Even two millennia after his death St. Paul continues to incite both positive and negative reactions in many people today, and this is true for both believers and non-believers alike. Who is this man, so loved and so hated at the same time, and yet always so little understood and unfortunately so often overlooked and disregarded by most Catholics, including the clergy? Who is the Apostle of the Gentiles, the man called by God to be a courageous and dauntless witness of the risen Christ? Is it better to consider him as a caring pastor and man of action or a systematic theologian and abstract thinker? Are we dealing with the true founder of Christianity—as some Bible scholars today have recently argued—or with an intrepid missionary of the Son of God who appeared to him and then sent him out on mission as an apostle of the Good News to the diverse and varied peoples of the Roman Empire? Paul’s ascetic religiosity, spiritually founded on abnegation, sacrifice and Christ’s crucifixion, made him very famous in the early Church as a prodigious miracle worker and as a celibate who was completely dedicated to the proclamation of the Gospel of God. He loved Christ with all his heart and dedicated all his energy to the service of Jesus, his Savior and Redeemer. Shortly after his death, along with Peter, he was also venerated and loved as a martyr, as a dedicated disciple who freely gave up his life for Christ for the edification of his brothers and sisters in the Lord. The cult of Peter and Paul began in Rome but quickly spread to all Christian communities by the end of the first century. Who is Paul for us today—apostle, community builder, miracle worker, mystic, martyr and author of the thirteen New Testament letters that we read almost every Sunday when we gather in church to hear and to preach the Word of God?
Born into a Jewish family of the diaspora Paul is raised and educated as a boy and teenager in Tarsus, an illustrious center of Asia Minor (today’s Turkey) and an important cultural center with regard to Hellenistic civilization. Later he heads to Jerusalem where he studies in the school of Rabbi Gamaliel the elder, the son of Hillel, who was the head of the Pharisee school in the first half of the first century A.D. During his years in the Holy City Paul receives his intellectual and religious formation as a young Pharisee and deepens his love for and knowledge of the Mosaic law. According to Luke, Paul was a “Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, brought up in this city and instructed at Gamaliel’s feet” (Acts 22:3). Nevertheless it bears noting that the Apostle himself in his letters never makes mention of this youthful period of his life spent in the Holy City. The Letter to the Philippians offers this significant self-description of his Jewish identity: “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrew parentage, in observance of the law a Pharisee, in zeal I persecuted the church, in righteousness based on the law I was blameless” (Phil 3:5-6). The events of Jesus’ public ministry can be dated to around the year 30-33, while the first Pauline letters were dictated by the Apostle in the early 50s: thus they are the oldest texts of the New Testament and as such provide us with invaluable insights into the primitive kerigma preached to the Pauline communities as well as the formation and constitution of the nascent Christian movement as it spread throughout the Greco-Roman world.
 
1. Paul’s Life

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1.1 Chronology

It is rather easy to delineate a general picture of the chronology of Paul’s life. Born at the start of the Christian era (5-10 A.D.), he converts to Christianity approximately in the year 36 and becomes a member of the followers of Jesus Christ; he goes up to Jerusalem on several occasions, where he encounters Peter and the other columns of the Church and participates in the first council of the apostles. An intense missionary activity soon follows, turning him into an itinerant preacher who covers the entire area touched by the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, an eventful and demanding apostolate marked by long sojourns with the various communities of Antioch of Syria, Corinth, Ephesus and Rome. He dies a martyr’s death in the empire’s capital under the emperor Nero in approximately the year 64 or 67, i.e. either at the start or end of the ruler’s cruel and tumultuous reign. If the general picture of Paul’s life is clear, unfortunately the same cannot be said with regard to a detailed ordering of the particular details of his biography. It is in fact rather difficult to provide a clear chronological list of the various episodes of his travels, the correct ordering of his letters and even the exact year of his death. The only extrabiblical data at our disposal which provide us with a reliable and trustworthy point of reference is the famous inscription now found in the archeological museum of Delphi. The text states that the Roman proconsul Gallio lived in Corinth in 51-52 AD. According to the Acts of the Apostles (cfr. 18:12ff.) the Apostle of the Gentiles was brought before Gallio in the city of Corinth, but we do not if their encounter took place at the beginning or at the end of his proconsulate. According to J.A. Fitzmyer, Gallio was in Achaia in the late spring or early summer of 52, and the proconsul would have questioned Paul sometime in the later summer or early fall. Since Paul was already in Corinth for about a year and a half, he had to have arrived there at some point in early 51. The varied events of Paul’s life are then ordered backwards and forwards from the certain dating of his Corinthian stay. In recent years the problem of Pauline chronology has been attentively examined with the presentation of many different hypotheses, not all of which can be adopted as certain and reliable, however. Some have, however, provided us with rather surprising conclusions. It is not the case for us to enter into a detailed discussion here. Suffice it to say that the varying chronological outlines of Paul’s life can be divided into two camps: the traditional dating which is based primarily on the Acts (an approach followed by J.A. Fitzmyer and R.E. Brown, and one which I accept as well) and the critical-revisionist chronologies which prefer instead to emphasize only the data presented in the Pauline corpus and question the historical reliability of the Acts (J. Murphy-O’Connor would be a fine example of a scholar who champions this approach).
The first reconstruction (connected to traditional chronology) divides Paul’s apostolic mission into three principal journeys: the first from 46 to 49, the second from 50 to 52 and the third from 54 to 58. It places the Council of Jerusalem in 49 after the end of the first journey, Paul’s imprisonment at Caesarea Maritima in the biennium 58-60 and his imprisonment at Rome between 61 to 63; his martyrdom then follows outside the capital in 64 (or shortly thereafter). The second scenario (based on the findings of those scholars like Murphy-O’Connor who propose revisionist chronologies) dates the Council of Jerusalem between 47-51, thus dating it after the first and second missionary journeys which had brought Paul to Asia Minor and Greece from 37 to 43; his arrest in Jerusalem and his imprisonment in Caesarea would have taken place from 52 to 55 or from 56 to 58. The scholarly discussion among the revisionists concerning Paul’s time in Palestine onwards then brings them in harmony with the more traditional chronology. The debate among exegetes continues to this day.
 
Fr. Scott Brodeur, SJ