Notes on St. Paul’s life, excerpts from the
book
Galilee/Tarsus
His parents lived in Gischala (modern Jish). Varus, the governor of Syria, twice brought his legions into Palestine.
On his second expedition he destroyed Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee. Paul’s
parents were sold as the slaves in Tarsus then probably got free (how we do not
know) and earned Roman citizenship.
Jerusalem
Only in Jerusalem could Paul have
encountered Pharisees so he headed for the Holy City when he was around 20 and
spent there 15 years.
Was he married? No data. If yes J.M.
O’Connor personally suspects that his wife and children perished in an accident
so traumatic that he sealed off their memory for ever. It was too painful to be
revisited, and too sacred to be disclosed to others. In any case, Paul never
remarried (1 Cor. 7: 8).
Did he meet Jesus in Jerusalem? Probably
no.
The chaos was such on the Day of
Preparation that no one who was not obliged in one way or another went out into
the streets. The little procession of Roman soldiers escorting a criminal on
his way to execution was not something to be followed in anticipation of excitement.
Pharisees on Law and Messiah in Jerusalem
in Paul’s time: This phase of salvation history was characterized by meticulous
obedience to the commandments of the Law. It had no place for the Messiah. He
was a figure of the future.
Encounter with the Risen Lord
Once Paul had accepted Jesus as Lord, he had
to acknowledge that he was ‘Christ’ (the Annointed One). Jesus was not just any
‘Lord’ but the Jewish Messiah for whom Paul had hoped. If Jesus was the
Messiah, then the time of the Law was over.
Arabia
Paul’s first decision after his conversion
was to go into ‘Arabia’ (Gal. 1: 17). It is also probable that Paul did not stay
very long. Once he had opened his mouth, he would have been suspect. I would
give him a week at the most. His silence as to the duration of his visit
confirms that it was very short, since he lists his two weeks in Jerusalem and
three years in Damascus (Gal. 1: 18). The sole importance of his imprudent
venture is that it indicates that from the beginning he was convinced that his
mission was to Gentiles.
Three years in Damascus and learning a
trade
Tent-maker (Acts 18: 3) - The skill
involved was minimal, so was quickly learned. New tents were always needed to
replace old ones, and ongoing maintenance was imperative.
Two weeks in Jerusalem
Paul hoped that his readers would
understand it in the sense of ‘to get acquainted with Cephas’, but he really
intended the meaning as ‘to get information from Cephas’ (Gal. 1: 18). What did
he need to talk to him about? It is absurd to imagine that Paul spent his two
weeks with Peter discussing the weather, the health of the latter’s
mother-in-law, or his nostalgia for fishing on the Sea of Galilee. Only one
basic question burned in Paul’s mind: what was Jesus really like?
Antioch
Paul’s first missionary journey under the
auspices of Antioch is narrated only by Luke (Acts 13–14), who presents Paul
and Barnabas going first to Cyprus, and thence into the southern part of central
Asia Minor.
The most important road in Asia Minor was
the trade route between
the Aegean coast and the Euphrates River.
Roman geographer Strabo a hundred years later, he called the route the ‘Common
Highway’ (Geography 14. 2. 29) because everyone used it. Luke narrates Paul’s second missionary
expedition in Acts 16–18.
An Unexpected Visit to the Celts
The Galatians had not been Hellenized, and
the Romans had imposed their administrative system directly on Celtic tribal
structures. Celtic was still being spoken in that region in the fifth century
AD.
Partnership
at Philippi
No synagogue in this city. Euodia and
Syntyche, as having ‘striven side by side with me in the gospel, together with
Clement and the rest of myco-workers, whose names are in the book of life’
(Phil. 4: 3).
Not surprisingly, therefore, Euodia and
Syntyche became heads of house-churches. This is why Paul, contrary to his
normal practice, draws public attention to the need for reconciliation between
these two ladies (Phil. 4: 2).
Labour in Thessalonica
Things were very different in Thessalonica.
