Paul

An Apostle's Journey

Douglas A. Campbell

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780802873477
• eBook ISBN: 9781467449427
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Biography

Douglas Campbell has made a name for himself as one of Paul's most insightful and provocative interpreters. In this short and spirited book Campbell introduces readers to the apostle he has studied in depth over his scholarly career.

Enter with Campbell into Paul's world, relive the story of Paul's action-packed ministry, and follow the development of Paul's thought throughout both his physical and his spiritual travels.

Ideal for students, individual readers, and study groups,  Paul: An Apostle's Journey dramatically recounts the life of one of early Christianity's most fascinating figures—and offers powerful insight into his mind and his influential message.

PART 1

CHAPTER ONE

Conversion

When Paul was Saul

Paul tells us very little about his life prior to his call. He says that he was a Jew descended from the tribe of Benjamin. He writes in Greek but he also knows Hebrew, the language of Judea, the Jews’ homeland, and of most of their Scriptures. He belonged to a particular sect within Judaism known for its precision vis-à-vis God’s Scriptures, the Pharisees. Perhaps think here of Catholics who have become Jesuits. The book of Acts adds some details to this.¹

Paul grew up in the city of Tarsus on the Cilician plains. These lie on the southern coast of present-day Turkey where it wraps around the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. Paul would have received the equivalent of his primary and secondary education from the small Jewish community living there, and from the city’s Greek system when he went to the local “gymnasium.” The Greek secondary schools of the ancient world were known as “gymnasia,” and we still speak of “gyms” today because the Greek education included a lot of physical training and competition. Paul then went off to college in Jerusalem to do a degree in Pharisaism, perhaps following in his father’s footsteps. He was known at this time by his Jewish name, Saul. The original Saul, Israel’s first king, was the tribe of Benjamin’s most important biblical representative, although things didn’t work out so well for him.

Acts says that Paul was a Roman citizen, so he must have had a Roman name too. Roman names had three parts: a forename chosen from a very limited list of candidates like Marcus or Lucius; a family name, which was preferably as prestigious as possible; and a “cognomen,” which was really just a nickname added so that all the people bearing the name Marcus and Lucius could be distinguished from one another. The full name of the person we know as Cicero, for example, was Marcus Tullius Cicero. Marcus was his first name, Tullius his not-so-prestigious family name, and Cicero his cognomen. In Latin it means “chickpea,” so one of the Roman Republic’s most famous rhetors and statesmen was known everywhere as Chickpea. “Paulus” means “small” in Latin—or, a little more poetically, “humble”—so it was almost certainly Paul’s cognomen. He would have been known everywhere in non-Jewish circles as “Tiny.”

But how did Paul get to be a Roman citizen? A lot of people wanted to be Roman citizens. The Roman empire was basically a vast political and economic octopus spreading out from a huge head that was the city of Rome, and membership had its privileges. Wealthy people would try to buy their way into the city’s citizenship, and legionaries received citizenship after serving in the army for twenty-five years. However, Roman citizens were primarily people who had been born in the city of Rome or who had descended from the same. The simplest explanation for Paul’s citizenship is that he was descended from Jews who had been enslaved and sent to Rome and then received citizenship there after they had been set free, as was customary. The great Roman general Pompey, Julius Caesar’s contemporary, had enslaved tens of thousands of Jews when he annexed Galilee and Judea in 65 BCE and taken many of them to Rome. Paul could easily have been a descendant of the survivors of some of these unfortunate Jews.

