How did Paul die?

Where Acts stops

Acts follows Paul all the way to Rome, and then it simply stops.

Paul stayed two whole years in his own rented house and received all who were coming to him, preaching God’s Kingdom and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, without hindrance.

Two years chained to a soldier, waiting for his appeal to Caesar to be heard, brings us to about AD 62. What came next, Luke never says. Some think he finished the book before the trial. Others think the message reaching the capital unhindered was the ending he wanted.

A farewell in a letter

Paul wrote from prison more than once, and one letter in his name reads like a last word.

For I am already being offered, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.

Many scholars think a follower wrote 2 Timothy after Paul’s death; others defend it as his own. Either way, it shows how early Christians remembered his last days: a prisoner in Rome, abandoned at his first hearing (2 Timothy 4:16), sure the end had come.

The earliest witnesses

No first-century writer describes the execution, but the tradition starts early.

• 1 Clement, about AD 96. A letter from the church in Rome says Paul wore chains seven times, was exiled and stoned, preached in East and West, reached the farthest bounds of the West, bore witness before rulers and so departed from the world (1 Clement 5).
• Tertullian, about AD 200. In Rome, he writes, Paul won his crown with a death like John’s, meaning John the Baptist, who was beheaded (Prescription against Heretics 36).
• Eusebius, early fourth century. Paul was beheaded in Rome under Nero, he says, and he quotes Gaius, a Roman Christian of about AD 200, who could show visitors the shrines of Peter on the Vatican and of Paul on the road to Ostia (Church History 2.25).

The farthest bounds of the West may mean Spain, where Paul had planned to go (Romans 15:24). Eusebius believed Paul was released after those two years, traveled again and was arrested a second time (Church History 2.22).

The sword, not the cross

Crucifixion was for slaves and non-citizens. A Roman citizen condemned to death was given the sword, and Paul was born a Roman (Acts 22:28). Peter, a fisherman from Galilee, was crucified, tradition says, as How did Saint Peter die? tells. That is why Christian art gives Paul a sword. A later legend adds that his severed head bounced three times and a spring rose at each spot, at a place called Aquae Salviae, south of Rome. The Abbey of Tre Fontane, Three Fountains, still stands there.

The tomb on the Ostian Way

Constantine built a small church over the grave, and in the 380s three emperors replaced it with a great basilica. Fire gutted it in 1823, and today’s St Paul Outside the Walls was rebuilt on the old plan. In 2006 Vatican archaeologists exposed a marble sarcophagus under the altar, beneath a slab inscribed PAULO APOSTOLO MART, to Paul, apostle, martyr. In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI announced that bone fragments drawn out through a small hole had been radiocarbon dated to the first or second century. Catholics and Orthodox keep June 29 as the feast of Peter and Paul together.