Meeting God in Paul

Rowan Williams

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780281073382
• eBook ISBN: 9780281073399
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Fresh insights into Paul's revolutionary message by one of the world's greatest living theologians. Rowan Williams explores the essentials of Paul's thought for complete beginners - as well as for those who've read Paul's letters many times before and want to see them in a fresh light. Written at a highly accessible level, this book would make a perfect gift for anyone thinking about confirmation, while also appealing to people who are curious as to why Paul has had such a profound influence on Christian history and belief.

1

Outsiders and insiders: Paul’s social world

When daylight came, the magistrates sent their officers with the order ‘Release those men.’ The jailer reported these instructions to Paul: ‘The magistrates have sent an order for your release. Now you are free to go in peace.’ But Paul said to the officers: ‘We are Roman citizens! They gave us a public flogging and threw us into prison without trial. Are they now going to smuggle us out by stealth? No indeed! Let them come in person and escort us out.’ The officers reported his words to the magistrates. Alarmed to hear that they were Roman citizens, they came and apologized. (Acts 16.35–39)

Paul the Roman citizen

Paul was very proud of his status as a Roman citizen, and if we are going to understand something about the world he lived in, and the assumptions with which people worked in that world, we need to understand a little about Rome and Roman citizenship. It is so important to Paul that we find him mentioning it in three places in the stories in the Acts of the Apostles. I have just quoted Acts 16.35 ff., the story of Paul’s adventures in Philippi, where he was arrested and imprisoned; here he is protesting indignantly at his treatment. And if you look at Acts 21.39 and Acts 22.25 you will find the same story – Paul being manhandled and mistreated by Roman soldiers or Roman officials, and stopping them short by saying, ‘Before you push me around any further, you’d better be aware that I am a Roman citizen.’

These are stories which remind us that the great thing about being a Roman citizen was that you had certain kinds of guaranteed protection – privileges and liberties that were not available to everybody. You were clearly different from slaves; but you were also different, for example, from that rather loose class of people that the Romans called peregrini (the origin of our word ‘pilgrims’) – a word that essentially just means ‘outsiders’. These would be people who lived in the towns and cities but didn’t have the rights of citizens; they might be migrant workers, or foreigners of some other kind.

So even within the Empire there were lots of different ways of belonging (or half-belonging) – slaves, migrants, citizens. And by the time you got to the barbarians who lived outside the Roman borders (frightful people like Celts), then of course you were in an entirely different world. But what sort of liberties and protections did citizens enjoy? If you were a citizen, for example, you could make a will – you could do what you liked with your property and leave it to whom you wanted. You could sue people in the law courts – usually a rather expensive business because you had to pay out considerable sums of money in bribes and sweeteners for the magistrates (unfortunately, you could also be sued in the law courts, which was at least as expensive for exactly the same reasons). You could marry without asking anybody’s permission. You could vote. You could stand for election. You could travel, and if you went to another city within the Roman Empire which was regarded as being of equal status to the one you had just left, you could exercise all your rights as a citizen there as well. Being a Roman citizen was a bit like having a British passport in the early twentieth century – you could go more or less anywhere and expect to be treated properly. Being a citizen was no small matter. And if we are to understand Paul’s world, we have to understand first and foremost that this is a world in which nothing exists that corresponds to our idea of universal human rights. There was no such thing as general equality before the law. Being a citizen guaranteed you many things; being a peregrinus, a migrant or a low-paid worker gave you a few limited privileges before the law; and being a slave gave you none at all.

There were various ways of acquiring citizenship, and once again we hear a bit about it in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 22.28), where a Roman army officer says to Paul that it cost him a great deal of money to buy his rights as a citizen and Paul replies, with what sounds like some disdain, that he was born a citizen. If that little detail is an accurate report (and there is no particular reason to think otherwise), it suggests that his family had probably been settled in Tarsus for quite a long time; because it was in 66 BC that all the inhabitants of Tarsus, in what is now south-eastern Turkey, were given citizenship rights by the Roman government.

Paul probably came from a family that was reasonably well to do but not so rich that he didn’t have to earn his living. His family is clearly well off enough to send him to Jerusalem for a long period of training in traditional Jewish scholarship, but we also learn that he had acquired a trade as a tent maker (Acts 18.3). So he is moderately comfortable, on the edges of the upper artisan class, some spare money going around, but above all – the crucial distinction – a citizen. Set that alongside the other two classes. If you were a migrant, a peregrinus, you could move around but you had no guarantee that your legal status would remain the same. You couldn’t vote, you couldn’t make a will – when you died your property would be confiscated by the city. You could be tortured, which a Roman citizen couldn’t be. And you could be subject to any number of painful and humiliating forms of execution, including crucifixion, which was not a punishment given to citizens. Hence Paul is able to travel freely and to work with the expectation of some security; and when he is arbitrarily arrested or punished, he can claim that his civic rights have been infringed.

Citizenship was not a matter of class or income in our sense. There would be citizens who were not very well off, and there would be migrants and even some slaves who were quite well off. It was a matter of security and identity: a matter of what you could take for granted without worrying. It was a distinction most visible in urban life, in the life of the cities – and we need to remember that the cities of Paul’s time were very mixed, very cosmopolitan. We mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the world of the New Testament was a world of simple Oriental peasants and ancient Romans in togas. It was a world commercially very active, culturally very creative, where languages and traditions mingled freely within the life of the cities, held together rather unstably by two main things: the authority of the Roman Emperor and the Greek language.

