Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul)
Justification by grace through faith, the body as temple, the new creation in Christ — Pharisaic Judaism reread through resurrection
Seven letters in the New Testament are now broadly accepted as authentically Paul's: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. Six others (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus) are disputed; the Acts of the Apostles is a Lukan portrait of him rather than his own work. The letters describe a Pharisee from Tarsus in Cilicia, trained under Gamaliel in Jerusalem, who persecuted the early Jesus movement until his transformative vision on the road to Damascus (c. 33–36 CE), and who then spent roughly thirty years as the church's most consequential missionary and theologian. He is the proximate source of the doctrines of justification by grace, the universal scope of the covenant, the bodily resurrection, and the church as the body of Christ — and the distant ancestor of every subsequent Western theology of grace.
Key works
- Romans (c. 57)
- 1 Corinthians (c. 53–54), 2 Corinthians (c. 55)
- Galatians (c. 48–55)
- Philippians (c. 60)
- 1 Thessalonians (c. 50)
- Philemon (c. 60)
- (Disputed: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, the Pastoral Epistles)
Declared Influences
Reformed / Calvinist Theology 35%
Jewish Philosophy (Maimonidean) 25%
Lutheranism 20%
Stoicism 10%
Platonism (Classical) 10%
Anachronistic as a confessional label, but Paul is the New Testament writer whom the Reformed tradition has most consistently named as its source. Justification by grace through faith, the bondage of the will to sin, and the doctrine of election are all read by the Reformers (and Augustine before them) as Pauline.
"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." (Ephesians 2:8–9 — disputed Pauline, but the most-quoted single text in Reformed theology)
Paul self-identifies as a Pharisee throughout the letters and reads the Hebrew scriptures as the indispensable substance of his theology. The framework slots his rabbinic-Pharisaic inheritance here as the closest available cousin to his actual formation.
"Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee." (Philippians 3:5)
Luther's reading of Paul on Romans 1:17 ("the righteous shall live by faith") is the Reformation's founding moment; Lutheran theology has continued to organise itself around Paul more centrally than any other tradition.
"I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate." (Romans 7:15)
Paul was a Roman citizen from a Greek-speaking city (Tarsus), and his prose is shot through with Stoic vocabulary — autarkeia (self-sufficiency), syneidesis (conscience), the cosmopolitan idiom of Romans 1, the Areopagus speech in Acts 17. The substance is not Stoic, but the rhetorical formation is.
"I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." (Philippians 4:11, drawing explicitly on the Stoic autarkeia)
A residual Hellenistic-Platonic dualism between the present age and the age to come, the body and the spirit, the visible and the eternal — though Paul's eschatology is more apocalyptic-Jewish than Platonic in substance.
"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:12)
Internal Tensions
Paul's theology has been read in opposite ways across two millennia: as the invention of dogmatic Christianity (Nietzsche, the History-of-Religions School) and as the most faithful continuation of Jewish apocalyptic in a new register (the New Perspective on Paul). The tension is real in the letters themselves: he is at once the apostle of universal grace and the Pharisee of a specific covenantal history, and the relation between these two has been the central question of Pauline interpretation since the second century.
I. Time
"Both" — God's eternity surrounds created time. Linear and uni-directional within the present age, oriented to the eschatological parousia. Deterministic at the level of providence (Romans 8:28–30), though the human will is genuinely addressed and answerable.
Attributes
II. Space
Substantival, infinite, three-dimensional, local. Paul's spatial imagination is practical-missionary: Antioch, Jerusalem, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, Rome, planned Spain — the Roman road system as the medium of the gospel's spread.
Attributes
III. Matter
Substantival, conserved, three-dimensional, local. Paul defends the bodily resurrection emphatically against any spiritualising reading (1 Corinthians 15): the resurrection body is a real body, not a disembodied soul.
Attributes
IV. Observer
A single embodied person, plural among others, with Both agency: actively working out salvation, yet "it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12–13). Metaphysical agency: Personal — the God of Abraham, definitively revealed in the resurrection of Jesus.
Attributes
V. Energy
Conventional first-century: finite, substantival, conserved. Paul does not develop a separate doctrine of energy; the relevant category is the Spirit's power working in believers.
Attributes
VI. Information
Conserved at both scales. The scriptures are durable; the resurrection of the body is the doctrinal guarantee of personal-identity conservation through and beyond death.
Attributes
Classified works
Works in the atlas that Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) authored or that draw on this persona's writings, with full attribute fingerprints of their own.
Computed school proximity
The persona's attribute fingerprint scored against all 202 schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated influences above.
Philosophical neighbors
Other personas whose attribute fingerprint sits closest to Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul)'s — intellectual neighbors across traditions and eras.
How Paul of Tarsus (Saul / Saint Paul) resolves each dilemma
54 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 5 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 3 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 2 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
32 mainstream positions
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Films Referencing This Persona (5)
Either directly referenced in the film, or reading the film through one of this persona's top schools.
Experiments Engaging This Persona's Schools
Surface via influence-schools that respond to the experiment. Each entry shows the school through which the connection runs.