Quotes about Paul

The mystery of Jesus Christ, for Paul, is that in him is revealed not only the glory of the one creator God but the true glory of humankind, lost at the fall.

Connecting the dots of Paul's journeys, actual and planned, is like mapping a royal procession through Caesar's heartlands.

Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul's life.

This idea of God being faithful to the covenant clearly seems to be Paul's meaning here in Romans 3.

The first thing that is missing from the usual line of thought, then, is any attempt to show how Paul deals not just with "sin" itself, but with the idolatry that lies behind it and the ensuing loss of "glory.

Did Paul "switch religions"? Or can we accept Paul's own account that, in following the crucified Jesus and announcing that Israel's God had raised him from the dead, he was actually being loyal to his ancestral traditions, though in a way neither he nor anyone else had anticipated?

This summary may be enough to alert us to the fact that, in Paul's presentation of salvation, the goal is for humans to share the "royal" and "priestly" ministry of the Messiah himself.

Unlike those in Philippi (perhaps including some of the Christians) whose citizenship is in Rome, the true citizenship of Jesus' followers is in heaven. This does not mean that Paul is here talking about their 'going to heaven' one day, any more than the Roman citizens in Philippi would expect to go to live in Rome one day (as people sometimes mistakenly suppose). Rather, they are part of the extended empire of 'heaven'.

Part of the reason for Paul's anxiety about shared table-fellowship, and shared worship, in Galatians 2 and Romans 14 and 15, was that Christian meals, not least but not only the eucharist, constituted a central part of what he meant by celebrate, rejoice. The word celebration has become almost a technical term, certainly in my own church and perhaps elsewhere, for 'holding a eucharist'. We must guard against that becoming a dead metaphor.

The question Paul faces in 3:21—26 is then the double problem of human sin and idolatry, on the one hand, and the divine faithfulness, on the other.

Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil.

The 'popular Paul' has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice