by N. T. Wright
We can infer quite a bit about his pondering. From everything we know of Saul of Tarsus, on the one hand, and Paul the Apostle, on the other, we cannot imagine that in this early period he ever stopped thinking things through, soaking that reflection in Jewish-style prayer, focusing it on Israel’s scriptures, and, like many other devout diaspora Jews, engaging with the culture all around him. He searched the ancient scriptures for all he was worth and argued about them in the synagogue and at the workbench with his friends and family. He thought his way backward from the “new fact,” as he saw it, of a crucified and risen Messiah, back into the world of Israel’s scriptures and traditions, back into the long, dark, and often twisted narrative of Israel that had been groping its way forward to that point without glimpsing its true goal. He reread Genesis. He reread Exodus. He reread the whole Torah, and the prophets, especially Isaiah, and he went on praying the Psalms. With hindsight (and, he would have insisted, with a fresh wisdom that came with the spirit), he saw Jesus all over the place—not arbitrarily, not in fanciful allegory (the only time he says he’s using allegory, he is probably teasing those for whom that was a method of first resort), but as the infinite point where the parallel lines of Israel’s long narrative would eventually meet.
These parallel lines are central to his mature thinking and foundational for what would later become Christian theology. First, there was Israel’s own story. According to the prophets, Israel’s story (from Abraham all the way through to exile and beyond) would narrow down to a remnant, but would also focus on a coming king, so that the king himself would be Israel personified. But second, there was God’s story—the story of what the One God had done, was doing, and had promised to do. (The idea of God having a story, making plans, and putting them into operation seems to be part of what Jews and early Christians meant by speaking of this God as being “alive.”) And this story too would likewise narrow down to one point. Israel’s God would return, visibly and powerfully, to rescue his people from their ultimate enemies and to set up a kingdom that could not be shaken. “All God’s promises,” Paul would later write, “find their yes in him.”14
Saul came to see that these two stories, Israel’s story and God’s story, had, shockingly, merged together. I think this conviction must date to the silent decade in Tarsus, if not earlier. Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day. If you had asked Saul of Tarsus, before the meeting on the road to Damascus, where Israel’s story and God’s story came together, the two natural answers would have been Temple (the place at the heart of the promised land where God had promised to live) and Torah (the word of God spoken into, and determinative of, Israel’s national life). The Temple indicated that Israel’s God desired to live in the midst of his people; the Torah, that he would address his people with his life-transforming word. Saul now came to see that both these answers pointed beyond themselves to Jesus and of course to the spirit.
In this new world (this too became axiomatic for Paul’s mature thought and thematic for his public career) it mattered that Israel’s God was indeed the One God of the whole world. A tight-knit orthodox Jewish community in the midst of a bustling, philosophically minded pagan city must have been a fascinating place to start thinking all this through. At first glance, Israel’s scriptures might seem to demand that Israel stay separate from the nations, the goyim. The pagans, like the Moabite women sent to seduce the Israelites in the desert, would lead them astray. They should stay separate. But look again, and you will see, not least in the Psalms, not least in the royal predictions of Psalms and prophets alike, that when Israel’s true king arrives, he will be the king not only of Israel, but also of the whole world. Saul, in Tarsus, must have reflected on what it would mean for Psalm 2 to come true, where the One God says to the true king:
You are my son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
And dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.15
This psalm echoes the promises to Abraham, promises about an “inheritance” and a “possession” that would consist of the land of Canaan. But the promises have been globalized. They now extend to the whole world. They say, in effect, that the promises of the “holy land” were a foretaste, a signpost, to a larger reality. The God of Abraham was the Creator, who called Abraham—and then, much later, David—so that through their long story, replete as it was with disasters and false starts, he would bring his restorative purposes to bear on the whole world.
That, indeed, seems to be the message of another psalm:
God is king over the nations;
God sits on his holy throne.
The princes of the peoples gather
as the people of the God of Abraham.
For the shields of the earth belong to God;
he is highly exalted.16
Put those psalms together with others such as Psalm 72 (“May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth”17), dip them in the prophetic scriptures like Isaiah 11 (the “shoot from the stump of Jesse,” that is, David, will inaugurate the new creation of justice and peace), and you have a composite picture of the hope of Israel: hope for a new world, not just a rescued or renewed people, and hope for a coming king through whose rule it would come about. Put all that into the praying mind of Saul of Tarsus, who is sensing a new energy transforming and redirecting his earlier “zeal,” and what do you get? One could not sing those and the other psalms in a Jewish community in a city like Tarsus without wondering what it might mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus was the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken. How would that work out? What would it look like in practice?
