Paul 6: Founder of Gentile Christianity

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[First posted 2012.  Continuing “What did Paul Achieve,” Chapter 5 of Charles Freeman’s A New History of Early Christianity; condensed and slightly edited. Please get a copy of the book for your library. —Admin1].

 

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When he was on one of his visits to Corinth, Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans.  (It is recorded as having been written at Cenchreae, the port of Corinth.)  It is the only one he sent to a community of which he had no direct experience and, free of the tensions that characterised his letters to communities whom he knew, it allowed for a more systematic exposition of his theology.  Perhaps he was trying to bring some coherence to his thoughts before he returned to Jerusalem with his collection and had to justify his views to the Jewish Christian community there.  Not surprisingly in view of the bruises he had suffered at the hands of his opponents and recalcitrant followers, this letter is preoccupied with the weight of human sin.  Everyone is subject to its stifling effect, even Jews who have observed the Law.  God’s proof of his own love for us is shown no longer through the Law but in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. ‘God did not withold his own Son but gave him over for us’ (Romans 8:32).  Baptism is in the death of Christ and the possibilities of eternal life lie with his resurrection.  The Law is now transcended and history has moved into a new phase in which all — including the Gentiles, of course — who show faith may be ‘justified’. 

No issue in Paul’s theology has proved more intractable than understanding what Paul meant by ‘righteousness’ and ‘justification through faith.’ What did it actually mean  to ‘set right’ as the Greek word Paul used implied?  Had the death of Christ, and the freeing of the human race from sin, made those with faith ‘justified’ in the sense of being released into spiritual freedom?  Did one actually have to do anything, good works, for instance, to stay in  a state of ‘justification’ or was it a once and for all gift through the grace of God?

 

At Romans 6:15-19, Paul brings slavery to the core of the argument.  Those who have been slaves to sin can now be redeemed by God through Christ and become slaves of righteousness instead.  The word “redeem” in Greek is the same term used when a slave’s freedom was bought — and it is used in the Old Testament to describe the process by which God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  The intensity with which Paul makes his argument is perhaps one instance where he writes from the heart.  The personal experience of his family’s freedom from slavery is expressed in his theology.  When, at Romans 8:15, Paul writes, ‘The Spirit [of God] you have received is not a spirit of slavery leading you back into a life of fear, but a Spirit that makes us sons, enabling us to cry “Abba! Father!” ‘; a personal sense of liberation is patent.

 

The Letter to the Romans was later to be taken up by Augustine and become one of the most influential documents in western history.  Luther went so far as to suggest that ‘this epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament, and truly the purest gospel’, an astonishingly narrow approach to the totality of the scriptures.  However, its impact at the time it was written is completely unknown. 

 

After a stay of perhaps 3 months in Corinth, Paul returned to Asia Minor.  He avoided Ephesus and headed instead for another major port of the region, Miletus, and it was here that he received a delegation from the Ephesian Christians.  By now he was in a mood of deep foreboding. There is no evidence that he had ever convinced the Jews of his mission and he must have known that he would hardly have been welcome in Jerusalem where he probably had a collection to deliver.  He did not expect to return alive from the city and he was pessimistic about the future of his missions. ‘I know that when I am gone, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock.’ His depression proved infectious.  The Ephesians were in tears when they escorted him to his boat.

 

Paul had already talked to the Thessalonians of the retaliation being inflicted on Jews.  This may well have referred to the increasing tension in Judaea.  When Paul arrived in Jerusalem (c. 58) the city was unsettled.  The clumsy tactics of Fellix, the procurator, had exacerbated unrest.  There had been massacres and these had fuelled the growing sense of Jewish nationalism which was to erupt in the disastrous rebellion of 66.  The Jewish Christian community, still under the leadership of James, felt acutely vulnerable and they insisted that Paul went through the ritual of purification to allay the suspicion that his mission to the Gentiles involved a rejection of his Jewish identity.

