Paul Behaving Badly

Was the Apostle a Racist, Chauvinist Jerk?

E. Randolph Richards, Brandon J. O'Brien

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830873326
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The apostle Paul was kind of a jerk. He was arrogant and stubborn. He called his opponents derogatory, racist names. He legitimized slavery and silenced women. He was a moralistic, homophobic killjoy who imposed his narrow religious views on others. Or was he? Randolph Richards and Brandon O'Brien explore the complicated persona and teachings of the apostle Paul. Unpacking his personal history and cultural context, they show how Paul both offended Roman perspectives and scandalized Jewish sensibilities. His vision of Christian faith was deeply disturbing to those in his day and remains so in ours. Paul behaved badly, but not just in the ways we might think. Take another look at Paul and see why this "worst of sinners" dares to say, "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ."

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PAUL WAS
KIND OF A JERK

Charles Monroe Sheldon considered Christ the supreme model of Christian behavior. That’s why the Topeka pastor wrote the novel In His Steps (1896), a story about a minister who challenges his congregants to judge all their actions by first asking themselves, “What would Jesus do?” The title is borrowed from Peter’s words in 1 Peter 2:21, and the book is one of the best-selling publications of all time. The subtitle became a popular catchphrase a century later (WWJD) and challenged a new generation of Christians to follow the example of Jesus.

Jesus himself said, “Follow me,” so we expect our ministers and mentors to encourage us to be more like Jesus. All of us should be more like Jesus. Christians expect the disciples of Jesus to say, as Peter did, “Follow the example of Jesus,” but it takes a special kind of chutzpah for a disciple to say, “Follow my example.”

Paul had chutzpah.

“Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters,” he encourages the Philippians (Phil 3:17, emphasis added). At the very least, he claimed an intermediary role between Jesus and other Christians. “Follow my example,” Paul exhorts, “as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). This from the man who challenges the Romans to “not think of yourself more highly than you ought” (Rom 12:3). It may be that Paul’s first-century readers had no problem with this instruction from their spiritual mentor. Maybe it didn’t sound brash to people then, but few modern Christians could summon the self-confidence to say these words about their own life: “Follow my example.” Coming from someone else, even from the pen of an apostle, the advice sounds arrogant.

In another letter, Paul tells the Galatians that God “set me apart from my mother’s womb” (Gal 1:15). We might not blink at that statement. We typically assume that all of us are chosen in our mother’s womb, but that’s not what Paul meant. The Bible only identifies a handful of people as set apart by God from before birth: Samson, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus. God specially appointed all of them for a specific role in redemptive history. That’s what Paul had in mind. He was like those guys. He was exceptional.

Statements like these—follow my example because I’m exceptional!—have earned Paul a reputation for being kind of a jerk. The truth is, this is just the beginning. Paul asserted his opinions, even when he was wrong. He bossed around churches and bulldozed other leaders. In 2014, the famed German scholar Gerd Lüdemann noted Paul’s “streak of arrogance and a tendency to vacillate,” and said Paul’s claims of “authority reinforced his sense of infallibility and often led him to bully any who disagreed.”1 While we don’t think Paul ever vacillated, he does seem to bully. This description may bring to mind certain celebrity pastors who seem immune to rebuke, or leaders from your past (and ours) who delivered their opinions from on high as if they were speaking the very words of God.

Elsewhere Paul curses his opponents (Gal 1:8). Some people try to rehabilitate Paul’s reputation by exclaiming, “I’m sure that’s not what he really meant.” But that really is what he meant. He repeats it just to make sure we got it: “I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!” (Gal 1:9). Paul claims to be superior to many of his contemporaries in keeping Torah (Gal 1:14), claims to speak in tongues more than all the Corinthians combined (1 Cor 14:18) and claims to have worked harder than all the other apostles (1 Cor 15:10). Then he curses some others in Corinth (1 Cor 16:22). Taken in total, his conduct has caused at least one modern Christian to claim, “No Christian genuinely seeking the righteousness of God should imitate a man like Paul.”2

APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES— AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!

