Perhaps the most misunderstood word in the Bible, and one Paul seems to rely on in the letter to the Romans, is "wrath", as in "the wrath of God". Is God angry, mean, resentful or vindictive--or does "wrath" mean something very different, even if still challenging?

In the suffering Servant song of Isaiah 53, God works through this despised, rejected and persecuted figure of the Suffering Servant, rather than working through the persecuting crowd. Jesus consistently made God available to people in this way, not only taking the side of the marginalised, but being made as marginal as possible through crucifixion. It’s not a total surprise then that the only way God would get through to Paul, or the only way he wanted to get though, is as The Persecuted One.

Much is made of the fact that Jesus made no great missionary journeys himself. Some even take this as an indication that Christ had no great missionary intentions. Was Paul taking the Gospel where Jesus had never intended it should go?

Paul wrote “letters,” but at the same time, they weren’t only letters...

Had Paul claimed that Jesus is Messiah because of his life and teaching, many could accept that. Had he even claimed that despite his ignominious death, Jesus was still messiah, a Jewish martyr, this too would be understandable within Jewish frames of reference. But Paul claims Jesus as messiah precisely because of the cross...

Certain influential voices today claim that Christianity is something completely different to what Christ intended, and that it is all Paul's fault. Did Paul go too far in his ministry?

Paul seems to think of himself and of other Christians as "included" or "located" in Christ, but not as an isolated believer.

If formerly Catholics seemed over-concerned with what happens after death, we find that now they often have little concern and only the vaguest ideas. And then, as now, people question how the resurrection of the dead could be possible. Paul speaks to all of this.

Paul, the Pharisee and persecutor of the followers of ‘the Way’, thought that Jesus was a counterfeit Messiah, whose false claims brought him to the kind of shameful and scandalous death that he deserved. Then he met the risen and glorious Christ...

Paul was the earliest writer of the New Testament and the first ever to articulate an understanding of the saving death of Jesus Christ.

"Metanoia" very aptly captures the essence of Paul’s experience and points to us the kind of conversion to which we too are being called today.

It sounds like a trick question, but Scripture scholars today spill much ink in discussions about the authorship of the Pauline epistles. Why would such a question arise? What are the most important things for an ordinary Catholic to know in this regard?

"Works well with others" is not the sort of notation we might expect on Paul's report card, but the record shows that he did, after all, work very well with others--if they were as intent as he was on the spread of the Gospel.

The early Paul (Saul) believed that the promises made to Israel by God had still not been fulfilled, but that the countdown was on.

How did Paul put together the history and sacred writings of Israel with the teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus? Was the Bible to be written from scratch, now that Jesus had come and made all things new?

Who was this Apostle sent to proclaim the Good News to the Gentiles? If we want to know Paul we must look primarily at the letters he wrote, which give firsthand information about his person and teaching.

Was Paul wrong about the "end of the ages"?

It has become commonplace to regard ‘low’ Christology (i.e. an emphasis on the humanity of Jesus) as early and ‘high’ Christology (i. e. an emphasis on the divinity of Jesus) as a late arrival to theology.

1961: The city of Rome was celebrating the centenary anniversary of the Apostle’s arrival there. To mark the occasion, Alberione commissioned two altars for the Queen of Apostles Basilica. One altar was to feature a painting of Jesus, the Divine Master or Teacher; the other, his faithful disciple, Paul.

In the last five chapters of Romans, Paul draws some practical conclusions from the dense doctrinal considerations of the first half of his letter. It all begins with a statement which could be described as a manifesto for Christian living: I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship (Rmns 12:1).

An essay on the Letter to the Colossians and the new and bracing worldview it proposes.

The surprisingly high vision of the Church in Paul's letter to the Ephesians has led many scholars to doubt Paul's personal authorship of this letter, but there is much we can learn from the image of the Church as Bride of Christ.

What is the faith that leads to salvation, according to St Paul? Is it our "faith in Jesus", or the "faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2: 20)?

The Holy Spirit is the Power that makes it possible for each Christian to do what Christ did.

In Romans 6:11 Paul tries to get his readers to think through and act out the consequences of their baptism, of their having declared allegiance to another Lord: "So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus."

The Galatians are people who have been living by grace and some have come along and tried to persuade them to live by the Law again. What is the relationship between grace (freedom in Christ) and Law? Do we even now really live according to St Paul's understanding?

Many modern-day readers hold the mistaken notion that the sequence in which the New Testament books are arranged in our modern-day editions follow the time or chronology of their writing. But the first writer of the New Testament was Paul, the Apostle, and his very first letter was addressed to the Christian community in Thessalonica (ca. 50 A.D.).

No one in the history of the world has understood and articulated the problem of Law and religion better than St. Paul, particularly in Romans and Galatians. But with this subject more than any other the opportunities for a superficial reading present themselves.

Raphael's depiction of "Paul Preaching at Athens" shows Paul at his parental best, patiently engaging in the process of religious formation. Like a concerned father or mother, Paul tries to meet these “children” on their own level, adapting his message in a way they will best understand while encouraging them in a journey toward acceptance of and maturation in Christ.

The Pauline mission, characterized by participation, collaboration, pooling of energies and resources, was a “networking in love” in the most concrete sense.

