Writers of the Bible
Paul
c. AD 5–67 · Tentmaker · Pharisee · apostle to the Gentiles · prisoner of Christ
Hebrew שָׁאוּל (Sha'ul, "asked for") — his Jewish name, Saul; Greek Παῦλος (Paulos), Latin Paulus — "small" — his Roman name, Paul
He set out to erase the name of Jesus and ended up writing nearly half the New Testament — much of it in chains.
The Books They Wrote (13)
Written c. AD 57 from Corinth, near the end of his third journey, to a church he had never visited — so he laid out his gospel with a completeness found nowhere else, and entrusted the letter to Phoebe, a deacon of nearby Cenchreae, to carry to Rome (16:1–2). It became the most consequential letter ever written: Augustine was converted reading it, Luther's Reformation caught fire in it, and Wesley's heart was "strangely warmed" hearing its preface read aloud.
Written c. AD 55 from Ephesus to a gifted but splintering church in the wealthy port city of Corinth, answering reports and questions about factions, sexual immorality, lawsuits between believers, and chaos at the Lord's Supper. Out of that tangle rose two of Scripture's summits: the love chapter (13) and the resurrection chapter (15).
Written c. AD 55–56 from Macedonia, in the aftermath of a "painful letter" and a wounded relationship — his most personal epistle, baring more of his heart than any other. Here are the treasure in jars of clay, the thorn in the flesh, and the answer he received instead of healing: "My grace is sufficient for you" (12:9).
Possibly his earliest surviving letter, c. AD 48–49, fired off to churches being told that faith in Christ was not enough without circumcision. It is the only Pauline letter with no opening thanksgiving — he goes straight to "I am astonished" (1:6) — a furious defense that justification is by faith alone, ending with the pen seized from the scribe: "See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!" (6:11).
Written c. AD 60–62 from Roman imprisonment, and likely a circular letter for the churches of Asia — the earliest manuscripts lack the words "in Ephesus." It is his most cosmic vision of the church as Christ's body and bride; critical scholars debate whether Paul or a close disciple penned it, though the letter names Paul twice and the early church received it as his without hesitation.
Written c. AD 61 from prison to his first European church, planted in a Roman colony where he had once sung hymns at midnight in its jail. It is the letter of joy — "to live is Christ" (1:21), the great Christ-hymn of chapter 2, and the command he repeats on purpose: "Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!" (4:4).
Written c. AD 60–62 from the same imprisonment, to a church he had never met, threatened by an early proto-gnostic teaching that shrank Christ to one power among many. His answer is the towering supremacy hymn: "the firstborn over all creation… in him all things hold together" (1:15–17).
Written c. AD 50–51 from Corinth, only months after he was sent out of Thessalonica by night — very likely his first letter, and thus possibly the earliest Christian document in existence. Its tender center is comfort for believers grieving friends who died before the Lord's return: they will not be left behind, "and so we will be with the Lord forever" (4:17).
Written c. AD 51, a few months later, to calm a panic — someone was teaching that the day of the Lord had already come, and some believers had quit their work to wait. Paul steadies them with what must happen first, and lays down a rule for the idle: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat" (3:10).
Written c. AD 62–64 to his "true son in the faith," left at Ephesus to set a troubled church in order — elders and deacons, worship and false teachers, and the confession he could never recite without adding his own name to it: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners — of whom I am the worst" (1:15). Critical scholars debate whether the three Pastoral Letters come directly from Paul's hand or from a trusted co-worker after his death; the letters themselves and the unbroken testimony of the early church name Paul.
Written c. AD 66–67 from the Mamertine dungeon in Rome, awaiting execution — his last surviving words: "the time for my departure is near… I have fought the good fight" (4:6–7). Even at the end the details are piercingly human: bring the cloak before winter, and the scrolls, especially the parchments (4:13).
Written c. AD 62–64 to his troubleshooter, dispatched to plant order in the raw young churches of Crete — an island whose own poet said its people were "liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons" (1:12). Its heartbeat is grace that trains: the grace of God "teaches us to say 'No' to ungodliness" and to live self-controlled, upright lives while we wait for the blessed hope (2:11–13).