We don’t know when Paul was born, but it is entirely possible that his great-great-grandfather and grandmother had been born to Jews deported to Rome by Pompey. His family had left Rome at some point, probably to travel back to Judea, but had settled down on the way in Tarsus, perhaps for business reasons.²

So Paul came from Tarsus but had a Roman ID card in his back pocket, something that would come in handy. He does not seem to have been especially wealthy because he tells us that he worked with his hands. Acts uses the unusual word schēnopoios to describe his trade. We don’t know exactly what this refers to. Literally it denotes a “scene-maker.” Scenes were canvas screens stretched and painted to be used as backdrops for plays. But it is hard to envision a Pharisee painting scenery for pagan plays for a living. It is more likely that he was a canvas worker, which this word could describe at a pinch. Mediterranean cities get very hot. Shops and stadiums in Paul’s day used canvas awnings to provide shelter from the sun, as well as from the occasional cloudburst. It is possible to see a magnificent set of canvas awnings extending into the sky when Maximus (a.k.a. Russell Crowe) arrives in Rome for the first time and looks up and sees the colosseum in the film Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott). Paul probably stitched canvas awnings for a living when he had to, carrying his tools around with him in a small pouch—an awl, a knife, thread, and some thick metal needles. To ancient eyes he wouldn’t have looked like much. The small but hugely influential upper class despised people who had to work with their hands for a living because they looked like slaves. Artisans like Paul were very low down in the pecking order.

One final detail in Paul’s background is important. He was “zealous” in a way that not all Pharisees were. Zealots were Jews who were prepared to kill for God, and our newspapers are sadly studded with the same phenomenon even today. Something about the early followers of Jesus offended Paul to the point that he placed them in a category that needed to be wiped out.³

History would have been largely uninterested in Paul, however, except for the strange event that now took place. Paul was converted to the very movement that he was trying to exterminate.

Conversion

Acts tells the story of Paul’s conversion with the author’s typical knack for drama.⁴ Paul was “breathing out hostility,” persecuting any adherents of the dangerous new messianic sect that he could find. He had been conducting the ancient equivalent of police sweeps in Jerusalem and the surrounding region of Judea, and we shouldn’t sugarcoat this: Paul was the leader of a death squad. Such was his zeal, he wanted to pursue these deviants wherever they had fled, even to foreign cities.

At some point in 34 CE he started out for Damascus to hunt down any fugitives there that he could find.⁵ But God had other ideas. Paul tells us that he was stopped short en route to Damascus by a revelation of God’s Son (Gal. 1:15–16). Acts provides the further details that he was literally flattened by this, struck blind by a light beaming from heaven. A voice spoke to him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?” Paul asks, not unreasonably. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” comes the reply.

An astonishing amount of information is packed into this short exchange, and we can see it informing almost everything that Paul later wrote and did.

Jesus is God

About twenty years after this moment, in a letter written to his bickering converts in Corinth, Paul has a long discussion about whether food that has been slaughtered in a pagan temple and so offered to its gods could be eaten by Christians (1 Cor. 8). Pagan priests were the butchers of the ancient world. They partly funded their expensive temples by being given live animals to sacrifice by rich donors. They would take a cut to eat themselves and then sell the rest of the meat secondhand out the back of the temple in a meat market. The proceeds funded the temple. Meat was a luxury product, so this made a lot of money when rich donors were doing their civic duty. Some Corinthian Christians, influenced by Judaism, thought that meat bought in this way should be avoided because eating it would be an act of idolatry. After all, it had been part of a pagan worship ritual. Others, however, were quite happy to socialize with their pagan friends who were feasting on this meat. Conflict ensued.

Navigating this conflict in chapter 8 in the letter, Paul begins by talking about who the real God is. He says in verse 6:

For us there is but one God, the Father,

from whom all things came and for whom we live;

and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ,

through whom all things came and through whom we live.

We can see immediately that Paul is not saying anything very different here from what he first heard on the road to Damascus about the Lord Jesus. But if any Jews who had not converted to Jesus were around when this statement was read out in Corinth, their jaws would have hit the floor. Paul is quoting one of the most treasured of all Jewish texts, Deuteronomy 6:4, which was used by many Jews as their main confession of faith. They prayed it every day. “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord, is one.” It goes on to say in verse 5, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” But Paul has inserted Jesus directly into this statement about God, distinguishing between him and his “Father,” although maintaining the oneness or unity of God. Extraordinary.

