by N. T. Wright
Return to Tarsus
3
Arabia and Tarsus
PAUL’S LETTERS GIVE us a few tantalizing glimpses of his life, and this is one of the strangest:
When God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, was pleased to unveil his son in me, so that I might announce the good news about him among the nations—immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. No, I went away to Arabia, and afterward returned to Damascus.1
As we shall see later, Paul is writing this in his own defense. He has apparently been accused of getting his “gospel” secondhand from the Jerusalem apostles. His opponents are therefore going over his head and appealing to Peter, James, and the rest, like someone objecting to the way a band was playing a cover from an old Beatles song and phoning up Paul McCartney himself to check on how it should really be played. Paul is therefore insisting that his message was his own; he had gotten it from Jesus himself, not from other members of the movement. It had come, he says, “through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah.”2 “The message” in question was not, after all, a theory, a new bit of teaching, or even details of how someone might be “saved.” “The message” was the news about Jesus himself: he was raised from the dead, he was therefore Israel’s Messiah, he was the Lord of the world. All of that was “given” to Paul on the road to Damascus. Knowing Israel’s scriptures as he did, he didn’t need anybody else to explain what it all meant. Start with the scriptural story, place the crucified and risen Jesus at the climax of the story, and the meaning, though unexpected and shocking, is not in doubt. That is the point he is making.
So why Arabia? The clunky, obvious, straightforward answer is that Paul was eager to tell people about Jesus and that Arabia was where he went on his first “evangelistic mission.” Scholars and preachers have written and spoken about “Paul’s missionary activity in Arabia” as though this interpretation was a done deal. But, as often, the obvious answer is almost certainly wrong. And, again as so often, the clue to what Paul means is found in the scriptures he knew so well.
We recall that the young Saul of Tarsus was, in the technical Jewish sense, “extremely zealous for his ancestral traditions”—a line that comes in Galatians immediately before the passage quoted above. We recall, further, that in the Jewish traditions of Saul’s day there were two outstanding ancient heroes of “zeal”: Phinehas, the young priest who had speared the Israelite man and the Moabite woman, and Elijah, who had tricked and killed the worshippers of the fertility god Baal. Phinehas is important for our understanding of Paul, for reasons to which we will return. Elijah is important for Paul not least because he gives us the clue to the journey to “Arabia.”
The word “Arabia” in the first century covered a wide range of territory. It could refer to the ancient Nabataean kingdom, which stretched from a little to the east of Syria—close to Damascus, in fact—southward through what is now Jordan and beyond to include the Sinai Peninsula. But one of the only other references to it in the New Testament—indeed, in the same letter, Paul’s letter to the Galatians—gives us a far more specific location: Mt. Sinai, in the peninsula to the south of the Holy Land and to the east of Egypt. Mt. Sinai was where God had come down in fire and had given Moses the Torah; it was the place of revelation, the place of law, the place where the covenant between God and Israel, established earlier with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was solemnly ratified. Sinai, the great mountain in Arabia, was, in that sense, the place of beginnings. It was the place to which subsequent generations looked back as the starting point of the long and checkered relationship, the often shaky marriage, between this strange, rescuing, demanding God and his willful, stiff-necked people. Sinai was where Elijah had gone when it all went horribly wrong. Sinai was where Saul of Tarsus went—for the same reason.
The echoes of the Elijah story are small but significant. After his zealous victory over the prophets of Baal, Elijah is confronted by a messenger from Queen Jezebel, herself an enthusiastic backer of the Baal cult. The royal threat is blunt; Elijah’s life is on the line. Zeal turns to panic. He runs away, all the way to Mt. Horeb.3 (Horeb is either another name for Sinai or the name of a mountain close by from which the Israelites set off to Canaan.) There he complains to God that he has been “very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts” (in other words, he has killed the prophets of Baal), but that it hasn’t worked. The people are still rebelling, and he alone is left, the last loyalist. He repeats this complaint a second time after a powerful revelation of wind, earthquake, and fire had been followed by “a sound of sheer silence,” one modern translation of a Hebrew phrase that in the King James Version appears as “a still small voice.”4
When God finally answers, Elijah is told, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus,” where he is to anoint new kings for Syria and Israel and a new prophet, Elisha, to take his own place.5 They will do what needs to be done to remove Baal worship from the land. What’s more, God declares to the puzzled prophet, “I will leave seven thousand in Israel” who will stay loyal.6 (Paul quotes that passage in another letter, likening himself to Elijah as the focal point of a “remnant.”)7
Already those with ears to hear may catch echoes of Paul in Galatians. He has been “exceedingly zealous for the ancestral traditions,” leading him to use violence in trying to stamp out heresy. Paul says that he “went away to Arabia”—just as Elijah did—and “afterward returned to Damascus”—again just like Elijah. So what is this all about? Why did Saul go to Arabia?
