pointing out that Paul's lists are boasting in weakness and have no reason to mention legal privileges, and that provincial protections were unevenly enforced. Hold the detail loosely and say so when you teach it.

The name is worth a word, because it is often taught wrongly. Paul did not receive the name Paul at his conversion. Acts uses Saul until 13:9, which says, 'Then Saul, who was also called Paul', and then uses Paul from there on, at the point where the narrative turns toward the Gentile world. Saulos is the Greek form of the Hebrew Sha'ul; Paulus is a common Roman cognomen. A Jew with Roman citizenship in a Greek-speaking city would ordinarily carry both, and would use whichever fitted the room.

The trade matters more than it looks. Paul worked with his hands, and says so with some heat in 1 Corinthians 9 and 1 Thessalonians 2:9. A man supporting himself at a bench in a workshop in the Greek East is a man with a particular kind of access, to slaves and freedmen and the working poor, and a particular kind of independence from wealthy patrons. Some of the friction in Corinth appears to be about precisely that refusal of support.

The traditional picture is of a tormented Pharisee, straining under the law, crushed by a conscience he cannot satisfy, who finds on the Damascus road the relief of grace. The picture is powerful, it has produced good preaching for centuries, and Paul himself does not paint it.

In 1963 Krister Stendahl, a Swedish Lutheran New Testament scholar who later became bishop of Stockholm, published an article in the Harvard Theological Review called 'The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West'. His argument was simple and has proved hard to dislodge. Paul, he said, had a robust conscience, not an introspective one. Philippians 3:6 describes his standing under the law as faultless, and Paul reports it without embarrassment. What happened to him at Damascus was not the resolution of an inner crisis but the receipt of an assignment. Stendahl argued that the introspective reading is Augustine's and Luther's, projected backward, and that Paul's own language in Galatians 1:15-16 is the language of prophetic commissioning: set apart before birth, called by grace, sent to the Gentiles. That is Jeremiah 1:5 and Isaiah 49:1-6, almost word for word in structure.

The point is not that nothing changed. Everything changed. Paul reassessed his whole ancestral inheritance in the light of a crucified and risen Messiah, which is as radical a reversal as a first-century Jew could undergo. The point is narrower: he did not change religions, and he never says he did. He believed to his last day that the God of Abraham had acted in Jesus for Israel and for the nations. Calling him a convert in the modern sense imports a category he did not use.

Not everyone accepts Stendahl's framing without qualification. Some scholars argue that conversion is still the right word if defined as Alan Segal defined it in 'Paul the Convert' (1990), as a radical transfer of allegiance and community within a shared religious world rather than a move between religions. Others note that Romans 7 and Philippians 3:7-9 do describe a reevaluation profound enough to deserve the word. The safest teaching position is to use both words, define each when you use it, and let students see why the choice is contested.

One practical consequence. If Damascus was a commissioning, then the question Paul spends his life answering is not primarily 'how is a guilty individual made right with God' but 'on what terms do the nations come in'. Both questions are in his letters. Which one is the driving question is a large part of the argument you will meet in the next lesson.

Modern readers imagine Paul alone at a desk with a pen. Almost nothing about that picture is right, and correcting it changes how you read.

The standard Greco-Roman letter had a shape: a prescript naming sender and recipient with a greeting, a thanksgiving or health wish, the body, practical exhortation, and a closing with greetings and a farewell. Paul uses the form and bends it. Where the ordinary Greek letter says chairein, greetings, Paul says charis and eirene, grace and peace, which is a Greek word altered toward a Christian one and a Jewish shalom laid alongside it. His thanksgivings are long and they preview the letter's themes. Galatians has no thanksgiving at all, and that silence is itself the first blow of the letter.

Letters were dictated. Romans 16:22 lets the secretary speak for himself: 'I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord.' That single verse is the best evidence in the New Testament for a practice that was universal among literate elites. E. Randolph Richards, in 'The Secretary in the Letters of Paul' (1991) and 'Paul and First-Century Letter Writing' (2004), surveys the ancient evidence and lays out the range: a secretary might take dictation syllable by syllable, take it in shorthand and write it up, receive a summary and compose the wording, or in the loosest arrangement be given the substance and trusted with the whole. Cicero used all of these with Tiro. Paul's own habit of taking up the pen for the last lines (Galatians 6:11, 1 Corinthians 16:21, Colossians 4:18, 2 Thessalonians 3:17, Philemon 19) only makes sense if someone else wrote the rest.

Letters were also expensive, slow, and carried by hand. Phoebe, a deacon or servant of the church at Cenchreae, carries Romans (16:1-2), and carriers ordinarily read the letter aloud and answered questions about it. So a Pauline letter is a performance in a room, heard once by a mixed assembly of mostly non-readers, with a live representative of the author standing there. That explains the rhetorical features: the imagined objector of Romans 3, the rapid questions, the repetitions, the sentences that work better in the ear than on the page.

Finally, a letter is occasional. It is written to particular people about particular trouble, and it assumes a shared history we do not have. The letters are not treatises. Romans comes closest to being one and even Romans has an errand behind it.

Pauline chronology has one hard external anchor, and everything else is built outward from it.

The anchor is the Gallio inscription, a set of fragments of a letter from the emperor Claudius found at Delphi, which names Lucius Junius Gallio as proconsul of Achaia and can be dated by Claudius's imperial acclamations to around AD 51 or 52. Acts 18:12 places Paul before Gallio's judgment seat at Corinth. Proconsuls served one-year terms beginning in early summer. That puts Paul in Corinth in AD 50 to 52, and it is the most secure date in the New Testament outside the Gospels.

