100 Fun Facts About Apostle Paul Bible

Paul described himself as a member of which strict Jewish group?

The Pharisees were still his party at his trial: Paul declared himself a Pharisee, son of Pharisees, and set the council arguing among itself.

Paul's home city of Tarsus lay in which region, as he names it in Acts?

Cilicia was his birthplace, and when a commander took him for a rebel, Paul answered that Tarsus in Cilicia was 'no insignificant city'.

To which tribe of Israel did Paul say he belonged?

Benjamin was also King Saul's tribe, and Paul's Jewish name Saul was perhaps given in memory of that first king of Israel.

Under which famous teacher of Jewish law was Paul educated in Jerusalem?

Gamaliel urged the council to leave the apostles alone in case they were fighting against God, yet his former pupil went on to hunt believers down.

What trade did Paul practise to support himself, partnering with Priscilla and Aquila?

Tentmaking let Paul preach without living off the churches: he wrote that he worked night and day so as not to be a burden to anyone.

According to Acts, what legal status was Paul born with?

Roman citizen by birth, Paul stopped a flogging in Jerusalem by pointing out that it was unlawful to flog a citizen who had not been tried.

At whose martyrdom was Saul present as a witness, according to Acts?

Stephen prayed that his killers be forgiven as he died, while Saul, minding their coats, approved of the killing.

Paul was on the road to which city when he was blinded by a light from heaven?

Damascus was his target: he carried letters from the high priest to arrest followers of Jesus there and bring them bound to Jerusalem.

What did the blinded Saul go without for three days?

Food and drink went untouched for those three days, until his sight returned and he was baptized.

Who laid hands on Saul to restore his sight and baptized him?

Ananias came because of a vision, and when he laid his hands on Saul, something like scales fell from Saul's eyes.

In Galatians, Paul says that after his conversion he first went to which region?

Arabia was where Paul went instead of going up to Jerusalem to consult the apostles, since he insisted his gospel came from no man but from Christ.

When enemies watched the city gates to kill Paul soon after his conversion, how did he escape?

Lowered in a basket through the wall, Paul escaped: the man who had come to arrest believers was now the one being hunted.

Which companion went to find Paul and brought him to the church that launched the Gentile mission?

Barnabas had already vouched for Paul when the Jerusalem disciples were afraid of him, and later went all the way to Tarsus to bring him to teach.

In which city were the followers of Jesus first called 'Christians'?

Antioch earned the name after believers fleeing persecution in Jerusalem began preaching to Greeks there, and its church later sent Paul out on his first missionary journey.

After Paul healed a man lame from birth, the crowd took him for which god, because he did the talking?

Hermes was the gods' messenger, so the crowd cast Paul as him, but soon afterwards they turned on him, stoned him and left him for dead.

On the first journey’s island stop, Paul rebuked and blinded which magician?

Elymas tried to turn the proconsul Sergius Paulus against Paul's message, but once the sorcerer was struck blind, the proconsul believed.

Which young helper left the first missionary journey at Perga and returned to Jerusalem?

John Mark's walkout later split the mission: Paul refused to take him on the next journey, the argument grew sharp, and the two leaders went separate ways.

The Council of Jerusalem, described in Acts 15, settled what key question?

Whether Gentile converts must be circumcised was settled in their favour: they were asked only to avoid idol-polluted food, sexual immorality, strangled meat and blood.

In the clash he recounts in Galatians, Paul confronted which apostle over eating with Gentiles?

Peter had happily eaten with Gentiles until men from James arrived, then drew back out of fear, and Paul opposed him to his face.

In which city did Paul and Silas meet the young disciple Timothy?

Lystra's believers spoke well of Timothy, so Paul took him along, and several of Paul's letters open by naming Timothy beside him.

What did Lydia of Thyatira, whom Paul met at Philippi, sell for a living?

Purple cloth was Lydia's trade, and after her household was baptized, she persuaded Paul's group to come and stay with her.

What event in Philippi led to the conversion of the jailer holding Paul and Silas?

