Paul

A Very Brief History

John M. G. Barclay

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780281076086
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Biographie biblique

'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.'
(Galatians 3.28)The revolutionary writings of St Paul have had an incalculable impact on Western history, and continue to influence directly the two billion Christians living today.Written by a world authority, this brief history begins by assessing what we know about Paul's life and letters, and his impact on the Roman world of the first century. It concludes by highlighting the key elements of Paul's thought and considering their consequences as they have played out over two millennia.

Part 1
THE HISTORY

1
Paul in the early Christian movement

Paul was a Jewish intellectual, a travelling craftsman, and a propagandist for a set of new and extraordinary claims about Jesus of Nazareth. He first vigorously opposed the Jesus movement, but then energetically pioneered its spread beyond its Jewish homeland, focusing on the recruitment of non-Jews (‘the nations’; ‘the Gentiles’). He founded and then fostered a network of churches (‘assemblies’) in ­cities around the north of the Mediterranean, from Syria to Italy, restlessly travelling and writing letters in order to promote what he considered a last-generation effort to save a doomed world. He fell out with some of the churches he founded, scandalized more cautious members of the Jesus movement, was opposed by many of his fellow Jews, and eventually fell foul of the Roman authorities. As a result, many of his mission plans were never fulfilled and his life was prematurely ended by his execution in Rome. But by that time what became known as the ‘Christian’ movement had become sufficiently robust to survive, and its growth and cross-cultural adaptability were greatly aided by Paul’s insistence that non-Jewish ‘believers’ were not required to adopt core Jewish practices. Moreover, Paul was as versatile in thought as in practice, and in his surviving letters he left a legacy of subtle and fertile theology that has wielded ever since an enormous influence on Christian thought and Western culture.

Such was Paul’s impact, and so many and varied were the early Christian claims to his legacy, that many ‘Pauls’ were soon generated and many legends recounted, some more flattering than others. A historian wishing to reconstruct the ‘original Paul’ needs to weigh the sources carefully. The general rules of history apply: the earlier the source the better; primary sources (from Paul himself) are more important than secondary sources (texts written by others about him); and all of our sources have their own ‘slant’ – none is entirely unbiased (and neither are we). There is no surviving trace of Paul in contemporary sources from outside the Christian movement, but of the Christian sources the earli­est and most important are his own letters and the admiring portrayal of his mission in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts for short), which was probably written some 20–30 years after Paul’s death (i.e. 80s–90s ce). Acts gives its account of the early Church in the mode of ancient ­historiography: it mixes traditions of various sources and kinds, and shapes them rhetorically to form a gripping narrative. We shall return to Acts below, among the ‘Early images of Paul’ (Chapter 5), but here we note that for a historian it carries less weight than letters written by Paul himself.

But which letters come from Paul? We may discount the later and obviously fictitious correspondence between Paul and Seneca, or the made-up letter known as 3 Corinthians. By the middle of the second century there were 13 letters attributed to Paul, the 13 that bear his name in the New Testament. (Later, the treatise included in the New Testa­ment under the title ‘Hebrews’ was also sometimes attributed to Paul, but it is anonymous, and the product of another, equally creative, mind.) For most of Christian history, and for most Christians today, all 13 letters are regarded as equally ‘Pauline’, but in the modern era of historical criti­cism (i.e. since the eighteenth century), all ancient texts, including these letters, have been subject to critical questions about their authorship and origin. We shall explore in the next chapter how modern scholars distinguish between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ (or ‘deutero-Pauline’) letters, but we may note for now that, for most contemporary historians, we hear Paul’s authentic voice only in seven of the letters bearing his name: 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corin­th­ians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians and Romans. These, then, are the main primary sources that we will use at this point for our historical reconstruction of Paul’s life and thought.