Both the Father and Jesus are confessed as creating, which was an activity that the Jewish Scriptures attributed solidly and consistently to God alone. To make matters worse, the sacred name for God, which was so holy that Jews did not even speak it but hid it behind the word “Lord,” is being attached here to Jesus. So clearly Jesus is God. But Paul is not splitting God into one God and then another Lord, Jesus, who is also a God. There is one God and one Lord, who are on some level the same thing. The conclusion is inescapable that Paul is stating here—quite calmly, and apparently in a way that all the Corinthians were fully comfortable with—that the one God who cannot be imaged and who made the heavens and the earth includes Jesus within his identity. Two figures are visible here within the one God, and a third will be added shortly.

God reveals God

Earlier on in 1 Corinthians, in chapter 2, Paul spends a bit of time talking about how the Corinthians worked all this out. Grasping the truth about Jesus doesn’t depend on the manner in which it is presented, he argues. The information that we have just described wasn’t introduced to the Corinthians by an elegant rhetorical display but by someone who looked more like a shaking bedraggled vagabond. In contemporary terms, then, it could be the subject of a stunning feature-length film, a gripping novel, a newspaper editorial, a conversation, a blog, a tweet, a badly written child’s essay, a boring lecture, or a conversation. It doesn’t matter. The claims being made are only understood to be true when the Spirit reveals them to be so. “God has revealed [his secret] to us by his Spirit,” Paul observes. Hence “we have received the Spirit who is from God that we may understand what God has freely given us” (1 Cor. 2:10, 12, although the whole chapter is relevant).⁶

It seems then that the Corinthians didn’t work all this out for themselves. They responded to the promptings of God by way of his Spirit. It was this revelation in their hearts and minds that introduced certainty about the truth of the information they were hearing by way of Paul’s unimpressive words. Because of this deep work of conviction, the human messenger doesn’t matter so much, Paul says, and a highly stylish messenger might even detract from the information’s truth because she or he would draw our attention away from the Spirit who is doing the important underlying work.

We can now see two revelations working together whenever God is being revealed and understood. There is Jesus, and there is the Spirit. These two figures operate like the two hands of God gathering people up and bringing them back to the Father. Presumably this is what happened to Paul near Damascus as well. He was touched by both the Lord Jesus and by God’s Spirit.

These claims can frustrate modern historians who like to build pictures of people out of the factors that shaped them as children and young adults—their families, early childhood homes, cultures, and so on—and explain their subsequent behavior in the light of those influences. What happened to Paul earlier on that made him convert in this astonishing way? But this assumes that the most important factors in history are things that take place within history, where we can see them—things like sociological and psychological factors. This would miss the point of what Paul tells us. He says that the most important factors in history come from outside of it, from God. He goes out of his way in his longest account of this event, in his letter to Galatians, to emphasize that whatever his background was, whatever the preceding factors, they didn’t matter that much. He was a learned Jew, he says in Galatians 1:14, and so dedicated, he says in the previous verse, that he was persecuting religious deviants.⁷ But he was heading in the completely wrong direction and God changed him by breaking into his life, the chapter continues. It was a surprise, a shock, a sudden about-face. Conventional historical analysis couldn’t predict this and can’t explain it. It can only be explained by divine revelation—and this applies just as much to Christians today. Christians believe that Jesus is Lord (God), because God has revealed this to us through God’s Spirit.

God is both three and one

We have just seen that three people are working together within the one God: the Father, the Lord Jesus, whom Paul sometimes calls the Son, and the Spirit (2 Cor. 13:13).

The Spirit was well known already within Judaism.

There was a sense in which Jews always understood that God was “out there,” far above them and above the earth, creating and sustaining it. The closest that they could get to God generally was through their temple where, after elaborate purification rituals, certain designated people could carefully and occasionally enter God’s presence, which hovered over the ark of the covenant. Any mistakes and, like the final scene in the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, dir. Steven Spielberg), you died! However, sometimes God showed up in other places very close by as well. Prophets received a “measure” of the Spirit, and the Spirit would come upon people like Moses, Samson, and even Saul. This Spirit gave life, healed, directed, spoke, and empowered. Jews knew well then of God’s presence with...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Map
• Introduction
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index of Persons, Places, and Topics
• Index of Scripture References