--- title: "Paul thought less of himself the longer he knew God" canonical: "https://paulineletters.com/explore/articles/pauls-self-descriptions" published: "2026-08-10" updated: "2026-08-14" license: "https://paulineletters.com/explore/license" source: "Pauline Letters" --- # Paul thought less of himself the longer he knew God > The longer Paul walked with God, the smaller he found himself to be — and the surer he grew of what he had been sent to do. Both movements run the whole length of his life, in opposite directions. **Did Paul become more humble as he got older?** Yes, and he left the evidence in his own letters. Writing from Ephesus around AD 54-55 he called himself the least of the apostles. From Rome around AD 60-62, the very least of all God’s people. Near the end, around AD 62-64, the chief of sinners — in the present tense. Each statement measures him against a larger group than the last. And not one of them is an apology for his calling, which never wavers anywhere in the letters. ## He did not start out small Around AD 33 or 34 a young man named Saul stood at the edge of an execution in Jerusalem and minded the coats of the men throwing the stones. He was not troubled by it. He had the law behind him, letters of authority in his bag, and a clear view of who was in the wrong — and he went from that courtyard to hunting believers house by house. Roughly thirty years later, worn down and writing to a younger man he had trained, the same person described himself as the worst sinner he knew of. Everything between those two sentences is the journey this site traces: the road to Damascus, the years in Arabia, three long missionary journeys, the riots, the shipwreck, the house in Rome with a soldier attached to him. But underneath the travel there is a second journey, quieter and harder to see, and it runs in only one direction. ## Least of the apostles (Ephesus, c. AD 54-55) By the time Paul settled in Ephesus he had been preaching for about twenty years. He had planted churches across Cyprus, Galatia, Macedonia and Greece, argued his case in front of a Roman proconsul, and outworked every colleague he had. On any honest accounting he was the most travelled missionary of his generation. Writing from there to the church at Corinth, he took up the subject of himself: > 1 Corinthians 15:9-10 Read the whole of it and this is not a man running himself down. It is a man doing arithmetic. He does not deny the record — he outworked all of them, and he says so plainly. He simply refuses to keep any of it. What looked from outside like an extraordinary career, he had come to see from inside as something handed to him. ## The very least of all God’s people (Rome, c. AD 60-62) Five or six years later he is in Rome under guard, writing the letter to the Ephesians. The self-description comes back, but the comparison has quietly widened. In Corinth he had measured himself against the other apostles — a dozen men. Now the field is every Christian alive: > Ephesians 3:8 The sentence never stops for self-reproach. It cannot: the smallness is only the setup, and the rest of the sentence is what the grace was given to accomplish. He calls himself the least of all God’s people in the same breath in which he says he was sent to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ to the nations. The two ideas are not in tension for him. They are the same thought. ## Chief of sinners (c. AD 62-64) Near the end of his life, writing to Timothy, the circle opens all the way out. He is no longer comparing himself to apostles, or to Christians. He is comparing himself to sinners — and putting himself first: > 1 Timothy 1:15-16 Note the tense. He does not write that he was the chief of sinners, decades ago, in the courtyard where Stephen died. He writes that he is. Thirty years of ministry had not carried him further from that man; it had shown him more clearly who that man had been. And once again the sentence does not end there. He is the chief of sinners, and that is precisely the reason he was shown mercy — so that anyone afterward who thinks themselves past saving has his case to look at. Set the three side by side and what grows is not the harshness of the word. It is the size of the room he is standing in. Least among the apostles. Least among all God’s people. First among sinners. Each circle contains the one before it. ## What never got smaller It would be easy to read this as a man being slowly ground down. The letters make that reading impossible, because alongside the descent runs something that never moves an inch. The letter to the Galatians opens without so much as a greeting first: > Galatians 1:1 And to the same Corinthians who heard him call himself the least of the apostles, he wrote, perhaps a year later, one of the strangest sentences in his letters — because it holds both halves at once, the standing and the nothingness, without blinking: > 2 Corinthians 12:11 In no way inferior. And nothing. Paul saw no contradiction there, and the distinction is the whole point of the arc. What kept shrinking was his estimate of himself apart from grace. What never shrank was his certainty about what he had been given to do. His humility was never a low view of his calling — it was a high view of who had called him. One note of honesty, since this site marks it everywhere else: two of the four letters quoted above, Ephesians and 1 Timothy, are letters whose authorship is genuinely debated, and their guides here carry that label. This project follows the traditional attribution and says so wherever it matters. A reader who sets those two aside is left with the first two rungs and the same direction of travel — a shorter arc, pointing the same way. ## Walk it yourself These lines were not written at a desk in one sitting. They were written from a rented hall in Ephesus, from a guarded house in Rome, from somewhere near the end — each one by a man in the middle of a journey, with the previous twenty or thirty years behind him. That is why they read differently in place. Step into the story at Ephesus, where the first of them was written, and keep walking: you will pass the riot in the theatre, the last voyage, the shipwreck off Malta, and the house in Rome where the second one came from. The words arrive when he wrote them, at the point on the map where he was standing. ## Common questions ### Did Paul call himself the chief of sinners? Yes — “sinners, of whom I am chief,” in 1 Timothy, a letter whose authorship is debated and labeled so here. The sentence does not stop there: it continues that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. The self-description exists to carry that claim, not to stand alone as self-loathing. ### Was Paul’s humility false modesty? The letters give a way to check: each smaller self-description keeps its grace clause attached — least of the apostles, “but by the grace of God I am what I am.” The estimate of himself shrinks across thirty years while his confidence in the message never does. False modesty performs; this sequence argues. ### Why did Paul boast if he was humble? Almost every boast in the letters is forced and says so — rivals in Corinth made comparison unavoidable, and Paul answers by boasting “of the things that concern my weakness”: beatings, escapes, anxiety for the churches. The one boast he volunteers is in the Lord, and he quotes Jeremiah to make it. --- Canonical: https://paulineletters.com/explore/articles/pauls-self-descriptions