After the death of Jesus (in the early 30s ce), some of his disciples announced that God had raised him from the dead, recounting experiences of the risen Jesus that made them reframe everything they had previously thought about Jesus and about their Jewish Scriptures and trad­itions. The energy of this group, and their momentous claims about Jesus as the Jewish Messiah (Christ) and the Lord of the world, caused controversy among Jews in Jerusalem. But when Jewish believers spread this message in the synagogues of neighbouring cities, a whole new layer of controversy arose. Within or on the edges of these Jewish communities were non-Jewish sympathizers (sometimes called ‘God-fearers’) who respected the Jewish community and its tradition, but did not make the full commitment to the Jewish Law necessary to become converts to Judaism (for men, that entailed circumcision). It appears that the Jesus message proved attractive in such circles. It spoke of salvation given by the one true God through trust in what he had done in the life, death and resurrection of the ‘Lord Jesus’; it promised entry into the people of God and the hope of salvation through a simple rite of washing (‘baptism’); and it demonstrated the presence of the risen Jesus in miracles and in other new experiences of the power of God understood as the work of his Spirit.

This is where Paul comes into the picture, in the mid 30s ce. According to his own testimony, Paul was actively seeking to ‘destroy’ the Jesus movement in or around Damascus, out of zeal for his ancestral Jewish traditions (Galatians 1.13–14; Philippians 3.5–6). He probably came from Tarsus, in the province of Cilicia (south-east Turkey), born of Jewish parents (‘a Hebrew born of Hebrews’), and given a Jewish education, through which he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures in their Greek translation. It is possible that part of this education was in Jerusalem (as claimed in Acts 22.3), but Paul seems thoroughly at home in the Diaspora (outside the Jewish homeland), where there were large and well-­established communities of Hellenistic Jews (e.g. in Alexandria, Antioch and Damascus). Paul describes himself as a Pharisee (Philippians 3.5), a movement among Jews renowned for the precision with which they interpreted the Torah (the Jewish Law). Something about the Jesus movement outraged Paul when he encountered it in Damascus. Perhaps it was its shocking claims about Jesus, whose crucifixion by the Romans marked him as a failed and now insignificant rebel. Or perhaps it was the way the Jesus movement attracted non-Jews and treated them as full members of God’s people on terms that seemed contrary to the Torah and to everything that Paul valued in his ancestral tradition.

Thus when Paul first encountered the Jesus movement he was its deadly opponent. He had not met Jesus, but he was convinced that his opposition to this movement was the proper expression of his loyalty to God. What happened next was not the resolution of an inner psychological tension, nor the salving of a guilty conscience, but a revolution in his understanding of the world, of himself, of right and wrong, and of the God he worshipped. What he experi­enced at or near Damascus was, he says, a ‘revelation’, in which he was granted a vision of the risen Jesus (Galatians 1.15–16; 1 Corinthians 15.8–10). He was now convinced that Jesus was indeed ‘Lord’, the agent through whom God would rule the world, and that in Jesus’ death and resurrection God had begun to save the world. In this, the original ‘Damascus-road experience’, Paul underwent a fundamental reorientation of his life and loyalties.

We cannot now trace all the shifts that took place in Paul’s mind immediately after this revelation, since the first of his surviving letters (1 Thessalonians) dates from more than ten years later. But as Paul would later describe it, what happened in this event was a ‘calling’ effected by the grace of God (Galatians 1.15; 1 Corinthians 15.10). His description echoes the commissioning of ‘the servant’ in Isaiah (Isaiah 49.1–6), whose mission embraced ‘the nations’ just as Paul’s calling impelled him to preach the good news among non-Jews (Galatians 1.16). But ‘calling’ in Paul means more than commission: it is the word he uses for what we term ‘conversion’ (1 Corinthians 1.26; 7.17–24; Galatians 1.6); that is, the start of a new relation to God. Paul did not ‘convert’ in the sense of ‘changing religion’ (a modern way of putting things), since the God who ‘called’ him was the same God he had always tried to serve. But this event revolutionized his understanding of his own tradition, because he now regarded Jesus as the centre and fulfilment of all God’s purposes, and in rereading his Scriptures he found there numerous echoes of this good news. And it revolutionized his moral and theological coordinates. If his persecution of the Church, which he had thought 100 per cent right, was in fact 100 per cent wrong, and if God revealed Christ and called Paul despite such a fundamental sin, it was clear that God’s grace was not given on the basis of human worth. That was an unnerving discovery, since it was normally (and understandably) imagined that God’s best gifts were differentially distributed according to the worth of the recipients. But if God’s favour was given without respect for worth, it was not limited, Paul came to see, by any ethnic criteria. It could be experienced even by non-Jews, whom Paul had considered out-and-out ‘sinners’ because of their ‘idolatry’ and shameful moral practices. God’s gift to the unworthy paralleled and was based upon the death and resurrection of Christ, since God had raised the crucified Jesus – in human terms worthless, and in Jewish terms ‘cursed’ (Galatians 3.13). Although Paul shows rather little interest in recycling the teaching of Jesus, his thought revolves around the great reversal that took place in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and that took place likewise in him. As he puts it in Galatians, ‘I have been crucified with Christ: it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2.19–20).