Not far behind that, what did it mean that the promises to Abraham had been universalized? What would a worldwide Abrahamic family consist of? How, so to speak, might it work? These are the questions that underlie much of Paul’s mature writing. We cannot imagine that he was not puzzling them out through the long, silent years in Tarsus.
We glimpse, then, Saul at the workbench; Saul praying and thinking; and, third, Saul listening to the ideas all around him, in the philosophical and political as well as religious cultures of cosmopolitan Tarsus. He would be taking it all in, not simply as further evidence of pagan folly (though there would be plenty of that), but as signs that the One God, the creator of all, was at work in the world and in human lives, even if those lives and that wider world were twisted and flawed through the worship of other gods. Tarsus, as we have said, was full of talk, philosophical talk, speculation, logic, wise and not so wise advice about life, death, the gods, virtue, the way to an untroubled existence. Philosophy wasn’t just for a small wealthy class, though there were schools where one could study Plato, Aristotle, and the various writers who had developed the great systems that flowed from their writings. The questions that drove philosophical inquiry were everybody’s questions. What made a city “just” or a human “wise” or “virtuous”? What constituted a good argument or an effective speech? What was the world made of and how did it happen? What was the purpose of life, and how could you know? These questions and the various standard answers were just as likely to be voiced at the barber’s or in the tavern as in a schoolroom with teachers and serious-minded students.
The default mode in Tarsus, and many other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world, would have been some kind of Stoicism, with its all-embracing vision of a united and divine world order in which humans partake through their inner rationality, or logos. The famous alternative, Epicureani
sm, was a minority, elite option that saw the gods, if they existed at all, as themselves a distant, happy elite who took no interest in human affairs and certainly didn’t try to intervene in the world. The puzzled uncertainties of the “Academy,” the successors to Plato (“We can’t be sure whether the gods exist, but we’d better keep the civil religion going just in case”) were giving way, in some newer teaching, to a vision of an upstairs/downstairs world such as the picture sketched by the biographer and philosopher Plutarch in the generation after Paul. For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss. (If that sounds like much modern Western Christianity, that is our problem. It certainly wasn’t what Paul believed.)
And all that was just the rough outline. There were many more themes and variations on themes, an endless round of discussions in the tentmaker’s cramped little shop, on the street, over meals with friends, at home. It was, we may suspect, fascinating and frustrating by turns. Like many other Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus, thinking as a Jew while taking on board the theories of the wider world, would reflect on the similarity and dissimilarity between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of Israel.
For Saul, with the vision of Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah close to his heart, there would be no question of retreat from the world. If the Stoics had a big integrated vision of a united world, so did he. If the Roman Empire was hoping to create a single society in which everyone would give allegiance to a single Lord, so was he. Paul believed that this had already been accomplished through Israel’s Messiah. If the Platonists were speaking of possible commerce between “heaven” and “earth,” so was he—though his vision was of heaven coming to earth, not of souls escaping earth and going to heaven. As a Jew, he believed that the whole created order was the work of the One God; as a “Messiah man,” he believed that the crucified and risen Jesus had dealt with the evil that corrupts the world and the human race and that he had begun the long-awaited project of new creation, of which the communities of baptized and believing Jesus-followers were the pilot project.
When he writes, later, that he has learned to “take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah,”18 it seems highly likely that this was a conviction to which he had come in the silent decade in Tarsus. So too when he tells the church in Philippi to consider carefully “whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy,”19 he is recognizing that human society, even in the radically flawed non-Jewish world, could and did aspire to live wisely and well. All this is part of Saul’s monotheism, renewed and deepened by his belief in Jesus. Saul knew that the world needed redeeming. He also knew that it remained God’s world.
Saul then, I propose, spent the silent years in Tarsus laboring, studying, and praying, putting together in his mind a larger picture of the One God and his truth that would take on the world and outflank it. If Jesus was the fulfillment of the ancient scriptural stories, that conclusion was inevitable. But all the while he must have been uncomfortably aware that this still thoroughly Jewish vision of the One God and his world, reshaped around the crucified and risen Messiah, was, to put it mildly, not shared by all his fellow Jews. Saul must already have come up against the social, cultural, exegetical, and theological tension that would stay with him throughout his career. What sense could it make that Israel’s Messiah would come to his own and that his own would not receive him?
We have no idea whether there was already a Jesus community in Tarsus, whether Saul was part of such a thing, or whether he met regularly with a handful of others to break bread in the name of Jesus. It is hard to imagine Saul as a solitary Jesus believer through all those years, but history offers no clues one way or another. But we certainly cannot imagine him staying silent. And to speak of the crucified and risen Jesus would inevitably be controversial. It wasn’t just that a crucified Messiah was bound to be seen by many Jews as blasphemous nonsense. It wasn’t simply that the idea of the One God becoming human was a shock to the Jewish system (though some strands of Jewish thinking at the time may perhaps have explored such a possibility). It was, just as much, that the implications of all this for the ancestral way of life were either not clear or all too disturbingly clear. Paul’s own question, what it would look like if the One God created a new single family of “brothers and sisters” in the Messiah, had potentially revolutionary answers. And traditional societies do not welcome revolution.
