Who Was Paul In The Bible
The short answer
Most of what we know about Paul comes not from a biography but from his letters—and that turns out to be the best way to meet him. Yes, the facts are there in the background: a devout Jew trained as a Pharisee, a onetime persecutor of the church, dramatically converted on the road to Damascus, then a tireless missionary who planted churches across the Roman world. But the letters show us something a résumé never could: how Paul understood himself.
In Philippians 3, writing near the end of his life, Paul is emphatic that he has not 'arrived.' Whatever spiritual credentials he once counted as gain, he now counts as loss. His picture of maturity is startling: the mature person is the one who knows the race isn't finished. "I press on toward the goal," he writes—the image of an athlete who refuses to coast even when he's ahead of the pack. For Paul, identity in Christ is not a trophy on a shelf but an unfinished pursuit.
The Corinthian letters add a second, harder layer. Paul was a contested figure even in his own lifetime. Rival teachers in Corinth accused him of things he knew he wasn't guilty of, and much of 2 Corinthians is his anguished, sometimes fierce, defense. He saw those false accusations in biblical terms: in Jewish thought, the 'satan' was the accuser—a kind of prosecutor bringing charges, true or fabricated, against people.
Put the two together and you get the real Paul: not a serene religious statue, but a self-aware man forged in conflict, honest about his own incompleteness, and utterly convinced that what mattered was not where he'd come from but what—and who—lay ahead of him.
What scholars say
In these passages, N.T. Wright draws out two sides of Paul's self-understanding: from Philippians, his insistence that true maturity means knowing you haven't arrived and must keep pressing toward the goal; and from 2 Corinthians, the backdrop of false accusations in Corinth, which Wright connects to the biblical picture of the 'satan' as accuser and prosecutor.
“Paul is quite clear about this. He hasn’t ‘arrived’ in that sense, and nor has anyone else. True maturity, he insists, actually means knowing that you haven’t arrived, and that you must still keep pressing on forwards towards the goal. The seasoned athlete knows that the race isn’t won and lost until the end has been reached. To imagine that because you find yourself out in front of the pack you can slack off and take it easy, having ‘arrived’, would be disastrous. As he says in verse 16, it’s important to maintain the position you’ve reached.”
“That is one of the strongest accusations anyone can make, but it’s not simply a bit of miscel-laneous religious name-calling. The teachers in Corinth had been accusing Paul of all kinds of things of which he knew he wasn’t guilty. In traditional biblical and Jewish thinking, the ‘satan’ was the accuser, the Director of Public Prosecutions for the heavenly court. It was his job to accuse people, to brings charges against all wrongdoers. In order to have charges to bring, the satan seems to have taken to whispering ideas into people’s ears . . . and so became the tempter as well as the prosecutor. And if people failed to respond to the whispered suggestions, the satan was quite capable of making false accusations instead.”
What it means for you
Paul's self-portrait cuts against two temptations most of us know well. The first is the feeling that we should have 'arrived' by now—that mature faith means having everything settled. Paul says the opposite: maturity is knowing you haven't arrived and pressing on anyway, holding the ground you've gained without slacking off. The second temptation is despair when we're misjudged. Paul spent years answering accusations he knew were false, and he kept going. If your spiritual life feels unfinished, or your reputation feels unfairly under attack, you're in the company of the man who wrote half the New Testament.
In context
Philippians 3 comes from a letter Paul wrote from prison to a church he loved, urging joy and steadiness; in it he reviews his own impressive credentials only to set them aside and describe his life as a race still being run. Second Corinthians is Paul's most personally raw letter, written to a church where rival teachers had attacked his authority and character. Together the two letters bracket his public life: one shows the missionary under fire, the other shows the veteran still refusing to coast.