← All Topics

Paul

80 Episodes

Paul is a first-century Jewish apostle and letter writer whose surviving epistles became central to early Christian theology and later Christian identity. In these discussions, he matters as a historically situated Jewish thinker whose arguments to gentile audiences are often flattened into timeless doctrine or misused against Judaism.

Why this topic matters

Paul sits at the center of recurring debates about law, gentiles, resurrection, slavery, authorship, and the relationship between early Christianity and Judaism. Episodes under this topic often push back on readings that treat Paul as if he stepped outside Judaism and founded a universal religion detached from its Jewish context.

Paul becomes a test case for one of the show’s biggest themes: the distance between historically situated ancient discourse and the later theological systems built from it. Conversations about him regularly turn on audience, circumstance, and genre, asking what changes when Paul’s letters are read as interventions aimed at specific gentile communities rather than as abstract doctrinal treatises.

Where to start

Start here for the best in-depth listening on Paul: featured segments, featured episodes, and the episode with the most mentions.

Quotes from the Data

“Paul was a Jew. But then he rejected this and this and this and this and this about Judaism. And it turns out to be sort of all the things, well, frankly, all the things that modern Christians generally reject about ancient Judaism themselves.”

Matthew Thiessen Episode 26

“And so the problem with—for Paul, the problem with Judaism wasn't they thought you had to earn your salvation, it was that they were ethnocentric and thought Jews and Jews only were God's people.”

Matthew Thiessen Episode 26

“Because God appointed me specifically to non-Jews. And in Galatians he does the same thing. He talks about having the gospel to the foreskin is the actual Greek.”

Matthew Thiessen Episode 26

“And if the Messiah's pneuma, his spirit, his stuff gets into you and you are placed in the Messiah, then you have also taken on a messianic identity. So you've become messianic and you've become sons and seed of Abraham too.”

Matthew Thiessen Episode 26

Top episodes

Ranked by mentions of Paul across the transcript. Start with the top mention above, then keep going here.

All episodes

Every episode currently tagged with Paul.