St Paul

The Misunderstood Apostle

Karen Armstrong

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782398141
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

St Paul is known throughout the world as the first Christian writer, authoring fourteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. But as Karen Armstrong demonstrates in St Paul: The Misunderstood Apostle, he also exerted a more significant influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the world than any other figure in history.

It was Paul who established the first Christian churches in Europe and Asia in the first century, Paul who transformed a minor sect into the largest religion produced by Western civilization, and Paul who advanced the revolutionary idea that Christ could serve as a model for the possibility of transcendence. While we know little about some aspects of the life of St Paul - his upbringing, the details of his death - his dramatic vision of God on the road to Damascus is one of the most powerful stories in the history of Christianity, and the life that followed forever changed the course of history.

Contents

Introduction

1. Damascus

2. Antioch

3. Land of Japheth

4. Opposition

5. The Collection

Afterlife

Notes

Introduction

WHILE JERUSALEM WAS celebrating Passover c. 30 CE, Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea, ordered the crucifixion of a peasant from the tiny hamlet of Nazareth in Galilee. Passover was nearly always an explosive time in the Holy City, where Roman rule was bitterly resented. Pilate and Caiaphas, the high priest, had probably agreed to deal promptly with any potential troublemaker, so they would certainly have taken careful note of Jesus of Nazareth’s provocative entrance into the city a week earlier, riding on a donkey as Zechariah had prophesied and acknowledging the homage of the enthusiastic crowd, who shouted: “Liberate us, Son of David!” Was he claiming to be the longed-for Messiah, a descendant of the great King David who would free Israel from foreign bondage? As if that were not enough, Jesus had immediately charged into the temple and overturned the money changers’ tables, accusing them of making this sacred place a den of thieves. When he was nailed to his cross, “an inscription was placed over his head, citing the charge against him: ‘This is Jesus, the king of the Jews.’”¹

Jesus had been born during the reign of the emperor Augustus (r. 31 BCE–14 CE), who had brought peace to a war-weary world by defeating rival Roman warlords and declaring himself sole ruler of the Roman Empire. The ensuing peace seemed little short of miraculous, and throughout his far-flung domains, Augustus was hailed as “son of God” and “savior.” But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly by an army that was the most efficient killing machine the world had yet seen; the slightest resistance met with wholesale slaughter. Crucifixion, an instrument of state terror inflicted usually on slaves, violent criminals, and insurgents, was a powerful deterrent. The public display of the flayed victim, his broken body hanging at a crossroads or in a theater and, all too often, left as food for birds of prey and wild beasts, demonstrated the merciless power of Rome.² Some thirty years before Jesus’s death, after crushing the revolts that had broken out after the death of King Herod the Great, the Syrian governor P. Quinctilius Varus had crucified two thousand rebels at once outside the walls of Jerusalem.³ Forty years after Jesus’s death, in the last days of the Roman siege of Jerusalem (70 CE), starving deserters trying to flee the doomed city, averaging about five hundred a day, were scourged, tortured, and crucified. The Jewish historian Josephus, an eyewitness, recorded the horrifying spectacle: “The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures; and so great was their number, that space could not be found for the crosses nor crosses for the bodies.”⁴

One of the most terrible things about crucifixion was that the victim was denied a decent burial, a disgrace that was insupportable in the ancient world in a way that is difficult for modern people to appreciate. The victim was usually left alive to be torn apart by carrion crows. In Judea, if the soldiers were persuaded to observe the Jewish law decreeing that a body be buried immediately after its demise, they might lay it in a shallow grave where it would soon be devoured by the wild scavenger dogs that prowled hungrily below the dying man. But from a very early date, Jesus’s followers were convinced that Jesus had been buried in a respectable tomb, and, later, the authors of the four gospels developed an elaborate story to explain how his disciples had persuaded the Roman authorities to permit this.⁵ This was a crucial element in the earliest Christian tradition.⁶

Jesus’s atrocious death would be central to the religious and political vision of Saul of Tarsus, the first extant Christian author. Paul was his Roman name. In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul. Jesus’s demonstration in the temple was not, as is often assumed, a plea for a more spiritual form of worship. As he rampaged through the money changers’ stalls, he quoted the Hebrew prophets who had harsh words for those who were punctilious in their devotions but ignored the plight of the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. For nearly five hundred years, Judea had been ruled by one empire after another, and the temple, the holiest place in the Jewish world, had become an instrument of imperial control. Since 63 BCE, the Romans had ruled Judea in conjunction with the priestly aristocracy, who collected the tribute extorted in kind from the populace and stored it in the temple precincts. Over the years, this collaboration had brought the institution into such disrepute that peasants were refusing to pay the temple tithe.⁷ At Qumran, beside the Dead Sea, Jewish sectarians were so disgusted with this corruption of their most sacred institutions that they had withdrawn from mainstream society, convinced that God would soon destroy the temple and replace it with a purified shrine not made by human hands. So Jesus was not the only person to regard the temple as a “den of thieves,” and his violent demonstration, which probably cost him his life, would have been understood by the authorities as a threat to the political order.

Galilee, the scene of Jesus’s mission in the north of what is now the state of Israel, was home to a society traumatized by imperial violence. Nazareth was only a few miles from the town of Sepphoris, which the Roman legions had razed to the ground during the uprisings after Herod’s death. Herod Antipas, the sixth son of Herod the Great, governed the region as the client of Rome and had financed his extensive building program by imposing heavy taxes on his subjects, laying claim to crops, livestock, and labor and expropriating between 50 to 66 percent of the peasants’ produce. Failure to pay the required tax was punished by foreclosure and confiscation of land, which swelled the estates of the Herodian aristocracy, as well as those of the bankers and bureaucrats who flocked into the region to make their fortunes.⁸ When they lost land that had been in their family for generations, the more fortunate peasants worked on it as serfs; others were forced into banditry or menial labor. This could have happened to Jesus’s father, Joseph the carpenter.

In about 28 CE, huge crowds had flocked from Judea, Jerusalem, and the surrounding countryside to listen to the fiery preaching of John the Baptist beside the River Jordan. Clad in rough camel’s hair that recalled the garb of the prophet Elijah, John had urged them to undergo baptism as a token of repentance to hasten the coming of the Kingdom that God would establish to displace the wicked rulers of this age. This was no purely spiritual message. When members of the priestly aristocracy and their retainers presented themselves for baptism, John denounced them as a “viper’s brood”; they would not be saved on the Day of Judgment simply because they were descendants of Abraham.⁹ In Israel, ritual immersion had long signified not only a moral purification but also a social commitment to justice. “Your hands are covered with blood,” the prophet Isaiah had told the ruling class of Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. “Wash, make yourselves clean. Take your wrongdoing out of my sight. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.”¹⁰ The sectarians at Qum...