Paul and the Mission to the Gentiles

The most famous of the Jewish Christians who took the gospel and its teachings to Gentile lands was Paul of Tarsus. A Pharisee devoted to Judaism, Paul had been a persecutor of Christians, but after a dramatic experience of the risen Christ c.

At the heart of Paul’s teaching was his belief that in Jesus Christ God had acted to bring salvation from sin to the world. Paul saw sin as a condition affecting all humanity: “All have sinned and fall short of the gloiy of God” (Romans 3:23). Controlling human beings and separating them from God, sin corrupts and ultimately destroys human life (Romans 6:23). For Paul, the good news of the gospel was that God’s promise of salvation from sin, anticipated in the Jewish Scriptures, had been fulfilled in Jesus’s death on the cross. Though sinless and undeserving of death, Jesus had offered himself as a perfect sacrifice in atonement for all sin. Although Paul’s language of “sin,” “sacrifice,” and “atonement” may sound strange today, it is really quite similar to what we might mean when we say we have done some “wrong” to someone and that we must do something to “make up for it.” In Paul’s time, Jews and Gentiles alike understood that sacrifice was the means of “making up for” an offense against God, or the gods.

Paul was always emphatic in maintaining that salvation cannot be earned by “works,” whether human efforts to obey the commandments in the Torah (Galatians 3:10) or good works in general. Instead, he taught that the salvation made possible by Christ’s sacrifice is a gift, the ultimate expression of God’s love, or grace. Salvation is given to those who respond to God’s grace in faith, the conviction that God has acted through Jesus Christ to atone for human sin. Although Paul was very clear in teaching that salvation depends on God’s grace and the individual’s turning to God in faith, he did not dismiss the importance of works. In Romans 2:5-10, for example, he says that people will be held responsible for the good and evil they do. Paul’s letters are not always precise about the relationship between faith and works, but they leave no doubt about the priority of faith. In his letter to the Galatians (2:16), Paul wrote that individuals are brought into a right relationship with God “not by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.”

For Paul, faith does more than bring salvation; it unites the believer with Christ in a “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) so real that Paul could say, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Like the apostles who had been filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Paul believed that the Spirit lives in believers and brings them into union with God. To the Christians at Rome he wrote: “You are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Romans 8:9). As a divine presence within, the Spirit encourages the growth of spiritual virtues, the greatest of which is love (1 Corinthians 12:27-14:1). Paul also believed that the Spirit makes all Christians one in the Church, which he often called the “body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12-27).

Like other early Christians, Paul looked forward to a time when Christ would return in glory to bring an end to evil, sin, and suffering (1 Corinthians 15:20-28). But he also believed that the transformation of the world, signaled by the resurrection of Christ, had already begun. Signs of change were especially evident in the lives of believers, who had been renewed, even re­created, through the action of God’s grace: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).