St. Paul

St. Paul was a Jewish Pharisee from Tarsus in Cilicia who persecuted the earliest Christians, was confronted by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and spent the rest of his life founding churches across the eastern Roman Empire. Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry his name, and they are the oldest Christian documents in existence, written before any of the Gospels reached their final form. His martyrdom at Rome is attested from the first century, the received tradition is that he was beheaded there under Nero, and he is buried under the basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls.

Born Tarsus, Cilicia Roman citizen Died in Rome, c. 64 to 67 Feasts: 25 January and 29 June Apostle to the Gentiles

1. The Persecutor

Paul was born Saul, in Tarsus in Cilicia, a Greek-speaking city on the southern coast of what is now Turkey with a serious reputation for learning. He describes himself as a Hebrew born of Hebrews, of the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the eighth day, a Pharisee, and blameless as to righteousness under the law (Phil 3:5-6). Acts adds that he was a Roman citizen by birth, which was uncommon and legally significant, and that he was educated in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel, the most respected Pharisaic teacher of the generation (Acts 22:3, 22:28). He worked with his hands as a tentmaker or leatherworker and supported himself with the trade for the rest of his life (Acts 18:3; 1 Thess 2:9).

He first appears in the New Testament at the stoning of Stephen, where the witnesses laid their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul, and Saul approved of his killing (Acts 7:58, 8:1). What follows is described in blunt terms: he ravaged the Church, going from house to house and dragging off men and women to prison (Acts 8:3). He himself never softened the record. He calls himself the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the Church of God (1 Cor 15:9).

He was travelling to Damascus with letters of authority to arrest Christians there when the thing happened that divides his life in two.

2. The Damascus Road

Acts tells the story three times, at chapters 9, 22 and 26, with small variations in detail and complete agreement on substance. A light from heaven flashed around him, he fell to the ground, and a voice said, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" He asked who was speaking. The answer was, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting" (Acts 9:4-5).

The wording carries the theology. Saul had been arresting Christians in Judea and Syria, and the voice from heaven calls that the persecution of Christ himself. Christ identifies himself with the people being dragged out of their houses. Paul spent the rest of his life unfolding that identification into the doctrine of the Church as the body of Christ, in which the members are joined to a living head, so that if one member suffers all suffer together (1 Cor 12:12-27; Rom 12:4-5; Col 1:18).

He was blinded, led into Damascus, and fasted for three days. A disciple named Ananias, who objected out loud when he was sent, laid hands on him, and he regained his sight and was baptised (Acts 9:10-19). He began preaching in the Damascus synagogues almost at once, and the reaction was what you would expect from both sides.

Paul's own compressed version in Galatians adds what Acts leaves out. God, he says, set him apart before he was born and revealed his Son in him so that he might preach him among the Gentiles; he did not go up to Jerusalem to consult anyone, but went away into Arabia, returned to Damascus, and only after three years went to Jerusalem to see Cephas, staying fifteen days (Gal 1:15-18). The apostle's authority, on his own account, came directly from Christ.

3. The Missionary

Acts organises Paul's work into three long journeys. The distances involved, largely on foot and by coastal shipping, run into thousands of miles.

The first journey (Acts 13-14) took him from Antioch in Syria, with Barnabas, to Cyprus and then into the interior of Asia Minor, to Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. At Lystra he was stoned and dragged out of the city and left for dead. The pattern established here held for twenty years: preach in the synagogue first, gather whoever will come, appoint elders, move on, write back.

The council at Jerusalem (Acts 15, and from Paul's side Gal 2) settled the question that made everything else possible. Gentile converts would not be required to be circumcised or to take on the whole Mosaic law. Paul's account is combative and includes his public confrontation with Peter at Antioch over table fellowship. Both accounts agree on the outcome.

The second journey (Acts 15:36 to 18:22) carried the mission into Europe: Philippi, where he was flogged and jailed and where the jailer's household was baptised; Thessalonica; Beroea; Athens, where he addressed the Areopagus using an altar to an unknown god as his opening (Acts 17:22-31); and Corinth, where he stayed eighteen months working as a tentmaker with Priscilla and Aquila.

The third journey (Acts 18:23 to 21:16) centred on Ephesus, where he taught for about three years and where a riot of the silversmiths eventually drove him out. From these years come the Corinthian correspondence and, most likely, Romans.

Paul was not travelling alone. Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, Titus, Luke, Priscilla and Aquila, Phoebe and many others appear by name. The last chapter of Romans is a list of greetings to more than two dozen people, a good many of them women, and it is one of the best pictures we have of what an early Christian network actually looked like.

