Who was Paul the apostle: from Saul of Tarsus to the letters

Paul is the most prolific writer in the New Testament and the reason Christianity spread beyond a single region within a generation. He is also the New Testament figure people most often describe using material that is not in it. His life can be reconstructed from two sources that do not always line up: the narrative in Acts and his own letters, which are earlier and are first-person.

Before Damascus

He introduces himself in Philippians 3:5-6:

circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the assembly; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless.

Acts adds the biography. In Acts 22:3 he says he was "born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel". Tarsus was a Greek-speaking city in what is now southern Turkey. Gamaliel was a leading Pharisaic teacher. Acts also says he held Roman citizenship, which is what later lets him appeal to Caesar.

His own account of the persecution is in Galatians 1:13-14:

For you have heard of my way of living in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the assembly of God and ravaged it.

He first appears in Acts 7, standing by the coats of the men stoning Stephen.

The road to Damascus

Acts tells the story three times — in chapters 9, 22 and 26 — and the accounts differ in small details, such as what the men travelling with him heard and saw. The first version, Acts 9:3-6:

As he traveled, he got close to Damascus, and suddenly a light from the sky shone around him. He fell on the earth, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He said, “Who are you, Lord?” The Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise up and enter into the city, then you will be told what you must do.”

Two corrections worth making. There is no horse anywhere in any of the three accounts; the falling horse is a convention of Renaissance and Baroque painting, Caravaggio's above all. And the light and blindness are in the text; the "blinding flash of insight" reading is a modern paraphrase.

Saul and Paul are not before and after

The most common misconception about Paul is that Jesus renamed him, the way Simon becomes Peter. The text says otherwise. He is called Saul for several chapters after Damascus, and the switch happens mid-narrative in Acts 13:9:

But Saul, who is also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, fastened his eyes on him

Saul is his Hebrew name, after the first king of Israel, from the same tribe of Benjamin. Paulus is a common Roman family name. A Jew with Roman citizenship in a Greek city having both is entirely ordinary. From Acts 13 onward the narrative is set in the Roman world, and the Roman name is the practical one.

The journeys and the letters

Acts 13-21 organizes his work into missionary journeys through Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece, with a base at Antioch and repeated returns to Jerusalem. The pattern is consistent: he goes to the synagogue first, gathers a mixed group of Jews and Gentiles, is opposed, moves on, and then writes back.

The letters are occasional documents — written to specific communities about specific problems, not as systematic theology. 1 Corinthians 13 is a correction of a congregation arguing about spiritual gifts, not a wedding reading. Romans 8 is part of a long argument addressed to a church he had not yet visited.

On authorship, it is worth being precise about where agreement ends:

Traditional Christian teaching in several communions holds all thirteen named letters to be Paul's. Stating the scholarly division is not a verdict on that; it is a description of where the arguments are.

The argument that shaped the movement

The decision that determined whether this stayed a Jewish sect or became something wider is the one Paul fought over: whether non-Jews who joined had to keep the law of Moses, and specifically whether they had to be circumcised. His answer was no, and Galatians is where he argues it hardest. Acts 15 describes a meeting in Jerusalem that settles the question with a compromise; Galatians 2 gives Paul's own version of a related confrontation, in which he says he opposed Peter to his face at Antioch over eating with Gentiles.

Two things are worth noticing. The New Testament preserves the disagreement instead of smoothing it, which is unusual in a founding document. And Paul's position is an argument made from inside Judaism, by a Pharisee, about how the promises to Abraham applied — not a repudiation of his own background, which he keeps asserting in the present tense.

How the letters were produced

They were dictated, not written, and produced by a working team. Romans 16:22 has the scribe insert his own greeting into the text: "I, Tertius, who write the letter, greet you in the Lord." Several letters name a co-sender alongside Paul. He supported himself by a trade that Acts 18 identifies as tentmaking, and he organized a collection from Gentile congregations for the poor of Jerusalem — a project he mentions across several letters and which Acts places at the centre of his last journey.

The end, and what the Bible does not say

Acts ends with Paul in Rome, under house arrest, teaching without hindrance. It does not narrate a trial, a verdict or a death. Everything about the beheading under Nero comes from later Christian sources — the letter of Clement, and then writers like Eusebius and Tertullian. That is a genuinely early tradition, and it is still tradition rather than Scripture. The same applies to the account of his execution site in Rome.

Nor does the New Testament tell us what his "thorn in the flesh" was. 2 Corinthians 12 mentions it and describes only its effect. Every identification — eye disease, epilepsy, malaria, opposition, a person — is a guess.

How to read him without getting lost

Start with Philemon; it is one page and shows how he actually wrote to people. Then Philippians, then Galatians, then Romans. Reading the letters in that order — short and personal before long and argued — makes the difficult ones far easier. His own summary of himself, in 1 Corinthians 15:9-10, is a good place to stop:

For I am the least of the apostles, who is not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the assembly of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am. His grace which was given to me was not futile, but I worked more than all of them; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.