BibleProject - Acts E5: N.T. Wright Interview - Getting to Know The Apostle Paul

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

This is a very special episode of our podcast. Today Tim and Jon talk with N.T. Wright, a well-known biblical scholar. Wright has heavily influenced many areas of theology, especially through his work outlining the Apostle Paul. Dr. Wright outlines his childhood and his original introduction to the Bible (0:00-9:40). Dr. Wright discusses Paul’s mindset as a Jew, especially before his transformation on the road to Damascus (9:40-18:20). Dr. Wright explains what he thinks happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. He thinks Paul was meditating on the vision in Ezekiel 1 while on the road. He also explains what he thinks happens during the decade after Paul’s transformation. Dr. Wright also mentions that it’s unusual that Paul never returns to Tarsus in Acts (18:20-31:50). Dr. Wright then discusses Paul’s balance between being loyal to his Jewish roots but also believing that the Jews and their God were supposed to be a blessing to all the nations. Dr. Wright says that for Paul, the whole point of the Gospel was to give Abraham his single worldwide family and that through the Jews, God would redeem all humanity. Paul believes that ultimately all people are God’s people, not just the Jews (31:50-end). Show Produced by: Dan Gummel, Tim Mackie, Jon Collins, Matthew Halbert-Howen Show Music: Defender Instrumental, Tents. Show Resources: Our video on Paul in Acts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiVAbkINtRU Paul: A Biography, N.T Wright. N.T. Wright’s online classes: www.ntwrightonline.org/thebibleproject Thank you to all of our supporters!

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode. Hey, this is Tim and welcome to the Bible Project podcast.

Usually, John, my partner in the Bible project, he does these introductions to the weekly podcast, but this episode I wanted to do because it's a special episode for the Bible project and also for me personally. I started to read the Bible in a committed way a little over 20 years ago now, and for the first couple of years I was just bewildered and lost like most people are when they start reading the Bible. But I had the privilege of signing up for classes at a great Bible college here in Portland. And I was introduced to the wonderful world of Biblical scholarship. And one of the scholars that I was introduced to in those early years was the late 90s. Was the work of a scholar of New Testament and Jewish studies.

His name in the US,'s called NT right over in Europe. Uh, he's referred to his Tom right, but I still remember it was a bookstore palace books here in Portland. I was wandering in the biblical study section and I saw one of his books. I never read anything by him before and so I picked it out and went down to the coffee shop in the bookstore and just started reading a book called The New Testament and the People of God. And dude, I was hooked. I couldn't put it down. And I didn't have a lot of money at the time, but I bought this big fat book anyway.

And I'm so glad that I did. I have been learning from NT Wright ever since that day for years and years now through his many, many books and lectures that are online. And also from the many courses that a website called NTRIONLINE.org, you can take classes with him on many topics in New Testament theology and different books of the New Testament. Also, if you listen through to the end of this podcast interview, we're going to tell you about a special discount opportunity that listeners of this podcast have to take classes from NTRiteOnline.org at a really great discounted price, so be sure to follow through with that.

NTRite, he's an amazing world-class scholar, publishing in the field of early Christianity and second temple Judaism. And in this episode, John and I got to sit down and talk with him about his favorite topic, among all topics in the New Testament to research and write about the Apostle Paul. So if you've been following the God series podcast all throughout this fall, you'll know that we just got into the letters of Paul and exploring Paul's convictions about Jesus's divine identity. Also, going to be releasing the next video in our Acts series, and it'll be all about the Apostle Paul and his missionary journeys.

And so John and I had this chance to interview and to write, and so that's what we talk about, the Apostle Paul. In this conversation, we explore what Paul's Jewish upbringing and education would have been like, what kinds of things shaped someone like the Apostle Paul, a Pharisee, and a Rabbi. We explore the dynamics of his transformation when he met the risen Jesus and what kind of reconstruction that would have done inside of his mind and heart. Also, we explore just his struggles and what life would have been like for him as an itinerant church planter in the

ancient Greek and Roman world. This is such a great conversation. I'm so glad we can share it with you. One thing to note is that Tom Wright lives in Scotland and we conducted this conversation via Skype. And so the audio is a little bit grainy, a little lower quality than we normally have here on the podcast. So sorry about that, but there's so many great learning moments in this conversation, I think, that you'll enjoy it, nonetheless. So as John would say, thanks for joining us.

Here we go. Your work's really informed the sub-structure. I hope so much of the Bible project and what we're doing. And... Oh, good. Well, that's a good one. Yeah, mostly through influencing my brain, my heart and my mind through your own work

for almost 20 years now, I think I first picked up New Testament and the people of God in a coffee shop here in Portland. And you captured me with the introduction and then I was off to the races. Good. So obviously you've produced a lot of work in New Testament and helping make your efforts to kind of reset the paradigm for how modern's approach.

Thinking about Scripture and its storyline and thinking the second-templed Jewish writers, thoughts after them. And Paul, you've had a passion for Paul. And so we're in the middle of a conversation we've been tracking with Paul. And so we're in the middle of a conversation. We've been tracking with Paul. I've heard you talk about your Introduction to Paul as a boy and your curiosity your fascination with him what he represents in the early Jesus Movement. I just for our listeners that it would be fun, I think, to hear that story and what has energized so much of your own life's work to understand Paul. It goes back to when I was five years old or so. It was June the 2nd, 1953, and I know that because it was my mother's birthday. It was also coronation day. It was the day the Queen Elizabeth 2nd was crowned. And there she still is, you know, this time later. And my sister, who's a year older than me, and I were both given coronation

Bibles. A small, chunky, King James version Bible. Heres's blue Mine was dark red. Wait, so this is a Bible that people are given on coronation? Well, it was just a sales gimmick I guess. Well, it worked. It had a coronation stamp on the front of Crown and a crafty lever on the front. Fascinating.