An earthquake at midnight threw open every door, yet no prisoner fled, so the jailer, about to kill himself, asked instead how he could be saved.

In Philippi, Paul cast a spirit out of whom?

A fortune-telling slave girl earned her owners money, so once the spirit left her, they dragged Paul and Silas before the authorities and had them jailed.

When a viper fastened on Paul's hand after his shipwreck, what did the islanders first assume about him?

He was a murderer, they reasoned, whom Justice would not let live even after he escaped the sea, but Paul shook the snake into the fire unharmed.

At the Areopagus, Paul built his sermon around an altar bearing what inscription?

To an unknown god gave Paul his opening: he told the Athenians that the God they worshipped without knowing was the one he had come to proclaim.

Which philosophers did Paul debate in the agora before being taken to the Areopagus?

Epicureans and Stoics dismissed him as a 'babbler' preaching foreign gods, so they brought him before the Areopagus to explain his new teaching.

Why had Aquila and Priscilla recently left Rome when Paul first met them?

Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome, so the couple were starting afresh, and because they shared Paul's trade he lodged and worked with them.

Which proconsul of Achaia, mentioned in Acts, helps historians date Paul's second journey?

Gallio threw the case against Paul out of court as a quarrel over words and names, and a letter naming him, found at Delphi, fixes when he held office.

Why did Paul have his hair cut off at Cenchreae, according to Acts?

Because of a vow, Paul cut his hair, and later in Jerusalem he underwent a Temple purification rite to show that he still kept the law.

Paul stayed almost three years in which city, an important centre of early Christianity?

Ephesus became his base: he taught daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus, so that all who lived in Asia heard the word.

Riots in honour of which goddess were stirred up against Paul by a silversmith?

Artemis's silver shrines were the silversmiths' living, so when Paul taught that gods made by hands are no gods at all, one of them rallied the craftsmen against him.

Galatians says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, nor which other pairing?

Male and female completes the line, and Paul draws the conclusion at once: all who belong to Christ are Abraham's offspring and heirs.

Which New Testament letter, long counted as Paul's, never names its author?

Hebrews was counted among Paul's letters for centuries, though even the early scholar Origen noticed its polished Greek lacked Paul's rougher style.

Paul wrote that faith, hope and which third virtue remain, calling it the greatest of the three?

Love never fails, Paul says, while even prophecy, tongues and knowledge will one day pass away.

Which is the longest of the thirteen Pauline epistles?

Romans went to a church Paul had not yet visited, preparing the way for a trip he planned to Spain, calling at Rome on the way.

Who was the scribe, or amanuensis, who wrote down Paul’s longest letter?

Tertius even slipped his own greeting into the letter he was taking down: 'I, Tertius, who write the letter, greet you in the Lord.'

Which woman from Cenchreae does Paul commend at the end of his longest letter?

Phoebe served the church at Cenchreae, and Paul asks his readers to give her any help she needs, since she had helped many people, including him.

Paul's letter asking a fellow worker to welcome a man back as a beloved brother is addressed to whom?

Philemon receives the request, and Paul even offers to repay anything the man owes.

What was the name of the man Paul called his child and sent back with a letter?

Onesimus means 'useful', so Paul plays on the name: once useless, he writes, but now useful to them both.

At Troas, what happened to a young man named Eutychus during Paul's all-night talk?

He fell from a window three floors up after dozing off and was taken up dead, Acts says, but Paul embraced him and he was brought back alive.

Which letter contains Paul's 'thorn in the flesh', given to keep him from becoming proud?

2 Corinthians records that Paul begged three times for the thorn to be taken away, and was told, 'My grace is sufficient for you.'

After his arrest in Jerusalem, which governor first heard Paul's case?

Felix kept sending for Paul in the hope of a bribe, and when he was replaced, he left Paul in prison as a favour to the Jewish leaders.

When Festus proposed sending him back to Jerusalem for trial, what did Paul do?

