The Apostle Paul

Paul is, after Christ himself, the figure who most marked the newborn Christianity. Thirteen letters bear his name in the New Testament, more than any other author, and the oldest of them were written before the Gospels were even set down. To these thirteen letters tradition long joined a fourteenth, the Epistle to the Hebrews, which does not bear his name and was received apart: from another hand, yet in his line and under his authority. They are living letters, addressed to real Churches to teach, correct, console, and strengthen. To know them is to enter the mind of the man who carried the Gospel from the Jewish world to the heart of the Empire, and who first put the Church’s faith into writing.

From Saul to Paul

He is born at Tarsus, in Cilicia, into a Jewish family, and receives the name of Saul. This Jewish name will go together with a Roman one, Paul, for he is a citizen of Rome by birth; it is not a name received at his conversion, but the one under which the apostle of the nations will become known. A zealous Pharisee, that is, of the Jewish current most rigorous in the observance of the Law, trained in Jerusalem at the feet of the master Gamaliel, he makes himself the ardent persecutor of the young Church, keeping the cloaks of those who stone Stephen, the first Christian martyr, a gesture by which he approved his killing. On the road to Damascus, where he was going to arrest disciples, a light throws him to the ground and a voice reaches him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Acts 9:4 He asks who speaks, and the answer overturns his life: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Acts 9:5 Christ identifies himself with those whom Saul strikes: to persecute the Church is to persecute him. Paul will always read that instant as pure grace, not as reward: God had chosen him beforehand to reveal his Son in him. “When God, who had set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might proclaim him among the nations…” Galatians 1:15-16

The apostle of the nations

The word apostle, from the Greek apostolos, means the one sent, commissioned with a mission and the authority of the one who sends him. Paul knows himself sent to the nations, to those Gentiles whom the Law held at a distance. Three great journeys carry him across Asia Minor and Greece, from city to city: he announces Christ, gathers believers, founds Churches, then departs, leaving behind young and fragile communities. Everywhere he earns his living with his hands, for by trade he is a tentmaker, working leather and cloth. He is set on being a burden to no one and on preaching free of charge: “working night and day, so as not to be a burden to any of you, we announced to you the Good News of God.” 1 Thessalonians 2:9 This independence is part of his freedom as an apostle. His letters are born of this distance: when a Church he has founded is troubled, divided, or led astray, he writes to correct and steady it. Each letter answers a precise situation, and yet each carries the whole Gospel. A grave question marked those years, whether the Gentiles who converted must first submit to the Law of Moses; gathered at Jerusalem, the apostles decided that it would not be imposed on them, opening to the Gospel the road of the nations. From that council he kept one charge: to remember the poor. He made it his life’s work, gathering in his Churches of Greece and Asia a great collection for the needy brethren of Jerusalem. This sharing was more than alms: it sealed in deed the unity of believers from among the Gentiles with the Church born of Israel.

The heart of his Gospel

At the center of everything Paul sets Christ crucified and risen. Man does not save himself by his works; God justifies him freely, by grace, in faith in Christ, and gives him a new life by the Spirit. The believer is incorporated into Christ as a member into a body, and the Church is that Body of which Christ is the head. All that Paul had held for gain, his birth, his Law, his righteousness, he counted as loss beside this one good: “I now count everything as loss because of the surpassing good of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.” Philippians 3:8 And what he is, he owes not to his own strength, but to the gift received: “What I am, I am by the grace of God.” 1 Corinthians 15:10

Strength in weakness

His apostolic life was a long trial: beatings, prisons, shipwrecks, hunger, betrayals. A suffering he calls a thorn in his flesh was not taken from him, and from it he received the word in which he found the meaning of all the rest: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” 2 Corinthians 12:9 His life had but one center: “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21 Tradition has him die a martyr at Rome, beheaded under Nero, about the year sixty. Not long before, he could draw up the account of a life given: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” 2 Timothy 4:7

Reading his letters

A letter of Paul usually follows one same movement: he names and greets himself, gives thanks for his readers, sets out the doctrine, draws its consequences for life, and ends with greetings. He dictated them to a secretary, sometimes adding a word in his own hand, and they were read aloud in the gathered assembly. The New Testament arranges them not by date, but by decreasing length, the letters to Churches first, then those addressed to persons. The Church received them from the beginning as the word of God, and she has read them in her liturgy since the first centuries, drawing from them without ceasing her doctrine of grace, of the Church, and of salvation.