by N. T. Wright
Saul therefore set off as a new Phinehas, a new Elijah. The scriptural models were clear. Torah and Temple—the One God himself—were under attack from this new movement. With his Bible in his head, zeal in his heart, and official documents of authority from the chief priests in his bag, young Saul set off in the firm hope that he too would be recognized as a true covenant member. “It was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Phinehas then; Saul now.
Jerusalem to Damascus
2
Damascus
A BLINDING LIGHT; a voice from heaven. A Caravaggio masterpiece. The persecutor becomes the preacher. The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is celebrated on January 25 every year in many Western churches, including my own. The event has become a cultural metaphor. Traditions, on the one hand, and proverbial usage, on the other, conspire together to make what happened to Saul of Tarsus both famous and obscure. The incident, narrated three times (with interesting variations) in the book of Acts, is clearly vital: from Paul’s own brief autobiographical remarks in his letters it is obvious that something fairly cataclysmic happened to him that day. But what exactly happened? And what did it mean?
A century after Freud, we are all amateur psychologists. The “road to Damascus,” a byword for millions who have only the sketchiest idea where Damascus actually is, has been a honey trap for psychological speculation—and for psychological reductionism. What was going on in Saul’s mind and heart that day? What transformed the zealous persecutor into the zealous apostle?
Theories have come and gone. Saul’s vision was “really” the moment when his “twice-born” personality kicked in. No, it was when his residual guilt at Stephen’s stoning came back to haunt him. No, it was what might be expected when the tension between the inner lusts of a young man and the outer demands of strict holiness finally exploded. Actually, it was an epileptic fit. Or maybe he was just dehydrated in the midday sun, and so on, and so on. Anything rather than face the question from the other end. Supposing . . . supposing it was more than this?
Theories of this kind are, in fact, a bit like what happens when people who have never seen a neon sign are suddenly confronted with one—but in the script of a foreign language. They spend their time wondering how on earth it lights up like that, without even realizing that the sign is saying something. The whimsical English poet John Betjeman puts it like this:
St. Paul is often criticised
By modern people who’re annoyed
At his conversion, saying Freud
Explains it all. But they omit
The really vital part of it,
Which isn’t how it was achieved
But what it was that Paul believed.1
Betjeman, as it happens, doesn’t do a very good job of explaining “what it was that Paul believed,” but he is right about the main point. To ask “how it was achieved” might or might not require that we study Paul’s psychology, but it is ultimately the wrong question. In any case, historical psychology may be an amusing armchair sport, but it is next to useless in real historical investigation.
A moment’s thought will make this clear—and it’s an important point at the start of a biographical investigation. Any trained pastor or counselor, let alone any actual psychiatrist, knows perfectly well that human beings are deep wells of mystery. We can still be surprised, perhaps shocked, when a friend of many years or even a spouse allows us a small glimpse of unsuspected inner depths, what some cultures call the “heart” and others the “soul.” Even when the counselor is trusted completely, sharing the same cultural assumptions and spiritual values, it will almost always be much harder than one might have supposed to get to the root of the personality, the deep springs of motivation, the dark agonies that produce sleepless nights or dysfunctional days. How much more impossible is it with someone who lived two thousand years ago in a culture very different from our own.
In addition to being impossible, that sort of study is fortunately unnecessary for biography, as indeed for history in general. This doesn’t mean that we cannot study human motivation. We are not restricted to talking only about “what happened” at the level picked up by a camera or tape recorder. The historian and biographer can study, and should study so far as possible, the levels of motivation that are available, not least the implicit narratives that run through a culture or through the mind of a political leader or an isolated individual.
Something like that was attempted before the buildup to the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces and their allies in 2003. Two enterprising American writers produced a survey of the popular cultural figures (in movies, TV shows, and comic strips) listed as favorites by presidents over the previous century.2 Again and again the presidents favored Captain America, the Lone Ranger, and similar characters’ scripts, in which heroes act outside the law to restore peace to beleaguered communities. The narrative seemed worryingly familiar. That wasn’t psychoanalysis, but it was a study of motivation. We can in principle inspect the implicit narratives that drive people to particular actions.
This has been done, to take another example, by historians of World War I. As historians, we cannot psychoanalyze the leaders of Germany, Russia, Poland, Serbia, France, and the other countries involved, or even the stiff-upper-lipped British foreign secretary at the time, Sir Edward Grey. Nor should we try. But historians can in principle probe the way in which the statements and actions of such people reveal a sense of purpose, an understanding of national identity and duty, a narrative of past wrongs needing to be put right, and a sense, in some cases, of the arrival of a historic moment that ought to be seized. We can, in other words, study why so many people in so many countries all came to the conclusion, around the same time, that what Europe needed was a good brisk war. This isn’t psychology. It is the historical study of how and why humans make the choices they do.3 History is not just about events, but about motivations. Motivations, no doubt, float like icebergs, with much more out of sight than above the waterline. But there is often a good deal visible above the water, often including a strong implicit narrative. We can study that.
