Photo Credit: Art and the Bible © 2005, artbible.info
“St. Paul”
by Peter Paul Rubens, Oil on Panel
Paul’s birthday ranges from the widest at 5BC to 5AD to a more probable 1AD-4AD. He was born and raised in Tarsus, a city on the southern border of what is now Turkey. Tarsus was a prosperous trading center, so much so that its Macedonian rulers who conquered Persia under Alexander the Great gave it self-governing status. When the Romans conquered it, they did the same. Tarsus was also a renowned “university” town, with a specific slant to Stoicism, which breaks out in Paul in his debate with Athenian philosophers around 50AD (Acts 17). His father was Jewish yet had Roman citizenship that passed on to his son who he brought up to be a strict Pharisee, which included learning a trade to support oneself. Here Paul became a tentmaker. Around the age of 13 he was sent to Jerusalem to study under Rabbi Gamaliel; in this he excelled, perhaps the best student of his class, and twenty years later he was holding the cloaks of those stoning Stephen to death. Thence, he became point man in persecuting the Christian church, the Book of Acts says he was breathing threats and murder against it, with the approval of the high priest.
His conversion on the road to Damascus is beyond striking and into the realm of astounding for he swings from threats and murder and thirty years of studying the minutest details of the law of Moses to a totally new perception of the Old Testament, that of faith in a dead yet alive Jesus, all within the scope of several minutes. Even he was stunned by this encounter with the risen Jesus that led to him to spend three years in “Arabia” to sort out what it all meant – why faith replaced observance of the Law and what that means for mankind, not just the Jewish nation. He returned to Damascus to preach the Gospel but now he was the target for killing and had to escape the city by being lowered in a basket over the city’s wall at night. He returned to Jerusalem and from there would begin preaching the Gospel in three missionary ventures into what now is Turkey and Greece.
These trips tested Paul’s faith not only religiously and spiritually, going from outward observance of the Law to a condition internal to a man - faith. He also endured this faith physically as he summarizes in II Corinthians 11:24-28:
“Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.”
He doesn’t mention imprisonment here for that only happened once – so far – for casting out the demon of a slave girl who made money off her predictions. When he returned to Jerusalem around 58AD, his sister’s son, his nephew, informed the Romans of a Jewish plot to kill him, where forty men took an oath to do so. The Romans spirited him out of the city to Caesarea and there he spent two years under house arrest. Tired of inaction, he appealed to Caesar as a Roman citizen so to Rome he must go. That entailed a shipwreck, an encounter with snakes on the island of Malta and house arrest once in Rome. Here the narrative becomes murky and several versions exist. First, that he was tried on the charges brought in Jerusalem and found not guilty, so some believe he visited his churches in Greece while others think he went to Spain as he had long intended. Then he returned, became embroiled in Nero’s Great Fire of 1964, was imprisoned and ultimately found “guilty” of being Christian and beheaded, which, as a Roman citizen, was his right. No torture or prolonged and painful death. The second version is that he was just caught up in Nero’s persecution and executed.
Yet even here, he was calm and composed under this sentence, faith now showing through. Death was only a transition as he wrote to Timothy (2 Tim: 4:6-8):
“For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.”
Copyright © 2025 Jim Dewar
