BIBL 320 — The Life and Theology of Paul
BIBL 320 studies the apostle Paul himself. Where BIBL 306 surveys Paul's letters among the rest of the New Testament and BIBL 323 reads Romans verse by verse, this elective steps back to ask two questions about the man: who was he, and what did he teach? The course runs in two movements. The first follows his life — Saul of Tarsus the Pharisee, the Damascus road, the missionary career, and the letters he wrote to the churches he founded. The second works through his theology as a set of themes — the gospel he preached, the law and its place, justification, union with Christ, the Spirit, the last things, and the shape of the Christian life. The course is organized by life and by theological topic rather than by book, and its signature skill is reading any Pauline text in three contexts at once: his life (the Pharisee turned apostle), his churches (the occasional setting of every letter), and his gospel (the center of his thought). Paul is the ground of the sharpest debates in New Testament scholarship, and each is held in the three-register, every-side-fairly discipline: whether the Damascus event is best called a conversion or a call, which letters Paul wrote with his own hand, what stands at the center of his theology, and the long argument of the New Perspective on Paul over what "the works of the law" meant and how justification works. Every reading works from English (the World English Bible) through the platform's scripture-reference blocks, with a Greek study popover behind any word for readers who want the original; no Greek is assumed. The companion electives BIBL 306 and BIBL 323 read Paul's letters directly, and BINT 301 and 302 sharpen the close-reading skill this course practices on the man behind them.
Learning outcomes
- Read any Pauline text in three contexts — his life, his churches, and his gospel — the signature skill of the course
- Describe Paul's Jewish and Greco-Roman world: Pharisaism, Hellenistic Judaism, Roman citizenship, and the Second-Temple setting of his thought
- Reconstruct the Damascus event from the Acts accounts and Paul's own retellings, and weigh whether it is best understood as a conversion or a call
- Describe Paul's missionary strategy, chronology, coworkers, sufferings, and the Jerusalem collection, locating his career against its fixed points
- Read a Pauline letter as an occasional document and articulate the Pauline corpus and the authorship question (undisputed, disputed, the Pastorals) in register
- Weigh the debate over the center of Paul's theology — justification, participation, apocalyptic — without collapsing it into a system
- Explain Paul's core theological themes — law and gospel, justification, union with Christ and the body, the Spirit, eschatology, and ethics — and weigh the New Perspective on Paul
- Synthesize Paul's life and thought by reading a single passage, Philippians 3:4b–14, as a recapitulation of the man and his gospel
Paul's World
Paul came from three worlds at once: a Pharisee trained in the Jewish law, a Jew of the Greek-speaking diaspora, and a citizen of Rome. This opening module sets that background — Tarsus and Jerusalem, the zeal of the persecutor, the uses of Roman citizenship — and reads Josephus's own portrait of the Pharisees beside it. It also hands the reader the skill the whole course practices: reading any Pauline text in three contexts, his life, his churches, and his gospel.
The Damascus Road
Everything in Paul's life turns on what happened on the road to Damascus. The module reads the three accounts in Acts alongside Paul's own first-person retellings, asking what is fixed and what varies across them. It then weighs the long-debated question of how to name the event: a conversion from one religion to another, or a prophetic call within Israel's own story.
The Apostle to the Gentiles
From Antioch to Rome, Paul spent some twenty years planting churches across the northern Mediterranean. This module traces the missionary strategy and its network of coworkers, the fixed points that anchor a Pauline chronology (the Gallio inscription chief among them), and the great projects of his later career: the Jerusalem collection, the catalogue of sufferings, and the road to Rome under guard.
The Letter-Writer and His Churches
Paul's letters were not treatises but occasional documents, each written into one congregation's situation. This module reads a letter for its form and setting, then turns to the shape of the Pauline corpus as a whole — the undisputed seven, the disputed three, and the Pastorals — and the authorship question they raise, handled in register and without a verdict.
The Center of Paul's Theology
Is there a single center to Paul's thought, and if so, what is it? This module opens the great scholarly debate — justification, participation in Christ, or apocalyptic — with each candidate at full strength and no verdict imposed. It then sets out the framework of the gospel Paul preached: the Jewish story brought to its turning point in the death and resurrection of the Messiah.
The Law, the Gospel, and the Righteousness of God
At the heart of Paul's theology stands the relation of law and gospel and his doctrine of justification by faith. This module explains what Paul means by the law and the work it does, the verdict-of-acquittal language of justification, and the place of faith over the works of the law. It closes with the major debate of modern Pauline studies, the New Perspective on Paul, presented from every side as a question about Paul's own Judaism.
In Christ
The phrase "in Christ" runs through Paul's letters as the shorthand of his theology. This module explains union with Christ and the body image that follows from it, then turns to the Spirit as the down payment of the age to come — the fruit, the gifts, and the call to walk by the Spirit.
The Already and the Not Yet
Paul lived between the resurrection of the Messiah and the resurrection still to come. This module explains his eschatology and the already / not-yet tension that shapes it, then his ethics — the indicative that grounds the imperative, set beside the Stoic ethic of Epictetus. A capstone reading gathers the whole course by locating Philippians 3 across the three contexts of Paul's life and thought.