And so I think my parents just wanted to give us something that would commemorate the fact that this was a major royal occasion. And it just happened to be that we didn't have piles at that stage. She was, I guess, six and I was five, something like that. And so we were given these piles. I vividly remember, but we sat on the floor with these chunky little books. And of course, it's quite daunting. I didn't just learned to read. We reflect through, and it's very daunting to see these great long

books of chronicles or even the book, or Matthew, or whatever. But then towards the end, we came upon this single page, which had one whole book, so-called, Alder itself, and that was Philemon. And I did think we even knew how to pronounce my Lehman. We may call it filmin or filmin or something like that, but we read it through together in the King James version. And I suspect that my mother or husband and my father had said, oh yeah, that's about a study through Ramway and to Paul wanted him to go back and so on. So I remember getting a sense of the story. The story of even a child can get home, Rob. Even though of course we didn't appreciate the subtlety

of the theological argumentation at that stage. But the story was there. And so that was my introduction to Paul, coming in at the back end as it were. But then in my teens, when I kind of returned to Paul, I did think I thought very much about Paul for the next 10 years, probably. I sang in the church choir and I knew a lot of the songs by heart as a result and

I knew the gospel story was pretty well through endless repetition and church and hearing sermons and so on. But I then remember every hearing sermons about Paul until I was in my teens and went to the script union camps, which were boys camps in the Scottish Islands, and the summer for two weeks and the east of time for a week. And the leaders would give us short talks about different biblical themes, and basically they were evangelistic and pastoral talks, often followed up with one-on-one pastoral conversations. And I just took to the Bible special New Testament like enough to order. And as I started to think about how it all fitted together, inevitably in that sort of security of a geographical context, Paul loomed pretty large. And I and my friends got interested in all sorts of bits of Paul and sometimes

for fun, thinking this was kind of a daring thing to do. We would agree four or five of us to sit round or even sit in the tent if it was raining outside and read an entire four-line letter straight through from start to finish. What is your age at this point? 16, 17, 80. Wow, yeah, we have very different growing up. I was also, I had done Latin from an early age in the age of eight and I'll take in Greek from the age of 13 so that I already take in Greek from the age of 13, so that I already was the proud possessor of a Greek New Testament from my age of 14 to 15. Wow. And so it was kind of exciting for me to have a flaw, like going into the forbidden bits that most of my contemporaries didn't know about. And it was just really exciting. This is

the stuff Paul actually wrote. Wow, what did he mean by this? And so on. And because that meant a great deal to me in terms of my own Christian life, in terms of trying to live as a Christian in an increasingly secular British world, it made a lot of sense. And so it became like a hobby. And so I would be taking time out from my school work

to list key passages and to scribble them down in the notebook and pop all about them and so on. And then as often happens in a happy life, something which starts off as a hobby, it becomes actually something which you then find yourself doing for a living, which is what's happened to me. Yes, early roots, deep and early roots. I mean those... Absolutely. I wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah, that's right. That's something I'm only really beginning to appreciate in my own middle age and having been hooked

on biblical studies for almost 20 years now. I am annually reaching these points of like, oh, the puzzles that have been with you for decades begin to get a little more clearer. And it's almost like this whole tradition. It takes a lifetime to really process everything that's being communicated in the realities of anyhow. So there you go, you've had many more decades to sit in the puzzles and to ponder.

So John and I, we've been talking already some through the podcast and the videos about the portrait of Paul. He is whatever you want to call his transformation. I've stopped calling his conversion and call it something more like his radical encounter or his transformation. Yeah, yeah.

But I was really captured in the biography you put together in just some new succinct ways, at least new to me, having followed your work about the story world of the pre-Jesus Saul, about how zeal, but also the passion for Israel's calling, but also a real awareness of the mission to the nations being the outflow of the story of Israel. So maybe give us a quick portrait of how you are now putting together Paul's mindset

before he's on the Damascus road. There's two things which are in hindsight, apparently, intention. And when I've talked to Jewish friends about these, I think they're both still in a kind of tension in the modern world as well. And one is the sense of the people of Israel, the Jewish people, being designed by God to be distinct from the rest of the world, and to be God's special people, the ones who have a special closeness to God, and have to maintain that, and so much of the Old Testament, and especially the last parts of the Old Testament, books like Ezra and Nehemiah, are all about the desperate need to keep Israel from becoming like the nations,

from going bad, if you like. And God has rescued us from the exile in Babylon, but if we're not careful, we'll be committing the same mistakes again and then bad and worse things will happen to us. And so then in the second temple period, after Israel and a name, I, on the through to the time of Jesus, the zealous Jews like Saul of Tarsus. And that's the word he uses of himself. He says, I was exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers. They're looking back to the great traditions of zeal for people like Elijah and Phineas in Elijah and first kings and Phineas in the book of Numbers and saying, that's what means to be a Zellist Jew. When Israel is going to the bad, worshipping the the the the bail or whatever it is, then somebody has to step in and

do what's necessary to purge the evil from Israel. So you have that great biblical tradition, which is what inspired the Macabees. If you read first Macabees tunes, great speech in there about what you now have to do granted the wicked Syrians who are coming to take over and they want to stop us all being live views. So that's clearly what Saul of Tarsus came from. That shouldn't be historically a puzzle, that shouldn't be quite a tip. That's so helpful to frame early Saul in that way, especially for modern audiences, because religious violence is such a charged topic.