4. The Letters of Paul

Thirteen New Testament letters carry Paul's name: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.

Nearly all scholars, Catholic and otherwise, accept seven as directly Paul's: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. The authorship of Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians is debated, and the three Pastoral Letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are the most debated of all. The arguments turn on vocabulary, style and the church structures the letters presume. Ancient writing conventions allowed a disciple to write in a master's name and voice, and a letter written that way within the Pauline circle would still carry his authority and would still be inspired Scripture, because the Church's canon rests on the Church's reception of the books rather than on modern authorship attribution.

The Letter to the Hebrews is a separate case. It is anonymous, it never claims Paul, and its Greek and its argument are unlike his. It circulated with the Pauline collection for centuries, which is why older Bibles print it as "the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews." Modern Catholic editions and scholarship treat it as anonymous. Counting Hebrews with Paul gives the familiar figure of fourteen; the honest count of letters bearing his name is thirteen.

The letters are also, chronologically, the oldest Christian writings we possess. 1 Thessalonians is usually dated to about AD 50, roughly two decades after the crucifixion and before any written Gospel. When Paul quotes the words over the bread and cup as something he received and handed on (1 Cor 11:23-26), he is preserving a formula older than his own letter, and it is the earliest written account of the institution of the Eucharist.

5. What Paul Actually Taught

Justification by grace. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus (Rom 3:23-24). Salvation is God's initiative from beginning to end, received rather than earned (Eph 2:8-9). The Catechism states the same thing: our justification comes from the grace of God (CCC 1996).

The body of Christ. The Church is an organism with a head and members, in which the gifts differ and the members need one another, and the weakest parts are indispensable (1 Cor 12).

The abolition of the old divisions. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28). Paul spent his career forcing the practical consequences of that line onto communities that did not want them.

The self-emptying of Christ. The hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2:6-11, in which Christ though in the form of God emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and became obedient unto death on a cross, is the foundational text for the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Charity above every gift. 1 Corinthians 13, written to a congregation showing off its spiritual gifts, is the most widely read passage he wrote. Love is patient and kind; love bears all things; faith, hope and love abide, and the greatest of these is love.

The resurrection. If Christ has not been raised, Paul writes, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain, and we are of all men most to be pitied (1 Cor 15:14-19). He staked everything on a historical claim and said so.

Strength in weakness. Paul asked three times for relief from what he called a thorn in the flesh, and received the answer, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor 12:7-10). He never identifies the affliction. Christians have found the passage useful for that reason.

6. Faith, Works and the Catholic Reading

Paul's statement that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law (Rom 3:28) sat at the centre of the sixteenth-century split in Western Christianity, and it is worth setting out what the Catholic Church actually holds.

Paul's target in Romans and Galatians is the claim that Gentiles must take on the works of the Mosaic law, circumcision above all, in order to belong to God's people. He denies that flatly. The Church denies it with him. Nothing anyone does earns the initial grace of justification.

Paul also insists, in the same letters, that the justified are expected to live differently, that the whole law is fulfilled in loving your neighbour (Gal 5:14), that faith works through love (Gal 5:6), and that each will be judged according to what he has done (Rom 2:6, 2 Cor 5:10). The Letter of James states directly that faith without works is dead (Jas 2:17, 2:26). The Catholic reading holds both, understanding good works as the fruit of grace already given rather than as a purchase price.

Catholics and Lutherans reached a formal agreement on the substance of this question in 1999, and the site treats it in detail on the page for the Joint Declaration on Justification. For the wider question see faith and works and salvation.

7. Arrest, Rome and Martyrdom

Paul was arrested in Jerusalem after a riot in the Temple precincts (Acts 21). He was held at Caesarea for two years under the procurators Felix and Festus, appeared before Herod Agrippa II, and then, as a Roman citizen, appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:11). The appeal took him to Rome, by way of a shipwreck on Malta (Acts 27-28). Acts ends with him under house arrest in Rome for two years, preaching openly and without hindrance (Acts 28:30-31), and says nothing about how he died.

The tradition about his death is early and consistent. Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth around the year 96, refers to Peter and Paul as recent examples who contended unto death, and says Paul bore witness before the rulers and departed from the world. By the second century Christians in Rome were pointing to specific memorials for both apostles. The received account is that Paul was beheaded rather than crucified, because a Roman citizen could not lawfully be crucified, at a place on the Ostian Way traditionally identified with Tre Fontane, during the persecution under Nero, in the middle to late 60s.

