Paul, apostle to the Gentiles · BereaWay Academy

🎯 Objectives

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

tell the main stages of Paul’s life, from his conversion to his missionary journeys;
recognise the structure of an ancient letter and the way Paul uses it;
read a letter of Paul by first looking for the readers’ situation and then for the message for you.

📖 Receive

Read Acts 9:1-22 slowly: the account of Saul’s encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. Then read the testimony Paul himself gives of that moment in Galatians 1:11-24 and Philippians 3:4-11.

As you read, pause on one question: what did Paul lose, and what did he gain, by meeting Christ?

Finally, read these words, written by Paul towards the end of his life:

“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.” — 1 Timothy 1:15 (KJV)

🔍 Examine

A man between three worlds

Saul was born in Tarsus, in Cilicia (in today’s southern Turkey), a lively city of Greek culture. He was a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, brought up “at the feet of Gamaliel” in Jerusalem, one of the most respected teachers of his day (Acts 22:3). He became a Pharisee, zealous for the Law and for the traditions of the fathers (Philippians 3:5-6). And he was also a Roman citizen by birth (Acts 22:28), a privilege he would use several times during his mission.

These three worlds, Jewish, Greek and Roman, are not a biographical detail. God prepared them carefully: Paul knows the Scriptures of Israel thoroughly, speaks and writes the common Greek of the empire and moves confidently through Roman cities. He is the right man to carry the gospel from the synagogues to the public squares of the nations.

From persecutor to servant

The first portrait of Saul in the New Testament is not flattering. We find him approving the killing of Stephen (Acts 7:58; 8:1) and then persecuting the church, convinced he was serving God. But on the road to Damascus, around AD 33-35, the risen Lord appeared to him and called him by name.

The Lord said of him to Ananias: “Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel” (Acts 9:15). Paul would never forget that grace had reached him while he was an enemy. That is why, years later, he would call himself the “chief” of saved sinners.

📌 A conversion and a calling

For Paul the encounter with Christ is both conversion (God saves him) and calling (God sends him). In Galatians 1:15-16 he uses language similar to that of the prophets: God set him apart from his mother’s womb to proclaim the Son among the Gentiles. Salvation and mission go together.

The journeys and the churches

The book of Acts tells of three great missionary journeys (Acts 13-14; 15:36-18:22; 18:23-21:16), followed by his arrest in Jerusalem, imprisonment in Caesarea and the voyage to Rome (Acts 21-28). Along the way communities were born in Galatia, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth and Ephesus. It is these very churches that received his letters.

So when you read a letter of Paul, always ask yourself: when and where was this church born? What relationship does Paul have with them? Acts and the letters shed light on each other. For example, Philippians becomes warmer and more moving if you remember how the church in Philippi began in Acts 16: a dealer in purple cloth, a jailer, a night of singing in prison.

How a letter was written

In Paul’s day letters followed a pattern everyone knew, which we find almost always in the New Testament too:

sender (“Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ…”);
recipients (“unto the church of God which is at Corinth…”);
greeting (“grace be unto you, and peace…”);
thanksgiving or prayer;
body of the letter, with teaching and exhortation;
final greetings and blessing.

Paul uses this pattern but fills it with the gospel. The usual greeting in the Greek world was chairein, “be well”; Paul writes charis, grace, and adds the Hebrew wish of peace. The thanksgiving becomes prayer and often announces the themes of the letter. That is why we notice when it is missing: in Galatians Paul goes straight to rebuke, because the situation is serious (Galatians 1:6).

Paul often dictated his letters to a secretary and then added a greeting in his own hand (Romans 16:22; Galatians 6:11). The letters were then read aloud in the assembly and circulated among the churches (Colossians 4:16).

Answers to questions we do not know

Paul’s letters are occasional: they respond to concrete problems. Reading them is a bit like listening to one side of a phone call: we hear the answers, but we have to reconstruct the questions. In 1 Corinthians 7:1, for example, Paul writes: “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me…”. We do not have that letter, but we can infer a lot from the way Paul answers.

This has two consequences. First, we should not expect every letter to say everything about a subject: to know Paul’s thinking on marriage, for example, you need to read both 1 Corinthians 7 and Ephesians 5. Second, the principles Paul applies to a particular situation are valid for us too, when we learn to recognise them.

The centre: Christ crucified and risen

Behind all the answers there is a single centre. Paul sums it up for the Corinthians: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). When he deals with divisions, moral problems, questions about food or spiritual gifts, Paul always brings the church back to this foundation. Those who read his letters learn to do the same.

A life at a glance

To find your way through the letters it helps to keep the main stages of Paul’s life in view. The dates are approximate and some are debated among scholars, but the order of events is fairly secure. The timeline below summarises the journey, from conversion to martyrdom.

timeline
    title The life of Paul, approximate dates
    c. 33-35 : Conversion on the Damascus road
    c. 46-48 : First missionary journey
    c. 49-52 : Second journey and the church in Corinth
    c. 53-57 : Third journey, Ephesus, letter to the Romans
    c. 60-62 : Imprisonment in Rome and prison letters
    c. 62-65 : Release and Pastoral Epistles
    c. 67 : Final imprisonment and martyrdom

A second way to get your bearings is to group the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name. The table is not a strict chronological order, but a map to understand which phase of his ministry each text belongs to.

Group	Letters	Feature
Letters from the journeys	Galatians, 1-2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Corinthians, Romans	Born during the founding and care of the churches
Prison letters	Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon	Written in chains, centred on Christ and the Church
Pastoral Epistles	1-2 Timothy, Titus	Addressed to co-workers leading the churches

When you open a letter, try to place it on this map: it will help you understand the tone, the concerns and the questions Paul is answering.

🔗 Connect

Acts and the letters: read Acts 18:1-11 (the founding of the church in Corinth) and then 1 Corinthians 2:1-5. Paul recalls the weakness and the message with which he had arrived in the city.
The letters and the Old Testament: Paul constantly quotes the Scriptures of Israel. The gospel he proclaims was “promised afore by his prophets” (Romans 1:2).
Paul and the other apostles: in Galatians 2:7-9 the pillars of the Jerusalem church recognise the grace given to Paul for the Gentiles. There is no gospel of Paul different from Peter’s: there is one gospel for all.
2 Peter 3:15-16: Peter calls Paul a “beloved brother” and admits that his letters contain things hard to understand. A good reason to study them with a method.

🙏 Apply

Paul never forgot where God had brought him out from. Do you remember what grace has changed in your life? Try writing it down in a few lines.
God had prepared Paul’s upbringing for his mission. Which experiences, skills or settings in your life could serve the gospel?
When you read a New Testament letter, do you stop to ask who the readers were and what problem they had? Try it in your next reading.
Pray for those who carry the gospel into difficult settings today, as Paul did among the Gentiles.

📚 Go Deeper

Read Paul’s address to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:17-38: it is the fullest portrait of his pastor’s heart.
Read Philippians in full, in one sitting, as its first readers would have done: it takes about a quarter of an hour.
Prepare a table with three columns, “letter”, “recipients”, “situation”. You will fill it in lesson by lesson.

In the next lesson we will open Paul’s most systematic letter: Romans, the gospel of grace.