It's very easy for somebody to grab on to Paul's portrait and put him in that type of category, but to be able to sympathize with the first part of his life, the worldview that would make sense of that kind of violence. It's helpful. I definitely agree, but of course those who engage in what we call religious violence or whatever today would say that they have a story too. I mean, it's absolutely how the threat, the threat. Part of the difficulty, but yes, to get inside the mind

of all of classes, the CY matches. And you imagine him growing up in Tassus, which is a big bustling pagan city. And I don't think the Jews lived in what we call a ghetto. I don't think they were sort of shielded from the realities of life on the street. I think the little boys, all the Tarsus, you perfectly well, what went on on the street.

There was no such thing as private life in the ancient world, unless you were very rich or very royal. And however Jewish you were, that wouldn't shield you from knowing exactly what people were getting up to or over those. So then the sense that we Jews are called to be different and we have a responsibility to the creative guard to maintain that difference and not to compromise. That's absolutely foundational. But then of course the second half of that is that in the Psalms and in Isaiah and in Genesis and in various passages like Malachar, chapter 1, there's all sorts of hints and promises that somehow, when God does for Israel what he's going to do for Israel,

then the rest of the world will get in on the blessing as well. And sometimes, when they're under pressure, this just comes out in terms of when God exalts us and the nations are going to be judged and smashed the pieces and you know Psalm 2 basically says that the Messiah will have the nations as his inheritance and he will bruise them with the rod of iron and Ashlam and pieces like a pot of special it doesn't sound very hopeful for the nations but that sort of goes with the Isaiah promise that I will give you as a light to the nation that my name may be known and my glory may be revealed in all the world. And it's as though those promises

are sitting there side by side that there is going to be judgment for the world but there's also going to be mercy for the world. And it's not clear in the second temple period how God is going to do both of those. And then in retrospect, when you have a crucified and risen Messiah, and you have the gift of God's own spirit animating the followers of this Messiah, then suddenly both halves of that come into focus and Saul finds himself swept out by both halves of that in meeting Jesus on the road to the mosque. So that he is simultaneously a loyal Jew in a new mode and then commissioned to be the one who takes this message to the world which has got a hearse and that transformation and I've had some issues with word. Conversion implies to many

people that he stopped being a Jew in order to be a Christian. So our words Jew and Christian are words designating particular contemporary religions. And this is the whole point, one of the biggest points I'd like to make is that this is a false embracing of the gospel of Jesus is not about comparative religion. It's not saying Judaism is a silly thing and Christianity is a sensible thing or Judaism is a wicked religion and Christianity is a good religion It's nothing to do with that at all. It's cool. It's what you can call Messianic eschatology is Jesus Israel's Messiah or is it because if he is then God's purposes and promises are fulfilled in him

And to be a loyal Jew means to sign on with this Messiah That's what's at the heart of it Do you think that his encounter with Jesus made him see this other side of the coin kind of for the first time? Or was it that he had already been wrestling through these two things and this encounter with Jesus finally opened up and explained it to him

in a way that made sense? It's possible. I mean, what I'm rather careful not to try to do is to psychoanalyze him. You know, psychoanalysis is hard enough when somebody is talking about their own language and you can see them smile or look nervous. When we are talking about motivation for historians, it's not the same as saying, I know what was going on in his hidden heart more than he knew himself It's not that at all. We can see what the motivation was. So I'm not sure about the pre-Christian wrestling. People have said this about Romans 7 that maybe on the way to Damascus,

Saul of Tarsus was wrestling with the fact that he wanted to keep the Torah perfectly, that he knew that he was sinful, etc. I don't see that. As a Jew he knew perfectly well what to do. If he sinned, you repent and you say sorry and you go to the temple and you offer the sacrifice and you maintain a clear conscience, and that's how you do it. And I think that's how he had done it all his life. So I think it's rather that if he is confronted with the fact of Jesus being alive having been crucified as a pretend Messiah, as it would be Messiah, this means that Israel's God, the Creator God, has declared to the world that this Jesus really was and is the Messiah, David's son, the son of God, etc. And in the light of that, and only in the light of that, you look back and you say,

oh my goodness, that's what that stuff in Isaiah was about. That's what those promises in Genesis 12 and 15 were all about. It's as though, as he says in 2 Corinthians 3, when someone turns to the Lord, the values removed. And I think that's what the Bible, I think he knows that's what has happened to him. We've talked a lot, and even our first video was about heaven and earth, and their overlap. So that's been a common topic for both of our projects. But talking about how both temple, about the prophets seeing visions of the Lord on his throne, in the temple, in visionary temples, the Lord on his throne, in the temple, in visionary temples, the glory over the temple,

