Paul

Paul was born a Jew in Tarsus, a Greek city of Cilicia, and raised in Jerusalem. He was trained at the feet of Gamaliel, whom Acts calls a teacher of the law honored by all the people. He held Roman citizenship from birth, which the commander who arrested him had to buy. He was a Pharisee whose father was a Pharisee, which names a family and a party rather than a private opinion. He stood at Stephen's execution while the witnesses laid their coats at his feet. Then he went house to house, dragging men and women off to prison. In his own account before Agrippa he says he cast his vote for death sentences and tried to force believers to blaspheme. He never softened any of it in later years. He was on the road to Damascus with arrest warrants from the high priest when a light stopped him and a voice asked why he was persecuting Me. Not them. He spent three days blind and without food. The first Christian word spoken to him was Brother Saul, said by a man who had just told the Lord exactly what this man had done. The name did not change on that road. Luke goes on calling him Saul for four more chapters and switches at Acts 13:9, on Cyprus, with the phrase “Saul, who was also called Paul.” Saul was his Hebrew name and Paul his Roman one, and a Roman citizen from a Greek city would have carried both from birth. For about thirty years he crossed the eastern Roman world and planted churches in Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia and Achaia. At Lystra a crowd tried to sacrifice to him and then stoned him and left him for dead, and he got up and went back into the city. By his own count he took five floggings, three beatings with rods, one stoning and three shipwrecks before the famous wreck of Acts 27 ever happened. He argued the case for Gentile freedom at Jerusalem and refused to let Titus be circumcised. He corrected Peter to his face at Antioch when a shared meal turned into a test of the gospel. He also parted from Barnabas over whether to take Mark, and Luke calls that disagreement sharp. Years later he asked for Mark by name and called him useful in the ministry. He was arrested in the temple courts on a charge Luke says rested on an assumption, held two years at Caesarea by a governor who was hoping for a bribe, and sent on to Rome because he appealed to Caesar. Acts ends with him under guard in a rented house, preaching for two full years, and reports no verdict.

Paul says the center of what he preached was handed to him rather than composed by him. He writes to Corinth: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas and then to the Twelve.” The list of witnesses runs on through more than five hundred at once, then James, then all the apostles, and it ends with him: “And last of all He appeared to me also, as to one of untimely birth.” The shortest statement of the Christian message in the New Testament closes with the name of the man who had tried to destroy it. He is never presented as a type of Christ. He is presented as the demonstration case for Christ's patience. His own words are: “But for this very reason I was shown mercy, so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display His perfect patience as an example to those who would believe in Him for eternal life.” The worst instance is handled first, so that nobody who comes later can claim to stand outside the offer. Augustine of Hippo said the same thing about the work that followed, writing in the early fifth century that Paul did not labor in order to receive grace, but received grace so that he might labor. Paul's own summary of his preaching, given under guard to a Roman court, is Christ out of Israel's prophets. “I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen: that the Christ would suffer, and as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to our people and to the Gentiles.” Tertullian read that sentence in the early third century as a claim of continuity rather than a break, and said Paul was maintaining just such a resurrection as the prophets had foretold. Notice the order Paul gives. To our people, and to the Gentiles. Romans 11 is where he answers the charge most often laid at his own door. He raises it himself and answers it in the first person: “I ask then, did God reject His people? Certainly not! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin.” He closes the argument in the same place: “Regarding the gospel, they are enemies on your account; but regarding election, they are loved on account of the patriarchs. For God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable.” John Calvin wrote in 1554 that the point of the passage is that nobody should think the covenant made with Abraham has been abrogated. John Wesley drew the plain conclusion in 1755, that Israel is neither totally nor finally rejected. Cyril of Alexandria, in the fifth century, said Israel will be saved in its own time. Replacement theology is condemned on this site, and Paul is the last writer in the New Testament who can be enlisted for it. The gifts he describes are given to the church rather than withdrawn from it. At Ephesus he laid his hands on disciples who had not heard there was a Holy Spirit, and “the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.” Writing to a congregation that had mishandled the same gifts, his instruction was not to stop using them: “Earnestly pursue love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy,” and at the close of the argument, “So, my brothers, be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues.” The correction he gives is order, and everything is to be done in a proper and orderly manner. This site teaches that the gifts continue. He also wrote the clearest account in the New Testament of the catching up of the church. “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will be the first to rise. After that, we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord.” Where that event falls in relation to the tribulation is a question Scripture leaves genuinely open, and serious people hold each of the answers. The site's page on the rapture plots the timings on one timeline of Daniel's seventieth week, gives each its best case and its hardest problem, and names this site's own tradition. This page quotes the verses and argues none of it.