Paul twice reminds his converts there how long and hard he had to work: ‘we
worked night and day that we might not burden any of you’ (1 Thess. 2: 9); ‘we
did not eat anyone’s bread without paying, but with labour and toil we worked
night and day that we might not burden any of you’ (2 Thess. 3: 8). The normal
artisan laboured only from sunrise to sunset.
Corinth
the Crossroads
It must have been an extraordinary moment
when Prisca and Aquilla first heard him preaching, and realized that it was the
same message to which they had responded in Rome.
Archeology: The inscription of the name
Erastus that he erected to himself near the theatre does not include his
father’s name. This means that Erastus had once been a slave. The paradox of a
crucified saviour resonated in the lives of prominent Corinthians and gave them
meaning.
The central message of the gospel, that the
saviour of the world died under torture, spoke to the contradictions of the
lives of such people. Though classed as weak, they knew their own power, and thus
could understand without difficulty the idea, revealed in the life of Christ,
as in that of Paul, that ‘power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor. 12: 9).
A Law-free Mission - Jerusalem and Antioch
Members of the mother church in Jerusalem
had arrived in Antioch, and were insisting that all Gentile converts had to
become Jews before they could be accepted as Christians (Acts 15: 1). Pagans must
be circumcised and observe the dietary laws in order to become followers of
Jesus.
Paul was furious (Gal. 2: 4–5). These
trouble-makers were ‘false brethren’ who were ‘secretly smuggled in’ in order
to ‘spy’ and then
to
‘enslave’ the Antiocheans.
If Paul had expected Cephas to be in the
same unrivalled position of authority as on his first visit, he was
disappointed. To his consternation, he and Barnabas were confronted by a
committee composed of James the brother of Jesus, Cephas and John (Gal. 2: 9).
In contrast to the cosmopolitan Paul, who
had travelled widely, James was a parochial Galilean who had moved no further
than Jerusalem. He had always lived as part of a Jewish majority, and thus,
without questioning, he continued unchanged his Jewish lifestyle, even after
accepting Jesus as the Messiah. Baptism and Eucharist, as ritual and meal, were
familiar additions, not radical substitutions.
But James finally agreed with Paul, why?
To circumcise Gentile converts was to
accept them publicly as Jews, even though they had no attachment to Judaism;
they were followers of Christ, not of Moses. So what loyalty to the Jewish
people could be expected of such individuals when hostile pressures began to
take their toll? In a crisis, could any nationalistic Jew really trust them?
Would such nominal Jews be prepared to sacrifice their lives for the Temple and
the Law? Questions such as these must have occurred to the more farsighted members
of the Jerusalem church. What seemed to be right in the present could be seen
to be a dangerous threat in the not-too distant future. James, I suggest, was
one of these. As the leader of the Jerusalem church, he was swayed, not by
theological reasons, but by practical considerations. Those who demanded the
circumcision of Gentile converts might be correct in theory, but it was not the
moment to insist on principle.
Farewell to Antioch
No reason is given for the arrival of
Cephas in Antioch (Gal. 2: 11). I suspect that it was sheer curiosity. At the
meeting in Jerusalem he had been intrigued by Paul’s vivid description of the
community at Antioch, and perhaps at Corinth, where Jewish and Gentile converts
lived together in harmony. Cephas had never lived in a mixed community.
Eventually Cephas cracked, and the
contagion of his example swept all away. Paul records with burning indignation,
‘Before certain
people came from James, he ate with
Gentiles, but when they came he
gradually withdrew and separated himself, fearing those from the circumcision.
And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was
carried away by their play-acting’ (Gal. 2: 12–13).
This is the negative side of Paul’s
single-minded commitment to
Christ. To him the truth was so clear and
unambiguous that he could not imagine Cephas or Barnabas agonizing over their
decisions. Paul failed to appreciate that Cephas was in a situation where he
had to take sides. Neutrality was not an option. Intellectually, he may have agreed
with Paul, but his heart made him line up with those who needed him most. The
strength of the Gentile church was evident in Antioch, and it had dynamic
leaders. The Jewish church, on the contrary, was struggling, and would be
shattered by the defection of one of its most revered figures.