 

This may have satisfied James and his followers but Paul was too well known for him to be left in peace.  Even before the 7 days of purification were over Jews from Asia had attacked him in the synagogue.  A rumor that he had offended by bringing a Gentile into the Temple spread round Jerusalem and caused such turmoil that the centurion in charge of the city garrison intervened to rescue Paul.  Further unrest followed when Paul spoke to the crowds.  He was eventually brought before the Sanhedrin but here again there was confusion when he preached the resurrection of the dead.  The Pharisees in the council supported him, the Sadducees opposed him.  Sensibly the centurion, who now knew Paul was a Roman citizen, arranged for him to be taken down to Caesarea to be judged by Felix.

 

Luke provides a series of speeches in which Paul justifies his beliefs before Felix, Felix’s successor, Festus, and Agrippa, a descendant of Herod whom the Romans had installed in a small kingdom to the north of Judaea.  Paul became passionate and overheated but he said nothing that justified a charge against him. Festus, however, was forced to acquiesce to Paul’s demand that he should be able to appeal direct to the emperor in Rome. In what is one of the best descriptions of a voyage in the ancient world, Luke describes the tortuous journey across the Mediterranean that followed.  Paul was imprisoned in Rome and may have suffered martyrdom there although some traditions (a hint in the First Letter of Clement, for instance) suggest that he was released and able to travel as far west as Spain before returning to Rome to his death, possibly in the persecutions of Nero.  Luke’s abrupt conclusion to Acts leaves the question open.

 

In custody in Rome, Paul seems to have found some kind of emotional peace.  It may have been the support of Christians in the city that calmed him.  Perhaps his imprisonment for his beliefs gave him the respect among them that he craved.  He may simply have felt relieved to be away from the tensions of the Greek east which had done so much to distress him.  It was probably now that he wrote the letter to the Philippians, the most irenic of his writings.

 

The community in the Roman colony of Philippi does not seem to have been disturbed by conflict with traditional Jews.  Paul feels confident about its prospects.  He assures them that Christ can be preached in many ways, a much more mature attitude than he had expressed in earlier letters.  ‘You must work out your own [sic] salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you, inspiring both the will and deed, for his own chosen purpose’ ([Letter to the] Philippians 2:12-13). Christ is now the example of good living.  For those who believe in Christ circumcision is spiritual, not a physical mutilation.  He talks too of his own spiritual journey that is not yet complete.  Again, as with the First Letter to the Corinthians, one can warm to Paul in a way which is difficult with his more intemperate letters.  The second part of the letter is somewhat darker in tone:  Paul warns of ‘the dogs’ who insist on circumcision, for instance, but one is relieved that he ended his life with a sense of achievement.

 

Paul’s immediate legacy is difficult to assess.  It is not known how many of his communities survived and whether any of them had access to a coherent statement of his theology.  Did anyone, except possibly a few Roman Christians, read the Letter to the Romans, for instance? Only those able to read Greek would have been able to read them in any case.  (Astonishingly, no Latin speaker is known to have read them in the original until the 15th century.)  all the major centres of the early church — Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome — were established independently of him.  In the 4th century when churches developed histories of their foundation by an apostle or evangelist (Rome and Antioch by Peter, Alexandria by Mark), none claimed Paul as their founder. Yet some memory of Paul’s missions persisted.  When Clement, bishop of Rome, wrote to the Corinthians in the 90s, it was to a community that was still squabbling.  Clement urged them to reread the letter (only one is mentioned) sent to them by Paul.  Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, writing in about 117 to the Philippians reminds them that he himself did not have the wisdom of Paul, the man who had taught them the word of truth and had written them letters (sic) which strengthened their faith.

