Who is apostle paul in the bible

And for that, he would need to meet a follower of Christ. In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias come and place his hands on him to restore his sight. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.

This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. He got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

Paul spent the next few days with the very Christians he had come to capture, and he immediately began preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ—to the confusion of Christians and Jews alike. In his own accounts of his conversion, Paul says that Jesus appeared to him 1 Corinthians —8 , and he claims that Jesus revealed the gospel to him Galatians — In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul appeals to the authority of eyewitness testimony, pointing out that Jesus appeared to many people including himself.

In his letter to the Galatians, he builds the case that the Galatians can trust the gospel he presented them because it came directly from God, and the first apostles supported his message Galatians —9. This encounter on the road to Damascus completely redefined who Paul was, and it changed the purpose of his journey from silencing Christians to speaking out in support of them.

Instead of taking away from their number, he added to it. And once Jesus redirected him, Paul continued on this trajectory for the rest of his life.

While he was a contemporary of Jesus, they never crossed paths—at least, not before Jesus died. The first century was a tumultuous time for Christianity.

As a leader in the Jewish community, Paul saw the rapidly spreading Christian community as a threat, and he directly contributed to the persecution early Christians faced. But after his encounter with Jesus, instead of stamping out Christianity, Paul stoked the flames of the faith wherever he went, at whatever the cost. More than any other person besides Jesus, Paul was the reason Christianity spread so far and so fast. And Paul and Saul are actually two versions of the same name.

The reality is that Saul was a Hebrew name and Paul was a Greek version of the same name. Of all the ways Paul affected Christianity, the biggest was arguably his role in spreading the gospel to non-Jewish communities.

When Christianity emerged, it was often thought of as a Jewish sect—it built on Jewish teachings and beliefs, and because most Christians were also Jewish, many still followed Jewish customs and rituals established in the Law of Moses. For Paul, the apostles, and the early Christians, the Law and specifically, circumcision was one of the greatest theological issues of their day. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.

For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath. Instead, they essentially instructed Gentiles be culturally sensitive to their Jewish brothers and sisters, because the Law was respected and observed by Jews everywhere.

After he received a vision Acts —16 , Peter was one of the first apostles to specifically advocate for sharing the gospel with Gentiles. But as the Gentiles joined the church, Paul noticed that Peter still treated Gentile Christians differently in order to save face with those who still valued the law.

For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?

So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified. And as he explained earlier in his epistle to the Galatians, Peter, James, and John already agreed with him: the Gentiles did not need to follow the Law of Moses, and Jewish Christians were not better or superior than Gentile Christians because they did follow the Law.

Some scholars argue there was a fourth missionary journey as well. In each of these, Paul and his companions set out to bring the gospel to Gentiles, and they establish the churches Paul wrote to in his epistles as well as many others. In some cases, Paul spent well over a year in the cities he preached to, living with the believers there and modeling a lifestyle of imitating Christ.

Over the course of his life, Paul likely traveled well over 10, miles to spread the gospel. He left the church with Barnabas and a man named John also called Mark, believed to be the author of the Gospel of Mark , and together they sailed to Cyprus , an island in the Mediterranean. Here Paul performed his first miracle, perhaps inspired by his own conversion on the road to Damascus: he blinded a sorcerer who opposed their attempts to evangelize a proconsul Acts — Then they sailed to Perga in Pamphylia , where John Mark parted ways with Paul and Barnabas this became a point of tension between Paul and Barnabas later.

They were invited to come speak on the following Sabbath, and when they did, most of the city attended. Many of the Jews in attendance grew angry and tried to stop them, but the Gentiles were receptive to their message. Paul and Barnabas ultimately left Psidion Antioch due to persecution, and traveled to another Turkish city called Iconium. Those who opposed Paul and Barnabas started a plot to stone them, but they caught wind of it and fled to the Lycaonian city of Lystra.

There, Paul performed another miracle: he healed a man who had been lame since birth Acts The people who saw this thought Paul and Barnabas were gods, and attempted to make sacrifices to them even as Paul and Barnabas tried to convince them not to. Some of the people who opposed them in Psidion Antioch and Iconium followed them to Lystra , and they stirred up the crowd against them.