Paul retells the story of Jesus’ self-offering at the Last Supper as a solution to a concrete problem experienced in the Corinthian community.

We take it for granted that we have only four accounts of the gospel in the New Testament—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But then, what is Paul trying to prove when he claims that he had been “set apart for the gospel of God” (Rom 1:1)?

Throughout history, not a few readers of the Epistles have come to regard the Apostle Paul as a renegade Jew, antagonistic to his fellow-Jews. Some have even suggested that Paul, who described himself “a Hebrew of Hebrews” (Phil 3: 5), was himself “anti-semitic”! This misunderstanding about Paul's attitude toward Judaism became widespread from the sixteenth century onward.

The paradox of Christian salvation is that though Christ shares our death in order that we may share his life, the believer can only share that life if he/she, in turn, is willing to share Christ’s death. This, in turn, reveals the mysterious fruitfulness of suffering.

Insights from Rene Girard and James Alison shed light on what Paul meant in "God made him to be sin who knew no sin" and "Christ became a curse for us."

The whole of the New Testament bears witness that Christ’s death is sacrificial, but few theological ideas have been more misunderstood.

How many people distance themselves from religion because they cannot outgrow the idea of a god, who, like a policeman, is always on the watch for offenses and ready to inflict the severest punishment? Is this the image Paul presents?

Contrary to charges that Paul was a woman-hater, the early Church cherished legends and stories of Paul's extraordinary women disciples, first among them Thecla, "equal to the Apostles."

In various passages Paul identifies himself as a prisoner, but how many times was he actually incarcerated? According to secondary sources, namely the Acts of the Apostles and the Second Letter to Timothy, Paul may have been imprisoned as many as five times, each imprisonment varying in duration.

The story of Saul of Tarsus’ meeting with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus appears three times within the Acts of the Apostles. Luke has placed the three versions of the story at strategic points in his narrative, each time with the intention of drawing the readers’ attention to a particular aspect of Paul’s experience.

As the Daughters of St Paul centennial nears its official conclusion, one of the Founder's collaborators reflects on the essential place of St Paul in Alberione's thought and spirituality.

St. Paul is one of the best-known personalities of the ancient world—the historian's dream come true. We have a better idea of Paul's life than we do of many major figures of the Roman Empire. We certainly know more about Paul than we do, humanly speaking, about Jesus, who left no personal writings at all.

John and Paul give two perspectives of the one reality of the Incarnation. For John, it is “putting on”; for Paul, it is “taking off.” For John, God becomes one of us by “putting on human flesh,” whereas for Paul, it is by “emptying himself of divine glory.”

How was a staunch Jew like Paul, without turning his back on his Jewish belief in the one true God of Israel, able to declare that “Jesus Christ is Lord!” (Phil 2:11). What force does this declaration have for him?

An attribute common to all of Rembrandt’s paintings of Paul is old age. As depicted in this painting, the Apostle is an elderly man, devoid of virile strength and grace. He is a lonely figure sitting in darkness, weighed down by layers of warm clothing. Rembrandt seems to have left nothing in writing to explain why the Apostle was a favorite subject of his, or why he chose to present Paul as older and vulnerable.

Pauline ethic may be summarized in three simple, yet loaded words: Identity informs behavior.

For us today, “justice” only evokes images of a legal system—law, court hearing, verdict, etc. An alternative translation is “righteousness,” with connotations of moral uprightness, but this fails to capture the mentality behind Paul’s original expression.

Aside from a few facts, Paul gives us no direct information about the life of Jesus. This has lead some scholars to conclude that Paul had no interest in, and possibly even no knowledge of the earthly Jesus, and this view has in turn given rise to the idea that Paul’s Jesus is purely a theological construction with no basis in any historical fact.

But Paul's relationship to the Bible isn't only that of an author.

We who travel today in speed and comfort may fail to recognize Paul’s commitment of time and personal abnegation in traveling by foot from place to place. What drove Paul onward in his journeys despite fatigue and the hardships of travel?

If you’ve ever heard the exhortation, “Offer it up!” you were encountering a Pauline notion.

Paul makes it clear again and again that Christ was the fulfilment of everything Judaism tried to do, and one way to express this was to refer to Jesus as the messiah.

Writing to the Philippians, Paul declares that he has been grasped by Christ (cf. Phil 3:12), as if Christ had physically captured him by surprise. It is this “assault” that Coghetti seems to be alluding to in his fresco in the Basilica of St Paul.

The first mention of a collection of Paul’s letters was found in a Latin document (165-185 A.D.) known as the Muratorian Canon, an annotated list of sacred Christian writings. Thirteen of Paul’s letters appeared in the list. Several theories have been proposed by scholars regarding the formation of the Pauline Corpus.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing in the New Testament is that someone highly unlikely to attribute divinity to anyone but God, i.e. a Jew steeped in rabbinical tradition, is precisely the person who makes the clearest claims for the divinity of Christ.

Although Paul wrote frankly about a public disagreement with Peter, Christian art and literature have firmly and consistently kept the two together.

The apostle Paul is sometimes characterized as a misogynist, and there are expressions in the epistles that could lead a modern mind to that conclusion. Scripture scholar Sister Bernardita Dianzon draws very different conclusions from her analysis of Paul's writings. (This article is being posted on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Daughters of St Paul.)