The Life and Ministry of Paul

The event

No one in the New Testament travelled further, wrote more, or was more thoroughly turned around than Paul of Tarsus. A Pharisee trained under Gamaliel, a Roman citizen by birth, and a Greek-speaking Jew from a Cilician trading city, he was equipped almost accidentally for a work he spent his early manhood trying to destroy. Saul's Conversion on the Damascus Road ended that: the risen Christ met him on the road he was travelling to arrest believers, and the church's chief persecutor became its most tireless missionary. Everything below flows from that morning.

The years immediately after are the quietest in the record. Paul went away into Arabia and back to Damascus, spent time in his home city of Tarsus, and was eventually fetched by Barnabas to help teach at the fast-growing congregation in Syrian Antioch — the base The Church at Antioch would become for the whole Gentile mission. It was Antioch, not Jerusalem, that sent him out.

Paul's First Missionary Journey took him and Barnabas through Cyprus and into the Galatian highlands, planting the first wave of Gentile-majority churches at Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe — and establishing the pattern that would repeat for the rest of his life: the synagogue first, a mixed response, then opposition sharp enough to drive him out of town, at Lystra by stoning. Those churches raised the question the church could not dodge, and The Jerusalem Council answered it: Gentiles are saved by grace through faith, not by circumcision and the law. Paul's Second Missionary Journey carried the gospel across the Aegean into Europe for the first time — Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, the Areopagus at Athens, and eighteen months in Corinth, where the courtroom scene of Gallio and Paul at Corinth gave later historians the single firmest date in his whole chronology. Paul's Third Missionary Journey settled him for roughly three years at Ephesus, the high-water mark of his church planting, and ended with a collection gathered from the Gentile churches for the poor saints in Jerusalem and a farewell to the Ephesian elders at Miletus in which he told them plainly that chains were waiting for him.

Out of those journeys came the letters. Thirteen of the New Testament's twenty-seven books carry Paul's name, and they were not written in a study — they were written on the road, to congregations he had planted and left, answering real questions from real people: Galatians against a gospel of law-keeping, 1 and 2 Thessalonians on the Lord's return, 1 and 2 Corinthians into a church tearing itself apart, and Romans, the fullest exposition of justification by faith ever set down, dictated at Corinth to a church he had never visited. That last letter alone has re-founded the church more than once, from Augustine's garden to Luther's tower to Wesley's warmed heart.

The chains came. Paul's Arrest in Jerusalem began in a Temple riot over a false rumour and ended with Roman soldiers pulling him out of a mob that meant to kill him. Paul's Imprisonment at Caesarea kept him two years in provincial custody, defending himself before Felix, before Festus, and before King Agrippa II, until, with the case about to be moved back to Jerusalem where an assassination plot was still waiting, he exercised the one right no provincial governor could overrule and appealed to Caesar. Paul's Voyage and Shipwreck to Rome is Luke's most vivid piece of narrative — a fortnight driven before a northeaster, a ship broken up on Malta, and not one of two hundred and seventy-six lives lost, exactly as Paul had been promised.

Acts closes with Paul's First Roman Imprisonment: two years under house arrest in his own rented lodging, receiving all who came to him and "proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance." Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon — the Prison Epistles — most likely date from those two years. Luke stops there without a verdict, because the gospel reaching Rome, not Paul's personal fate, was the story he set out to tell.

Paul's Martyrdom is therefore known from his own last letter and from the church's earliest memory rather than from Acts. Writing to Timothy from a second and far harsher confinement, he said, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." Tradition going back to Clement of Rome, within living memory of the events, holds that he was beheaded on the Ostian Way outside the city under Nero — beheaded rather than crucified because a Roman citizen could not lawfully be crucified. The apostle who had set out from Damascus to arrest Christians died in the capital of the empire for being one.

What holds these thirty years together is not Paul's stamina but his message. He said it himself, to the Ephesian elders and to anyone who would listen: he counted his life of no value to himself, if only he might finish his course and the ministry he received from the Lord Jesus — to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.

Dating

The span here is simply the span of the events it covers: the conversion at c. AD 34 and the martyrdom at c. AD 64-68. It is a date range, not a claim of exclusive coverage — Saul's Conversion on the Damascus Road sits at its near edge and is drawn as its own mark rather than folded into this one, and other events in these years that are not Paul's own life keep their marks too. Pauline chronology is genuinely disputed at both ends and reasonably firm only in the middle. The one fixed point is the Delphi inscription placing Gallio's proconsulship of Achaia at c. AD 51-52, which anchors Paul's eighteen months in Corinth; everything else is reckoned forward and backward from it using the intervals Paul gives in Galatians 1-2 ("after three years", "after fourteen years") and the durations in Acts. Reading those intervals differently moves the conversion anywhere from c. AD 31 to c. AD 36. At the other end, the accession of Porcius Festus — the hinge for the Caesarean imprisonment, the voyage and the Roman years — is placed by most scholars at AD 59, by others at 60, and by a minority anywhere from the mid-50s to 61; every later date moves with it. The martyrdom rests on tradition rather than on any dated record, and AD 64-68 is a range rather than a year. The order of events is not in doubt; the years carry margins of several years at each end, and this entry's AD 34-68 should be read as the conventional reconstruction rather than as a settled fact.

Scripture references

• Acts 9:1-31
• Acts 13:1-28:31
• Galatians 1:11-2:14
• 2 Corinthians 11:22-33
• 2 Timothy 4:6-8

Other witnesses

• Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.22, 2.25
• 1 Clement 5