Paul, Apostle of Christ – a scene guide
A scene-by-scene look at the 2018 film about the conversion and martyrdom of the apostle to the Gentiles. Includes ten clips from the film.
For paid subscribers: This is a revised, ad-free version of a scene guide I first posted to my blog on March 26, 2018. You can read the original version here, and you can see more posts about the film—including my review of it and my interviews with director Andrew Hyatt and lead actor James Faulkner—via the tags at that blog and this Substack.
Click here for more scene-by-scene guides to recent Bible films.
I recently posted scene guides for Risen and The Young Messiah. Now it’s time for Paul, Apostle of Christ. The film focuses on the last days of Paul’s life, as he awaits his martyrdom and tells his life story to Luke. Along the way, there are flashbacks to his previous life as a persecutor of the Church, and to his conversion.
The scene guide below notes the many, many passages from the New Testament that are woven into the script — or at least as many as I could detect! — and it includes a few notes on the secular history and apocryphal traditions that are alluded to in the film as well. Also: ten clips from the film have been available online since it first came out, so I have included those in the scene guide where appropriate, too.
Paul, Apostle of Christ – a scene guide (with clips)
0:40-6:40 — Luke arrives in Rome
The opening titles set the film in Rome in AD 67, during the persecution under Nero that took place after a great fire destroyed much of the city. The fire itself took place in AD 64, and the persecution that followed is mentioned by the ancient Roman historians Tacitus (who wrote the Annals c. AD 116) and Suetonius (who wrote The Lives of the Caesars c. AD 121). References to Paul’s death appear in Christian writings as early as I Clement in the AD 90s, but the earliest source that explicitly links it to the reign of Nero is The Acts of Paul, an apocryphal text that was written c. AD 160.
The opening titles identify the film’s title character as “Saul of Tarsus”. The fact that Saul (or Paul) came from Tarsus, the capital city of Cilicia — a region on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey — is mentioned a few times in the book of Acts (9:11, 30; 11:25; 21:39; 22:3) but not in any of Paul’s epistles.
The titles go on to say that Saul is known to the Roman world as “Paul”. The book of Acts calls him “Saul” for the first several chapters in which he appears, but then — starting in Acts 13:9, just a few verses after he embarks on his first missionary journey — it starts calling him “Paul”, and it never uses “Saul” again except when Paul tells the story of his conversion and quotes what other people said to him (Acts 22:7, 13; 26:14). Interestingly, the book of Acts switches from one name to the other while Paul is talking to a Roman official who is also named Paul (Acts 13:6-12): the Roman is typically called “Sergius Paulus” in English Bibles, but Paul and Paulus are both “Paulos” in the original Greek, so their names are actually identical.
The opening titles mention — and the first scene shows — that Christians are being burned to death in the streets. This appears to be based on the passage in Tacitus which states that some Christians “were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.” The immediate context of that passage seems to indicate that this took place in Nero’s gardens, though, rather than in the street.
Luke’s arrival in the city, and his prominent role throughout the film, are based on Paul’s statement that “only Luke” was with him as he awaited his death (II Timothy 4:11).
Luke meets Priscilla and Aquila, in that order. Aquila and Priscilla were Jewish-Christian tentmakers who first met Paul in Corinth c. AD 50 (Acts 18:1-2). At the time, Paul was on his second missionary journey, and Aquila and Priscilla were two of the many Jews who had just been expelled from Rome by the emperor Claudius. (Suetonius says Claudius expelled the Jews because they “constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus,” and some historians — but not all — think this is a garbled reference to Christ, i.e. they think Claudius expelled the Jews because of disturbances over the arrival of Christianity in Rome.) Paul began working with Aquila and Priscilla partly because he was a tentmaker just like they were (Acts 18:2-3), and eventually the three of them moved to Ephesus together (Acts 18:19); it is believed that that is where Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, which ends with Paul sending greetings from Aquila and Priscilla (I Corinthians 16:19). The couple then stayed in Ephesus while Paul continued on his travels (Acts 18:19), but it appears they moved back to Rome eventually, because when Paul wrote his letter to the Romans a few years later, he sent greetings to them there (Romans 16:3). They evidently left Rome again after that, though; Paul’s second letter to Timothy is believed to have been written when Paul was in Rome, awaiting his martyrdom — and in it, he sends greetings to Aquila and Priscilla (II Timothy 4:19), which suggests they had left Rome by then. So: Aquila and Priscilla were certainly associated with the Christian community in Rome, but they might not have been there during the period depicted in this film.