What the record supports: Paul reached Rome as a prisoner, and Christians in Rome within one generation held that he had been martyred there. The specific manner and location are tradition of long standing rather than documented fact, and the tradition is old enough and stable enough to be taken seriously.

8. The Tomb on the Ostian Way

The basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura, St Paul Outside the Walls, stands on the road to Ostia over a burial site venerated as Paul's from very early on. The first church there was built under Constantine and was replaced by a far larger basilica at the end of the fourth century. Fire destroyed most of it in 1823 and it was rebuilt on the same plan.

Excavation under the altar in the early 2000s exposed a stone sarcophagus and an ancient marble slab inscribed PAVLO APOSTOLO MART, to Paul, apostle and martyr. In 2009 Benedict XVI announced that a probe had been introduced into the sarcophagus without opening it, and that carbon dating of bone fragments recovered from inside gave a date in the first or second century, consistent with the tradition.

That result establishes the age of the remains and the antiquity of the veneration. It cannot establish identity, and the announcement did not claim that it did. What it does show is that Christians were burying and honouring someone at that spot within living memory of the apostolic generation, which is a real piece of evidence about where the Roman church believed Paul lay.

9. Feast Days and Patronage

Paul has two major days in the Roman calendar. 25 January is the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, which closes the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, deliberately, because the man who was changed on the Damascus road is the natural patron of the hope that divided Christians can be changed too. 29 June is the Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul, the two apostles the Roman Church has always honoured together as its founders, and the day the pope blesses the pallia.

He is a patron of missionaries and evangelists, of writers and public workers, of Malta, where he was shipwrecked, and, with Peter, of the city of Rome. In art he is shown with a sword, for his martyrdom and for the word of God described as a sword (Eph 6:17), and usually with a book or scroll, bald and bearded, a convention fixed since antiquity.

10. What a Reader Can Take From Paul

No past disqualifies anyone. The Church's greatest missionary began as the man holding the coats at Stephen's execution. Paul never hid it, and he treated his own history as the proof of what mercy can do (1 Tim 1:15-16).

To harm the Church is to touch Christ. The question on the Damascus road was "why do you persecute me." That is the standard by which every Christian's treatment of other Christians is measured.

Work with your hands and owe nobody. Paul supported himself by his trade so that the Gospel would cost his hearers nothing. Very few people ever preach from that position.

Weakness is the working condition, not the obstacle. Paul asked for the thorn to be removed and was told the grace was enough. Anyone waiting to be fixed before they begin has misread him.

Write the letter. Almost everything Paul left behind was occasional correspondence to specific congregations about specific problems. Faithfulness in ordinary tasks is what turned out to be permanent.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St Paul?

St Paul was a Jewish Pharisee from Tarsus in Cilicia, a Roman citizen by birth, who persecuted the earliest Christians and then, after an encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, became the Church's most far-reaching missionary. He founded congregations across Asia Minor and Greece, wrote the letters that make up the oldest Christian documents in existence, and by early tradition was beheaded in Rome under Nero.

Why did Saul change his name to Paul?

Acts uses "Saul" up to chapter 13 and "Paul" from then on, at the point where his mission turns toward Gentile territory. Saul was his Hebrew name and Paulus his Roman one, and a Jew of the diaspora with Roman citizenship would normally have had both from birth. Scripture never describes a change of name at his conversion.

How many books of the Bible did St Paul write?

Thirteen New Testament letters carry his name. Nearly all scholars accept seven as directly his: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians and the three Pastoral Letters are debated. Hebrews is anonymous, never claims Paul, and is treated as anonymous in modern Catholic scholarship despite circulating with his letters for centuries.

What happened on the road to Damascus?

Acts describes it three times, in chapters 9, 22 and 26. A light from heaven struck Saul down and a voice said, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" When he asked who was speaking, the answer was, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." He was blinded for three days, and a disciple named Ananias laid hands on him in Damascus, after which he regained his sight and was baptised.

How did St Paul die?

Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome and does not describe his death. Clement of Rome, writing around the year 96, refers to his martyrdom, and the received tradition is that he was beheaded rather than crucified, because he was a Roman citizen, on the Ostian Way during the persecution under Nero in the middle to late 60s. He is buried beneath the basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls.

When are the feast days of St Paul?

The Conversion of St Paul is celebrated on 25 January, closing the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The Solemnity of Sts Peter and Paul falls on 29 June, honouring the two apostles the Roman Church regards as its founders.