It is important to evaluate Paul’s worldview, as it affects all of his writing. His ideals are noteworthy because of their apocalyptic nature, something that is almost universally recognized by scholars, including Ben C. Blackwell, Jon K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston, author of Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination. To Paul, the end times were near. Ernst Käsemann, author of “The Beginnings of Christian Theology,” explains his interpretation of Paul’s worldview as a time of emergence:

 

[T]he apostle does not understand history as a continuous evolutionary process but as the contrast of the two realms of Adam and Christ. Pauline theology unfolds this contrast extensively as the struggle between death and life, sin and salvation, law and gospel. The basis is the apocalyptic scheme of the two successive aeons which is transferred to the present. Apparently Paul viewed his own time as the hour of the Messiah’s birth-pangs, in which the new creation emerges from the old world through the Christian proclamation. Spirits, powers and dominions part eschatologically at the crossroads of the gospel. We thus arrive at the dialectic of “once” and “now,” which is absorbed into anthropology in the form of “already saved” and “still tempted.” In the antithesis of spirit and flesh this dialectic determines the cosmos until the parousia of Christ. (qtd. in Blackwell, et al.)

 

Essentially, Paul believed Jesus’s return as Messiah would happen very soon, even within his lifetime, and thus felt led to bring non-Jews, or Gentiles, to follow Jewish (or Mosaic) law so they would be saved when the Messiah returned. This worldview is present in Paul’s writings as he discusses the intersections of law, sin, Christ, and the end times—it could have also been a prevalent worldview after Jesus’s death in general.