Paul: A Biography
by Tom Wright
Ewan put this book into my hands. I couldn’t put it down. Honestly. I recommend you get a copy and read it. Here’s why: It will open up the Bible to you... the vast world of Scripture, the Holy Lands, the story of Israel, Jews, Gentiles, One God, Abraham, Isaac, David and Jesus, Messiah and Lord... all brought to you through the life of Paul, but brought to life through Paul’s greatest interpreter, Tom Wright.
I never thought I needed an interpreter of the Scripture. I thought of myself as Philip, not the eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). But Wright changed my mind. Truth be told, I’m the Ethiopian: “... how can we understand, without someone to guide us?” Just as the Ethiopian eunuch discovered, reading the Bible is difficult, and understanding what we are reading - all the stories and pronouncements - is daunting. We need a guide AND an interpreter.
Tom Wright is both.
In his book, Paul: A Biography, Wright literally brings Paul to life. It’s no exaggeration to say that we - the Church, the Body of Believers, the Community of Jesus-followers - owe much of our faith and belief to Paul, his incredible energy, his experience (his 'testimony'), his subsequent impulse to travel and his infectious zeal for Jesus, all revealed through his letters totaling just 80 pages or so in the standard Bible. To interpret those pages, Wright puts us into the mind of Paul, a Jew, the Jewish world, the culture of the Greeks and Romans, and all of the dynamics caused by being a Jesus-follower here on earth, ruled by our worldly powers and plagued by our earthly concerns. In short, Wright provides us with a proper 'context' to understand what happened with the arrival and life of the long-awaited Jewish Messiah and the execution, resurrection and departure of a King-for-us-all.
For example, Wright puts us in a 1st-century mindset to tell us that Jesus-followers of that era were not preoccupied with going to heaven or hell - that was a medieval construction. They were preoccupied with the heaven-and-earth construct, how God moves and reveals Himself in the real world. The Messiah who was to transform the earth in a 'new creation' would transform our minds and bodies too. Religion to the Jesus-followers of the 1st century was not about belief but community, the 'body of believers'. Religion, Wright explains, comes from the Latin word 'religio' meaning 'to bind'. And Paul wanted to bind people not to the Jewish practices of sacrifice, eating rituals, circumcision, and restrictions on sex, but to 'ideas' such as Jesus-as-Messiah, Jesus-as-Lord, One God, his Son, and the Spirit. Yes, argues Wright, Paul wants to bind Jews to Jesus as an extension of Jewishness, and bind Jesus-as-Messiah-and-Lord to the wider world of Greeks, Romans and ALL the gentiles (and me!).
According to Wright, the issue in the 1st century is not sin but idolatry. If you were Jewish, you had the One God. The barrier between God and his creation in the larger world of Greeks and Romans, however, was the many-gods barrier. The sin-as-barrier comes later, when Paul exhorts his listeners and readers, Jews and Gentiles alike, to be God’s agents on earth, to reflect God’s wisdom and order INTO the world and to reflect the praises of creation BACK to God.
So according to Wright, Paul’s story is a rescue story. Paul is saying that God will put the whole world right IF people - their heads and hearts - can be put right. This is what Paul is determined to do.
Wright paints a picture of Paul as a pivot, bringing us a Messiah not just for the Jewish, but for the world. Unlike other Jesus-followers, Paul is a pivot because he is Jewish AND Roman. He is a loyal Jew and a subject of Caesar, endowed with certain rights as a citizen of Rome, chief among them being the right to be heard in his own defense. Jesus, the hope and King of Israel, is part of the One God central to Jewishness that Rome allowed despite non-Jewish Romans having to pledge allegiance to Caesar only. It is through this tiny pivot-point of Jewish-AND-Roman that Jesus emerges from the Jewish world to the world at large.
Sure, Paul was a troublemaker, says Wright. Pre-Damascus road, he certainly was making trouble for Jesus-followers. But Paul was right without being righteous, Wright explains. Yes, in the synagogues he was beaten, a crazy Jew who was hard to take. Nevertheless, his narrative is so powerful, connecting Jesus-as-promised-Messiah to God-made-visible, the Old Testament to the New, the covenant to the new covenant, that God WILL appear to God HAS appeared, that after abandoning the Temple in the time of the Babylonian exile, God has come back in the person of his Son. Crazy? Yes. But blessed with a quick mind and being a talker, Paul had the ability to persuade. Sure, he was accused of getting his gospel second-hand (versus the first-hand accounts of Peter, James and the rest). But Paul was given his gospel directly, Wright argues, on the road to Damascus where Jesus revealed himself to Paul, on the roads first down to Sinai (for credibility where earlier God met Moses), then over to Jerusalem (where Peter, James and the other powers-that-be were headquartered) and up to Antioch, west into Greece and Europe, back to Jerusalem and west again to Rome and Spain(?), accompanied by the Spirit.
Wright starts each chapter with a map, and we readers are allowed to tag along. And along the way, Wright explains what is going on in Paul’s mind and world, the whys and the wherefores, the arguments and squabbles, the rehearsals and rehashing of the One God-Jesus as Messiah and Lord talking points linking Paul’s own experience with the larger narrative of Jewish belief that God would put the whole world right.
Paul preaches and persuades: It’s not heaven where God dwells, it’s Heaven-and-Earth in which God wants to dwell.
The Bible narrative, according to Paul (and Paul’s greatest interpreter Tom Wright), isn’t to be read to know WHAT to think, but HOW to think clearly, scripturally and prayerfully. Knowing HOW to think, we can work out for ourselves the 1001 issues, circumstances and problems that beset our earthly lives. Paul shows us that God is at work, working through people, binding us to a better world - a new creation - of heaven-and-earth made possible through the Messiah and the Spirit.
Paul opened our eyes, and Tom Wright opened mine!
Don Hughston