Appealed to Caesar, Paul was sent to Rome for the emperor to judge, though Festus admitted he could hardly say what the charges were.

On his voyage to Rome as a prisoner, Paul was shipwrecked on which island?

Malta's islanders showed the shipwrecked crew unusual kindness, lighting a fire to welcome them all out of the rain and the cold.

The ship carrying Paul toward Rome ran into a storm after leaving Fair Havens on which island?

Crete's Fair Havens is where Paul urged them to spend the winter, but the centurion trusted the ship's master and owner, and they sailed into a violent north-easter.

How does the Book of Acts leave Paul at its end?

Preaching from a rented house under guard, Paul welcomes everyone who comes to him while he waits for his trial.

Under which emperor is Paul traditionally said to have been beheaded?

Nero is the emperor tradition names, because Acts ends before Paul's death and never says how he died, leaving later writers such as Eusebius to tell it.

The Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls stands on which ancient road?

Via Ostiensis ran past the estate of a Christian woman named Lucina, where Paul was said to be buried, and Constantine built the first church over the grave.

What inscription appeared on the marble sarcophagus found under the basilica in 2002?

Vatican archaeologists declared it Paul's tomb in 2006; radiocarbon dating in 2009 put the bone fragments in the 1st or 2nd century.

In many churches, the feast of Paul's conversion on 25 January ends a week of prayer for what?

Unity among Christians is the aim, and in 1941 the Faith and Order movement moved its own unity week to these January dates so churches could pray together.

Which animal in Caravaggio's painting of Paul's conversion never appears in the Bible's accounts?

A horse became a fixture of paintings of the scene from the 15th century onward, yet Acts says only that Saul fell to the ground.

According to Acts, what fell from Paul's eyes when his sight returned after three days of blindness?

Scales, or 'something like scales' in the text, gave English the idiom 'the scales fell from my eyes' for suddenly seeing a situation clearly.

Which Jesus saying, absent from all four Gospels, does Paul quote?

'More blessed to give than receive' comes at the close of Paul's farewell to church elders at Miletus, where he urges them to support the weak as he had, by working with his own hands.

Which everyday phrase comes from Paul's account of the last trumpet?

The twinkling of an eye is how quickly Paul says the living will be changed when the trumpet sounds: not everyone will sleep in the grave, he writes, but everyone will be transformed.

Which travelling companion does Paul call 'the beloved physician' in his letter to the Colossians?

Luke is venerated as the patron saint of physicians, and tradition credits this doctor with writing both a Gospel and the Book of Acts.

On which island, the first stop of his first missionary journey, does Acts first call Saul 'Paul'?

Cyprus is where the switch happens, mid-story and without comment, so the popular idea that Saul was renamed Paul at his conversion has no basis in Acts.

Which Dutch master painted himself as the Apostle Paul in a 1661 self-portrait in the Rijksmuseum?

Rembrandt marked himself out as the apostle with a manuscript in his hand and a sword tucked under his arm, Paul's traditional attributes in art.

Who overheard a plot by more than forty men to ambush Paul and warned the Roman commander?

His nephew, the son of Paul's sister, carried the warning to the barracks, and that same night the commander sent Paul to the coast under an escort of 470 troops.

A night vision of a man begging for help led Paul to sail from Troas to which region?

Macedonia became the goal only after the group had been stopped from preaching in Asia and from entering Bithynia, so the dream settled a route that had hit two dead ends.

Paul ends several of his letters by telling believers to greet one another with what?

A holy kiss is the root of the 'sign of peace' in church services, which in many congregations has since softened into a handshake or a hug.

Paul's three Pastoral Epistles are addressed to Timothy and which other trusted co-worker?

Titus and Timothy both get advice on running churches, though many scholars think all three letters were written in Paul's name after his lifetime.

In which coastal city was Paul held prisoner for two years before being shipped to Rome?

Caesarea is where the governor kept Paul under guard in Herod's headquarters, sending for him often in the hope, Acts says, of being offered a bribe.

Which king, arriving with his sister Bernice, heard Paul's defence before he was sent to Rome?