It was a rather odd kind of Greek by the standards of classical Greece, but nonetheless an effective medium for communication. I suppose you could compare its development with the way in which the English language has gone through a number of startling and surprising transformations as a language of commerce and trade, let’s say, in South East Asia. Anyone who has ever spent any time in Singapore will recognize that there are very vigorous forms of English spoken there which are not exactly those of the Home Counties. The Greek that St Paul and his associates spoke would have been that kind of language: vigorous, crisp and often eloquent – but not quite classical.

As we have seen, divisions within this world weren’t a matter of wealth and income. Some non-citizens had quite a lot of money from trade, but they couldn’t dispose of it simply as they wanted. They could be mobile – they could take their business around the Empire, like St Paul’s friends Aquila and Priscilla, whom we meet in several places in the New Testament (first of all in Acts 18, and they turn up again in Romans 16; most readers find them an irresistibly appealing couple, sensible, hospitable and entirely supportive of Paul, Apollos and others). But we don’t know whether they were citizens; probably they weren’t – because they had been exiled from Rome along with other Jews by the Emperor Claudius. So they move around the Empire as traders, and they clearly have quite a lot of disposable income. They have a house big enough for the community to meet in (Romans 16.5), and they can obviously give generous support to wandering apostles. Nonetheless, if they lacked citizenship, they would have been far more insecure than the wandering teacher Paul.

Worst of all, of course, was the position of the slave. The slave, we should never forget, is literally the property of someone else. The slave has no rights of movement or travel. The slave can only travel with the master’s licence. A slave cannot marry, except with the master’s consent. A slave, if brought up before the law courts, is routinely tortured – and I do mean routinely: it was assumed that no slave would tell the truth unless forced to do so (they would after all be legally bound to defend their masters or mistresses), so if they were giving legal evidence, the default position was that they would have to be tortured. In extreme circumstances they could be killed with impunity by their owners. In cultivated Roman circles, it was regarded as rather bad form – as well as economically foolish – to put the lives of your slaves at risk or kill them, but the sanctions were social rather than moral or legal. And of course the body of the slave, male or female, was entirely at the disposal of the master, or indeed mistress, for sexual services.

A slave might well be highly educated. A master might decide to invest in a slave, to expose him to all the best resources of classical education so that he could be a tutor to the younger generation or a resourceful and professional business manager, or so that he could help a master write his memoirs. A slave could in some circumstances accumulate money, and therefore could sometimes buy his or her freedom. But that depended on whether the master would allow it or not. If the master was in trouble with the law, the slave was liable to share his punishment. If a master was convicted of treason in the Roman Empire, it was not unknown for the whole household to be executed – in the case of slaves, probably by crucifixion.

That was the world of the Roman Empire and its great cities, the world Paul inhabits – a world which is more strange to us and our assumptions than we might ever have guessed from the pages of the Bible alone. And these points about the legal status of different groups in the Empire are worth labouring if only to underline the point I made earlier: this is a world that has no conception of universal human rights or dignities – a world in which where you fitted into the social pattern determined pretty well everything about you.

I shan’t at this stage say very much about what Paul does with all this in his teaching, but there is one thing that is worth noting before I pass on. The evidence of a letter like Paul’s first letter to the Christians in Corinth makes it very clear that urban Christian communities included people of very diverse social background and status. Paul, with the inimitable tactlessness he can sometimes show, reminds the Corinthians in the first chapter of his first letter to them (1.26) that not many of them came from respectable or well-born backgrounds. Later on in chapter 6 he rattles off a list of disreputable styles of behaviour and says, ‘Such were some of you.’ The impression is that the community in Corinth had quite a strong representation of non-citizen groups: shopkeepers, migrant workers, household slaves. But also in 1 Corinthians 6 we find St Paul being strongly critical of Christians who choose to go to law to settle disputes – which must mean that it included citizens who had the right to institute legal proceedings. So, if you begin with the picture of Roman society I have been sketching, and turn to something like the first letter to Corinth, you will see how eccentric the Christian community would have looked to almost anybody in the world around at the time. A place in which slaves and citizens, traders and migrant workers, mingled together; a very rare place indeed (but more of that in the next chapter).

Paul the Jew

Paul is a Roman citizen – but he also, of course, inherited another very stratified and very strict tradition. He is a Jew: a Jew whose name was originally Saul, and who, he tells us, came initially from the tribe of Benjamin (Philippians 3.5). He belongs to that huge class of Jewish entrepreneurs and traders, merchants, travellers and teachers called ‘the Diaspora’ – the Jewish people dispersed around the Mediterranean in the centuries just before the beginning of the Christian era. As I have said, the likelihood is that his family had been settled in Tarsus for some time. Tarsus was an obvious place for traders and others to settle. Tucked into the corner of south-east Turkey, it was a great regional centre, a major trading city. It had been given privileges by the Roman government in the century before Christ; and it is in fact the place where Antony first met Cleopatra. So when Paul, speaking to the Roman commander, says that he is a citizen of (in the old translation) ‘no mean city’, we see what was in his mind. Tarsus had amphitheatres and baths and paved streets, a reputation and a resident governor.

But Paul seems to have spent quite a bit of his early adulthood in Jerusalem. He refers to having ‘sat at the feet of Gamaliel’ (Acts 22.3), and we know Gamaliel from earlier in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 5.34–39) as a member of the Jewish Council who advises against punishing the early Christians severely, famously advising, ‘Let’s see how this turns out, because if it comes from God, it is going to work and we are going to look very foolish.’ But we also hear a...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Praise for this book
• About the author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• 1. Outsiders and insiders: Paul’s social world
• 2. The universal welcome: Paul’s disturbing idea
• 3. The new creation: Paul’s Christian universe
• Questions for reflection or group discussion
• Lenten reading guide
• Notes
• Suggestions for further reading