all of that's related to what happened to Paul on the road when he encounters, and the form that he encounters, Jesus, what he might have been praying to get into that mindset. John, I haven't talked about this, and I'm eager for him to hear how you put that together. Yeah, so this is as in Paul's meditative practice of trying to do what other Jews at the time did and that's a great devotional exercise to meditate on the throne vision, the throne chariot vision in the first chapter of his e-kills. That's what the coffee version is. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work in Dunlund. I have a colleague here at St Andrews actually who's an expert on ancient Jewish mysticism and the practice of Jewish prayer and of the different texts that devout Jews with meditators on goes right on into the later rabbinic period. And it's hard to be sure about exactly whether Paul was doing this, but what he does say about his de-masculotrote experience fits so well with the fact that this is how Zellus Yang-Ju might well have been praying. And one of the ways that you meditate on the throne chariot vision is that

like his eql, you meditate on the wheels and the charib, doubting to and fro and the fall of encreachers, and then in prayer, like in some traditions of prayer today in Catholic and Protestant circles, people envisage, people imagine, people ask the Holy Spirit to lead them into an imaginary encounter with Jesus, which turns into a real encounter with Jesus. That happens, people do it.

But I think for Paul, he was wanting to do which turns into a real encounter with Jesus. That happens, people do it. But I think for Paul, he was wanting to do what, if I would want to do, which is to allow the eye of the mind and the heart to go upwards from the wheels to the chariot, upwards from the chariot to the beginning of the figure sitting on the throne in the chariot and maybe up to the face itself. And Ezekiel does that. And of course, Ezekiel suddenly gets to the figure on the throne and he falls on this face like one dead. And the voice says, get up out of those job for you. And I think that's what Saul

was doing. Only the real shock of Saul was when he gets up to the figure on the throne, he sees Jesus. This is the Jesus whom he has known about and whose followers he has been persecuting. The extraordinary thing about that is that this is simultaneously the fulfillment of his deepest hopes and the absolute dashing to pieces of all the things that he believed about the way those so-called people filled. And so not surprisingly, he has a major crisis and is blind and is fast for days, etc. etc. And you can understand that, of course. Yeah, so let's camp out here for a minute. This was really significant for me when I heard you put the pieces together like that. So yeah, what we're saying is in the broader culture

of second-temple Jewish piety. So we know about the Shema, people are regularly saying prayer, scripture-inspired prayers. Yeah, daily. Three times a day. Three times a day. This is woven in to just daily Jewish prayer life,

meditating on the scriptures, Psalm 1, and patterning your own experiences of prayer and worship after what you see people doing in the scriptures. One of the things that happens when the great biblical figures who were extremely deviled, or actually, maybe not even pious or devout, but they have these encounters with the angel of the Lord, with the throne, presence of God.

This is a design pattern, a motif. That's a typical kind of experience. Yeah, in the Bible. So it's so easy to imagine Paul reciting the Shema as he's going up to Damascus to get rid of these deviant Jews who were saying this crucified man to Messiah. Exactly. I mean, it's exactly his piety.

Yeah, that's driving him. That's driving him. Yeah. And, you know, as he mentions, you said in two Corinthians where he mentions having vision, I know a man, most likely himself, who's had these visions of the multiple tiers of heaven. I mean, this is very common prayer meditation language in his day. Yes, although that's a funny passage in chapter 12 of the two Corinthians because he says it says this person was caught up in the third heaven. Yes. There are many Jewish texts which speak of seven. Seven. And the former student of mine who wrote a book called Why Am is the third heaven.

Yeah. I got stuck. How can we just get any further? Yeah, that's a good question. It may be that that's ironic, you know, that they want him to tell about his experiences. And he says, well, I've got to start with that. So I'm working my own plan. Yeah. So, yes, so I think the point is when Luke tells us about this is LS Paul having an encounter with the glorious presence on the road, we're meant to upload all of these patterns

and stories from the Hebrew Bible. That make that encounter not just, that's a cool thing to happen to Saul, but it fits perfectly with the kind of thing that would need to happen to him. The same thing that Ezekiel needed to convert him into an unhappy prophet, it's the same tradition being tapped into. Yeah, and indeed, of course, in Galatians 1, when Paul is defending himself against the charge that he's just got a second-hand gospel

and he's missed out the crucial bits of it because obviously the Galatians have been told that that Paul describes his own conversion in language which echoes both the story of Elijah and the prophecies of Elijah and the prophecies of Isaiah and the call narrative from Jeremiah. He says, with God who formed me in his mother's womb and wanted to send me to the nations was pleased to reveal his son in me, etc. These are echoing scriptural

passages. So he's saying, I'm not a second-grade apostle. I'm actually standing in the line of the great prophets. Yeah, that's right. This is God has formed me to do this. Yeah, yeah, Amos, who can proclaim the Word of the Lord except the one who stood in his counsel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The divine throne room happened to Paul in the person of Jesus and off he goes. That's just a new framework for a lot of people.

I think that's right. And I think part of the problem that we've had for many generations in the Western world and church is that we thought of the Jews and Judaism as the dark background against which the gospel shines out all the more brightly. And so we have not studied the Jewish world because we thought, well, that's a bad bit in what we want is a good bit. And of course, that's a particular misleading way of seeing it. So we have invented

a kind of anachronistic context for Paul, which actually corresponds to modern Western spirituality and religion, rather than seeing him in his own world. Our post transformation, Paul, well, there's a lot we don't know, isn't there? There's time periods are difficult, but we know he goes into a... Yeah, what do we know? I mean, he... At this point, he's got to put all the pieces together, right? Like, he's been reading the scriptures this whole life, but now he wants to go back and like reread and rethink it, right? It's an odd period because, as I say in the biography, there's about a 10-year gap of which we know virtually nothing because he's there in

