In Search of Paul

John Dominic Crossan, Jonathan L. Reed

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061960642
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

John Dominic Crossan, the eminent historical Jesus scholar, and Jonathan L. Reed, an expert in biblical archaeology, reveal through archaeology and textual scholarship that Paul, like Jesus, focused on championing the Kingdom of God––a realm of justice and equality––against the dominant, worldly powers of the Roman empire.

Many theories exist about who Paul was, what he believed, and what role he played in the origins of Christianity. Using archaeological and textual evidence, and taking advantage of recent major discoveries in Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Syria, Crossan and Reed show that Paul was a fallible but dedicated successor to Jesus, carrying on Jesus's mission of inaugurating the Kingdom of God on earth in opposition to the reign of Rome. Against the concrete backdrop of first–century Grego–Roman and Jewish life, In Search of Paul reveals the work of Paul as never before, showing how and why the liberating messages and practices of equality, caring for the poor, and a just society under God's rules, not Rome's, were so appealing.

Readers interested in Paul as a historical figure and his place in the development of Christianity

•Readers interested in archaeology and anthropology

1

Jewish Faith and Pagan Society

The influence of Judaism on non-Jews in the Roman Empire was profound and lasting. This is paradoxical. For the exclusiveness of Jewish worship, and the strictness of the Jewish food laws, served as a barrier between Jew and gentile. Moreover the Jews do not as a rule appear to have actively propagated their religion. So evidently there was something in the nature of Jewish religion, and of the Jewish community, which satisfied a need felt by many within and even beyond the frontiers of the Empire.

—Wolf Liebeschuetz, “The Influence of Judaism Among Non-Jews in the Imperial Period” (2001)

Judaism throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods and even after the triumph of Christianity showed tremendous vigor not only in strengthening itself internally with the development of that remarkable document, the Talmud, but also in reaching out to pagans and later to Christians and winning large numbers as proselytes and as “sympathizers.”…Even after the three great revolts of 66–74, 115–17, and 132–35, the Jews were hardly powerless and indeed continued to win proselytes and especially “sympathizers.” In short, the lachrymose theory of Jewish history, highlighting the weakness and suffering of the Jews, would not, on the whole, seem to apply to the ancient period.

—Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (1993)

Judaism, by the early third century, may well have been a more popular religion among the pagans, and therefore a more powerful rival to Christianity in the race for the soul of the Roman world, than we have had any reason to think until now. This helps us understand the tension between the Church and the Synagogue in the first few centuries A.D.

—Robert F. Tannenbaum, “Jews and God-Fearers in the Holy City of Aphrodite” (1986)

In the City of Aphrodite

Overture

You come to Aphrodisias on a full-day visit from Denizli, in southwestern Turkey. As you leave that city its innumerable modern textile factories continue the area’s ancient importance for the manufacture of cotton, linen, and woolen garments. So also do the flocks of sheep and goats that take right-of-way across the narrow roads as you shortcut through the mountains off the main Denizli-Antalya road. It is a beautiful mid-September day in 2002, cool and cloudy, with an odd shower early and late, so not really inconvenient.

Two thousand years ago, Octavian, the not-yet Augustus, said, “Aphrodisias is the one city from all of Asia I have selected to be my own,” and the citizens carved that accolade on the archive wall of their theater. Since the Greek goddess Aphrodite was the Roman goddess Venus, from whom the Julian line was allegedly descended, the city was most fortunately named at that precise historical moment. Millennia later, in Aphrodisias: City of Venus Aphrodite, the frontispiece poem by L. G. Harvey says,

when all paper words

are turned to ash

there will remain

one scarred hillside

beautiful enough to last

forever.

Kenan Erim, of New York University, the city’s Turkish-born excavator and that book’s author, spent his professional life there and is now buried most appropriately beside the reconstructed gate to Aphrodite’s temple. He said that “of all the Graeco-Roman sites of Anatolia, Aphrodisias is the most hauntingly beautiful” (1). Agreed.

The hamlet of Geyre once sat atop the ancient site, but was removed and rebuilt in its nearby location after an earthquake in the 1960s. That opened the site for archaeology, but the old village square still underlies the new entrance plaza ringed by restrooms (very elegant), a restaurant (very limited), and a museum (very beautiful). You get there around 11:30 A.M. and have the site almost totally to yourself. The morning tour buses heading west from Hierapolis and the hot-spring pools of Pamukkale are just leaving, and those reversing that itinerary will not arrive until much later. You sit high up in the once thirty-thousand-seat theater, eat a quiet picnic lunch, admire the stands of stately poplars amid the marbled ruins , and look east to where the seven-thousand-foot tip of Baba Dag emerges periodically from scudding cloud cover. At the foot of that mountain are the marble quarries that gave the city ready material for sculpture or inscription and made its products famous far beyond its own borders. The Dandalaz tributary, fed from the snows of that eastern mountain range, circled the city’s south side and took sculptures northwestward to the ancient Meander, the modern Büyük Menderes, which carried them westward to the coast and the world.

