Paul Read online

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  Another obvious barrier stood between my teenage Bible-reading self and a historical reading of Paul. I assumed without question, until at least my thirties, that the whole point of Christianity was for people to “go to heaven when they died.” Hymns, prayers, and sermons (including the first few hundred of my own sermons) all pointed this way. So, it seemed, did Paul: “We are citizens of heaven,” he wrote.3 The language of “salvation” and “glorification,” central to Romans, Paul’s greatest letter, was assumed to mean the same thing: being “saved” or being “glorified” meant “going to heaven,” neither more nor less. We took it for granted that the question of “justification,” widely regarded as Paul’s principal doctrine, was his main answer as to how “salvation” worked in practice; so, for example, “Those he justified, he also glorified”4 meant, “First you get justified, and then you end up in heaven.” Looking back now, I believe that in our diligent searching of the scriptures we were looking for correct biblical answers to medieval questions.

  These were not, it turns out, the questions asked by the first Christians. It never occurred to my friends and me that, if we were to scour the first century for people who were hoping that their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and “go to heaven,” we would discover Platonists like Plutarch, not Christians like Paul. It never dawned on us that the “heaven and hell” framework we took for granted was a construct of the High Middle Ages, to which the sixteenth-century Reformers were providing important new twists but which was at best a distortion of the first-century perspective. For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world. (When Paul says, “We are citizens of heaven,” he goes on at once to say that Jesus will come from heaven not to take us back there, but to transform the present world and us with it.) And this hope for “resurrection,” for new bodies within a newly reconstituted creation, doesn’t just mean rethinking the ultimate “destination,” the eventual future hope. It changes everything on the way as well.

  Once we get clear about this, we gain a “historical” perspective in three different senses. First, we begin to see that it matters to try to find out what the first-century Paul was actually talking about over against what later theologians and preachers have assumed he was talking about. As I said, history means thinking into other people’s minds. Learning to read Paul involves more than this, but not less.

  Second, when we start to appreciate “what Paul was really talking about,” we find that he was himself talking about “history” in the sense of “what happens in the real world,” the world of space, time, and matter. He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of “salvation” was about Israel’s Messiah “inheriting the world,” as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul’s perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new “otherworldly” hope.

  Many skeptics in our own day have assumed that Christianity is irrelevant to the “real world.” Many Christians have agreed, supposing that if they are going to insist on the “heavenly” dimension, they have to deny the importance of the “earthly” one. All such split-world theories, however well meaning, miss the point. Though Paul does not quote Jesus’s prayer for God’s kingdom to come “on earth as in heaven,” the whole of his career and thought was built on the assumption that this was always God’s intention and that this new heaven-and-earth historical reality had come to birth in Jesus and was being activated by the spirit.

  Third, therefore, as far as Paul was concerned, his own “historical” context and setting mattered. The world he lived in was the world into which the gospel had burst, the world that the gospel was challenging, the world it would transform. His wider setting—the complex mass of countries and cultures, of myths and stories, of empires and artifacts, of philosophies and oracles, of princes and pimps, of hopes and fears—this real world was not an incidental backdrop to a “timeless” message that could in principle have been announced by anyone in any culture. When Luke describes Paul engaging with Stoics, Epicureans, and other thinkers in Athens, he is only making explicit what is implicit throughout Paul’s letters: that, in today’s language, Paul was a contextual theologian. This doesn’t at all mean that we can relativize his ideas (“He said that within his context, but our context is different, so we can push him to one side”). On the contrary. This is where Paul’s loyalty to the hope of Israel comes through so strongly. Paul believed that in Jesus the One God had acted “when the fullness of time arrived.”5 Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

  So when we try to understand Paul, we must do the hard work of understanding his context—or rather, we should say, his contexts, plural. His Jewish world and the multifaceted Greco-Roman world of politics, “religion,” philosophy, and all the rest that affected in a thousand ways the Jewish world that lived within it are much, much more than simply a “frame” within which we can display a Pauline portrait. Actually, as any art gallery director knows, the frame of a portrait isn’t just an optional border. It can make or mar the artist’s intention, facilitating appreciation or distracting the eye and skewing the perspective. But with a historical figure like Paul, the surrounding culture isn’t even a frame. It is part of the portrait itself. Unless we understand its shape and key features, we will not understand what made Paul tick and why his work succeeded, which is our first main question. And unless we understand Paul’s Jewish world in particular, we will not even know how to ask our second question: what it meant for Paul to change from being a zealous persecutor of Jesus’s followers to becoming a zealous Jesus-follower himself.

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  The Jewish world in which the young Saul grew up was itself firmly earthed in the soil of wider Greco-Roman culture. As often in ancient history, we know less than we would like to know about the city of Tarsus, Saul’s hometown, but we know enough to get the picture. Tarsus, a noble city in Cilicia, ten miles inland on the river Cydnus in the southeast corner of modern Turkey, was on the major east–west trade routes. (The main landmass we think of today as Turkey was divided into several administrative districts, with “Asia” as the western part, “Asia Minor” as the central and eastern part, “Bithynia” in the north, and so on. I will use the simple, if anachronistic, method of referring to the whole region by its modern name.)