Damascus, then he stays for a while, then he goes off to what he says, Arabia, and I suggested that that is actually, he does what Elijah does, which is to go to Mount Sinai, to say to God, excuse me, what's this all about? As Elijah gets told, return to Damascus and get on with the job. And so that's what he does. But then he gets into trouble in Damascus because he's too hot to handle. And so they're sending away, he goes to Jerusalem, he's too hot to handle there. So they send him back home to Tassas, you know. Well, that's what you can, Grongon, see if you can do anything good there. And then he all goes very quiet for about a decade. And that's a big decade, my goodness. And then Barnabas comes looking for it

because Barnabas is working with this church in Antioch where everything's exploded and we have Jews and Gentiles and all sorts getting together in the church, it's very exciting. And my day need teaching. And they need somebody who knows the scriptures like the back of his hand. And somebody who can tell it like it is.

He just understands just a man. Yes, and also someone who can navigate the multicultural blend that is anti-op. Well, exactly. Somebody who is not going to be accused of not knowing his Jewish world. Yes, of course, modern commentators sometimes said, oh well Paul never really knew what Judaism was about. That's rubbish. That's because the Protestant Paul didn't know what Judaism was about, the real Paul certainly did. But he also knew what it meant as you said, he's to live in a thoroughly multicultural environment. And so he was the ideal person to come and be a teacher in the Church of New Antioch, and then from there to go off as what we now call a missionary. Yes.

Any more, I don't know if they're new in the sites, but as you thought about how to present that decade that led to Antioch. But there's a lot happening there that really sets him up for the main stage of acts of the missionary journey. I mean, it is difficult, but I think we have to conclude that he spent a lot of time in the scriptures. Yeah. And that he spent a lot of time praying, and that I think he spent a lot of time making sense. Because that is a family business.

Yeah. And that's how you're in a living, if you're in that business. But as well, and this is the really sad bit, I think he spent a long time trying to persuade his beloved parents, siblings, whoever, that Jesus really was Israel's Messiah. And a lot of them, we have no idea whether any of them did believe it or not, but we suspect that a lot of them didn't. And that that's what lies behind the agony in Romans 9 and Romans 10. He says, I could wish that I myself would come from the Messiah for the sake of my kin so could walk into the flesh. Yeah, these are not theoretical people sort of cardboard cutouts.

Yeah, people he knows and loves with whom he's wept and you know worked and and that agony as well as the joy of the gospel is etched into him all the way through his life. Of course his family would be among the first people he would want to share about this amazing thing that way through his life. Of course, his family would be among the first people he would want to share about this amazing thing that happened in his life. It's kind of like when kids go home from after being away at college, sharing all their discoveries

and their parents may not buy a lot of it, I don't know. It's a bad analogy, but it kind of gets you into the idea. I guess it's interesting to me, I've never thought about this decade of his life before. It's interesting that as persuasive of a guy he is, that decade in Tarsus, he didn't start like some movement or something, you know? It's a little odd as well, because when you look at the geographic, the first mission journey, when he goes from Cyprus across to southern Turkey and then up to Pasadena and New York and then turns east and goes to

Debella, Listeria and Iconium. If you just carry on there a bit longer, you get to Tarsus, but he doesn't, he goes back and then back from the Turkey Seacos back to Ontario. And it's as though somehow he's going to draw a veil over Tars classes. It's very hard, that. Oh, you're saying it's conspicuous that Tarsus doesn't feature in the missionary stories. Why wouldn't it? It's not too big of a journey to stop by on the way to the Jewish places.

Well, the graphic world, the other places he goes through. Yeah. I know we're probably supposed to get any sort of spiritual insight from this gap in scripture, but it is interesting to me that I meet a lot of really ambitious people and I'm a Kevin and Bishops person. And to think about a 10-year hibernation period.

Hunker and let things simmer. It just sounds horrible to someone who wants to be a mover and shaker, but it was very farmed up for him. Yeah, but you know, I teach both graduate students here as members and we are quite stripped about getting people through their PhDs in four years and maybe you get an extension for three months or whatever, but when I was young many people in PhD programs would go on for six, seven, eight, nine years. I took seven years of a mine because I was doing two other jobs at various stages, and so it spun out. But there's a lot of people who have settled down sometime in their 20s and actually made

themselves expert in something so that when they emerge into their 30s, they've actually got a very, very solid basis. And I think Paul, I think all the's wanted to spend 10 years as it were being unproductive. The Father think in the mercy of God, that time meant that he was prayerfully learning the scriptures in a whole new way, and particularly learning to pray in a whole new way. So as you hinted before, he's always prayed the Shemaah, but now he's always told the story of the Exodus, but now, as in Ezekiel 1, Ephesians 1, it's got Jesus in the middle of it and so on. He is rethinking what it means to be a loyal Israelite with Jesus as God's Messiah all the way through. So let's talk about Barnabas and Saul being launched

from the multi-ethnic Jesus community in Antioch. So the way Luke painted that portrait, of course, is the Holy Spirit. People start becoming aware of the Spirit speaking to lots of people. At the same time, we need to send out these two to go begin a new season of ministry out around the Mediterranean. I like that you first talked about those two balanced tensions in Paul's worldview, his loyalty to the God of Israel and to the covenant, and then also the other side