After Paul’s Damascus experience we can trace some of his geographical movements, though it is impossible to determine a precise chronology. Paul narrates only fragments of his story, and it is unclear how much we can rely on the narrative in Acts which, where it overlaps with Paul, does not always cohere with his account of his life. Paul teamed up first with Barnabas, founding communities of believers in and around Antioch (in Syria), perhaps partly in and partly outside the parameters of Jewish synagogue communities. Their work was controversial when it became known among more traditional members of the Jerusalem church (for reasons we shall trace in Chapter 3), but at a conference in Jerusalem a compromise allowed them to continue enlisting non-Jewish members without requiring males to get circumcised (Galatians 2.1–10). But the compromise did not hold. A dispute arose at Antioch at which Paul’s conduct of the mission to non-Jews was criticized, and he found himself in a heated argument with Peter (Galatians 2.11–14). Thereafter he probably lost his support base in Antioch and moved progressively west, accompanied by other colleagues (Titus, Timothy and Silvanus/Silas), through the provinces of Galatia and Asia (central and west Turkey), and then over to Macedonia and Greece. As he travelled, he spread his good news about Jesus, sometimes in Jewish synagogues and sometimes in the workshops where he plied his (leather-working?) trade, talking in vivid and urgent terms to customers and fellow workers. Little clusters of believers were formed in cities in Galatia, in Colossae and Ephesus, in Thessalonica, Philippi and Corinth, and in other urban centres, some vividly portrayed in Paul’s surviving letters, some now lost from ­memory. Such churches met in homes or shops, most, perhaps, with fewer than 30 members.

Paul was a restless missionary, not least because he ex­pected that Jesus would return and wrap up history within his lifetime (1 Thessalonians 4.13–18). Most of his converts were from a non-Jewish background, and he began to worry that the Jesus movement would split along ethnic lines between Jerusalem-organized groups of Jewish be­lievers and his own network of churches, who were not only ethnically different but also more socially adapted to the Hellenized world of the eastern Roman Empire. He conceived the idea of raising a significant sum of money from his churches and taking it to Jerusalem as poor relief, a gift that (like all ancient gifts) would create social ties and thus keep the movement together. It proved a lot harder than he expected to raise the money – not least because his most successful church, in Corinth, withdrew their trust in him. But eventually, by the mid 50s ce, he had gathered a suitable collection. He wanted to press his mission further west to Rome, and from Rome to Spain, but he decided first to accompany the money to Jerusalem, while nervous about his reception there (Romans 15.14–33).

It was a fateful decision. According to Acts, Paul was treated with suspicion, even downright hostility, by the Jerusalem church, and it is likely that they refused to accept the collection. In any case, he was arrested in Jerusalem by Roman authorities and charged with causing unrest. He had been in prison elsewhere on previous occasions for short periods, but this time the proceedings dragged on. After years in prison in Caesarea, he was sent to Rome under armed escort, so that his case could be heard in an imperial court. Earlier, when he was setting off with the collection to Jerusalem, Paul had written in friendly terms to the ­believers in Rome to introduce his mission and his message, but they had never met him in person, and they too, it seems, were wary of him. We do not know what happened after Paul’s arrival in Rome (Acts becomes vague and breaks off at this point), but he may have been ensnared in the growing suspicion of Christians that justified Nero’s campaign against them after the fire in Rome in 64 ce. In fact, his trial may have made clear to the Roman authorities that the Jesus movement was not welcome in the Jewish community, and thus should not benefit from the privileges and exemptions accorded to Jews. Paul was probably executed, in the early 60s, on a charge of sedition or of disturbing the peace. He was perhaps in his early fifties.

For 30 years Paul had played a major role in the development of the Jesus movement. This was its first, formative generation, a time of expansion, cultural transition and internal controversy, and...