Working backward from Corinth using Galatians 1 and 2, the Damascus event lands somewhere around AD 33 to 35, which is within a handful of years of the crucifixion. Working forward, the collection for Jerusalem occupies the mid to late fifties, the arrest in Jerusalem falls around AD 57, and the Roman imprisonment of Acts 28 around AD 60 to 62. Acts ends with Paul under house arrest and does not report his death. Church tradition, beginning with 1 Clement 5, which speaks of Paul bearing witness before rulers and departing the world, and continued by Eusebius, holds that he was executed at Rome under Nero in the middle sixties. That tradition is early and widely attested but is not, strictly, documented.

A second external datum helps with Romans. Suetonius records that Claudius expelled Jews from Rome because of disturbances at the instigation of one Chrestus (Claudius 25.4), usually dated to AD 49 and usually taken to reflect conflict over Christ within the synagogues. Acts 18:2 says Paul met Aquila and Priscilla in Corinth because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. A church that lost its Jewish members for several years and then received them back after Claudius died in AD 54 is very likely the church Romans 14 and 15 are addressing.

One honest caution. There are two main reconstructions of Paul's movements, one that follows Acts closely and one that builds the chronology only from the letters and then fits Acts in where it can. John Knox argued in 'Chapters in a Life of Paul' (1950) for the second approach, and it produces a somewhat different sequence, particularly around the Jerusalem visits of Galatians 2 and Acts 15. Where the two collide, say so rather than quietly harmonising.

Thirteen letters carry Paul's name. Seven are accepted as his by virtually every scholar of every persuasion: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Six are disputed in varying degrees: 2 Thessalonians and Colossians mildly, Ephesians more, and 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus most of all. Hebrews is a separate case and does not claim Paul as author at all. This section gives the arguments on each side at their strongest, because a student who has only heard one of them has not been educated.

The case against Pauline authorship of the Pastorals runs on three legs. Style and vocabulary: in 1921 P. N. Harrison published a word-by-word study finding a large body of vocabulary in 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus that occurs nowhere else in Paul, along with the absence of small connecting words Paul uses constantly, and a shorter, flatter sentence rhythm. The exact counts vary by method and are themselves argued over, but the pattern is real and you can feel it reading the Greek or even a literal English translation. Theology and setting: the Pastorals speak of the faith as a deposit to be guarded, describe a settled structure of overseers and deacons with lists of qualifications, and address a slow problem of false teaching within congregations rather than a crisis at the frontier. Chronology: the movements presupposed by 1 Timothy and Titus, with Paul leaving Timothy at Ephesus and Titus in Crete, do not fit anywhere in Acts, which requires either a release from the Roman imprisonment and a further period of travel, for which there is no independent evidence, or a later author.

The case for Pauline authorship answers each. On style, the samples are tiny, and statistical arguments from a few thousand words of Greek are weak; Luke Timothy Johnson, in his Anchor Bible commentary on 1 and 2 Timothy (2001), argues that the method is circular, since the Pauline norm against which the Pastorals are measured is itself constructed by selecting which letters count. Different genre and different addressee should produce different vocabulary: a letter to one coworker about appointing elders will not sound like an argument about Israel's election. On structure, overseers and deacons already appear in Philippians 1:1, and Acts 14:23 has Paul appointing elders early. On chronology, a release and a fourth journey is not impossible, and 1 Clement 5 and the Muratorian Fragment appear to know of Paul reaching the limits of the west, which would require a release. On theology, Paul near the end of his life, handing over a movement, would be expected to talk about transmission.

The secretary hypothesis sits across the middle of this and genuinely changes the shape of the question. If a secretary could be given the substance and trusted with the wording, as Richards shows was a real option, then style-based arguments lose much of their force, because the style you are measuring may be the secretary's. Some have suggested Luke on the strength of vocabulary overlap, which is suggestive and nothing more. The honest thing to notice is that the secretary hypothesis cuts both ways: it weakens the argument from style against authenticity, and it also blurs the very idea of authorship that both sides are arguing about. If a coworker composed the sentences with Paul's approval, whose letter is it? The category we are disputing may be sharper than the ancient practice was.

Ephesians and Colossians each have their own file. Ephesians has long sentences unlike anything in the undisputed letters, a realised eschatology in which believers are already seated with Christ in the heavenly realms (2:6), and extensive verbal overlap with Colossians; the words 'in Ephesus' in 1:1 are missing from our earliest and best witnesses, including P46, which is from around AD 200, and the original hands of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which suggests a circular letter. Colossians is a closer call: its style differs measurably, but it shares a whole cluster of personal names with Philemon, which nobody disputes, and that overlap is hard to explain as imitation.

One further question sits underneath the whole debate, and it is an ethical one. If a follower wrote in Paul's name a generation after his death, was that fraud or an accepted convention? Bart Ehrman, in 'Forgery and Counterforgery' (2013), argues at length that ancient writers who discuss the practice condemn it, and cites cases like Serapion of Antioch rejecting the Gospel of Peter and Tertullian reporting that a presbyter in Asia was removed from office for writing the Acts of Paul (De Baptismo 17). Others, following David Meade's 'Pseudonymity and Canon' (1986), argue that within Jewish tradition writing in a founder's name could be understood as extending his authority rather than counterfeiting it, on the model of the Isaianic and Solomonic collections. Both positions are held by serious people. What is settled is that the arguments are about evidence and can be discussed calmly. What is not settled is the verdict on any of the six, and a course that tells you otherwise on either side is not telling you the truth about the state of the question.