that the outflow of loyalty to that covenant should be blessing for the nations. So Paul goes out and Luke really wants to paint that balanced portrait of like to Israel first. He's always going to synagogues first, but then there's usually tension, riots, and violence involved that pushes him out. So Luke really wants to keep that balance. Paul will coin it in the phrase to the Jew first

then to the Greek. What would it be like for Paul to go into a diaspora synagogue in one of these cities? The diaspora meeting Jews that don't live in Jerusalem. That's right, Jews who have been living outside the land for many, many, many generations now. I think the first thing to say is he knows the astrosynagogues because he grew up in India. Right, yeah, yeah. We don't know how old he was when he went to Jerusalem, but he had been formed by his experience as a the astro-Jew. And as you say, that we're Jews all over the world, far more Jews living everywhere from Babylon to Egypt to Spain to France, whatever, than they were living in Jerusalem and its

immediate environs itself. So this was, in a sense, normal due days and as far as Paul was concerned, wore the life of a dance particular. And one of the things that Jews did characteristically, and we can see this, because there are many books written in the second temple period, which do this, is to tell the story. And that parts over, you tell the story of how our four

fathers went down to Egypt and they were enslaved and God brought them out to the mighty hand in the stretch out arm, etc. But that story goes back to Abraham and sometimes even to Adam and it comes forward through Moses, through the entries of the land, Joshua, the old story, then the rise of the King, Saul, David, then the prophets, and then of course, Ono, the exile. And then the exile is kind of what it's all gone very dark. And now, has exile finished or hasn't it? And there are many, many Jews who agree with Daniel 9 that the exile is continuing, going on for 490 years. And so the question is we are still really waiting for that dark period

to be over. And they're telling the story partly because this is the story of the end of Uttaronomia, the great covenant promises. And the end of Uttaronomia is seen by Jews at the time, the greatest lawry in Josephus says this explicitly, not just as a long-range prophecy of some bits of Jewish history, but as the whole story and miniature that Israel is going to have to live through. So telling the great story is a normal Jewish thing to do. But then the question is, where are we in this story? And if you tell the story, saying God has actually now done what he always said he would do and sent a Messiah from the house of David, and he's proved this by raising it from the dead. Then my goodness, the whole story takes on as to what you should do with that. Some views would say if the Messiah has come, we should quickly intensify all our keeping of the Torah and make sure that Israel is absolutely pure because if this is the Messiah, that's

what we want us to do. And Paul is saying, well, actually no, because this promises for the nations as well, and indeed this is how the promise to the nature is just a bit fulfilled, then through the Messiah, God has dealt with sins. This is such an important point in the current debates about Paul that have gone on really for the last 40-50 years. People have plagued off the idea of the forgiveness of sins on the one hand over the inclusion of Gentiles on the other. And some have just said, oh, it's just about the inclusion of Gentiles. And therefore, it isn't really about forgiveness of sins. And others have done it the other way around. And the whole point is, if God has dealt with sins on the cross of Jesus, then anyone who belongs to the Messianic family,

anyone that we were kind of called a Christian, is a sin for a given person. And therefore, however, Gentile and pagan their background, they are welcome as part of the same family. Forgiveness of sins means inclusion of Gentiles, or because the other around inclusion of Gentiles, it's absolutely conditional upon the sin for giving achievement across.

And this is something that our contemporary feelings have found really difficult to get their heads around, but for Paul it's second nature. What you're saying is there's different themes in Paul's work. One is clearly the death of Jesus and forgiveness of sins. Another one is his life actual mission on the groundwork, which is the mission to the nations, to include them in the family of Jesus. At least since the Protestant Reformation, we found it difficult to understand the Hebrew Bible narrative in which those two go together. That's the really sad thing. Yeah. But because

in the Protestant Reformation, they were answering all the distortions that they inherited from the Middle Ages. Yes. They wanted to know, do you get justified by doing good works, or thank you Luther, is it just by faith? And of course they say it's by faith, because if you ask the question that way round, that's what we have to do. But with that, goes and gender, that therefore we want the Bible in our own language, we want the worship in our own language, and guess what the church collapses into different ethnic and geographical groups. Forgetting that the whole point of the gospel is that God wants to give Abraham the single worldwide family. And so we have seen the idea of church unity across different ethnic groups as an optional extra if you like.

And maybe not even an optional extra, if you like, and maybe not even an optional extra. You don't even need to think about it, but for Paul, that is absolutely basic. And it's basic in Galatians, which is the great document of the Protestant Prethamae. There is a huge irony there from the last 400 years. I see it in my country, you see it in yours, and we badly need to recapture Paul's vision, which is of the single family. Yeah. So I want to make sure I understand this tension.

For the Jewish people, certain customs of being separated became really important. So the Sabbath, circumcision, kosher, it really distinguished them from other nations and it really created a boundary. It seems like that was the main psychology mentality of let's stay separate. And it feels like a really big switch for Paul to say, actually man, no, we need to allow the Gentiles in and not put this on them. Was there any other people thinking that way, or was that just a brand new kind of Jewish thought

that came through Paul? It's a big and difficult question. There was no absolute one size fits all in the Jewish world on this, because for some Jews, it would be fine if you were a gentile, if you wanted to hang out in the synagogue and sell your prayers there, and you wanted to hang out in the synagogue and say a prayer is there, and you could sort of join in, and you wouldn't necessarily need to be a proxylizing

and get circumcised, you know, there are different layers, different ways of coping with that. And if you look at the studies that have been done of Jews in the diaspora, some are very much keeping themselves to themselves, and others are more prepared to do what we would today call a simulating But there are certain things which certain boundaries like for instance intermarriage Which is still to move for many people even if they actually have many pagan friends. They wouldn't Give their orders to their sons or vice versa But what you notice with Paul interestingly is there is a new

thought, a new type of separateness which comes from belonging to the Messiah. And this is very clear in books like Colossians and Ephesians, where the single family is now defined as the United Family, but also the Holy Family. Therefore, don't live like the Gentiles do. And particularly sins of speech, so no lying, no anger, no violent speech, and particularly sexual misdemeanors, that this is still absolutely out of line, and that if you belong to the Messiah, then there are very definite clear standards.

