Paul the Apostle

Life and Ministry

Saul of Tarsus was born in the diaspora — a Roman citizen by birth, a Pharisee by training, a Hebrew of Hebrews who studied under Gamaliel in Jerusalem and stood approving as Stephen was stoned. On the road to Damascus, c. AD 34, the risen Christ confronted him in a light from heaven, struck him blind, and sent him to be baptized by Ananias. From that moment until his death some thirty years later he was the apostle to the Gentiles — three missionary journeys across Asia Minor, Macedonia, Achaia and onto Rome itself, thirteen letters in the New Testament canon under his name, churches founded from Antioch to Corinth, and a theology of grace, justification, and the body of Christ that gave the Gentile mission its mind.

Circumstances of Death

Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome awaiting trial, having appealed to Caesar. The earliest tradition — preserved by Clement of Rome writing within a generation — places his death in the same Neronian wave that took Peter. As a Roman citizen he could not be crucified; the universal tradition is that he was beheaded by the sword on the Ostian Way south of Rome. Eusebius reports that he was buried where the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura now stands; nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations under that altar confirmed a first-century sarcophagus inscribed PAULO APOSTOLO MART.

Legacy

Paul gave the church its dogmatic vocabulary — justification by faith, adoption, propitiation, the Body of Christ, principalities and powers — and his epistles became the lens through which the early church read the Hebrew scriptures and the words of Jesus. Every Western reformer from Augustine to Luther to Wesley met Christ first in Paul's letters. His prison correspondence from Rome closes with the words "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."