The fact that Luke meets Priscilla first — and that the actress who plays her is mentioned in the credits before the actor who plays her husband — may be a subtle nod to the fact that nearly every reference to this couple in the New Testament puts Priscilla’s name first.
Priscilla thanks Eubulus for guiding Luke to the Christians’ secret community. Eubulus is one of the people who sends his greetings in II Timothy 4:21.
Aquila tells Tarquin to speak with Heroditon and Rufus about the supplies they need. Paul sent greetings to Rufus in Romans 16:13 and said Rufus’s mother “has been a mother to me, too.” Even more intriguingly, Mark — the canonical gospel that is traditionally associated with the Roman church — says Simon of Cyrene had a son named Rufus (Mark 15:21). If that’s the same Rufus that Paul sent greetings to, then one of the Christians hiding from Nero’s soldiers in this film could be the son of the man who helped Jesus carry his cross — but the film never gets into that.
6:40-8:00 — Luke has dinner with Priscilla and Aquila
Luke says things have gotten worse in Rome since his previous visit with Paul. He’s referring to the time Paul went to Rome to appeal a case to Nero that had been brought against him in Jerusalem (Acts 28:14-31; cf Acts 25:9-12). Paul’s arrival on that visit is one of several passages in the book of Acts that are written in the first person plural (“we got to Rome,” etc.), so the book — or one of its key sources — was clearly written by someone who had traveled with Paul, and the someone in question is traditionally thought to have been Luke. While it’s not clear how long Paul’s traveling companion stayed in Rome, Paul stayed for two years, living with a guard in a rented house and receiving visitors. Those years are generally dated to c. AD 60-62, or two to four years before the Great Fire and the persecutions that resulted from it.
Aquila says men, women and children are being torn apart by beasts in the circus, to the laughter of the crowd. This, too, comes from Tacitus, though Tacitus — who detested the Christians and believed they deserved to be killed by Nero! — says the Romans began to feel “compassion” for the Christians because it seemed to them that the Christians were not being killed “for the public good but to glut one man’s cruelty.”
Priscilla tells Luke there are many people in the community who need a physician. Paul called Luke “the doctor” in Colossians 4:14, when Luke sent greetings to Paul’s readers.
8:00-9:50 — Paul meets the new prison prefect
Paul is in the Mamertime prison. The name “Mamertime” comes from the Middle Ages; in Paul’s day it was known as the Tullianum, and it was already several centuries old.
A few point-of-view shots indicate that Paul is having trouble with his eyesight, and Paul confirms this when he speaks to Luke a little bit later. There are several passages in the New Testament that indicate Paul had trouble with his eyes. He was blind for a brief period after his first vision of Jesus (Acts 9:8-18, 22:11-13), he appears not to have recognized the Jewish high priest at one point (Acts 23:1-5), and in his epistle to the Galatians, he mentions an illness he endured while he was with them, and he says he knows the Galatians would have torn out their eyes and given them to him if it had been possible to do so (Galatians 4:13-15). He also comments on how large his handwriting is when he signs that epistle (Galatians 6:11).
Paul is also bald in this film, which is how he is traditionally depicted in Christian iconography. (It is also how he was depicted in the David C. Cook comic-book adaptation of the Bible that I grew up with.) And Mauritius, the new prison prefect, comments that Paul is not standing up straight. Details like these may or may not be nods to the tradition that Paul was “a man little of stature, thin-haired upon the head [and] crooked in the legs,” which goes back at least as far as The Acts of Paul — though Paul himself does admit in one of his epistles that he was not always as impressive in person as he seemed to be in his letters (II Corinthians 10:10). In context, Paul was addressing the charge that he was “timid” when he spoke to the Corinthians face-to-face (II Corinthians 10:1), but his physical appearance could have played into that.
Paul is told that he will be executed by beheading. While Paul’s martyrdom is alluded to in earlier texts, the detail that he was beheaded is first attested in The Acts of Paul — which goes on to describe some miracles that allegedly accompanied his death. Supposedly, Paul was beheaded because his Roman citizenship entitled him to a quicker, cleaner execution than the other martyrs. (His citizenship isn’t mentioned in any of the epistles but it is mentioned in Acts 16:37-38, 22:23-29, and 23:27.)