The parallel with Elijah—the verbal echoes are so close, and the reflection on “zeal” so exact, that Paul must have intended them—indicates that he, like Elijah, made a pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai in order to go back to the place where the covenant was ratified. He wanted to go and present himself before the One God, to explain that he had been “exceedingly zealous,” but that his vision, his entire worldview, had been turned on its head. And he received his instructions: “Go back and announce the new king.”
The picture in Acts, it turns out, is oversimplified. (The longest histories ever written leave out far more than they put in, and Luke wants his book to fit onto a single scroll.) In Acts 9:20–28, Paul announces Jesus in the synagogue in Damascus until a plot against his life forces him to leave town and go back to Jerusalem. Somewhere in that story there must be room for a desert pilgrimage, after which Paul “returned again to Damascus.”
But the point is far more significant for a biographer than simply sorting out a potential conflict between two sources. We discover from the Arabia journey something about Paul’s own self-awareness, including at that point a perhaps welcome note of self-doubt in the midst of the zeal—the zeal of the persecutor and then the zeal of the proclaimer. Whether on foot or by donkey, one does not go for several days into a desert just to find a quiet spot to pray. Saul wanted to be clear that the shocking new thing that had been revealed to him really was the fulfillment, the surprising but ultimately satisfying goal, of the ancient purposes of the One God, purposes that had been set out particularly in the law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. He wanted to stay loyal. Saul was starting to come to terms with the possibility that, if the divine purposes had been completed in Jesus, it might mean that a whole new phase of the divine plan, hitherto barely suspected, had now been launched, a phase in which the Torah itself would be seen in a whole new light. And Saul, like Elijah, was told to go back and get on with the job. Elijah was to anoint a couple of new kings and a prophet as well. Saul of Tarsus was to go back and get on with the prophetic task of announcing that Jesus of Nazareth was the true anointed king, the Messiah, the world’s rightful sovereign.
So Saul went back to Damascus, apparently confirmed in his understanding of himself as a prophet fulfilling the ancient role of announcing God’s truth and God’s anointed king to Israel and the nations. If he has not usually been seen this way, that may be because we have not paid sufficient a
ttention to the scriptural echoes he sets up in many places in his writings, but particularly in the very passage we have been studying. When he speaks of God setting him apart from his mother’s womb, he is deliberately echoing the call of Jeremiah.8 When he speaks of God “unveiling” his son in him, he is using the language of Jewish mystics and seers who spoke of that “unveiling” or “revelation” as constituting a divine commissioning.9 When he says that the Jerusalem church later “glorified God because of me,” he is echoing Isaiah, from one of his all-time favorite chapters, and claiming for himself the prophetic role of the “servant.”10 He continues to echo that chapter in Galatians 2 when he speaks of wondering whether he “might be running, or might have run, to no good effect.”11
Paul, in other words, is not only making it clear in Galatians 1–2 that his “gospel” was given to him directly, not acquired secondhand through the Jerusalem leaders. He is also making it clear that his call and commissioning have placed him in the ancient prophetic tradition, whether of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Elijah himself. His opponents are trying to go over his head in their appeal to Jerusalem, but he is going over everybody else’s head by appealing to Jesus himself and to the scriptures as foreshadowing not only the gospel, but the prophetic ministry that he, Paul, has now received.
This, then, is why he went to Arabia: to hand in his former commission and to acquire a new one. His loyalty to the One God of Israel was as firm as it had always been. Since many Christians, and many Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul’s life.
As we try to figure out what exactly happened next, our sources present us with a confused flurry of incidents, ending with Saul paying a brief visit to Jerusalem before going back home to Tarsus. Saul’s time in Damascus, including his trip to Arabia and back, probably took three years, most likely from AD 33 to 36. (Questions of chronology always get complicated, but the main lines are clear.) Thus, though the alarm and anger at his initial proclamation of Jesus may have been real enough, it seems to have taken a little while before this looked like it was turning violent. Only when the threats became severe, with his life in danger not only from the local Jewish population but from a local official as well, did Paul make his famous escape, avoiding the guards on the city gates by being let down the city wall in a basket.
Many years later Paul would use that incident to good rhetorical effect. In his second letter to Corinth, he makes an ironic list of all his “achievements,” and the climax of it all is the time when he had to run away!12 It was the shape of things to come. His career, did he but know it, lay before him in outline in this one incident. Announce Jesus as Messiah, and opposition will arise from Jews, offended at the idea of a crucified Messiah, and from pagan authorities, fearing a breach of the peace. Perhaps too from more perceptive pagans, who might glimpse the (scriptural) point that Israel’s Messiah was not to be a local or tribal chief only. He would be the master of the entire world.
In any case, to Jerusalem Paul then goes, most likely in AD 36 or 37. Writing to the Galatians over a decade later, he explains that he stayed with Peter (whom he calls by his Aramaic name, Cephas) for two weeks, seeing no other Jesus-followers except James, the Lord’s brother, already acknowledged as the central figure in the new movement. The meeting was set up by Barnabas; the Jerusalem leaders were understandably suspicious, but Barnabas assured them that Saul really had seen Jesus on the road, and that in Damascus he really had been boldly announcing Jesus as Messiah. So far, one might think, so good.