Apostles held special status among the earliest Christians. In the New Testament, the term “apostles” usually designates Jesus’ twelve closest disciples. Throughout the Gospels and Acts, this core group is often identified by a collective name: the Twelve (see for example Mt 26:20; Mk 9:35; Lk 9:12; Jn 6:67; Acts 6:2). These men made up Jesus’ inner circle, his most intimate friends. To the masses Jesus spoke in parables, but to the Twelve he explained in detail the mysteries of the kingdom of God (Mk 4:10-11). They were the only people who saw Jesus calm the stormy sea, walk on water and break the bread of the Last Supper. Even after Jesus ascended to heaven, the apostles were forever affected by their experience with him in life. Everybody noticed. Even the enemies of the apostles, Israel’s leaders who tried to suppress the Gospel, noticed: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13, emphasis added). Having been with Jesus marked them as special.

When heresy and schism threatened the unity of the young church in the next generation after all the apostles were dead, church leaders appealed to the authority of the apostles to give church members confidence in their pastors and in the Scriptures. Clement of Rome, one of the first bishops of Rome who was possibly a companion of the apostle Paul (Phil 4:3), argued that the leaders of the local churches could be trusted because they were appointed by the apostles. The pastors were appointed by the apostles, the apostles were appointed by Christ, Christ was sent by God (1 Clement 42:1-4; 44:1-3). In the next couple of generations, “apostolicity” was an important criterion for a book to be considered part of the canon of Scripture. You could trust the content of the books written by folks like Matthew and John because they had been there. They had witnessed Jesus’ miracles and heard his teaching with their own ears. John himself asserts: “That . . . which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 Jn 1:1). So the earliest Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). Christian tradition inherited its reverence for the apostles from the New Testament itself.

There are times Paul seems not to care about all that. Paul was not one of the Twelve. He did not follow nor interact with Jesus before his crucifixion. Gerd Lüdemann observes, “He did not consider the life of Jesus of Nazareth to be an important topic. Paul never met Jesus personally and had little familiarity with his deeds and teachings.”3 This is overstating the case, though it is true Paul rarely quotes Jesus. And the only sense in which Paul ever spoke with Jesus was on the Damascus road, yet in that interaction Jesus told Paul off. Paul dismisses the fact that the other apostles had walked with Jesus; they knew him “according to the flesh” (2 Cor 5:16 ESV). He never expresses any disappointment that he didn’t follow Jesus through the villages of Galilee. Instead he brags about learning at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3).

Instead of honoring the apostles, Paul insisted that he was just as authoritative as any of them. He says the apostles were “reputed to be pillars” (Gal 2:9 NASB)—an expression not intended to be complimentary. He asserts “I consider myself not in the least inferior to the most eminent apostles” (2 Cor 11:5 NASB). He doesn’t consider the apostles’ proximity to Jesus to have elevated their status in the least. Luke thought it was important that he had received the message from those who had been there. He was careful to compose a faithful account “just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Lk 1:2). It mattered to Luke if you were an eyewitness. It didn’t matter to Paul that he wasn’t.

Time and again Paul emphasizes that “his gospel” is precisely that: his own. “I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it” (Gal 1:12). Following his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul’s “immediate response was not to consult any human being” (Gal 1:16). When Paul finally interacted with the Christian leaders in Jerusalem a decade later (Gal 2:1), he insists that they “added nothing to my message” (Gal 2:6). How arrogant it seems that Paul would be so unwilling to submit himself to the teaching of the apostles when others did—and on the grounds that he didn’t have to because he was an apostle too!

So confident was Paul in his understanding of the gospel that he felt free to challenge the Twelve. Peter, for example, was happy to eat with Gentiles in Antioch. But when “certain men came from James,” Peter withdrew from the Gentiles and he influenced other Jews to do the same (Gal 2:12). On the face of it, Peter appears guilty of little more than being cliquish. But Paul lays into him. When he saw that Peter was “not acting in line with the truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:14) Paul “opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Gal 2:11). And he did it “in front of them all” (Gal 2:14). In the process of calling Peter out, he delivers a theological treatise on the law and the gospel. He presumed to correct Peter’s gospel—a gospel Peter knew firsthand because he had walked with Jesus.