His shortest letter — 25 verses, written c. AD 60 from prison alongside Colossians and carried by Onesimus, a runaway slave walking back to the master he had wronged. Paul does not command; he persuades, offers to pay the debt himself ("charge it to me"), and asks Philemon to receive Onesimus "no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother." One private note about one man — and a seed that would one day help split slavery's roots.
Life Story
Born into two worlds
Saul was born in Tarsus of Cilicia, a prosperous crossroads city whose schools rivaled Athens — and he was born a Roman citizen (Acts 22:28), a legal shield most people in the empire would never hold. Like every son of a devout Jewish family he learned a trade: tentmaking, cutting and stitching leather and Cilician goat-hair cloth — the craft that would one day fund his missions so that he could preach free of charge. Two worlds met in one boy: a Greek-speaking city of philosophers and commerce, and a strict home of the tribe of Benjamin that named him for the tribe's most famous son, King Saul. His parents sent him to Jerusalem, where he trained under Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), the most honored rabbi of the age. He outran everyone: "I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers" (Galatians 1:14). By his own résumé he was "a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee… as for righteousness based on the law, faultless" (Philippians 3:5–6). Every credential a man could earn in Israel, he earned — and would later count it all loss.
Breathing out murderous threats
The first time Scripture shows him, he is minding coats. As the witnesses stoned Stephen, they "laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul" — "and Saul approved of their killing" (Acts 7:58; 8:1). That day a great persecution broke out against the Jerusalem church, and Saul became its engine: "he began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison" (8:3). He was no thug; he was a theologian on fire. In his eyes a crucified man hung under God's curse, so calling Jesus the Messiah was blasphemy to be burned out of Israel. He cast his vote for believers' deaths, tried to force them to blaspheme, pursued them to foreign cities (Acts 26:10–11) — and, "still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples" (9:1), obtained letters from the high priest authorizing arrests in Damascus, a hundred and thirty-five miles away. He never got over what he had been, writing decades later that he had "intensely" persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it (Galatians 1:13).
The Damascus road
Near noon, close to Damascus, a light from heaven brighter than the sun threw him to the ground, and a voice said, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting" (Acts 9:4–5). One sentence rearranged his universe: the crucified "blasphemer" was alive, was Lord — and counted every dragged-off believer as his own body. Saul rose blind, was led by the hand into the city he had meant to enter as an inquisitor, and for three days neither ate nor drank. Then God handed a disciple named Ananias the most terrifying assignment in Acts: go and lay hands on Saul of Tarsus. Ananias objected — "Lord, I have heard many reports about this man" — and God answered, "Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name" (9:13–16). Ananias went in, and his first words to the persecutor were "Brother Saul." Something like scales fell from Saul's eyes; he got up and was baptized — and within days the synagogues of Damascus were listening, stunned, as the hunter proclaimed that Jesus is the Son of God.
Ten thousand miles for one name
From Antioch, over roughly a dozen years, Paul made three great missionary journeys — close to ten thousand miles by foot and sea. The pattern repeated in city after city: the synagogue first, then the Gentiles; then a riot, a beating, or a jail, and behind him a young church left glowing in the dark. Cyprus and Galatia; across to Europe at Philippi; down through Thessalonica and Athens to Corinth, where he stayed eighteen months; then three years in Ephesus until the silversmiths' riot drove him on. He cut leather by day and preached by night, refusing to be anyone's salaried philosopher. The cost is best read in his own inventory, written when rivals forced him to "boast": "Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea… I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst… Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches" (2 Corinthians 11:24–28). The stoning was at Lystra, where the crowd dragged him out of the city believing he was dead — and he got up and walked back in (Acts 14:19–20).
