A Short Book about Paul

The Servant of Jesus

Paul W. Barnett

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532665561
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

Most books about Paul the apostle are long and very detailed, and for many a potential reader a daunting prospect. A Short Book about Paul is deliberately brief, but its brevity is not at the cost of accuracy. We trace the main contours of Paul's life, which turn on the hinge of the singular event outside Damascus in c. AD 34. From that time the leading persecutor of the disciples became the dedicated preacher of the message about Jesus.This short book shares with many the opinion that Paul remains the most influential voice from Greco-Roman antiquity apart, that is, from the Lord whose servant he was. At the same time, many critics have found fault with him, especially from the time of the Enlightenment.Paul's achievements were considerable. Between AD 47-56 he established a network of congregations in five Roman provinces--Syria-Cilicia, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia. His thirteen surviving letters are witnesses to his dedicated pastoral care of these tiny, far-flung gatherings. Not to be missed was his remarkable skill in recruiting a small army of loyal coworkers like Timothy, Luke, and Titus.The result of Paul's decade-long journeys in the provinces of Anatolia and Greece was the planting of the seeds of Christianity that would develop into the official religion of the eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople.

One

The Greatness of Paul

Jesus was a public figure for only four years, between AD 29–33. During those years he gathered twelve disciples, taught in public and private, cast out demons and healed the sick, debated with other rabbis, and was crucified in Jerusalem where he was resurrected from the dead. In just over twenty years (from AD 34–57) Paul had established Christianity in a vast arc from Arabia around to and including Macedonia that was effectively a quarter of the land space of the Roman Empire. In the following centuries the lands in which Paul established churches became the world center of Christianity, based in Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.

By AD 64, as the great historian Tacitus noted, the Christians in Rome had become a “vast multitude,” a suitably large scapegoat to blame for the fire that destroyed most of the world capital in that year.

There were many of Jesus’ early followers who spread the message about him during those decades, but the greatest of them was a man named Paul. In fact, it is difficult to think of the astonishing growth of early Christianity apart from him. James Dunn claimed that “it was Paul more than any other single person who ensured that the new movement stemming from Jesus would become a truly international and truly intellectually coherent religion.”1

Equally remarkable was Paul’s role in changing the Jesus movement from being narrowly and exclusively Jewish to being open to non-Jews as well. Paul deliberately travelled through gentile lands to invite their people to embrace the Jewish Messiah, Jesus. Dramatically, he insisted that the followers of Jesus did not first have to become Jewish proselytes. Faith in Jesus, expressed in baptism, was sufficient and was not to be compromised by demands for male circumcision, adherence to Jewish food and purity laws, or obedience to the religious calendar.

In the many churches that Paul established, the majority of the members were gentiles. Before his conversion, Paul had been a leading younger Pharisee, as he said, “a Hebrew of Hebrews.” There is nothing more astonishing about Paul than his outreach to the non-Jews, all the more so since he himself steadfastly remained a Jew to the end of his life.

Paul’s unique achievements—effectively founding Christianity as a world movement and without the requirement of converts adopting Jewish practices—are quite noteworthy when we consider his circumstances. Paul faced ferocious opposition from gentile culture that was based on the gods of Greece and Rome, but no less was he opposed by those Jewish Christians who insisted that gentile converts must adopt Jewish practices.

Paul the missionary had no money but had to work during the night as a tent maker to support himself and his companions. He had no political influence, but was publicly flogged on many occasions. He travelled vast distances, mostly by foot, through forbidding mountains and harsh countryside. He was often alone, without companions, as he was in Arabia and Athens.

Martin Hengel wrote appreciatively that Paul’s mission was “unique in the ancient world” and “an unprecedented happening in terms both of the history of religion in antiquity and of later church history” and that as a result of what he did Paul “has remained unparalleled over the subsequent 1900 years.”2

Several things help explain Paul’s achievements, the most important of which was the depth of his personal devotion to the crucified but resurrected Jesus. On the road to Damascus the heavenly Jesus confronted Paul, the would-be destroyer of the new “faith.” Immediately after being baptized he began preaching the faith he had attempted to destroy. Thirty years later, knowing that his own death was near, he wrote passionately about longing to meet with the one whom he had unswervingly served throughout those years.3 For the thirty years from his conversion near Damascus to his death in Rome it was his love for Jesus that inspired Paul and drove him on.

This is the more remarkable since Paul had not, so far as we know, ever met the man Jesus. As well, the Jesus whom Paul served came from a lower social and educational stratum. Jesus was a self-educated man who followed the trade of his stepfather Joseph, a builder. By contrast, Paul was a privileged citizen of his home city, Tarsus, and by birth a Roman citizen. From his teen years Paul had been educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, the greatest rabbi of his day.

How do we explain Paul’s passionate devotion to one who, humanly speaking, was his social and economic inferior? It was because the Jesus who addressed him did so from the brightness of heaven, convincing Paul that Jesus was actually the eternal Son of God who had given his life for Paul the persecutor to have a right standing with God and be blessed with the presence and power of the Spirit of God. Paul spoke movingly of “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”4 God directed Paul to proclaim the Son of God “among the gentiles,” law-free and grace-based.5

It was Paul’s sense of Christ’s love for him that drove him and inspired him to the very end of his life. As he said in just a few words, “the love of Christ controls us.”6 His pronoun “us” includes his fellow believers but we are in no doubt that Paul was speaking primarily about his sense of Christ’s love for him.

The measure of Paul’s devoted service of Jesus was the degree to which he suffered for him. In Damascus at the time of his baptism, Paul was told “how much he must suffer” for the sake of Jesus’ name.7 He was flogged five times with the thirty-nine lashes in Jewish synagogues, beaten with rods three times by Roman sergeants, endured numerous imprisonments, countless beatings, once being stoned, twice being shipwrecked, and was often near death.8 He spent almost ten of his thirty years as a Christian in prison. He writes of “sharing abundantly in Christ’s sufferings.”9 He kne...