But the pattern begins to kick in again. Saul, knowing his scriptures inside out and possessed of a quick mind and a ready tongue, is bound to get into public debate, and public debate is bound to get him into trouble. And trouble, coming just a few years after the stoning of Stephen, is something the Jesus believers can do without. So they escort Paul down to the sea at Caesarea and put him on a boat back home to southern Turkey.
It is hard to know what the Jerusalem community thought would happen next. They were in dangerous, unmapped new territory. Saul of Tarsus, still on fire with having seen the risen Lord, eager to explain from the scriptures what it was all about, apparently careless of the hornets’ nests he was stirring up, was one problem too many. “Let him go back to Tarsus,” they probably thought. “They like good talkers there. And besides, that’s where he came from in the first place . . .”
* * *
There follows a decade or so of silence: roughly 36 to 46 (like most dates in ancient history, including most of the ones in this book, we are dealing in approximations, with a year or so to be allowed either way). Faced with a silent decade at a formative period of someone’s life, a novelist might have a field day; we must be more restrained. But if we send cautious historical and biographical probes into this blank period from either end, we may find at least three themes that need to be explored.
First, and most straightforwardly, we must assume that Saul set to and earned his own living in the family business. As we saw earlier, he was a tentmaker, which involved general skill with leather and fabric of various kinds as well as the specific manufacture of actual tents, awnings, and so on. Jewish teachers did not expect to make a living from their teaching; Saul, as a strange new type of Jewish teacher, would not suppose that going about announcing the crucified Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Lord would earn him a living. His craft was hard physical labor, and his subsequent apostolic letters show that the apostle took a pride in supporting himself by manual work. Saul, by now perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, would be living and working alongside his family and in close contact with the rich mixture of people who passed through the great city of Tarsus.
Importantly for Saul’s later work, tentmaking was a portable trade. As long as he had his working tools, he could set up shop in any town, buying his raw materials locally and offering his regular products for sale. When people in churches today discuss Paul and his letters, they often think only of the man of ideas who dealt with lofty and difficult concepts, implying a world of libraries, seminar rooms, or at least the minister’s study for quiet sermon preparation. We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the gospel were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop. Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus. His heart was still zealous, loyal to the One God.
The second thing we can be sure of is that he prayed, he studied, and he figured out all sorts of things. Faced with his letters (written a decade and more later), dense as they are with concentrated argument, we cannot imagine that when he wrote them he was breaking entirely new ground. He could no doubt improvise on the spot, but in his mature thought he gives every evidence of long pondering. Saul spent a silent decade deepening the well of scriptural reflection from which he would thereafter draw the water he needed.
During this period he had one particular experience from which, in retrospect, he learned one particular lesson. Writing to Corinth in AD 56, he seems to be mocking the Corinthians’ desire for spectacular “spiritual” events. “All right,” he says, “if I must, I must. Someone I know in the Messiah . . .”—he won’t even say it’s himself, though this becomes clear. “This ‘Someone’ was snatched up to the third heaven.” (Since heaven was often subdivided into seven, this itself might have seemed a bit of a letdown.) “I don’t know,” he says, “whether this was a bodily experience or one of those out-of-body things; only God knows that. And this ‘Someone’ heard . . . but actually I’m not allowed to tell you what was heard. Oh, and the most important thing about it al
l was that I was given ‘a thorn in my flesh,’ a satanic messenger, to stop me from getting too exalted with it all.” The underlying point in the letter is clear: “You shouldn’t be asking this kind of question and trying to rank me with other people and their ‘experiences.’ If you do, I will only say that yes, these things have happened, but that the real point was that I had to learn humility, to understand that ‘when I’m weak, then I am strong.’”13
The underlying point for our understanding of Paul is that he continued the practices of prayer and meditation within which, I have suggested, his Damascus Road vision took place and that sometimes these led to almost equally spectacular results. Perhaps this may have happened to comfort and reassure him at a moment when things were particularly difficult back home in Tarsus. Perhaps the “thorn in the flesh” was the continuing resistance to the gospel on the part of people he loved dearly, though speculation has been rife as to whether it was a bodily ailment, a recurring temptation, or even the recurring nightmare of the stoning of Stephen, in which he himself is standing by giving his grim approval. The point leads to an ironic climax. He prayed three times about this, he says to the Corinthians, asking that it be removed. The Corinthians are no doubt expecting him to log this as a great “answer to prayer” of which they could be proud. Instead, he reveals that the answer was No.
This is the only window we have on the silent years at Tarsus, and Paul seems to have been determined that they would remain more or less silent. “Yes, something happened, but that’s not the point.” But here too we can see his mind at work: praying, puzzling things out, pondering.