So what's gone is all the South which marks out Jewish people from their Gentile neighbors, but what is inherited instead is a sense of utter loyalty to Jesus and therefore to the new humanity which is launched in Jesus and exactly as in the gospels, it is the idea of the renewal of the human race and the renewal of the human person that becomes the new standard of holiness and that sure as anything marks out the Christians from their pagan neighbors. And in many ways it's there also bits of what we could lose to called Jewish ethics which comes straight through. But it's within this very difficult framework of people who've come from all kinds of different backgrounds. And it's hard enough to teach

people Christian ethics when they all grew up in the same town and they're all attending the same church and they all basically want to be good people. Imagine trying to do that with a multicultural polyglobs community. Some of them not even literate yet trying to live together in a time like Corinth and trying to pray together. It's a huge undertaking and the fact that it even gets off the ground at all is a sheer miracle of grace. Yeah that's right. So yeah this helped So, the framework of a distinct family of Abraham called to become the blessing to the nations. That for, it calls mine, that is still the same charter.

He didn't convert to that. It's actually in and through the crucified and risen Messiah that the family of Abraham is, goes multi-ethnic, which has always been part of the plan. But the separateness therefore has to be adapted to that new reality. That's very helpful. Paul is just as concerned about the separateness, the messy energy. The holiness, the other... Yeah, but it needs to look differently.

And it can look differently now because sin was dealt with. Yeah, that's right. The connection, then. Well, okay, so Tom, this took me years to sort out, and your early work on Paul really helped me, and then I've followed down as many of your footnotes as I could over the years, realize you're not the only one saying this, but this idea that the laws of the Torah for Paul,

among which are the kosher laws, certain decisions, Sabbath, but those become emblems because they're like the lightning rod issues in the diaspora in the Greco-Roman world. But what that season of the covenant did to Israel was both make them distinct, but as the story of the Hebrew Bible tells,

it also crushed them. It's what resulted in their exile was their inability to be faithful to the laws of the covenant. So it's that tension that God called it distinct people to be separate. The whole burden of the Hebrew Bible is to say, and they didn't do it successfully. That's why they landed in exile. But that doesn't mean the job given to Israel was bad. The whole point is this because humans are screwed up. And so it's that nuanced view of the laws that Paul is carrying the next step forward as he puts the story together. And

it's that message that he's now bringing to these multi-asnic congregations. For me, all this lands in the second half of Romans 2 and the beginning of Romans 3 in the great Protestant tradition of commentating on Romans, this point I think is usually missed completely, because people assume that from Romans 1, 18 to 320, the only thing he is basically saying is you're all simple. And if Jews think they're an exception, then they're wrong because they're simple too.

And that misses the point in 217, following that the Jew is responding and saying, but we Jews are the answer to the problem. It's not just where exceptions to the problem. It's where the answer to the problem. And Paul says, well, in a sense, yes, you are, but you've blown this. And so at the beginning of chapter three, Paul raises the question, what did we say about the Jews? Now notice at this point, the Great Western tradition Catholic Anne Protestant has basically agreed with what Paul proposes and then denies. Because when people tell the story of

the story of salvation, if you like, they'll often end up saying something like, well God did give this initial revelation to the Jewish people or the the Israel people, and it was the law, and it was difficult for them, they couldn't do it. So God said, okay, we'll scrap that and we'll do it a different way, namely by sending Jesus. And that's precisely what God does not say. The whole point of roadness is that God does not change His covenant to God. He said, he would save the world through Israel and he will. The problem is how are you going to get a faithful Israelite? Correct. That's what you need. And so Romans 3, 1 to 9 states that problem very sharply. Yes. And then 3, 21 says the faithfulness of Jesus, the Messiah. That's how it happened.

And that whole sequence of thought transforms everything. Transforms how you read Romans. Transforms how you read all of Paul's films. Yeah. So funny, in the tradition I grew up, we were kind of taught to read Romans 2, 17, as sarcastic. But actually Paul agrees with it. He says you think that you're a like to those inductive teacher of beige and Paul is agreeing with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never I never read that way. I was read as him when I was talking about people. And gradually, gradually things come down. As I have discovered, after you showed it to me and then many others, this is very key for understanding how Paul puts the whole story of the Bible together with Jesus at the culmination. So if the laws and the covenant that were for Israel to help them fulfill their mission to become a blessing to the nations

paradoxically it ended up killing them through their disobedience leading to exile because of their sins Which is why you need Romans 9 to 11 you can't do Exactly right. That's where these questions really get faced The way I put it to students is that God called Abraham and his family to be the doctors who are going to deal with the sickness that has infected the human race. The problem was the doctor was carrying the disease himself. Those two scans land up on the cross of Jesus. There's a vocation of Israel, the vocation of Israel to be the healer of the world, the ultimately a vocation

that only God himself can undertake in the world. So this is back to 15 minutes ago when you first said, this is a very important point, and we've basically just been talking about it since. And whether it's in Acts, whether it's in Paul, whether it's in Jesus' announcement, the forgiveness of sins is in that biblical context has a whole different set of nuances than the way most modern people read it. The forgiveness of sins is related to how Israel got into exile, and that problem has to be solved so that the blessing of Abraham can go out to the nations.

