by N. T. Wright
Reading some of his letters, in fact, one might almost think that he had been a childhood friend of someone like the philosopher Epictetus, a down-to-earth thinker determined to get philosophy out of the classroom and into the street. He uses well-known rhetorical ploys. When he tells the Corinthians that human wisdom is useless, he sometimes sounds like a Cynic; when he talks about virtue, a casual listener might, for a moment, mistake him for a Stoic. When he writes about the difference between the “inner human” and the “outer human,” many to this day have supposed him to be some kind of Platonist—though what he says about resurrection and the renewal of creation then becomes a problem. The mature Paul would not have been afraid of giving impressions such as these. He believes, and says explicitly here and there, that the new wisdom unveiled in Israel’s Messiah can take on the world and incorporate its finest insights into a different, larger frame. The “good news” of the Messiah opens up for him the vision of a whole new creation in which everything “true, attractive, and pleasing”7 will find a home.
But the messianic “good news” meant what it meant, first and foremost, within the Jewish world of the first century. Whole books could be written about every aspect of this, not least as it relates to the young Saul of Tarsus, but we must be brief. Saul grew up within a world of story and symbol: a single story, awaiting its divinely ordered fulfillment, and a set of symbols that brought that story into focus and enabled Jews to inhabit it. If we are going to understand him, to see who he really was, we have to grasp this and to realize that for him it wasn’t just a set of ideas. It was as basic to his whole existence as the great musical story from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms is to a classically trained musician today. Only more so.
The story was the story of Israel as a whole, Israel as the children of Abraham, Israel as God’s chosen people, chosen from the world but equally chosen for the world; Israel as the light to the Gentiles, the people through whom all nations would be blessed; Israel as the Passover people, the rescued-from-slavery people, the people with whom the One God had entered into covenant, a marriage bond in which separation might occur but could only ever be temporary. There are signs all across the Jewish writings of the period (roughly the last two centuries before Paul’s day and the first two centuries afterward) that a great many Jews from widely different backgrounds saw their Bible not primarily as a compendium of rules and dogmas, but as a single great story rooted in Genesis and Exodus, in Abraham and Moses. Saul’s Bible was not primarily a set of glittering fragments, snapshots of detached wisdom. It was a narrative rooted in creation and covenant and stretching forward into the dark unknown.
It had become very dark indeed in the centuries leading up to Saul’s day. Whether people read Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, whether they followed the line of thought through the books of Kings and Chronicles, or whether they simply read the Five Books of Moses, the “Torah” proper, from Genesis through to Deuteronomy, the message was the same. Israel was called to be different, summoned to worship the One God, but Israel had failed drastically and had been exiled to Babylon as a result. A covenantal separation had therefore taken place. Prophet after prophet said so. The One God had abandoned the Jerusalem Temple to its fate at the hands of foreigners.
Wherever you look in Israel’s scriptures, the story is the same. Any Jew from the Babylonian exile onward who read the first three chapters of Genesis would see at a glance the quintessential Jewish story: humans were placed in a garden; they disobeyed instructions and were thrown out. And any Jew who read the last ten chapters of Deuteronomy would see it spelled out graphically: worship the One God and do what he says, and the promised garden is yours; worship other gods, and you face exile. A great many Jews around the time of Paul—we have the evidence in book after book of the postbiblical Jewish writings—read those texts in that way too; they believed that the exile—in its theological and political meaning—was not yet over. Deuteronomy speaks of a great coming restoration.8 Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all echo this theme: the words of comfort in Isaiah 40–55, the promise of covenant renewal in Jeremiah 31, the assurance of cleansing and restoration in Ezekiel 36–37. Yes, some Jews (by no means all) had returned from Babylon. Yes, the Temple had been rebuilt. But this was not, it could not be, the restoration promised by the prophets and by Deuteronomy itself.
Through those long years of puzzlement, the complaint of the (“postexilic”) books of Ezra and Nehemiah sounded out: “We are in our own land again, but we are slaves! Foreigners are ruling over us.”9 And slaves, of course, need an Exodus. A new Exodus. The new Exodus promised by Isaiah. This was the hope: that the story at the heart of the Five Books—slavery, rescue, divine presence, promised land—would spring to life once more as the answer both to the problem of covenantal rebellion in Deuteronomy 27–32 and to the parallel, and deeper, problem of human rebellion in Genesis 1–3. The former would be the key to the latter: when the covenant God did what he was going to do for Israel, then somehow—who knew how?—the effects would resonate around the whole world.
At the center of this longing for rescue, for the new Exodus, stands one text in particular that loomed large in the minds of eager, hopeful Jews like Saul of Tarsus. Daniel 9, picking up from Deuteronomy’s promise of restoration, announces precisely that idea of an extended exile: the “seventy years” that Jeremiah said Israel would stay in exile have been stretched out to seventy times seven, almost half a millennium of waiting until the One God would restore his people at last, by finally dealing with the “sins” that had caused the exile in the first place. The scheme of “seventy sevens” resonated with the scriptural promises of the jubilee—this would be the time when the ultimate debts would be forgiven.10 Devout Jews in the first century labored to work out when the 490 years would be up, often linking their interpretations of Daniel to the relevant passages in Deuteronomy. This was the long hope of Israel, the forward-looking narrative cherished by many who, like Saul of Tarsus, were soaked in the scriptures and eager for the long-delayed divine deliverance. And many of them believed that the time was drawing near. They knew enough chronology to do a rough calculation. And if the time was near, strict obedience to the Torah was all the more necessary.