Paul no longer wished to be part of the
church of Antioch, and he could not in conscience continue to represent it.
This was the most decisive moment in his life, after his conversion. It was the
catalyst that forced him to rethink his position on two fundamental issues: his
role as a missionary and the place of the Law in Christian communities. He came
to decisions that determined the rest of his missionary career.
A Return Visit to Pessinus (Galatia) and
then Ephesus
Paul’s first winter in Ephesus (AD 52–3)
was marked by an event that brought him back to the very beginnings of the
Jesus movement. Somehow he came into contact with a small group that considered
themselves followers of Jesus of Nazareth, but who had never heard of the
Passion, Resurrection or descent of the Holy Spirit. They knew only the baptism
of John (Acts 19: 1–7). These were Ephesian Jews who, while on pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, had received a baptism of repentance for their sins at the hands of Jesus.5
They knew him only as the senior assistant of John the Baptist. When John and
Jesus moved their prophetic mission to reform Judaism to the more densely
populated west bank of the Jordan, the former as the leader took the more
difficult task of preaching to the Samaritans, while Jesus went to the Judaeans
(John 3: 22–4). Both believed that the time was short, and that maximum exposure
was imperative. Thus John baptized at the springs on the eastern slope of Mount
Gerizim (as near as he could get to the ruined Samaritan Temple on the summit),
and Jesus went to the heart of Jewish life, the Temple in Jerusalem. There, to
grab attention, he overturned the tables of the money-changers (John 2: 13–16).
It was
during this ministry that Jesus encountered
the visiting Ephesian Jews and won their repentance.
Antioch decided to send a reforming
delegation to follow Paul’s route through Galatia into Macedonia and down to
Achaia. No matter how subtle the delegation was, it would not have taken the Galatians
very long to recognize that a very different vision of Christianity was being
proposed to them. They took refuge in passive resistance, and sought to win
time by insisting that Paul be consulted. It is easy to imagine the shock
experienced by Paul by the news that people from Antioch were bent on taking
over his foundation in Galatia, and that some of his converts there were
proving receptive to a Law-observant gospel. The sense of bewilderment (Gal. 5:
7), even of despair (Gal. 4: 11), comes through very clearly in his response,
but the dominant emotion is restrained anger.
The delegation had made a bad tactical
mistake by insisting on Paul’s dependence on Jerusalem, which, they claimed,
was the source of the authentic gospel. But Paul responded that the gospel
preached by me is not worked out by man; for I did not receive it from anyone
nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 1:
11). Here it would be easy to charge Paul with being somewhat less than honest,
because he had learnt much from the Christian communities of Damascus, Jerusalem
and Antioch in which he had lived. He was thinking, however, of the core of his
Law-free gospel, which, as we have seen, flowed directly from the rearrangement
of his ideas caused by his encounter with the Risen Lord. What he absorbed from
believers in Damascus, Jerusalem and Antioch was so thoroughly sifted through his
mental filters that it became merely the confirmation and elaboration of his
intensely personal fundamental insight.
Here is the place for the letter to the
Colossians. The church there was founded by a native son, Epaphras (Col. 4:12).
