Paul

c. 5–c. 64 · Ancient Israel

“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

14 works in canonNonfiction
InfluenceDrew from 0 · Inspired 11
Active period50 CE – 65 CE
Influence

The lineage through Paul

Inspired(11)

who Paul shaped

  • One line from 1 Timothy — 6:10, 'the love of money is the root of all evil' — becomes the running theme of Chaucer's most damning character
  • The Pardoner preaches it as his Latin tag, Radix malorum est cupiditas, citing it again and again through his Prologue and Tale
  • The bite is that he preaches Paul's warning against greed while embodying that greed completely — Scripture turned into a con man's sales pitch
  • The single text that converted Augustine — and through him, much of Western Christianity
  • In the garden at Milan, he hears a child chanting tolle lege, opens Paul's codex at random, and lands on Romans 13:13-14: "put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ"
  • He read that one verse as God speaking directly to him, and his doubt fell away — the Confessions hinge on it
  • Paul's single strange sentence — caught up to the third heaven, 2 Corinthians 12 — became Dante's license to write Paradise
  • Dante names him directly: Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono, "I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul" — measuring his own pilgrim against Paul's rapture
  • The Comedy's tiered heavens and ascending vision take this Pauline glimpse beyond the body as their precedent
  • Paul's whole armour of God becomes an actual wardrobe in Bunyan
  • The helmet of salvation, breastplate of righteousness, shield of faith, the sword of the Spirit, and "all-prayer" — Ephesians 6 turned into gear Christian must put on before he can fight
  • "When he puts on Christ, he is then completely armed from head to foot," Bunyan writes, dramatizing the metaphor into a scene at the Palace Beautiful
Leo TolstoyRussian 19th Century

via Anna Karenina

  • One line from Romans 12:19 — "Vengeance is mine; I will repay" — became the epigraph and moral spine of one of the great novels
  • Paul's claim that judgment is God's prerogative, not man's, is the verdict Tolstoy hangs over Anna's whole story
  • A single verse, load-bearing: read it here and you'll recognize the weight it carries when Tolstoy puts it at the door of Anna Karenina
  • Paul's resurrection chapter becomes Donne's most famous defiance
  • 1 Corinthians 15:26 — "the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" — turns into the closing thunderclap of "Death, be not proud": "Death, thou shalt die"
  • The trumpet of 15:51-52, the dead raised, drives "At the round earth's imagined corners" too — Donne's Holy Sonnets run on Corinthian eschatology
  • One verse of Paul's became a whole poem — Herbert built a piece in The Temple around Colossians 3:3, "your life is hid with Christ in God"
  • He titled it after the verse and threaded the line "My life is hid in Him, that is my treasure" diagonally across the lines, so the page enacts the hiddenness it names
  • A small, exact debt: see how a single Pauline sentence becomes architecture in a seventeenth-century English devotional poet
  • Paul's line "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23) is the verse Faustus damns himself by — Marlowe puts it in his scholar's mouth in the opening soliloquy
  • The trap is in the cutting: Faustus reads only the first half and stops, the half before Paul's promise of "eternal life through Jesus Christ"
  • The whole tragedy turns on a half-read scripture — go see what the rest of the verse says
  • Paul's promise of glory beyond reckoning — "eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard" (2:9) — becomes a punchline two thousand miles downstream
  • Shakespeare hands it to Bottom, who wakes from the night's enchantment and mangles it into "the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen"
  • The joke only lands if you know the verse he's botching
  • Paul's warning that "Satan disguises himself as an angel of light" (11:14) is the line Austen reaches for when Wickham's charm is finally exposed
  • Pride and Prejudice brands the fallen seducer "almost an angel of light" — a quiet biblical brand that tells you exactly how to read his good looks
  • Paul's "armour of God" (6:11-17) — the helmet, the breastplate, the sword of the Spirit — is the gear Milton straps onto his loyal angels in the War in Heaven
  • Paradise Lost takes Ephesians' wrestling "not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces of evil" and stages it literally across the battlefield of Book VI
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In their words

Famous Quotes

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

“I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Biography

About Paul

Pharisee turned apostle, the most prolific author in the New Testament. His letters to early churches articulated the theology of grace, faith, and the body of Christ that became the intellectual foundation of Christianity, influencing Augustine, Luther, and the entire Western tradition.

Paul, Ranked

According to Groblé

  1. Philippians~61PaulEasy·Quick·9 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  2. 2 Timothy~64PaulModerate·Quick·7 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  3. Hebrews~65PaulHard·Quick·28 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  4. Galatians~50PaulModerate·Quick·12 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  5. 2 Thessalonians~51PaulModerate·Quick·4 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  6. 1 Timothy~63PaulModerate·Quick·9 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  7. Romans~57PaulHard·Quick·38 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  8. 2 Corinthians~56PaulModerate·Quick·24 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  9. 1 Corinthians~54PaulModerate·Quick·38 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  10. 1 Thessalonians~51PaulEasy·Quick·7 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  11. Ephesians~62PaulModerate·Quick·12 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  12. Philemon~60PaulEasy·Quick·2 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  13. Colossians~62PaulModerate·Quick·8 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek
  14. Titus~63PaulEasy·Quick·4 pagesInfluence—Popularity—BibleEpistleAncient Greek