Agrippa met Paul's challenge about believing the prophets with a famous deflection, asking whether a little persuasion was meant to make him a Christian.

Paul wrote that he planned to stop in Rome before going on to preach in which western land?

Spain was to be his next mission field, with the Roman church as his base; later writers such as Cyril of Jerusalem said he got there, though the New Testament never does.

What name does Acts use for the Jesus movement whose members Paul, as Saul, set out to arrest?

The Way is the name Paul still uses years later on trial, telling a Roman governor that he serves God as a follower of the Way, 'which they call a sect'.

In the 'armour of God' passage credited to Paul, which piece of equipment stands for faith?

The shield is the piece meant to put out the enemy's flaming darts; the same list pairs the helmet with salvation and the breastplate with righteousness.

Which city's synagogue won praise for checking Paul's message against the scriptures every day?

Berea lent its name to the many churches and study groups that call themselves Berean, after hosts who tested even an apostle's claims against the text.

Paul wrote that he planted the seed and which eloquent preacher from Alexandria watered it?

Apollos had such a following that some believers were calling themselves his party, and Paul's gardening image was meant to show the two were not rivals.

Why did Paul call himself 'least of the apostles' and unworthy even to bear the title?

He had persecuted the church, he explains, yet in the next breath he claims to have worked harder than all of the other apostles.

What cargo did the crew of Paul's storm-battered ship finally throw into the sea to lighten it?

Wheat went over the side last, after the ship's tackle, and only once Paul had persuaded all 276 people aboard to stop fasting and take a meal.

What false charge sparked the Jerusalem riot that ended with Paul in Roman custody?

Bringing Greeks into the temple was only an assumption: his accusers had earlier seen Paul in the city with a Gentile companion, Trophimus, and jumped to a conclusion.

Paul split the Sanhedrin by saying his trial concerned which belief, denied by its Sadducees?

The resurrection of the dead divided the council so bitterly that the commander, afraid Paul would be torn to pieces, sent soldiers in to drag him out.

When Paul was arrested in Jerusalem, the Roman commander mistook him for a rebel leader from where?

Egypt was home to an agitator who had led four thousand men into the wilderness; hearing Paul address him in Greek told the officer he had the wrong man.

In a list of hardships that includes three shipwrecks, what does Paul say he received five times?

Thirty-nine lashes, 'forty minus one' in his words, was the synagogue's maximum: the law allowed forty, and courts stopped one short so that a miscount could never break it.

The Alexandrian ship that carried Paul to Italy after his wreck bore which pair as its figurehead?

Castor and Pollux were worshipped as protectors of sailors, and the ship named for them had spent the winter at the same island as Paul's stranded party.

The second-century Acts of Paul describes the apostle's appearance as including which features?

Bald with crooked legs is only part of the portrait, which adds eyebrows that meet and a hooked nose and may preserve a memory handed down by word of mouth.

A forged set of letters, accepted as genuine by Jerome, pairs Paul with which Roman philosopher?

Seneca earned an entry in Jerome's book On Illustrious Men thanks to the letters, which were treated as real until Renaissance scholars began to pick them apart.

According to Acts, which everyday items that had touched Paul were carried to the sick to heal them?

Handkerchiefs and aprons did the healing at a distance in what Acts itself calls 'special miracles', and the fame of them soon had travelling exorcists borrowing Paul's name.

How did Agabus act out his warning that Paul would be arrested in Jerusalem?

Agabus tied himself with a belt, hand and foot, using the one Paul wore; Paul's friends wept and begged him to turn back, and he answered that he was ready to be jailed or worse.

On his first visit to Jerusalem as a believer, Paul says he met which 'brother of the Lord'?

James reappears later in the same letter as one of the three leaders Paul calls the reputed 'pillars' of the Jerusalem church.

What were Paul and Silas doing at midnight in the Philippi jail, with their feet in the stocks?

Singing hymns and praying, with the other prisoners listening, came only hours after both men had been stripped and beaten with rods on the magistrates' orders.