Overview

What text do you read to see most clearly Paul’s life, and what site do you visit to see most clearly Paul’s world—even, or especially, if Paul himself neither wrote that text nor visited that site? In this chapter two chosen sites, the city of Aphrodisias, now in southwestern Turkey, and the island of Delos, now in mid-Aegean Greece , frame two contradictory aspects of the chosen text, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, now a prelude to Paul’s letters in the New Testament.

We begin this chapter at Aphrodisias because it illustrates most forcibly two major themes of this book, the relationship of Paul to Roman imperial theology and to his Jewish religious tradition. The former theme focuses here on the Sebasteion, or Augusteum, whose elegant gate, three-storied facing porticoes, and high-stepped imperial temple celebrated the Roman Julio-Claudian divinities by inserting them among and above the ancient gods and traditions of Greece. The latter theme focuses here on a Jewish inscription that explicitly distinguishes Jews, converts, and a third category of “God-worshipers,” with rather surprising numbers in each category.

We continue by considering the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles as a most ambiguous source for understanding Paul’s life and work, mission and message. We presume, by the way, that the same author wrote that two-volume work that is now separated into the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, but we do not presume that author is “Luke, the beloved physician” from Colossians 4:14 (we use “Luke” simply for convenience). On the one hand, Luke emphasizes certain elements with regard to Christians, pagans, Jews, and Roman authorities that reflect his own, much later views rather than Paul’s much earlier experiences. On the other, he emphasizes the presence of “God-fearers” or “God-worshipers” in Jewish synagogues and underlines Paul’s controversial successes among them. Those pagan sympathizers, not full Jews but no longer pure pagans, will be crucial for this book’s understanding of Paul’s polemics with those fellow Jews on whose domain he was confrontationally convert poaching. Luke, in summary, both knows much about Paul’s time and place, but also interprets it according to his own time and place. Both those elements must be carefully and critically assessed in reading Paul through Lukan eyes.

We finish this chapter on another site that Paul never visited, Delos, amid the Cycladic Islands of the Aegean. We chose it for two reasons. First, it was a microcosm of Paul’s world, a miniature crucible of that world’s political, economic, social, and religious ferment. Second, it is today an entire island preserved for archaeological study. In its many temples, shrines, and synagogues we see both Roman theology spreading eastward from Rome, but also Eastern religions spreading westward toward Rome. We recognize in both cases the absolute conjunction between religion and politics. We catch glimpses of the voluntary associations that organized religion and economics within Greco-Roman commercial life. Above all, we see the ancient tradition of Judaism moving powerfully among Greeks and under Romans. It was only amid that mobility and because of its possibility and security that Paul could operate so successfully.

The Sculptures of the Imperial Sebasteion

Imagine what Paul would have seen had he visited Aphrodisias. Imagine you are walking in the middle of that city on a busy street and turn in under one of the arches of a beautiful two-story marble monumental gate. You slow down for a moment in its shade, but soon rejoin the sun’s glare on a glistening east-west plaza, 46 feet wide, 40 feet high on both sides, and 300 feet long. It is like entering a roofless funnel as long as a football field. To your left and right are parallel three-story-high galleries lined with bulky Doric columns on the bottom level, sleek Ionic columns on the middle level, and ornate Corinthian columns on the third and upper level. Your eyes are drawn up along those columns toward the terra-cotta roof tiles that contrast with the deep blue sky. But they are drawn even more forcibly along the length of the plaza’s funnel to the temple at its far end. It sits on a high podium and can be reached only by a flight of stairs to a front emphasized by six Corinthian columns, taller, larger, and more imposing than those all along the third story to your left and right. Walking toward the temple past civic officials, ministering priests, and people from all walks of life, you look up at those high galleries on either side and see something that is unique in all the Greco-Roman world. Between the columns on the upper two levels of both sides are 180 5-by-5-foot panels sculpted in high relief.