When, therefore, something shakes someone to the very core, so that that person emerges from the cataclysm in some ways the same but in other ways radically different, there are, no doubt, many explanations that could be given. Such explanations ought not to cancel one another out. What we can try to do, and will now try to do in the case of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road and thereafter, is to take what we know of our subject before the event and what we know of him after the event and place these apparently contrasting portraits within the rich cultural and spiritual Jewish world of his day, replete as it was with various forms of the controlling Jewish narrative. We must look carefully to see what emerges, not only about the event itself, whatever it was, but about the way in which the “zeal” of the eager young Torah student emerged in a different form as “zeal” for what he called the “good news,” the euangelion, the gospel, the message about Jesus—the fulfillment, shocking though it seemed, of the ancestral hope.
Some saw it at the time, and many have seen it since, as one narrative replacing another. The word “conversion” itself has often, perhaps usually, been taken that way. But Saul—Paul the Apostle—saw it as the same narrative, now demanding to be understood in a radical, but justifiable, new way. The narrative in question was the hope of Israel.
If I say that Saul of Tarsus was brought up in a world of hope, many readers may misunderstand me. “Hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. The optimist looks at the world and feels good about the way it’s going. Things are looking up! Everything is going to be all right! But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God. This God had made the world. This God had called Israel to be his people. The s
criptures, not least the Psalms, had made it clear that this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end, to be true to his promises, to vindicate his people at last, even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering.
“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.
In Saul’s world, those unshakable promises were focused on one great story, with one particular element that would make all the difference. The great story was the ancient freedom story, the Passover narrative, but with a new twist. The One God had liberated his people from slavery in Egypt, and he would do the same thing again. But they weren’t in Egypt now. Their slavery, in Saul’s day, was more complicated. For a start, nobody in the ancient stories had ever suggested that Israel’s time in Egypt was a punishment for wrongdoing. But Israel in Babylon was a different story. Read the prophets—it’s hard to miss. Young Saul, as we saw, would easily have made the connection between Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden and Israel being exiled from the promised land. Adam and Eve listened to the voice of the snake and no longer did their job in the Garden, so off they went, into a world of thorns and thistles. The Israelites worshipped the idols of Canaan and no longer did justice, loved mercy, or walked humbly with the One God, so off they went to Babylon.
In neither case (Adam and Eve, on the one hand, and Israel, on the other) could this be the end of the story. If it was, the One God would stand convicted of gross incompetence. The story of Israel, starting with Abraham himself, had always been, and in Saul’s day was seen to be, the start of a rescue operation, the beginning of a long purpose to put humans right and so in the end to put the whole world right again. The human project, the humans-in-the-garden project, had to get back on track. But if the rescue operation (Abraham’s family) was itself in need of rescue, what then? If the lifeboat gets stuck on the rocks, who will come to help, and how?
By Saul’s day it was clear that the Abraham project, the Israel vocation, had indeed gotten to the point where it needed rescuing. As we saw earlier, some Jews had come back from Babylon, while others were scattered all over the known world. But the cry went up from generation to generation, between the time of the Babylonians and the time, four centuries later, when Roman soldiers marched through the sacred land: We are still in exile. “Exile” wasn’t just geographical. It was a state of mind and heart, of politics and practicalities, of spirit and flesh. As long as pagans were ruling over the Jews, they were again in exile. As long as they were paying taxes to Caesar, they were in exile. As long as Roman soldiers could make obscene gestures at them while they were saying their prayers in the Holy Place, they were still in exile. And, since the exile was the result of Israel’s idolatry (no devout Jew would have contested the point, since the great prophets had made it so clear), what they needed was not just a new Passover, a new rescue from slavery to pagan tyrants. They needed forgiveness.
That was the glad news the prophets had spoken of, the word of comfort at every level from the spiritual to the physical. That is why the famous opening of the central poem in the book of Isaiah stresses comfort: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.”4 When the king pardons a jailed criminal, the criminal is set free. When the One God finally puts away the idolatry and wickedness that caused his people to be exiled in the first place, then his people will be free at last, Passover people with a difference.
That was the ancient hope, cherished not only by Saul of Tarsus but by thousands of his fellow Jews. By no means were all of them as “zealous” as Saul was. Few, perhaps, had his intellectual gifts. But they were mostly aware, through scripture and liturgy, of the ancient divine promises and of the tension between those promises and the present realities. One way or another, it was a culture suffused with hope. Hope long deferred, but hope nonetheless.
That is the great story in which Saul and his contemporaries were living. That is the narrative they had in their heads and their hearts. That story gave shape and energy, in a thousand different ways, to their aspirations and motivations. It explains both hope and action. This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.