Imagine This

Paul is the newest staff member at the booming five-thousand-member church you started. He wasn’t there when the church was planted. He wasn’t part of the first meetings in your living room. He never had to load and unload the sound equipment in the hot sun at the rented high school. And yet he is so confident in his opinion that he corrects you publicly on stage and in your face. Or, Paul is the new employee you’ve hired at your company who has a fancy degree and no experience, but is certain that he’s doing it right and you’re doing it wrong. I wonder if it bothered Peter to be corrected in front of everyone. It certainly would have irritated me. I don’t mind being corrected, but there is a right way to do it and then there is a way that makes you a jerk.

Peter may have been wrong. Like all of us at times, Peter may have momentarily stepped off the path of discipleship. But show some respect. Peter was there when Jesus was arrested. Peter was there when Jesus fed the five thousand. Peter was the spokesperson at Pentecost. For goodness sake, Peter was chosen to be one of the three to witness the transfiguration! In a storm, Peter walked on water (Mt 14:29); Paul, in a storm, had to swim (Acts 27:42-44). Jesus commanded his disciples, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private” (Mt 18:15 NASB, emphasis added). Paul didn’t do that. He confronted Peter publicly and to his face. He shamed a highly regarded shepherd of God in front of the flock.

PAUL ON A PEDESTAL

Evangelicals often give Paul extra credit and justify his behavior because we have him on a pedestal that is just an inch or two shorter than Jesus. It’s an honest temptation since Paul wrote most of the New Testament. Even so, Paul’s contemporaries did not share that temptation. Luke, the writer of Acts and occasional traveling companion of Paul, obviously admired Paul but he still went out of his way to remind us that Paul wasn’t perfect. Many popular Greco-Roman stories of the day included a “divine-man” character. But Luke wants everyone to know that Paul wasn’t half-man, half-god. Paul wasn’t Hercules, so Luke tells two stories in which his readers would have immediately recognized that Paul was wrong.

In the first, Paul has a falling out with Barnabas, “a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means ‘son of encouragement’)” (Acts 4:36).

Notice that Luke starts the story by reminding us of Barnabas’s excellent pedigree and nickname that all of us would admire. Barnabas was the first disciple to vouch for Paul after Paul’s “conversion” from persecutor to propagator of the gospel (Acts 9:27). In Acts, Barnabas always acts with integrity (Acts 11:22-25). On the second missionary journey, Barnabas wants to take John Mark along. Paul disagrees, because he considers John Mark a quitter (Acts 15:37-38). The disagreement becomes so strong that Barnabas and Paul split. Who was right, Barnabas or Paul? Our instinct might be to justify Paul—he’s the hero, right? Not at the time. The first readers of the book of Acts would know John Mark had written a Gospel. Many would know that Mark was a later companion of Paul (Col 4:10; Philem 24) and that Paul considered Mark personally useful (2 Tim 4:11). In other words, while we modern readers give Paul the benefit of the doubt, in the first century that honor would have gone to John Mark and Barnabas. Besides, if you had a problem with Barnabas, you were the problem. He was a saint.

Luke records another episode in Acts that illustrates his willingness to point out Paul’s faults. It also illustrates an insight into Paul’s personality—that being wrong didn’t stop Paul from being confident. When Paul wanted to travel to Jerusalem, the Christians in Tyre urged Paul “through the Spirit” not to go to Jerusalem (Acts 21:4). When Paul left Tyre, he traveled toward Jerusalem to Caesarea. While he was there, the prophet Agabus received a vision from the Holy Spirit and walked all the way from Judea (thirty miles!) to tell Paul not to go to Jerusalem. The apostles who traveled with Paul to Caesarea told him not to go to Jerusalem. The Caesarean believers told Paul not to go to Jerusalem.

Paul decided to go to Jerusalem. He simply “would not be dissuaded” (Acts 21:14). In his defense, he gave a very spiritual-sounding explanation for ignoring everyone’s advice. “I am ready not only to be bound,” Paul said, “but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 21:13). That’s good, because when he arrived in Jerusalem, he was promptly arrested.

Let’s avoid letting Paul off the hook on which Luke clearly puts him. Luke was careful with his words. He tells us Paul said that the Spirit wanted Paul to go to Jerusalem, and then Luke clearly states that the Spirit said otherwise: “Through the Spirit they urged Paul not to go on to Jerusalem” (Acts 21:4)....