The Torah loomed all the larger if one lived, as did the young Saul, outside the promised land and hence away from the Temple. The Torah, in fact, functioned as a movable Temple for the many Jews who were scattered around the wider world. But the Temple remained central, geographically and symbolically. It was the place where heaven and earth met, thus forming the signpost to the ultimate promise, the renewal and unity of heaven and earth, the new creation in which the One God would be personally present forever. We don’t know how often Saul traveled to the homeland with his parents for the great festivals. Luke describes Jesus, aged twelve, being taken from Nazareth to Jerusalem for Passover, and we know that tens of thousands of Jews gathered from all over, both for that festival and for others such as Pentecost, the feast of the giving of the Torah. It is thus quite probable that the young Saul acquired at an early age the sense that all roads, spiritually as well as geographically, led to the mountain where David had established his capital, the hill at the heart of Judaea where Solomon, David’s son, the archetypal wise man, had built the first Temple. The Temple was like a cultural and theological magnet, drawing together not only heaven and earth, but the great scriptural stories and promises.
The Temple was therefore also the focal point of Israel’s hope. The One God, so the prophets had said, abandoned his house in Jerusalem because of the people’s idolatry and sin. But successive prophets (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Malachi) had promised that he would return one day. That list is significant, since the last two prophets named, Zechariah and Malachi, were writing after some of the exiles had returned from Babylon, after they had rebuilt the Temple and restarted the regular round of sacrificial worship. We will never understand how someone like the young Saul of Tarsus thought—never mind how he prayed!—until we grasp the st
range fact that, though the Temple still held powerful memories of divine presence (as does Jerusalem’s Western Wall to this day for the millions of Jews and indeed non-Jews who go there to pray, though they do not think that the One God actually resides there now), there was a strong sense that the promise of ultimate divine return had not yet been fulfilled.
If this seems strange, as it does to some, consider this. Two of the greatest scenes in Israel’s scriptures are moments when the divine glory filled the wilderness Tabernacle and then the Jerusalem Temple with a radiant presence and power.11 Isaiah had promised that this would happen once more, indicating that this would be the moment when Jerusalem would be redeemed at last and Israel’s God would establish his kingdom in visible power and glory.12 At no point do any later Jewish writers say that this or anything like it has actually happened. The closest you might come is the glorious double scene in Sirach 24 and 50, written around 200 BC. In the first, the figure of “Wisdom” comes from heaven to dwell in the Temple; in the second, the high priest himself appears to be an almost visible manifestation of Israel’s God. But this rather obvious piece of propaganda for the aristocratic high-priesthood of the time cut little ice after the various crises that then followed. No, the point was that it hadn’t happened yet. The God of Israel had said he would return, but had not yet done so.
Saul of Tarsus was brought up to believe that it would happen, perhaps very soon. Israel’s God would indeed return in glory to establish his kingdom in visible global power. He was also taught that there were things Jews could be doing in the meantime to keep this promise and hope on track. It was vital for Jews to keep the Torah with rigorous attention to detail and to defend the Torah, and the Temple itself, against possible attacks and threats. Failure on these points would hold back the promise, would get in the way of the fulfillment of the great story. That is why Saul of Tarsus persecuted Jesus’s early followers. And that is why, when Paul the Apostle returned to Jerusalem for the last time, there were riots.
All this, to pick up an earlier point, is many a mile from what we today mean by “religion.” That is why I often put that word in quotation marks, to signal the danger of imagining that Saul of Tarsus, either as a young man or as a mature apostle, was “teaching a religion” in some modern sense. Today, “religion” for most Westerners designates a detached area of life, a kind of private hobby for those who like that sort of thing, separated by definition (and in some countries by law) from politics and public life, from science and technology. In Paul’s day, “religion” meant almost exactly the opposite. The Latin word religio has to do with “binding” things together. Worship, prayer, sacrifice, and other public rituals were designed to hold the unseen inhabitants of a city (the gods and perhaps the ancestors) together with the visible ones, the living humans, thus providing a vital framework for ordinary life, for business, marriage, travel, and home life. (A distinction was made between religio, official and authorized observance, and superstitio, unauthorized and perhaps subversive practice.)
