One might expect a review of a book with this title to be written by an expert on Paul, but this isn’t me. A quick glance at the Amazon page for this book shows that it has attracted a large number of reviews, many by non-experts, and that they range from substantial praise (a majority) to extremely critical (a smallish minority). I soon stopped reading them, because I didn’t want them to affect what I write here.
The title Paul: A biography intrigued me. How can one write a narrative of Paul’s life that goes beyond what Luke tells us in The Acts and Paul himself tells us in his letters? The short answer is that one can’t. To be sure, Wright uses his enormous knowledge as both a New Testament scholar and a scholar of ancient history to place Paul’s letters in chronological order, to attribute dates to them and to relate them to the events of The Acts (there is a chronological table at the end of the book). Wright also makes a good many inferences about events to which Paul refers in his letters. Paul himself obviously knew what he was referring to, but the modern reader can at times only guess, and if those guesses are not informed by a great deal of background knowledge they are quite likely to be wrong. Each of Paul’s letters was written to an individual or a group of people, and Paul had specific things to say to the recipient(s). Through all of them Paul also speaks to us, but we understand more clearly what he is saying if we have some idea of his context, and this is what Wright provides.
I’ve been reading Galatians recently, and in the light of Wright’s Biography it has come alive for me in a way that it has never quite done before. Wright comments in the Preface that he makes two large assumptions in order to figure out the chronology of Paul’s life: that Galatians letter was written to a south Galatian church; and that the prison letters were written during an imprisonment in Ephesus.
So Paul: A biography is not a biography in the conventional sense. It is a character study of the man Paul, based on the substantial evidence of the New Testament documents and on Wright’s reading of them in the light of his bountiful background knowledge. He shows what it means for Paul to have been a zealous young diaspora Jew before he comes on stage at the end of Acts 7. He would have known the stories of those who had been zealous for Israel’s God ever since Abraham. This included characters up to Paul’s own time, characters like Judas Maccabeus who led the revolt against the Syrians and reconsecrated the Temple in 164 BC, the event celebrated in the Hanukkah festival. He would have known what it meant to maintain Jewish purity by keeping the Torah in the largely gentile city of Tarsus, purity not for his own sake but for the sake of the coming Kingdom of God. This was the zeal that led him to persecute Christians, who represented a heretical departure from pure Judaism.
In what Wright calls ‘the Abraham project’ the Jews were called to be a light to the gentiles, to fulfil God’s purpose of putting humans right with Him and so finally to set the whole world right, culminating in the bodily resurrection of the righteous. By Paul’s day ‘the Abraham project’ was in need of rescue: Jews had worshipped idols, God had abandoned his Temple, his people had been punished with exile in Babylon, and since their return to Israel had been unable to re-establish an ongoing Jewish kingdom. But Isaiah and Ezekiel had promised that God would indeed return: the whole world would be set right.
What Paul came to understand on the Damascus road or shortly afterwards was that this Jewish vision had been fulfilled in Jesus. Wright says:
… that meant that … Paul was conscious of living in the first days, the opening scenes of the new drama of world history, with heaven and earth now held together not by Torah and Temple, but by Jesus and the spirit, pointing forward to the time when the divine glory would fill the whole world and transform it from top to bottom. You would not find this vision in the non-Jewish world of Paul’s day. It is Jewish through and through, including in the fact that it has been reshaped around the one believed to be Israel’s Messiah.
“You have been saved by grace through faith,” [Paul] writes in Ephesians. “This doesn’t happen on your own initiative; it’s God’s gift. It isn’t on the basis of works, so no one is able to boast.” As it stands, that statement can easily be fitted into the going-to-heaven scheme of thought, but a glance at the wider context will show that Paul has very different ideas. In the first chapter of Ephesians he insists that the entire divine plan “was to sum up the whole cosmos in the king—yes, everything in heaven and on earth, in him.” Here, in the second chapter of the letter, he explains the purpose of “being saved by grace through faith”: God has made us what we are. God has created us in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared, ahead of time, as the road we must travel.Readers familiar with Wright’s writings, particularly The day the revolution began, will recognise that the theology he attributes to Paul is the theology Wright has presented elsewhere—and this is fair enough, as it is the theology that Wright has uncovered in his years of studying Paul against the background of contemporary Judaism.
Paul, as Wright sees him, was a man of energy, a man of whom people might say, ‘Doesn’t he ever sleep?’. He works at his tentmaking, but always finds time to answer a questioner, to go from house to house ‘to encourage, to warn, to pray, to weep’. He is persistent, he is forever thinking about the next talk he will give to an audience, he calls a scribe to dictate a letter, he pauses for evening prayers. He is blunt and up front. He confronts, and this is gets him into trouble, but he accepts it. He bosses the ship-owner en route to Rome. But he is vulnerable (see 2 Corinthians), and suffers beatings and imprisonments. People love him, they want to work with him, and they weep at his departure. He cares for the churches, loves them without limit, and prays for them constantly. ‘He modelled what he taught, and what he taught was the utter, exuberant, self-giving love of the Messiah,’ says Wright.
Wright addresses the book to a non-academic lay readership, and for this reason keeps footnotes to an absolute minimum. However, the prose is at times not easy reading, and one cannot describe the book as suitable for a general Christian readership. Against this background, the academic in me found the shortage of footnotes rather irksome!