His first convert was Philemon, who was followed into the faith by his wife,
Apphia, and by Archippus, whose relationship to the first two is unknown
(Philem. 1). They actively participated with Epaphras in the evangelization of
Colossae. Philemon was just the sort of person that Paul himself would have targeted
in a new city. He had at least one slave, Onesimus, and a dwelling large enough
to contain a guest-room (Philem. 22). His home became a house-church (Philem. 2),
and he probably had space to receive the whole church when the occasion
demanded. So the letter to the Colossians is related to two other letters
(Ephesians, Philemon)
Correcting
Colossae
Christians at Colossae were exhibiting an
unhealthy curiosity in a Jewish mystical-ascetic movement, which happened to be
in vogue in the Lycus valley, because it seemed to offer something at once more
elevated and concrete than the unadorned teaching of Epaphras. Jesus was given
cosmic significance at the price of his terrestrial reality. He was elevated to
the point where he could no longer be imitated. Believers, in consequence, were
no longer challenged by exposure to the agonizing suffering of a crucified
Saviour. Instead, they were invited to relax into serene contemplation of the
worshipping angels in heaven. Those believers at Colossae who were influenced
by the mysticalascetic Jewish approach took from this Christology only those aspects
that were compatible with their cosmic speculation. Didactic hymns were part of
the liturgy at Colossae (Col. 3: 16), so one of them in an inspired moment
crystallized what they thought of Christ into a two-strophe hymn (Col. 1:
15–20), which Epaphras and the delegation brought to Paul in Ephesus:
He who is the image of the invisible God
First-born of all creation
For in him were created all things
All things through him and to him were
created.
Paul’s response: Paul’s insistence that Christ is present in
him, and in all members of the church, draws the cosmic dimension of the
Christological reflection of the Colossians down into ecclesiology.
The Report of Chloe’s Employees (from Corinth)
The report brought back by Chloe’s people
stunned Paul (1 Cor.
1: 11–12). Paul treats first the divisions
in the community (chs 1–5) and concludes with a defence of the Resurrection
(ch. 15). A divided community is no different from society, and without the
Resurrection, Christ is meaningless. If we look closely at 1 Corinthians 1–4,
where Paul is most explicitly concerned with divisions in the community, a
group emerges whose members believed that their possession of ‘wisdom’ made
them ‘perfect’ (2: 6). As possessors of ‘the Spirit which is from God’ (2: 12),
they were ‘spirit people’ (2: 15). They thought of themselves as ‘filled (with
divine blessings)’, ‘wealthy’, ‘kings’ (4: 8), ‘wise’, ‘strong’, ‘honoured’ (4:
10). They looked down on others in the community who had not attained their
exalted spiritual status as ‘children’ capable of imbibing only ‘milk’ (3: 1),
and as ‘fools’ who were ‘weak’ and ‘dishonoured’ (4: 10). For convenience I
call them the Spirit People.
Paul chose to play on the dark side of the
majority by turning the Spirit People into figures of fun. Cruel laughter was
the weapon he selected for his campaign. For the Spirit People it went much
deeper. Profoundly wounded by the humiliation of public ridicule, they were
completely alienated, and became Paul’s implacable enemies. Since they could
not attack him directly, they channelled their pain and anger into frustrating
his ambitions for the community. It was the Spirit People who offered hospitality
when the Judaizers from Antioch-on-the-Orontes, who had troubled the churches
of Galatia, arrived in Corinth in the middle of the summer of AD 54, thereby
showing that some Corinthians at least were prepared to listen to an
alternative vision of Christianity.
A Letter Written in Tears
‘I wrote you out of much distress and
anguish of heart and with many tears’ (2 Cor. 2: 4). Unfortunately this letter
has not survived, but Paul gives us enough hints to work out his approach. His
strategy was to win their sympathy by revealing their treachery through the
description of his hurt. The letter was designed to tug at the heart-strings,
while at the same time administering a severe shock. The missive had to be
strong enough to shake the Corinthians, but not so brutal as to alienate them.
Effective reproof had to be blended with the assurance of his affection.
Thedelicacy of the decisions made the writing an agonizing business. Even after
it had been despatched, Paul fretted about the impact of the letter. It might
do more harm than good. It might have stood a better chance of achieving his
goal, had he said this rather than that.The uncertainty weighed upon him
terribly.