* * *
The particular element that brought all this into sharp focus, and indeed into blinding focus on the road to Damascus, concerned Israel’s God himself. It wasn’t just Israel that had gone into exile. According to the prophets, Israel’s God had abandoned Jerusalem, had departed from the Temple, leaving it open to invasion and destruction. But the prophets didn’t leave it at that. They promised a great restoration. Two of Israel’s greatest prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, focused these long-range promises on the assurance that the One God, having apparently abandoned his people to their fate, would return. “Flatten the hills and fill in the valleys,” shouts Isaiah. “Roll out the red carpet for God to come back!”5 The watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls will shout for joy as, in plain sight, they see him returning to Jerusalem.6 A new Temple would appear, declared Ezekiel, and the divine glory would come to dwell there as it had in the wilderness Tabernacle at the climax of the freedom story, the book of Exodus.7
All this meant that the symbolism at the heart of all ancient temples would come true at last. Temples were built to hold together the divine realm (“heaven”) and the human realm (“earth”). Jerusalem’s Temple, like the wilderness Tabernacle before it, was designed as a small working model of the entire cosmos. This was where the One God of creation would live, dwelling in the midst of his people. When the Temple was destroyed, this vision was shattered, but the prophets declared that God would one day return. Malachi, one of the last of the ancient prophets, several generations after the return of some Jews from Babylon, insists to the skeptics that “the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.”8 Rumors of an endless absence were wrong. He would return. But the people had better be prepared . . .
So how could one prepare? What should a devout Jew be doing in the meantime? Well, one should keep the Torah for a start. As we saw earlier, for many Jews even in this period (i.e., before the final destruction of the Temple in AD 70) the Torah had become like a portable Temple: wherever they were, in Rome or Babylon, in Greece or Egypt, if they prayerfully studied the Torah, then it might be as if they were in the Temple itself. The divine presence would be there, not with flashing glory, not with a pillar of cloud and fire, but there nonetheless.
There were patterns and disciplines of prayer, too, through which that glorious moment might be anticipated by a devout Jew (and young Saul was nothing if not a devout Jew). There were ways of prayer—we hear of them mostly through much later traditions, but there are indications that they were already known in Saul’s day—through which that fusion of earth and heaven might be realized even by individuals. Prayer, fasting, and strict observance of the Torah could create conditions either for the worshipper to be caught up into heaven or for a fresh revelation of heaven to appear to someone on earth, or indeed both. Who is to say what precisely all this would mean in practice, set as it is at the borders of language and experience both then and now? A vision, a revelation, the unveiling of secrets, of mysteries . . . like the Temple itself, only even more mysterious . . .
There was a centuries-old tradition of Jewish sages longing for this kind of thing and in some cases being granted it. Such stories go all the way back to the narratives of Israel’s patriarchs. Abraham has a strange, disquieting vision of the divine presence as a burning cooking pot, passing between the halves of sacrificial animals and establishing the covenant.9 Jacob, running away for his life, dreams of a ladder reaching down from heaven to earth.10 Joseph interprets dreams for Pharaoh’s servants and then for Pha
raoh himself, before suddenly finding that his own boyhood dreams are fulfilled as well in ways he could never have imagined.11 Closer to the first century, there was Daniel. Daniel, like Joseph, interpreted dreams for a pagan king; then, like Jacob, he had his own visions of heaven and earth in dangerous but glorious interchange.12
These memories informed the minds of those first-century Jews who found themselves in the long, puzzling interval between the time when the One God had abandoned the Temple and the time when he would return in glory. Heaven and earth would come together at last. But how? And when? Interim answers were given in various writings. Seers, mystics, and poets wrote of dreams and visions whose subject matter was the rescue of Israel and the final saving revelation of the One God. Often these took the literary form of “dream plus interpretation,” fused together to provide the “revelation” (in Greek apokalypsis) of things normally hidden. This was the world in which Saul of Tarsus, heir to these traditions, practiced his fierce and loyal devotion to Israel’s God. This was how to keep hope alive, perhaps even to glimpse its fulfillment in advance.
Once again, locating him within this world is a matter not of psychology, but of history. We are trying to think our way into the mind of a zealous young Jew determined to do God’s will whatever it cost, eager to purge Israel from idolatry and sin, keen to hasten the time when God would come back and rule his world with justice and righteousness. What could be more appropriate than for such a young man to seek through prayer and meditation to inhabit for himself those strange old traditions of heaven-and-earth commerce, to become, in his own mind and heart and perhaps even body, part of that heaven-and-earth reality, a visionary whose inner eye, and perhaps also whose outer eye, might glimpse the ultimate mystery?
You will see where this is going (though Saul, of course, did not). But there is one more element to add to the mix before we get there. In later Jewish tradition—again we must assume that such traditions have deep historical roots, though they are now lost to our view—one central text for meditation of this sort, for heaven-and-earth mysticism if we want to call it that, was the opening of the book of Ezekiel. In one of the strangest scenes in all scripture, the prophet sees the heavenly throne-chariot upon which the One God goes about his business. He describes it with immense caution, starting down below with the whirling and flashing wheels and the strange four-faced creatures (angels? who can say?) that inhabit them. (Even reading the text can make you giddy. Some of the later rabbis tried to keep people from reading it until they were at least forty years old.)