The saints

Saint Paul

Apostle · Feast day June 29 (with Saint Peter) · First century · Tarsus, and the whole Roman world · Also known as Saul of Tarsus, the Apostle to the Gentiles

Saint Paul, once Saul the persecutor of Christians, was struck down by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and became the greatest missionary of the early church and the author of nearly half the New Testament. No one after Jesus has shaped the Christian faith more.

But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.1 Corinthians 15:10 (KJV)

The persecutor

Saul was born in Tarsus, a city of Cilicia, a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin and a Roman citizen by birth, which was a rare and valuable thing. He was trained in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel, the most respected teacher of the age, and became a Pharisee zealous for the law beyond any of his peers, blameless, as he later said, touching the righteousness which is in the law. He was brilliant, disciplined, and utterly certain he was serving God.

That certainty made him the fiercest enemy the young church had. He first appears in Scripture consenting to the death of Stephen, the first martyr, holding the coats of those who stoned him. Then he made havoc of the church, entering house after house and dragging men and women to prison, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord. He was on his way to Damascus with letters of arrest when everything changed.

The road to Damascus

As he neared Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven, brighter than the noonday sun, blazed around him and struck him to the ground, and a voice said, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me. When he asked who it was, the answer came: I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. In that instant his whole world turned over: the movement he was destroying was the living Christ himself, and every blow against the church had fallen on the Lord of glory.

Blinded, he was led by the hand into the city, and for three days he neither ate nor drank. Then God sent a frightened disciple named Ananias, who laid hands on him, and the scales fell from his eyes, and he was baptized. At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God, to the amazement of all who knew his past. It is the most famous conversion in history, and the pattern of every conversion since: not a good man reaching up to God, but God laying hold of his enemy and making him a friend and a servant.

The missionary journeys

For the rest of his life Paul crossed the Roman world on foot and by sea, planting churches in city after city, from Antioch to Cyprus, through Asia Minor, into Greece at Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, and Corinth, and finally to Rome itself. He supported himself as a tentmaker, reasoned in the marketplaces, and left communities of believers wherever he went. His hardships were staggering, and he listed them himself: five times beaten with thirty-nine stripes, three times beaten with rods, once stoned and left for dead, three times shipwrecked, in perils of waters, of robbers, of his own countrymen, in weariness and painfulness, in hunger and cold.

He counted it all as nothing for the sake of Christ, saying that what things were gain to him he counted loss, that he might win Christ. He longed to preach where Christ was not yet named, and to present every believer mature in Jesus. Near the end, a prisoner awaiting execution, he could write with peace, I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.

The mind and heart of the gospel

From prison cells and the open road, Paul wrote letters to those young churches and to fellow workers, thirteen of which stand in the New Testament, from Romans to Philemon. In them the gospel of grace is spelled out with a depth the church has drawn on for two thousand years: that all have sinned, that we are justified freely by grace through faith and not by works, that there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ, and that neither death, nor life, nor things present, nor things to come shall be able to separate us from the love of God.

He gave the church its picture of believers as one body with many members, its great hymn of love in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, its confidence in the resurrection, and its call to rejoice in the Lord always. And he did it all while insisting he was the least of the apostles, not worthy to be called an apostle, because he had persecuted the church, and that he was what he was only by the grace of God.

By strong tradition Paul was beheaded in Rome under Nero, a Roman citizen granted the sword rather than the cross. His life is the enduring proof that no one is beyond the reach of Christ, and that the fiercest enemy of the gospel can be made its greatest servant.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Peter · Saint Luke · Saints for June 29 · Saint of the day