The writer in chains — and the Ostian Way
The letters were written in the cracks of that life. Paul dictated to scribes — in Romans the scribe even says hello: "I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord" (16:22) — then took the pen to sign in his own oversized script, "the distinguishing mark in all my letters" (2 Thessalonians 3:17; Galatians 6:11). Nearly half of them have chains in the background: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, and 2 Timothy all breathe prison air, which is why he could call himself "an ambassador in chains" (Ephesians 6:20). Arrested in the Jerusalem temple on a false rumor, he spent two years in Caesarean custody, appealed to Caesar as a citizen, survived a fourteen-day storm and shipwreck off Malta, and reached Rome under guard — where Acts leaves him in a rented house, "welcoming all who came to see him," preaching "with all boldness and without hindrance" (28:30–31). Early tradition — Clement of Rome within a generation, later Eusebius — says he was released for a time, traveled on, and was re-arrested in Nero's persecution; from the Mamertine dungeon he wrote his last letter, and around AD 67 he was beheaded on the Ostian Way outside Rome, his citizenship's one mercy sparing him the cross. He left behind thirteen letters — nearly half the books of the New Testament — and a chain of churches from Jerusalem to Rome that has never stopped multiplying.
Key Verse · Galatians 2:20
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Pointing to Christ
"For to me, to live is Christ" (Philippians 1:21) — the man who once tried to erase that name spent thirty years spelling it out across the Roman world. There is a strange and telling fact about his thirteen letters: they never once describe Jesus' face, rarely retell his miracles, and quote only a handful of his sayings — and yet they never talk about anything else. Christ crucified, Christ risen, Christ in you, the hope of glory. And Paul understood that his own biography was part of the message: "I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life" (1 Timothy 1:16). The persecutor's conversion is the gospel's standing proof-case — if the man breathing murderous threats could be met on the road, forgiven, and transformed, then no one reading his letters is out of reach.
Questions People Ask
Why does the Bible call him both Saul and Paul?
It was not a conversion rename — Jesus never changed his name the way he renamed Simon. Like many Jews of the Roman world he carried two names from birth: Saul, his Hebrew name after Israel's first king (who was also a Benjamite), and Paulus, his Roman name as a citizen. Luke marks the switch not at Damascus but at the launch of the Gentile mission — "Saul, who was also called Paul" (Acts 13:9) — and from that point on, the missionary to the Roman world goes by his Roman name.
Did Paul ever meet Jesus?
Not during Jesus' earthly ministry, so far as Scripture records — they were in Jerusalem in overlapping years, but no meeting is ever mentioned. Paul's encounter came after the resurrection, on the Damascus road, and he insisted it was as real as any apostle's: "Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" (1 Corinthians 9:1). He soberly lists himself as the last witness of the risen Christ — "and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born" (15:8) — which is why he claimed the title of apostle while calling himself the least of them.
Why do Paul's letters make up so much of the New Testament — did he know he was writing Scripture?
Thirteen of the New Testament's twenty-seven books bear his name — the practical fruit of a calling: Christ sent him to the Gentile world, and letters were how a traveling church-planter kept pastoring congregations he could not visit. Did he know? He knew his words carried the Lord's authority — "what I am writing to you is the Lord's command" (1 Corinthians 14:37) — though he could hardly have pictured billions reading his mail. Remarkably, Scripture itself answers the question: within Peter's lifetime, Paul's letters were already being classed with "the other Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:15–16).
Did some of Paul's letters get lost?
Yes. He mentions an earlier letter to Corinth written before our 1 Corinthians ("I wrote to you in my letter…", 1 Corinthians 5:9) and a letter to Laodicea that the Colossians were told to read (Colossians 4:16) — neither survives. That need not shake us: inspiration does not mean God preserved everything an apostle ever wrote, but that everything God intended for his church's permanent instruction was preserved and recognized. Paul doubtless wrote many letters; the thirteen we have are the ones God kept for us.
How did Paul die?
The Bible does not record it — Acts ends with him under house arrest in Rome, still preaching. Early and consistent tradition finishes the story: released for a time (he had hoped to reach Spain, Romans 15:24), he was re-arrested in Nero's persecution, wrote 2 Timothy from a Roman dungeon expecting death, and was beheaded on the Ostian Way outside Rome around AD 67. Clement of Rome, writing within thirty years, says he "bore witness before the rulers, and so departed from the world"; Eusebius preserves the tradition of beheading — the one mercy of his Roman citizenship, which spared a citizen the cross.