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[First posted in 2012; revived on the occasion of Christianity’s lenten season. This picks up from “What did Paul Achieve,” Chapter 5 of Charles Freeman’s A New History of Early Christianity; condensed and slightly edited. We highly recommend this book for the library of all serious students of religion, particularly the Christian religion.–Admin1.].
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Paul first appears in Acts as Saul. His name probably derives from Saul, the first king of Israel, the most prominent member of his tribe, that of Benjamin. It is under this name that he holds the coats of those stoning Stephen. His zeal for his Jewish faith has turned him into a vigilante ready to exploit the growing unease with the emerging Christian communities. He comes across as an outspoken and violent protagonist, something of a loner (there is no evidence that he ever married and he is puritanical about sex) and probably obsessive about the mastering of texts. It is a type one can recognise but no one could have predicted the way in which his life was to be transformed by Christ.
The dramatic moment of his conversion comes, perhaps in 34, on the road to Damascus, where Paul was planning to extend his campaign against the Christians. Christ appears as if in a vision, berating Paul for his persecutions. All the accounts, in the letters and ini Acts, date from more than 20 years later but they retain the abruptness of the event. ‘I was apprehended by Christ Jesus,” as Paul puts it in Philemon. It is impossible to retrieve the psychological underpinnings of the conversion but a powerful and influential element of the experience as Paul reflects on it was that he, an undoubted sinner, perhaps already wracked with guilt, had been picked out for salvation. He equates his own vision of Christ with that of the apostles. Paul’s seems a far-fetched, even contrived, interpretation but it was his confidence in his personal mission that was to drive his activities in the years to come. He believed that he was the agent through whom the divine plan would unfold.
The conversion of Paul did not involve a change from one religion to another. If Paul had not considered himself still a Jew he would never, as a Roman citizen, have submitted himself to Jewish floggings as he did, nor refer, in Galatians (3:28-9), to all believers in Christ as ‘Abraham’s offspring’.
Although Paul’s relationship with Judaism, and certainly with Jews, was to become tortuous, he remained a Jew who attempted to portray Christ as some kind of fulfillment of Jewish history, one which would extend beyond the Law and the requirements of circumcision and Jewish diet into the Gentile world.
He believed passionately that the Second Coming was imminent and that it was possible to find a place for Gentiles in salvation.
‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ,”
—-as the famous passage in Galatians (3:28) puts it. In this he was venturing beyond the margins of conventional Judaism. He was in a theological no-man’s-land and the boundaries between traditional Judaism, Jewish Christianity as it was emerging in Jerusalem and his own teachings remained without clear definition. It was an extraordinary position to be in, one which exposed Paul to ostracism from Jews and hardly ensured a welcome from more than a tiny minority of Gentiles.
Three years after his conversion Paul made a visit to Jerusalem to meet Peter and James. It must have been an uneasy occasion. Peter and James had unchallengeable status as the chosen companions of Jesus and founders of the movement in his memory. There was little role for an outsider in their circle, especially one who had persecuted Christians, other than as repentant disciple. Were they even able to communicate with each other in a shared language, let alone understand each other’s perspectives? The Jerusalem apostles had known Jesus intimately as a human being; Paul could only contribute an apparent vision of Jesus as the Christ. Even if Paul did learn something of Jesus’ life it made little impact on him. There is scarcely a reference in any of the letters to any of Jesus’ teachings, other than, perhaps signiificantly to his prohibition of divorce.
At some point Paul must have shifted his focus to the symbolic importance of Christ’s death and resurrection. His psychological make-up may have been of crucial importance here. Paul identifies strongly with Jesus alone in agony on the cross, a reflection perhaps of his own isolation. Yet here was a theological impasse. Like other Christians Paul had to confront the problem of a messiah who had broken with conventional expectations of messiahship by dying.
By the time he writes Galatians, Paul has transformed Jesus into a form of messiah who is radically different from the one expected. Rather than triumphing on earth through his majesty he had chosen to die because humankind was sinful (see Galatians 1;4, 2;20). He had risen to his Father in heaven, his humanity transformed in the process (see later Romans 1:3-4) but his return to earth was imminent.
This personal and deeply felt response by Paul did not gain him any standing with the Jerusalem Christians. He left after a fortnight. There is now a long gap in the record, from, say AD 37, when he met the disciples in Jerusalem to 48. It remains uncharted.
Paul may have mastered his trade as a tent maker, made incipient ‘missionary’ journeys or returned to Tarsus to further his education. He must have had some reputation by the end of the period as it was in his home city that he was tracked down by a fellow Christian, Barnabas, described in Acts as a Hellenised Jew from Cyprus, and taken to Antioch where he preached for a year. From Antioch Barnabas took Paul back to Jerusalem. Here an agreement was made with the apostles that he should preach to the Gentiles while they would continue to work only with the Jews. In return Paul agreed that he would collect offerings for the Jerusalem church. The desire to collect offerings is hard to explain but it can perhaps be seen as evidence of Paul’s wish to keep some form of communication between the two worlds of Christianity, as they were in the process of becoming. Maintaining some form of relationship with the Jerusalem Christians was, after all, one of the few days he could preserve some credibility as an apostle.
Now began Paul’s missionary journeys. They were extraordinary in terms of the physical demands made on him. It is possible to reconstruct the day-to-day walks that the overland routes described in Acts (if these are accurate) would have required. A single day’s walk of over 20, or even up to 30, miles between cities was often unavoidable and this pace was kept up for days at a time. This was on unmade roads, some of them mountainous and beset with the dangers of brigands and wild animals. Paul must often have sought out caravans of traders for protection. Even a city had been safely reached, paul was often greeted at best with distrust and often hostility. There is little wonder that he has achieved a heroic status among his admirers. Yet, as the analysis of his journeys below will suggest, his strategy may have been misguided.
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