At Antioch, the great city of Roman Syria, the followers of Jesus once ate together, Jews and non-Jews at one table. Then men arrived from James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the community in Jerusalem. Cephas, the disciple better known as Peter, withdrew from the meals with non-Jewish believers; even Barnabas, Paul's partner in the mission, went with him. Paul confronted Peter in front of them all. He tells the story himself, in his letter to the Galatians, and he does not say how it ended. The question at that table — must a non-Jew become a Jew, circumcised and keeping the law of Moses, to belong to the God of Israel? — is the question his whole thought answers.
He came to it from the other side. In his letters he calls himself a Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, more zealous for the traditions of his ancestors than most of his generation, who persecuted the new movement and tried to destroy it. Then, he writes, God revealed his Son to him, and the risen Christ appeared to him last of all the witnesses, so that he would proclaim him among the Gentiles. Historians place this between about 33 and 36. The Acts of the Apostles, a history of the first churches written decades later, tells the story most readers know: Saul, as Acts calls him at first, born in Tarsus and taught in Jerusalem by the rabbi Gamaliel, struck down by a light on the road to Damascus. The letters mention Damascus, but no road and no light. Nor do they speak of guilt: Paul says he had been blameless by the standard of the law, and from this the Swedish scholar Krister Stendahl argued in 1963 that Paul received a call, like the prophets, rather than a conversion out of a troubled conscience.
For roughly twenty years he founded small congregations, mostly of non-Jews, in the cities of Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece, worked with his own hands so as to charge them nothing, and held them together by letter. Nearly all scholars accept seven letters as his, all from the 50s; the earliest, to Thessalonica around 50, is older than any of the gospels. Three more in his name, Ephesians, Colossians and the second to Thessalonica, are disputed: many scholars think his followers wrote them after his death; others, with the tradition, hold them to be his. Each of the seven argues with somebody. In Galatia, rival teachers told his converts that faith in Christ was not enough without circumcision. In Corinth, rival missionaries — he called them, with irony, the "super-apostles" — said his letters were strong and his presence weak; he answered that God's power shows itself in weakness, and listed as proof five floggings of thirty-nine lashes, a stoning and three shipwrecks.
His answer is the claim he is remembered for: Jews and non-Jews stand in the same place before God. All have failed, and all are put right with God in the same way, through pístis (trust) in what God did in the crucified and risen Christ, and not by doing the works the Jewish law requires. Abraham is his witness: he trusted God and was counted righteous before he was circumcised, so he is the father of believing Gentiles too. Paul argued this from the Jewish scriptures, which he read in Greek, and he did not think he was leaving Israel: three chapters of Romans insist that God has not abandoned his people. Nor was he working alone: on a visit to Jerusalem, James, Peter and John — the "pillars", as he calls them — had agreed that he should go to the Gentiles, and no one made his companion Titus, a Greek, be circumcised.
He wrote Romans in Corinth, most likely in 56–57, to a church he had never seen, before carrying money collected in his Greek congregations to the poor of Jerusalem; he hoped to travel on through Rome to Spain. What followed is known only from Acts and the tradition. Acts tells of his arrest in Jerusalem, an appeal to the emperor as a Roman citizen, and two years under guard in Rome, where its story stops. The tradition says he was beheaded in Rome under Nero, between about 64 and 68.
The letters outlived him and became scripture. Marcion, a Christian teacher at Rome around 144, held that Paul alone had understood Jesus and built an early Christian canon from ten of his letters and one gospel. Augustine, then a teacher of rhetoric at Milan, opened Romans in 386 and gave up his old life; Luther drew from it the teaching on faith that the Reformation was built on. Since E. P. Sanders, an American scholar, published Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977, many scholars have read Paul's quarrel as one about how Gentiles join God's people rather than about earning salvation. Whether Paul left Judaism or argued as a Jew to the end is still disputed.