To your left, on the upper level of the north gallery, are universalizing Hellenistic allegories such as Day and Night or Land and Sea, which locate the entire sculptural program within the widest ambience of time and place from Greek mythology. On the middle level, history is absorbed into that mythical framework above it by a series of conquered peoples, personified as elegantly dressed females standing on inscribed bases, extending across the entire sweep of the Roman Empire and emphasizing military victories under Augustus. To your right, in the south gallery’s two upper levels, is the same celebration of war and conquest, the same absorption of history into myth, the same creation of Roman imperial theology. But now the juxtaposition is reversed. In the upper story are important members of the divine Julio-Claudian dynasty, from Augustus and Livia to Nero and Agrippina. In the middle story are various scenes and divinities from Greek mythology such as Zeus, Aphrodite, Poseidon, and Asclepius. But among them are also Aeneas’s flight from Troy and the She-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, the two mytho-historical stories of Roman and Augustan origins.

An inscription dedicates the complex to “Aphrodite, the Theoi Sebastoi, and the People.” The Theoi Sebastoi are the Augustan gods (Sebastos is Greek for the Latin Augustus), the family of the Julio-Claudian divinities (minus Caligula!). There are no panels on the bottom level, only on the two upper levels of both sides. You are forced constantly to swivel from left to right and consistently to look upward until your neck begins to hurt. Your body gets the message even before your mind catches up. That panorama of Roman imperial theology smoothly controls them both.

The Sebasteion, begun under Tiberius and finished under Nero, was damaged by an earthquake even as it was being built and was eventually destroyed by another one afterwards. The northern gallery was quarried for building materials, but the southern one survived without that indignity. But the overall sculptural program can be reconstructed from the many surviving panels that Kenan Erim first discovered in 1979. Two examples contain Roman imperial theology in striking summaries.

A first panel is iconographically simple and still somewhat historical. It depicts an idealized world-conquering Julio-Claudian emperor, not armored but naked except for a back cloak, standing in the center. To his right is a battle trophy above a kneeling and weeping barbarian prisoner whose hands are tied behind her back. To his left is a female figure, either the Roman people or the Senate, crowning him with an oak wreath. A second panel is iconographically more complex and much more cosmic. Claudius, nude as was that preceding figure and all other male imperial figures in the Sebasteion (save an armored one of Nero), strides forcibly forward with his cloak billowing in a wide semicircle above his head. On his right a female earth figure has given him a cornucopia, symbol of control over earth’s fertility—no more wars. On his left a female sea figure has just given him an oar or rudder, symbol of control over ocean’s safety—no more pirates. It displays divine control of both Land and Sea. Nudity, of course, was the Greek and Hellenistic way of iconographically indicating divinity; imperial nudity meant imperial divinity.

What is most interesting, however, is how that Sebasteion fused Roman and Greek elements and styles, although its relief-clad galleries were neither, but unique. The temple’s placement was not approachable from all sides in the Greek egalitarian manner, but had a single procession-like approach that exuded imperial authority in the Roman hierarchical style. The emperors’ portraits, whether those of Augustus, Claudius, or Nero, closely copied the imperial models distributed by Rome. Their bodies and scenes did not rely on Roman models, however, but were local creations and represented a Greek interpretation of Roman imperial rule. The galleries represent, as a whole, the idea that Greek myth and history were destined to unfold into Roman rule under the divine Roman emperors.

The city of Aphrodisias, left free and independent by Rome, was not coerced into setting up that magnificent building. But since the relationship between Rome and Aphrodisias was mutually beneficial, it is no surprise that the civic council endorsed the Sebasteion’s construction and that it was financed by two wealthy Aphrodisian families. Two brothers, Menander and Eusebes, paid for the monumental gate and northern gallery, which were restored by Eusebes’s wife, Apphias, and her daughter Tata after an earthquake. The temple and southern gallery were built by two other brothers, Diogenes and Attalus, but since Diogenes died in the planning stages, it was completed by his wife, Attalis Apphion, and then restored after the earthquake by his son Tiberius Claudius Diogenes, who had a Roman name and presumably Roman citizenship. Those citizens were certainly attracted to the imperial favors that inevitably followed imperial honors, including of course Roman citizenship, and they understood the material blessings that accompanied Augustan and Julio-Claudian rule for those who positioned themselves appropriately.

Those blessings extended beyond the elites, as the vast figural program on the Sebasteion makes clear. The number of masons, craftsmen, and sculptors necessary for this enormous enterprise was substantial, and most workshops in the city received commissions. The sudden demand for skilled labor led to the hasty promotion of marble cutters to figural sculptors. Many a new apprentice took up mallet and chisel for on-the-job training, as is apparent from the uneven quality of carving. Designers and foremen disguised that fact from viewers by having novices cut the panel’s lower portions, which were less visible from the plaza, and having experts work the upper and more visible portions, especially the imperial portraits. Roman imperial rule energized Aphrodisias’s sculpt...