The Jewish equivalent of this was clear. For Saul of Tarsus, the place where the invisible world (“heaven”) and the visible world (“earth”) were joined together was the Temple. If you couldn’t get to the Temple, you could and should study and practice the Torah, and it would have the same effect. Temple and Torah, the two great symbols of Jewish life, pointed to the story in which devout Jews like Saul and his family believed themselves to be living: the great story of Israel and the world, which, they hoped, was at last reaching the point where God would reveal his glory in a fresh way. The One God would come back at last to set up his kingdom, to make the whole world one vast glory-filled Temple, and to enable all people—or at least his chosen people—to keep the Torah perfectly. Any who prayed or sang the Psalms regularly would find themselves thinking this, hoping this, praying this, day after day, month after month.
Surrounded by the bustling pagan city of Tarsus, the young Saul knew perfectly well what all this meant for a loyal Jew. It meant keeping oneself pure from idolatry and immorality. There were pagan temples and shrines on every corner, and Saul would have a fair idea of what went on there. Loyalty meant keeping the Jewish community pure from those things as well. At every stage of Israel’s history, after all, the people of the One God had been tempted to compromise. The pressure was on to go with the wider world and to forget the covenant. Saul was brought up to resist this pressure. And that meant “zeal.”
Which brings us at last to the biographical starting point that the later Paul mentions in his letters. “Zealous?” he says, “I persecuted the church!”13 “I advanced in Ioudaïsmos beyond many of my own age and people,” he says, “I was extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions”14 Where did this “zeal” come from? What did it mean in practice? If this is what made the young Saul tick, what was the mechanism that kept that ticking clock running on time? And what did it mean, as he himself puts it in his first letter, to exchange this kind of “zeal” for a very different kind?15 Addressing those questions brings us to the real starting point of this book.
Part One
Beginnings
Tarsus to Jerusalem
1
Zeal
IT BEGINS WITH an ancient tale of sex and violence.
We glimpse the little boy, precocious beyond his years, soaking up the stories of his ancestors, reading them for himself without realizing how unusual it was for a small boy to read big books in the first place. There are certain activities—music, mathematics, and chess, for instance—in which quite young people can become prodigies. In Jewish families, studying the Torah can be like that: the young mind and heart can drink it all in, sense its drama and rhythms, relish the ancestral story and promise. The youngster can get to know his way around the Five Books of Moses the way he knows the way around his own home. All the signs are that Saul of Tarsus was that kind of child. We sense the quiet delight of his parents at his youthful enthusiasm.
It wasn’t simply a matter of head knowledge. Far from it. Jewish life was and is centered on the rhythm of prayer. We see young Saul learning how to strap the tefillin, small leather boxes containing key scripture passages, to the arm and the head as Moses had commanded for male Jews when praying the morning service. We see him reciting the Psalms. He learns how to invoke the One God without actually saying the sacred and terrifying Name itself, declaring allegiance three times a day like a young patriot saluting the flag: Shema Yisrael, Adhonai Elohenu, Adhonai Echad! “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one!” Saul may be young, but he has signed on. He is a loyalist. He will be faithful.
Little Saul soon learns to look forward to the great festivals such as Tabernacles or Hanukkah, commemorating great moments from the nation’s history. Especially he would enjoy Passover, with its wonderful story and its strange, evocative meal (“Why is this night different from all other nights?” he had asked when he was the youngest in the family). He reads that story, the freedom story, in the book later generations would know as Exodus, the “coming out” book. This was the story of what had happened, of what would happen. This was what the One God did when his people were enslaved—he overthrew the tyrants and set his people free, bringing them out of Egypt and leading them to their “inheritance,” their promised land. Saul drinks it all in. This is his story, the story he will make his own. It will happen again: a new, second Exodus, bringing full and final freedom. He will play his part in the long-running drama.
The trouble was, of course, that God’s people seemed bent on wandering off in their own direction, again and again. That’s where the sex and the violence came in. It always seemed to go that way. They wanted to be like the goyim, the nations, instead of being distinct, as they had been summoned to be. That’s what the food laws are all about: others eat all kinds of things, including blood; Jews eat only the “clean” foods, with careful procedures in place for how animals are killed and cooked. That’s what circumcision was supposed to say: others regard sex as a toy, bu
t for Jews it’s the glorious sign of the ancient covenant. Others have no rhythm to their lives; Jews keep the Sabbath, delighting in the weekly anticipation of God’s promised future, the day when God’s time and human time would come together at last. Again and again the ancient Israelites had forgotten these lessons, and bad things had happened. And now, in the recent memory of the Jewish people of Saul’s day, many Jews had forgotten them again, had compromised, had become like the goyim. And that is why some Jews, and he among them—one of the first solid things we know about young Saul—followed the ancient tradition of “zeal.” Violence would be necessary to root out wickedness from Israel.
The tradition of “zeal” is part of the freedom story. Young Saul learned that story early on, that it was God’s people against the rest of the world, the nations, the goyim, and the goyim usually won. There were brief flashes of glorious history: David beating the Philistines, Solomon teaching wisdom to the whole world. That’s how it was supposed to be. But clinging to this story meant struggling to retain hope in the face of experience. Long ages of disappointment and disaster seemed to be the norm: ten tribes lost, and the remaining two dragged off into captivity, weeping by the waters of Babylon.