2Cor
(1-9) A Carefully Drafted
Letter
Paul’s principal objective in writing 2
Corinthians 1–9 was to drive a wedge between the Spirit People and the
Judaizing delegation from Antioch. Almost equal in importance was the need to
convince the Spirit People that suffering and weakness, not dignified bearing
and eloquence, were the distinctive signs of a genuinely Christian leader. The way Christ died was, for Paul, the
demonstration of Christ’slove for humanity. Thus, even though the preaching
tradition of the early church spoke only of the death of Jesus, Paul
consistently insisted that Jesus died in a particularly horrible way, although
he recognized that a crucified Christ was ‘a stumbling block to Jews and folly
to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 1: 23). The Spirit People preferred to avert their
thoughts from this dimension; it cannot be integrated into any philosophical
approach to religion. No doubt the Judaizers co-operated. They could assert,
with perfect justification, that Paul’s stress on the manner of Christ’s death
was exceptional. Moreover, their adaptation to what the Spirit People expected
of religious leaders meant a life-style more compatible with that of the Lord
of Glory than with that of a tortured criminal.
Not
good received (2Cor10,10) For someone will say, “His letters
are severe and forceful, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech
contemptible. so….
Furious response
In a mood of desperate anxiety for the
future of the Corinthian community, he dashed off his final letter to his most
troublesome community (2 Cor. 10–13). The reasonable tone and subtle arguments
of 2 Cor. 1–9 are replaced by a wild outburst, in which Paul gives free rein to
his capacity for sarcasm and irony.
A
Letter to Rome
The theme of the letter is set forth with
admirable brevity: ‘the gospel
is the power of God for salvation to
everyone who has faith, to the
Jew first and also to the Greek’ (Rom. 1:
16). In terms of the political purpose of the letter, chapters 1–14 could be considered
a prolonged captio benevolentiae, a ploy designed to win the favour of
the readers. Only at the very end of the letter does Paul finally return to the
question of his forthcoming visit, which he had introduced at the beginning (1:
10–15). He explains why he has not visited them earlier. He was on God’s
business elsewhere, ‘from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum I have fully
preached the gospel of Christ’ (15: 19). The all-important point that motivated
the letter is finally stated: ‘Now with no further scope for me in these
regions, I desire, as I have for many years, to come to you when I go to Spain.
For I do hope to see you on my journey, and to be sent on by you once I have
enjoyed your company for a little while’ (15: 23–4). Clearly Paul feels that he
has done everything he can in the eastern Mediterranean. He does not ask
straight out to be commissioned as an apostle by Rome. That would be premature,
but the request is delicately hinted at in his use of the verb ‘to send on’. The
ground is being carefully prepared for his visit.
Journey to Jerusalem and imprisonment
A Mission to Spain
The Roman church did not give Paul the
welcome that he had worked to ensure. This was not due to any particular ill
will. Simply too much time had elapsed. He still wanted Rome to adopt him as
its missionary to Spain. The Roman believers did not agree, and could produce a
series of perfectly good reasons to justify their position. First, Spain
belonged to their sphere of influence. Thus, it was their responsibility to preach
the word of God there, and they would choose whom they willed to represent
them. It was not for an upstart from the provinces to thrust himself upon them.
Second, they were the only ones equipped to communicate with the Latin-speaking
colonies in Spain. Paul, on the contrary, would have been severely
linguistically challenged. Third, they were the best judges of the most
opportune moment to launch a missionary expedition. Finally, Paul’s inevitable
failure would make it difficult for them to mount their own campaign. Paul did
in fact go to Spain. Under the circumstances it would have been totally out of
character for him to have done anything else. The sea journey was an easy one.
He could have reached the coast of Catalonia in four days, or Gades (modern
Cadiz) in seven days on a ship sailing out of Ostia, the port of Rome. Once he
landed, he was in trouble and, as the Romans had foretold, he achieved nothing.
It was as ignominious a flop as his abortive attempt to convert the Nabataeans
immediately after his conversion. While inspired by great enthusiasm, both
ventures were ill-conceived and ill-prepared. It cannot have taken Paul more
than a summer to admit that, since Greek was hardly spoken on the Iberian
Peninsula, he was not going to get anywhere in the foreseeable future in Spain.