That's the whole biblical nations. That's Galatians 3, 10s for 14 and an upshow. Yeah, that was transformative for my understanding of the whole biblical story. That forgiveness of sins needs to be put into that story, which is not, it's not. It's put into my own individualistic, me and Jesus narrative in the traditions I, that I was raised in. Yeah, me too, me too. But the great thing about doing it it the way that I've done it

is that you don't lose any of that. That's right, exactly. All of the intimacy of a forgiven relationship with the God we know in the Through Jesus and by the Spirit, that is all still there. I wouldn't be without it, you know. That's right. People sometimes imagine that I'm offering them something

which is purely a sociological agenda. Yeah. And the problem with theology is that because it's such an all-enbracing subject, it covers everything, but you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've delivered this. Yes, totally. Yes, the whole point of Genesis 1 through 11 is that humans have found themselves exiled and need to be forgiven.

Everyone and our larger groups, and it's both that global, multi-ethnic story, all humanity story, and the Israel story that Paul encountered on the road to Damascus, and it took him wild to sort it out. It's easy for us to imagine that there's a complete lack of overlap between what he would say to Jews and what he would say to Gentiles, but we must never forget that because Paul is complete lack of overlap between what he would say to Jews and what he would say to Gentiles. Yes. Yes. But we must never forget that because Paul is a law of Jew, he is a creation or monotheist. That is to say he believes that the whole world is God's world, that all people are making God's image,

that all truth is God's truth. That's why he can say in that wonderful passage in Philippians 4, you know, whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is just, whatever is lovely enough good report. If there's any virtue, any praise, think about these things. There's a lot of that stuff out there, celebrate it. But then he says, this, by the way, is highly often a cave, according to the pattern that you learned and saw another sort of in me. In other words, there is a lot of God's sheer goodness out there in the world, celebrate it and talk to people out there and make them realize what's going on. But don't allow that inclusivity to be like to betray you into thinking that you can behave as the rest of the world behaves

because you mustn't, because you're new creation So on a rainy day in Whatever when he's walking away from Ephesus. He's on to the next city You see seen some people give their legions to Jesus. He probably got beat a timer to a question at the But at the heart of the biography book that I love you kept repeating it is what made him tick? What made him get up another day and go to the next city? What kind of thing would drive and motivate him as we can understand from his letters? He is very explicit about this. There's no secret. It's the big A word agape love. He said the love of the Messiah leaves us no choice.

The love of the Messiah drives me on. The son of God loved me and gave himself for me. That's a very passionate, very intimate thing to say. And when he said nothing will separate us from the love of God in the Messiah Jesus our Lord. That sense of being brought to us, we talk about love and it's such a floppy English word. It covers many things. The Paul it includes that whole Covenant love and I have loved you with an everlasting love and I think of ours. I think of the sons and Gods love for Israel and through Israel for the world God's love for it for all this creation

Lord, how manifold will your works in wisdom you've made them all, some 105, some 104, there's a sense of the overflowing generous love of the Creator God, the overflowing covenant love of the God of Israel, all poured into this one actual human being, Jesus, who is Himself the very embodiment of that love, and Paul feels that love surrounding him and sustaining him and encouraging him, and the only choice is to love and return. And that's obviously what he does. And so that's his own account of what gets him out of bed every morning, and what pushes him on despite everything. And two Corinthians, that bit about the love of

the Messiah leaving us no choice in to Corinthians 5. Yeah think what's just gone before in to Corinthians 4. Think what's coming after is in to Corinthians 6. This is somebody who suffers and has suffered mightily, and yet says in the middle of it all he knows as well. You guys thank you for listening to the Bible Project podcast. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as John and I did. If you want to find out more about NTWRITES work, here's two things you can do. One is his most recent book is on the Apostle Paul. It's called Paul a biography. You can find out on Amazon or online or we'll have a link to it in the show notes Also, you may not know and we are happy to let people know about this

You can actually take classes from NT-Rite online and watch lectures and have interactive learning experiences At NT-Rite online. That's exactly the website, NTRIDOnline.org. And if you have listened this far in the podcast, we were able to work out an arrangement where we have a special website coupon type thing that you can get some courses at a huge, huge discount. If you go to the website, you'll see all the courses that you can take on all kinds of things and new

testaments on. However, if you type in this web address for Bible Project listeners, type in ntrightonline.org, forward slash the Bible project. You'll get a special landing page. You'll be able to access his course on the Book of Fy Lehman for free, and also a huge, huge discount on the course called Paul of Biography, where you can learn in greater depth the things we talked about in this very conversation. The Bible Project is a non-profit animation studio in Portland, Oregon. We believe that the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus and has wisdom to offer the modern world.

You can find all of our resources online for free at thebibelproject.com. Today's episode was edited and produced by Dan Gummel. The theme music was by the band Tense. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. We believe the Bible is a unifying story that leads to Jesus. We are a crowdfunded project by people like me. Five free videos, studying out and more at thebibelproject.com.

All right. you