They stoned Paul and left him for dead outside the city. Then he got up and went back in. Paul and Silas travelled through Derbe and then Lystra , where they picked up a believer named Timothy this is the Timothy Paul writes to in 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy. Together they traveled from town to town and told people what the apostles had decided at the Council of Jerusalem where James told Gentile Christians not to worry about circumcision, which was pretty ironic, because Paul had just circumcised Timothy Acts The Holy Spirit kept Paul and his companions from preaching in the province of Asia , so they went to Phrygia and Galatia where they planted the church Paul would later write to in Galatians , eventually making their way to Troas.

They wound their way through several provinces to arrive in Philippi , the main city in Macedonia. Here they met with a group of women, including a wealthy cloth dealer named Lydia.

After they baptized Lydia and her household, she invited them to stay at her house. These were the first members of the church Paul writes to in Philippians. During their time in Philippi , a spirit that possessed a local slave girl was bothering Paul, so he cast it out of her Acts They got everyone riled up against Paul and Silas and managed to convince the local authorities to have them beaten and imprisoned.

For three Sabbaths, Paul taught in the synagogues and established the group of believers that he would later write to in 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians.

He gained many followers, but those who opposed him started a riot and threatened his supporters, so the believers sent him on to Berea. Unfortunately, some of those who opposed Paul and his companions in Thessalonica heard he was in Berea , so they came and started causing trouble. Paul left to Athens. Plus Toggle navigation. Password Assistance. Email address. Paul in the Bible. Share Tweet Save. Chapter Parallel Compare. May it not be held against them.

Acts Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. Ephesians Romans For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison. He directed that he be flogged and interrogated in order to find out why the people were shouting at him like this.

The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains. I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the law of our ancestors. I was just as zealous for God as any of you are today. Corinthians and Romans from his third missionary journies. Then, Paul's arrival in Jerusalem was followed quickly by arrest and a two-year imprisonment in Caesarea Maritima.

Thereafter he was shipped to Rome on appeal to the imperial court of Nero. There see Acts 28 he apparently wrote his so-called prison letters: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. Reports of uncertain reliability place Paul's death at about a. Galatians In my mind, Paul met Jesus on a dusty road, spent three days fasting in Damascus, regained his eyesight, then jumped right into ministry to the Gentiles and never looked back.

But a closer examination of Scripture tells a little different story. What did Paul do during all this time in Arabia? Many scholars feel this may have been a spiritual retreat for Paul, a time to reconcile everything he knew from the Old Testament Scriptures with his new reality in Christ. In Arabia, Paul could immerse himself in the reality of his Savior and focus on learning and growing in preparation for ministry. Ancestry and family life: A Benjamite, a Pharisee trained under the famous Gamaliel, circumcised the eighth day, a Roman citizen.

Extremely zealous follower of Judaism Php Paul was a Hebrew of Hebrews. When and where he lived: Paul lived during the time of the early church. He came from Tarsus near the Northeast shore of the Mediterranean. Training and occupation: Paul was a Pharisee Php Therefore he was highly educated in that time period. He trained under another famous Pharisee named Gamaliel Acts He was a student of the Scriptures and knew them well.

He was a skillful writer, debater, and public speaker. Place in history: Paul was an apostle of Christ. He traveled extensively spreading the gospel and establishing churches. He was a missionary to the Gentiles, yet loved his own brethren deeply. He was the spiritual leader over a number of far-flung churches and trained up pastors and elders to oversee those churches. He wrote much of the New Testament, giving us very important doctrines and teachings.

Eventually he was martyred. Special traits: 1 Poor eyesight? He says that God sent a thorn in his flesh to keep him humble 2 Co On the second missionary journey Barnabas wanted to take Mark, but Paul disagreed because of a previous mistake that Mark had made.

Evidently Barnabas was right because Mark went on to be a faithful missionary. Paul also grew angry with the servant girl who was a fortune teller and cast that spirit out, apparently in anger Acts He also was disrespectful of the high priest Acts He was never lukewarm.

He either zealously persecuted Christianity or he zealously proclaimed it. This was a very good quality when he finally focused his energy on serving Christ. He was highly educated and could have done a lot of other things, but gave his life to Christ. See Philippians