What did Paul advise Timothy to take a little of for the sake of his stomach?

Wine, 'a little' of it, was his prescription for a young colleague who had been drinking nothing but water and was often unwell.

The apostle Paul's name comes from an old Roman surname that literally means what?

Small is the literal sense of the Latin original, a surname of Rome's Aemilian clan that also gave the world Paolo, Pablo and Pavel.

Which teaching drawn from Paul's letters became the central doctrine of Luther's Reformation?

Justification by faith mattered so much to Luther that he added the word 'alone' to Paul's sentence in his German Bible, an insertion that stirred lasting controversy.

The capital of which US state is named after a log chapel dedicated to the Apostle Paul?

Minnesota's capital was known as Pig's Eye, after a local tavern-keeper, until the priest who built the chapel told settlers to adopt its name instead.

Which phrase for the authorities entered English through Tyndale's translation of a letter of Paul?

The powers that be comes from Tyndale's 1526 rendering of Paul's instruction to submit to rulers, on the ground that every existing authority has been put there by God.

Paul wrote that the day of the Lord will come unexpectedly, like what in the night?

A thief in the night was Paul's picture of a day nobody can predict, one that strikes just as people are saying 'peace and safety'.

Paul pictures Gentile believers as wild branches grafted into which kind of cultivated tree?

Olive grafting of that kind runs 'contrary to nature', Paul admits; his point was that the new branches live off the old root and have no grounds to boast.

The seven sons of which Jewish priest were beaten by a possessed man after invoking Paul's name?

Sceva's sons ran from the house naked and wounded after the possessed man replied that he knew Jesus and knew Paul, then asked who they were.

Which former companion does Paul say abandoned him because he preferred this present world?

Demas had once sent greetings alongside Paul's trusted doctor; by the last letter he has gone, and only that doctor is still at the apostle's side.

Which centurion of the Augustan cohort escorted the prisoner Paul on his voyage toward Rome?

Julius treated his prisoner kindly from the first port, letting him go ashore to see friends, and at the wreck he stopped the soldiers from killing the captives to save Paul.

Paul's speech to the Areopagus quotes a line about being God's offspring from which Greek poet?

Aratus wrote the line in his Phenomena, a poem describing the constellations, and Paul turned it into an argument against gods made of gold, silver or stone.

Which Roman proconsul became a believer after watching Paul strike a court sorcerer blind?

Sergius Paulus shares his name with the apostle, and Jerome guessed that Saul began calling himself Paul to commemorate the conversion of so prominent a man.

What name does the King James Bible give the violent wind that drove Paul's ship off course?

Euroclydon is a cyclonic north-easter of the Mediterranean autumn and winter, and it caught the ship because the voyage had run on past the safe sailing season.

Which member of the Areopagus court became a believer after hearing Paul speak in Athens?

Dionysius is remembered as the first bishop of Athens, and by the sixth century a set of mystical treatises by an anonymous author was circulating under his name.

After his shipwreck, Paul healed the fever-stricken father of which leading man of the island?

Publius had lodged the castaways for three days, and once his father recovered the rest of the island's sick came to Paul to be cured.

Which second-century teacher built the first known Christian canon around ten letters of Paul?

Marcion rejected the Jewish scriptures altogether, and his slimmed-down canon pushed the wider church into deciding which books it accepted.

Which woman does Paul call notable among the apostles, a name later copyists turned into a man's?

Junia was understood to be a woman throughout the early centuries, by writers such as John Chrysostom and Jerome; the masculine 'Junias' spread much later and was still printed in many 20th-century Bibles.

Paul's letter to the Colossians tells them to swap letters with the church in which nearby city?

Laodicea's letter is generally thought lost, and a later forger filled the gap with a short Latin epistle stitched together from lines of Paul's other letters.

Which Roman abbey is by tradition the site of Paul's beheading?

Tre Fontane means 'three fountains': legend says the apostle's severed head bounced three times and a spring rose wherever it struck the ground.