  Tarsus could trace its history back two thousand years. World-class generals like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had recognized its strategic importance; the emperor Augustus had given it extra privileges. It was a city of culture and politics, of philosophy and industry. Among those industries was a thriving textile business, producing material made from goats’ hair, used not least to make shelters. This may well have been the basis of the family business, tentmaking, in which Saul had been apprenticed and which he continued to practice. The cosmopolitan world of the eastern Mediterranean, sharing the culture left by Alexander’s empire, flowed this way and that through the city. Tarsus rivaled Athens as a center of philosophy, not least because half the philosophers of Athens had gone there a hundred years earlier when Athens backed the wrong horse in a Mediterranean power play and suffered the wrath of Rome. But if the Romans were ruthless, they were also pragmatists. Once it was clear they were in charge, they were happy to make deals.

  One deal in particular was struck with the Jews themselves. Everybody else in Saul’s day, in regions from Spain to Syria, had to worship the goddess Roma and Kyrios Caesar, “Lord Caesar.” Augustus Caesar declared that his late adoptive father, Jul
ius Caesar, was now divine, thus conveniently acquiring for himself the title divi filius, “son of the deified one,” or in Greek simply huios theou, “son of god.” His successors mostly followed suit. The cults of Roma and the emperor spread in different ways and at different speeds across the empire. In the East, Saul’s home territory, they were well established from early on.

  But the Jews were relentless. They wouldn’t go along with it. They could and would worship and pray to only one God, the God of their ancestors, whom they believed was the only “god” worthy of the name. The ancient Israelite prayer in Greek, which they all now spoke, made a sharp contrast between “Lords.” Kyrios Caesar? No, they declared, Kyrios ho theos, Kyrios heis estin, “The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”6 There is one Kyrios and only one. So what was to be done? Would the Romans force the Jews to compromise, as some earlier conquering empires had tried to do? Some Jewish leaders proposed to Rome that, instead of praying to Caesar, they would pray to their One God for Rome and its emperor. Would that be enough? Yes, said Caesar, that will do. A special pragmatic privilege. Live and let live. That was the world in which young Saul had grown up.

  We don’t know how long his family had lived in Tarsus. Later legends suggest various options, one of which is that his father or grandfather had lived in Palestine but had moved during one of the periodic social and political upheavals, which, in that world, always carried “religious” overtones as well. What we do know about them is that they belonged to the strictest of the Jewish schools. They were Pharisees.

  The word “Pharisee” has had bad press over many years. Modern research, operating at the academic and not usually the popular level, has done little to dispel that impression, partly because the research in question has made things far more complicated, as research often does. Most of the sources for understanding the Pharisees of Saul’s day come from a much later period. The rabbis of the third and fourth centuries AD looked back to the Pharisees as their spiritual ancestors and so tended to project onto them their own questions and ways of seeing things. Ironically for those who try to locate Paul within his own Pharisaic context, his writings themselves offer the best evidence for that context in the period prior to the Roman-Jewish war of AD 66–70.

  Paul’s evidence must no doubt be taken with a pinch of salt because of his newfound faith in Jesus; some later Jews have questioned whether he had ever been a Pharisee at all. But the other great first-century source on Pharisees, the Jewish historian Josephus, requires equal caution. Yes, he says quite a lot about Pharisaic movements in the period, but everything he says is colored by his own stance. Having been a general at the start of the war, he had gone over to the Romans and had claimed moreover that Israel’s One God had done the same thing, an alarmingly clear case of making God in one’s own image. So all the evidence requires careful handling. Despite this, however, I think it is clear that Saul and his family were indeed Pharisees. They lived with a fierce, joyful strictness in obedience to the ancestral traditions. They did their best to urge other Jews to do the same.

  This was never going to be easy in a city like Tarsus. Even in Jerusalem, with a mostly Jewish population and with the Temple itself, the building where heaven and earth came together, right there in its recently restored beauty there were cultural pressures of all sorts that could draw devout Jews into compromise. How much more had this kind of challenge existed in the Diaspora, the “dispersion” of Jews around the rest of the known world, a process that had been going on for centuries. Cultural pressures and different responses to them were the stock in trade of Jewish life as families and individuals faced questions such as what to eat, whom to eat with, whom to do business with, whom to marry, what attitude to take toward local officials, local taxes, local customs and rituals, and so on. The decisions individual Jews made on all of these questions would mark them out in the eyes of some as too compromised and in the eyes of others as too strict. (Our words “liberal” and “conservative” carry too many anachronistic assumptions to be of much help at this point.)

  There was seldom if ever in the ancient world a simple divide, with Jews on one side and non-Jews on the other. We should envisage, rather, a complex subculture in which Jews as a whole saw themselves as broadly different from their non-Jewish neighbors. Within that, entire subgroups of Jews saw themselves as different from other subgroups. The parties and sects we know from Palestinian Jewish life of the time (Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and a nascent militantly “zealous” faction) may not have existed exactly as we describe them, not least because the Sadducees were a small Jerusalem-based aristocracy, but intra-Jewish political and social divisions would have persisted. We who today are familiar not only with the complexities of Middle Eastern culture and politics but also with the Western challenge of multicultural living (a bland homogeneity or a dangerous mix of particular identities?) can imagine something of what a city like Tarsus must have been like.

