Frank Thielman, Paul Apostle of Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025)
Thielman’s goal in this work is to compose a biography of Paul, in the same vein as F. F. Bruce’s magisterial Paul Apostle of the Heart Set Free, that helps the general reader to understand what motivated St. Paul’s extraordinary life and ministry.[i]
In short, this volume asks the question: what made the apostle tick? Thielman’s answer is that St. Paul’s experience of the Risen Messiah and his subsequent relationship with the Resurrected Jesus fundamentally changed him so much that the apostle spent the rest of his life doing everything he could for the gospel’s sake.
To accomplish this work’s goal, Thielman reconstructs St. Paul’s life from all thirteen canonical Pauline letters, which he considers to be authentic, Acts of the Apostles, other early Christian works, pagan literary sources, and archaeological evidence, attempting to present the most probable portrait of the apostle. This biography consists of twenty-six chapters with three helpful appendices and six maps interspersed throughout the work (for a list of these and their page numbers, see below). Instead of footnotes, Thielman has placed his copious references, mainly to secondary sources, in endnotes, while leaving most primary source references in the body of the text.
In the preface, Thielman lays out some of his distinctive assumptions about St. Paul and his life that the reader will meet in the volume. The first is Thielman’s use of the abovementioned sources, including all thirteen of the apostle’s letters and Acts. He notes that he has laid out his case for accepting these letters as Pauline and the historical reliability of Acts in appendix 1.
The second assumption is that Thielman considers Galatians 2:1–10 and the Apostolic Council of Acts 15 to refer to the same event. Thus, he does not accept the view common among more “conservative” leaning scholars that Galatians 2:1–10 refers to St. Paul’s and St. Barnabas’s visit to Jerusalem in Acts 11:27–30. However, unlike other scholars who equate Acts 15 with Galatians 2:1–10, Thielman believes Galatians is Paul’s earliest canonical letter and that he composed it to the churches in southern Galatia. Therefore, he holds to what is known as the Southern Galatia Hypothesis for the destination of Galatians, which means that Thielman believes that the apostle composed the letter to the churches in the province of Galatia that did not consist of ethnic Galatians and that he and St. Barnabas missionized in Acts 13:13–28. It is noteworthy that many scholars who accept the identification of Galatians 2:1–10 with Acts 15 posit that Galatians is not St. Paul’s earliest canonical letter and they tend to subscribe to the Northern Galatia Hypothesis vis-à-vis the destination of Galatians, which means that they propose that the apostle addressed Galatians not to the people in southern Galatia but to ethnic Galatians who lived in the province’s northern portion.
The third assumption of Thielman’s is that St. Paul composed the Pastorals in the timeframe that Acts narrates. Consequently, unlike many scholars who accept Pauline authorship of the Pastorals and have a habit of placing one or more of these letters in the life of St. Paul after the events recorded in Acts, Thielman perceptively finds space for them in Luke’s narrative, and he lays out his arguments for this in appendices 2 and 3.
Overall, this work is thoughtful, clear, concise, engaging, and historically informed. Thielman’s primary source driven volume does a masterful job of contextualizing St. Paul’s world of Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and Greco-Roman society and positioning the apostle in it. His work is too vast for me to comment adequately on it so I will discuss two important points that Thielman makes that influence his reconstruction of St. Paul. First, in his discussion of the revelation of Jesus to the apostle on the Damascus Road, Thielman rightly and convincingly argues that St. Paul was converted, not just commissioned or called as an apostle. From St. Paul’s letters, he stresses the discontinuity between the apostle’s pre-Christian and Christian life, noting that what happened to St. Paul—his life being transferred into the Resurrected Messiah (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 2:20; 6:15; Romans 6:4–11; Philippians 1:21)—is so “radical” that only the term conversion is appropriate (22–25).
Second, his appendix in which he defends Pauline authorship of all thirteen canonical letters of the apostle is well informed not only concerning the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy (or false writings in the name of someone) in Greco-Roman antiquity but also related to the discussion of the authenticity of these letters among prominent Church Fathers. For example, Thielman notes the difficulty in determining the authenticity of any document from antiquity, quoting St. Augustine who asked how people of his day knew that Plato, Aristotle, etc. composed the works attributed to them. St. Augustine’s answer: these writings have been passed down through the ages as genuine and thus they should be accepted as such. Similarly, St. Augustine argues that we can know that canonical books are genuine because “they have been handed down as genuine from one generation to another in the church from the time of their composition” (344).[ii] Thielman notes that this is not a “bad argument” and
“If no other arguments for or against a particular Pauline letter’s genuineness are decisive, and if the ancient world was awash in forgeries, then it made, and makes, sense to consider the antiquity of the document itself and the antiquity and reliability of those who testify to its authorial claims. The disputed Pauline letters fare reasonably well under those considerations, and so it seems intellectually justifiable to use them as sources to construct the apostle’s career and thought” (344–45).
In my opinion, this argument for Pauline authorship of all thirteen letters is not a bad one, either. It is honest, well thought out, humble, and, at the end of the day after the dust clouds of grammar, theology, and vocabulary have settled, presents the best defense of Pauline authorship of all epistles in the Pauline corpus. I am grateful for Thielman for expressing it so eloquently.
For this, and for many more reasons that space and time prohibit me from discussing, I highly recommend this work to any interested student of St. Paul, layperson, clergy, or scholar.
I am grateful to Eerdmans for a gratis copy of this work, which in no way influenced my review of it.