For Saul, this question cannot have been merely theoretical. Here we probe, with caution, into one of the most sensitive parts of the silent decade in Tarsus. He had gone back to his family. All we know of Saul indicates that he would have wasted no time in telling them that he had met the risen Jesus, that the scriptures proved him to be God’s Messiah, that the One God had unveiled his age-old secret plan in and through him, and that by the power of his spirit this Jesus was at work in human hearts and lives, doing a new thing and creating a new community. How would his family have reacted?
They might conceivably have wanted to cut him some slack. Many young men or women leave home for a while and come back with new and disturbing ideas. Often they settle down eventually, and their elders smile indulgently at their youthful enthusiasm. But it seems more likely, assuming that young Saul learned his traditional “zeal” at home, that there would have been a fierce reaction. Saul would not have held back; he would not have toned down his message. There would have been no stopping him. Either Jesus was the Messiah, or he wasn’t. And, if he was, then there could be no “take it or leave it.” One could not shrug one’s shoulders and walk away. If Israel’s Messiah has come, then Israel must regroup around him, whatever it takes. Every would-be messianic movement in Israel’s history carried that challenge. We imagine arguments, misunderstandings, accusations of disloyalty to the ancestral traditions—even though Saul would be at pains to insist that what had happened in Jesus and what was happening through the spirit was what the ancient scriptures had been talking about all along. (“Maybe so,” his father might have replied with a weary sigh, “but Moses never said you could be part of Israel without being circumcised . . .”)
Among other strong points that emerge again and again in his mature writing and that must have been hammered out on the anvil of these constant arguments, we find Paul’s vision of what Jesus had achieved in his death and resurrection. Every time he refers to these earth-shattering events in his later writings, he draws out different drafts from that deep well of earlier reflection. At the heart of it, rooted in the Passover theme, which Saul had known from boyhood and which Jesus himself had made thematic for his own life and death, we find the idea of victory. Something had happened in Jesus’s death and resurrection as a result of which the world was a different place. It didn’t look different outwardly. Saul, returning to the Tarsus of his boyhood, would have seen the same sights, the same idols and temples, the same standard pagan behavior. But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.
The world he had known was full of dark powers. Or, to be more precise, the created order was good, as Genesis had said, but humans had worshipped nongods, pseudogods, “forces” within the natural order, and had thereby handed over to those shadowy beings a power not rightfully theirs. The “forces” had usurped the proper human authority over the world. Evidence was all around. Tarsus, like every ancient non-Jewish city, was full of shrines, full of strange worship, full of human lives misshapen by dehumanizing practices. And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil. The resurrection proved it. If he had overcome death, it could only be because he had overcome the forces that lead to death, the corrosive power of idolatry and human wickedness.
This is a dark theme to which we shall re
turn. We mention it here partly because Paul must have thought through these questions in this early period and also partly because it is at the root of his understanding of what with hindsight we call his Gentile mission. Here’s how it works.
Paul believed that, through Jesus and his death, the One God had overcome the powers that had held the world in their grip. And that meant that all humans, not just Jews, could be set free to worship the One God. The Jesus-shaped message of liberation included forgiveness for all past misdeeds, and this message of forgiveness meant that there could be no barriers between Jewish Messiah people and non-Jewish Messiah people. To erect such barriers would mean denying that Jesus had won the messianic victory. Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil. This translated directly into one of the great themes of his mature thought and particularly his pastoral efforts: the unity of all Messiah people across ethnic boundary lines. And this is one of the things that Saul’s own family must have found impossible to swallow.
Here, I believe, we have the root of the ongoing grief in the heart of the mature Paul as he looks at “his flesh-and-blood relatives.”20 The people over whom he is agonizing (with “great sorrow and endless pain in my heart”) are not a generalized mass of “unbelieving Jews.” Paul knows their names. He sees their faces and their sorrowful head-shaking. His mother. His father. He hears their voices in his inner ear, praying the Shema as they had taught him to pray it, unable to comprehend that their super-bright, utterly devout son—brother—nephew—had turned away to such horrible heresy. And yet they loved him all the same, since Saul always wore his heart on his sleeve, and they knew when he was in distress as well. Love and grief are very close, especially in warm, passionate hearts. Saul shrank from neither. He wrote constantly of love—divine love, human love, “the Messiah’s love.” And he constantly suffered the grief that went with it.