 

The Acts of the Apostles must have consolidated Paul’s memory.  It is not known how and where copies circulated but it has been argued that it acted as the catalyst for the collection of Paul’s letters.  By this time, others were writing in his name.  The letters tot he Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, a second letter to the Thessalonians and letters to Timothy and Titus, which are part of the New Testament, were all attributed to Paul, a sign that his status was recognized by some followers.  Yet his legacy remained an ambiguous one.  What is remarkable is the number of early Christian writers, the gospel writers and the early church fathers, who do not appear to have been influenced by Paul’s writings at all.  They were clearly contentious.  In the 2nd Letter of Peter, written in about 140, the author notes that there are obscure passages in Paul ‘which the ignorant and unstable misinterpret to their own ruin’ (2 Peter 3:16).  When, very much at the same time, Marcion, the first great enthusiast for Paul, attempted to create a canon of texts, an early New Testament as it were, of a single gospel and Paul’s letters, the attempt failed.  The declaration that Marcion was a heretic did nothing to boost Paul’s position nor did Marcions links to the gnostics whose teachings the church condemned.  It was not until the late 4th century, as a result of the adulation of John Chrysostom in the Greek-speaking world and Augustine in the Latin, that Paul became fully integrated into the Christian tradition.  Even so, he has inspired radically different Christian responses.  Is he the conservative champion of an austere moral absolutism or the man who urged the breakdown of all conventional hierarchies?  Did he ever resolve the conflict between the revolutionary nature of his message and his personal abhorrence of social disorder?  How far, in practice, did his teachings create a Gentile Christianity which would never have evolved without them?

Paul shifted the focus from Jesus’ teachings, of which he said virtually nothing, to the drama of his crucifixion and resurrection.  He demanded an emotional commitment to Christ that required a rejection of worldly interests, the temptations of the flesh and even ‘the wisdom of the wise.’ In the contexts of his belief that the Second Coming was at hand this was understandable.  But the Second Coming did not come and Paul became something completely different.  His letters, which had been received piecemeal by their recipients, were brought together as if they were to define Christian living for all time.  The results were always healthy.  The rejection of ‘the wisdom of the wise’ easily led to an assault on reasoned thought.  His concerns over sexuality fed into paranoia about the lures of women and the ‘evils of homosexuality.  The stress on sin might be developed into a denigration of human nature.  Paul’s own ambivalence toward his Jewish background fuelled anti-Semitism.

 

Paul cannot be blamed, of course, for the ways in which his letters were separated from their original context and used by Christians for other purposes.  Tortured as they often are, they stand on their own as fine literature and impressive examples of ancient rhetoric.  At its most passionate, their eloquence is remarkable.  So one can never wish Paul had never happened.  The greatest regret must be that his letters are such isolated survivals.  Christianity would have been dramatically different if we had, for instance, fuller records of Jewish Christianity.  There might never have been the antagonisms between Jew and Christian that were already in place by the second century.  We would have benefiited immensely from the survival of some of Apollos’ speeches (although the Letter to the Hebrews may reflect some of his ideas.)  Apollos may have preached only to an intellectual elite, in the tradition of Plato, but a more reasoned theology would have provided a useful contrast to the impassioned and highly emotional rhetoric of Paul.

 

Paul will always remain controversial and enigmatic.  He was heroic in his endeavors but hardly attractive as a personality.  Puritans seldom are. In a comparatively rare moment of insight (2 Corinthians 12:20), he recognized the bitterness and confusion he could bring to those he visited.  Even the loyal Timothy seems to have been rejected for failing to live up to his mentor’s expectations.  The arrival of his letters must have been dreaded.  No one could be quite sure what he would demand next or what idiosyncratic interpretations he might make of scripture or the message of Christ.  They were, after all, personal to him and not part of an established tradition.  For those who were attuned to the apostles who had actually known Jesus, his authority must have been suspect and his apparent vision of Christ hardly comparable to their eyewitness testimony.  Yet, there have always been Christians –Augustine and Luther are good examples –who remain intrigued by Paul even to the extent of appearing to give his letters precedence over the gospels.  They are the theologians who have given Paul the prominent place in Christian tradition which he occupies today.  

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