  We can’t be sure how many Jews lived in Tarsus in Saul’s day. There were, quite possibly, a few thousand at least in a city of roughly a hundred thousand. But we can get a clear sense of how things were for the young Saul.

  If there are parallels between today’s complex societies and that of a city like ancient Tarsus, there is one radical difference, at least when seen from the modern Western perspective. In the ancient world there was virtually no such thing as private life. A tiny number of the aristocracy or the very rich were able to afford a measure of privacy. But for the great majority, life was lived publicly and visibly. The streets were mostly narrow, the houses and tenements were mostly cramped, there was noise and smell everywhere, and everybody knew everybody else’s business. We can assume that many of the Jews in Tarsus would have lived close to one another, partly for safety ( Jews, absenting themselves from official public “religion” including the celebrations of the imperial cult, were regularly seen as subversive, even though they tried in other respects to be good citizens) and partly for ease of obtaining kosher food. The questions of where one stood on the spectrum between strict adherence to the ancestral code, the Torah, and “compromise” were not theoretical. They were about what one did and what one didn’t do in full view of the neighbors. And about how the neighbors might react.

  All this obviously involved the workplace as well. We know from Paul’s mature life and writings that he engaged in manual work. “Tentmaking” probably included the crafting of other goods made of leather or animal hair in addition to the core product of tents themselves. (We may think of tents as camping gear for leisure use, but in Paul’s world then, as in parts of the world today, many people moved from place to place for seasonal work, and even people who stayed put would depend on canvas awnings and shelters to enable them to work under the hot sun.) This probably means two things.

  First, Saul was probably apprenticed to his father in this family business. We don’t know whether the father was himself a Torah scholar, though it seems likely that Saul’s deep familiarity with Israel’s scriptures and traditions, however much they were nurtured in his subsequent Jerusalem education, had begun at home. But being a Torah student or teacher was not a salaried profession. Rabbis in Saul’s day, and for centuries afterward, earned their living by other means.

  Second, the market for tents and similar products would be wide. One might guess that likely purchasers would include regiments of soldiers, but travel was a way of life for many other people as well in the busy world of the early Roman Empire. It seems improbable that a Jewish tentmaker in a city like Tarsus would be selling only to other Jews. We can safely assume, then, that Saul grew up in a cheerfully strict observant Jewish home, on the one hand, and in a polyglot, multicultural, multiethnic working environment on the other. Strict adherence to ancestral tradition did not mean living a sheltered life, unaware of how the rest of the world worked, spoke, behaved, and reasoned.

  Reasoning, in fact, is one thing the mature Paul was particularly good at, even if the density of his arguments can still ch
allenge his readers. Everything we know about him encourages us to think of the young Saul of Tarsus as an unusually gifted child. He read biblical Hebrew fluently. He spoke the Aramaic of the Middle East (the mother tongue of Jesus and quite possibly Saul’s mother tongue as well) in addition to the ubiquitous Greek, which he spoke and wrote at great speed. He probably had at least some Latin.

  This multilingual ability doesn’t mark him out in and of itself. Many children in many countries are functionally multilingual. In the longer perspective of history, in fact, it is those who know only one language who are the odd ones out. But the mature Paul has something else of which fewer people, even in his world, could boast. He gives every impression of having swallowed the Bible whole. He moves with polished ease between Genesis and the Psalms, between Deuteronomy and Isaiah. He knows how the story works, its heights and depths, its twists and turns. He can make complex allusions with a flick of the pen and produce puns and other wordplays across the languages. The radical new angle of vision provided by the gospel of Jesus is a new angle on texts he already knows inside out. He has pretty certainly read other Jewish books of the time, books like the Wisdom of Solomon, quite possibly some of the philosophy of his near contemporary Philo. They too knew their Bibles extremely well. Saul matches them stride for stride and, arguably, outruns them.

  What is more, whether Saul has read the non-Jewish philosophers of his day or the great traditions that go back to Plato and Aristotle, he knows the ideas. He has heard them on the street, discussed them with his friends. He knows the technical terms, the philosophical schemes that probe the mysteries of the universe and the inner workings of human beings, and the theories that hold the gods and the world at arm’s length like the Epicureans or that draw them into a single whole, to pan, “the all,” like the Stoics. It’s unlikely that he has read Cicero, whose book On the Nature of the Gods, from roughly a century before his own mature work, discussed all the options then available to an educated Roman (this does not, of course, include a Jewish worldview). But if someone in the tentmaker’s shop were to start expounding Cicero’s ideas, Saul would know what the conversation was about. He would be able to engage such a person on his own terms. He is thus completely at home in the worlds of both Jewish story and non-Jewish philosophy. We may suspect that he, like some of his contemporaries, somewhat relishes the challenge of bringing them together.