List of the content of Thielman’s Paul Apostle of Grace:
- Paul before His Encounter with Christ (1–16)
- A Revelation from God (17–26)
- Following Christ in Damascus and Arabia (27–37)
- Return to Jerusalem (38–52)
- Ministry in Syria and Cilicia (53–66)
- Forming and Expanding the Multiethnic Church of God (67–78)
- Advancement and Opposition in Southern Galatia (79–87)
- Resistance to the Multiethnic Church (88–103)
- Advancing Westward with the Gospel (104–113)
- Church Planting and Suffering in Macedonia (114–127)
- A Cool Reception in Athens and Laying a Foundation in Corinth (128–142)
- An Urgent Letter from Corinth to Christians in Galatia (143–154)
- Urgent Letters to Thessalonica and Overcoming Opposition in Corinth (155–166)
- A Visit to Jerusalem, a Collection for Its Needy Christians, and a New Beginning in Ephesus (167–77)
- Ministry in Ephesus and a Letter to Christians in Corinth (178–192)
- Trouble in Corinth and Strange Teaching in Ephesus (193–205)
- “Fighting Without and Fear Within” (206–219)
- A Turning Point (220–232)
- Back to Jerusalem with the Collection Delegation (233–246)
- Violence and Arrest in the Jerusalem Temple (247–262)
- A Taste of Roman Justice in Caesarea-by-the-Sea (263–270)
- A Turbulent Journey West and Respite on Malta (271–285)
- House Arrest in Rome (286–298)
- Visitors from Philippi and the Lycus River Valley (299–313)
- Fighting from Prison against Discouragement in Ephesus (314–322)
- Paul Finishes the Race (323–335)
Appendix 1: The Evidence for Paul (337–352)
Appendix 2: The Historical Setting of Paul’s Imprisonment Letters (353–362)
Appendix 3: The Place, Manner, and Time of Paul’s Death (363–370)
Map 1: The Roman World in the First Century AD (xviiii)
Map 2: From Syrian Antioch to Cyprus to Southern Galatia and Back to Syrian Antioch (72)
Map 3: From Syrian Antioch to Southern Galatia to the Aegean Region to Jerusalem and Back to Syrian Antioch (105)
Map 4: From Jerusalem to Syrian Antioch to Southern Galatia to Ephesus to Macedonia, Illyricum, Achaia, and Back to Jerusalem (173)
Map 5: The Temple (253)
Map 6: From Caesarea to Rome (272)
[i] While his main audience is general, Thielman notes that those with a knowledge of Roman history and geography will benefit most from his work.
[ii] “You are so hardened in your errors against the testimonies of Scripture, that nothing can be made of you; for whenever anything is quoted against you, you have the boldness to say that it is written not by the apostle, but by some pretender under his name. The doctrine of demons which you preach is so opposed to Christian doctrine, that you could not continue, as professing Christians, to maintain it, unless you denied the truth of the apostolic writings. How can you thus do injury to your own souls? Where will you find any authority, if not in the Gospel and apostolic writings? How can we be sure of the authorship of any book, if we doubt the apostolic origin of those books which are attributed to the apostles by the Church which the apostles themselves founded, and which occupies so conspicuous a place in all lands, and if at the same time we acknowledge as the undoubted production of the apostles what is brought forward by heretics in opposition to the Church, whose authors, from whom they derive their name, lived long after the apostles? And do we not see in profane literature that there are well-known authors under whose names many things have been published after their time which have been rejected, either from inconsistency with their ascertained writings, or from their not having been known in the lifetime of the authors, so as to be banded down with the confirmatory statement of the authors themselves, or of their friends? To give a single example, were not some books published lately under the name of the distinguished physician Hippocrates, which were not received as authoritative by physicians? And this decision remained unaltered in spite of some similarity in style and matter: for, when compared to the genuine writings of Hippocrates, these books were found to be inferior; besides that they were not recognized as his at the time when his authorship of his genuine productions was ascertained. Those books, again, from a comparison with which the productions of questionable origin were rejected, are with certainty attributed to Hippocrates; and any one who denies their authorship is answered only by ridicule, simply because there is a succession of testimonies to the books from the time of Hippocrates to the present day, which makes it unreasonable either now or hereafter to have any doubt on the subject. How do we know the authorship of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Varro, and other similar writers, but by the unbroken chain of evidence? So also with the numerous commentaries on the ecclesiastical books, which have no canonical authority, and yet show a desire of usefulness and a spirit of inquiry. How is the authorship ascertained in each case, except by the author’s having brought his work into public notice as much as possible in his own lifetime, and, by the transmission of the information from one to another in continuous order, the belief becoming more certain as it becomes more general, up to our own day; so that, when we are questioned as to the authorship of any book, we have no difficulty in answering? But why speak of old books? Take the books now before us: should any one, after some years, deny that this book was written by me, or that Faustus’ was written by him, where is evidence for the fact to be found but in the information possessed by some at the present time, and transmitted by them through successive generations even to distant times? From all this it follows, that no one who has not yielded to the malicious and deceitful suggestions of lying devils, can be so blinded by passion as to deny the ability of the Church of the apostles— a community of brethren as numerous as they were faithful — to transmit their writings unaltered to posterity, as the original seats of the apostles have been occupied by a continuous succession of bishops to the present day, especially when we are accustomed to see this happen in the case of ordinary writings both in the Church and out of I”t (St. Augustine, Contra Faustus 33.6; translation taken from https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/140633.htm).