islamqert.blogg.se

He was proud, too, of the Roman citizenship inherited from his father he used his Roman name Paulus in preference to his Jewish name Saul, and he found in the world empire of Rome a model for his later faith in a universal Christian commonwealth. Paul was proud of his native city and manifested his debt to its Greek culture in his command of idiomatic Greek, in the occasional use of philosophical terms, and in a wealth of metaphors drawn from city life. Paul’s birthplace, Tarsus in Cilicia, a district of Asia Minor lying on the main trade route between East and West, was a cosmopolitan university city, which had been the home of famous Stoic philosophers. The general belief is, however, that Acts was written by Paul’s companion the evangelist Luke, who drew on his own diary for much of the story. Because its evidence sometimes conflicts with that of the letters, some scholars question the historicity of Acts. For that, it is necessary to rely on Acts, written some 30 years after Paul’s death. The letters alone, however, provide no connected story. The Pastoral Letters (to Timothy and Titus) were written by a disciple of Paul beat probably contain Pauline defragments. About Ephesians, opinion is divided, but it contains little biographical material. The primary source is his own correspondences, of which Romans I and II, Corinthians, and Galatians are acknowledged to be genuine by all scholars Philippians, Colossians, I and II, Thessalonians, and Philemon by most. Sourcesįor Paul’s life, there are no reliable sources outside the New Testament. None of the followers of Jesus did more than he to establish the patterns of Christian thought and practice. His efforts and his vision of a world church were responsible for the rapid spread of Christianity and for the speed with which it became a universal religion. More than half of the Acts of the Apostles deals with his career, and this, together with the letters written by him or in his name, comprises one-third of the New Testament. His letters, the earliest extant Christian documents, antedate the Gospels of the New Testament. Paul was a 1st century Jew who, after being the bitterest enemy of the Christian Church, became its leading missionary and possibly its greatest theologian.