Paul was a follower of Jesus Christ who famously converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus after persecuting the very followers of the community that he joined. However, as we will see, Paul is better described as one of the founders of the religion rather than a convert to it. Scholars attribute seven books of the New Testament to Paul; he was an influential teacher and a missionary to much of Asia Minor and present-day Greece.
A Founder of Christianity
In the last century, scholars have come to appreciate Paul as the actual founder of the religious movement that would become Christianity. Paul was a Diaspora Jew, a member of the party of the Pharisees, who experienced a revelation of the resurrected Jesus. After this experience, he traveled widely throughout the eastern Roman Empire, spreading the “good news” that Jesus would soon return from heaven and usher in the reign of God (“the kingdom”). Paul was not establishing a new religion; he believed that his generation was the last before the end time when this age would be transformed. However, as time passed and Jesus did not return, the second century Church Fathers turned to Paul's writings to validate what would ultimately be the creation of Christian dogma. Thus, Paul could be viewed as the founder of Christianity as a separate religion apart from Judaism.
In Christian tradition, he is known as Paul of Tarsus, as this is where Luke says he was born (Acts 9:11). At the time, Tarsus was located in the province of Cilicia, now modern Turkey. However, Paul himself indicates that he was from the area of Damascus which was in Syria (see the letter to the Galatians). Luke has provided many of the standard elements in Paul's life, but most of these items stand in stark opposition to what Paul himself reveals in his letters. For instance, Luke claims that Paul grew up in Jerusalem, studying at the feet of many who would be considered the first rabbis of normative Judaism, and eventually becoming a member of the council, or the Sanhedrin. Paul himself says that he only visited Jerusalem twice, and even then his stay was a few days. What do we do about suchOn the one hand, Luke has a very obvious agenda in his presentation of Paul as someone who willingly obeys any dictates from Jerusalem, consulting them constantly on how he should run his “mission”. On the other hand, Paul has an agenda as well, claiming that no one human told him what to do, but that it was the resurrected Christ who gave him the game plan (see Galatians), and so he continually dismisses any influence from Jerusalem in his overall activities. In the final analysis, it is usually best to consult Paul's letters over Luke's version in terms of historicity when it comes to both Paul's motivation and his actual work.
Paul's Works
In the New Testament, we have 14 letters traditionally assigned to Paul, but the scholarly consensus now holds that of the 14, seven were actually written by Paul:
- 1 Thessalonians
- Galatians
- Philemon
- Philippians
- 1 & 2 Corinthians
- Romans
The others were most likely written by a disciple of Paul's, using his name to carry authority. We understand these letters to be circumstantial, meaning they were never intended as systematic theology or as treatises on Christianity. In other words, the letters are responses to particular problems and circumstances as they arose in various communities. They were not written as universal dictates to serve as Christian ideology but only came to have importance and significance over time.