by N. T. Wright
It would mean, in fact, the launching of a project (though they couldn’t have foreseen this at the time) that with long hindsight we might call “Christian theology.” If a community like the one in Antioch was to keep its balance as a group of Jesus-followers in that world of clashing cultures, its members would need to grasp two things. On the one hand, they would have to put down roots firmly into the Jewish traditions, into the scriptures. On the other hand, they would have to think through what precisely it meant that Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of those same scriptures, had been crucified and raised from the dead. Only by going deeply into the scriptural story of Israel and the events concerning Jesus, reflecting from many different angles on its full significance, could such a community keep its identity, its integrity, and its nerve. Who did Barnabas know who had that kind of knowledge and the eager energy and the way with words that would communicate it? There was one obvious candidate.
It was a decade or so since Saul had gone to Tarsus, after his brief time in Damascus and then Jerusalem. We cannot tell whether anyone in Jerusalem or Antioch had seen or heard of him during that time. But Barnabas hadn’t forgotten him. He had a strong sense that Saul was the man for the job. This was the beginning of a partnership that would launch the first recorded official “mission” of the new movement—and that would also, within a few years, reflect the inner tensions within that movement still awaiting resolution. Barnabas and Saul would sing from the same sheet . . . until someone tried to add a new verse to the song.
So Saul came to Antioch. Once again he was leaving home; this time, we assume, with the mixed feelings he would later describe as “great sorrow and endless pain.”1 He worked with Barnabas and the local Antioch leaders for a whole year, teaching and guiding the new and growing community. They did their best to shape the new believers and their common life in accordance with scriptural roots and the “good news” events concerning Jesus. Much as we might like to be a fly on the wall in those early days, all we can be sure of is that the ways of reading scripture and interpreting the Jesus events that we find already fully grown in Paul’s mature letters were taking shape, not just in his head and his heart, but in the life of the community. Paul, the greatest theoretician of the new movement, was never merely a theoretician. Pretty much every idea he later articulated had been road-tested in the narrow, crowded streets of Antioch.
Luke claims that it was in Antioch, in this period, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christianoi, “Messiah people.”2 That claim has been challenged by those who rightly point out that our word “Christian” implies an organized movement separate from the Jewish world and that there is no evidence of such a thing for at least a generation or so. The only other places in the New Testament where the word is used are on the lips of Herod Agrippa, who teases Paul for “trying to make him a Christian,” and in an early letter where Peter refers to people “suffering as Christians.”3 Both of these look as if the word was a nickname used by outsiders, quite likely in contempt (“Messiah freaks!”), rather than a word the Jesus-followers used for themselves. But that, anyway, isn’t the point. In the Antioch of the 40s you might mistake the word Christos for a personal name. The Jesus-followers, the Messiah people, were, so to say, getting a name for themselves, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t have acquired a literal name at the same time. The most natural choice would have been Christianoi, Messiah people, a word that, like the community itself, like Saul of Tarsus himself, had deep Jewish roots but a strange new reach and power.
That odd sense of a new kind of life, as in all the very early Jesus communities, was heavily dependent (they would have said) on the powerful presence and guidance of the holy spirit. Whatever account we want to give of this phenomenon today, we cannot begin to understand Saul, Barnabas, and their colleagues without recognizing that as they prayed, sang, studied scripture, organized their community life, and (not least) went about talking to both Jews and non-Jews about Jesus, they were conscious of an energy and a sense of direction unlike anything they had known before. They had no hesitation in ascribing that energy and leading to the divine spirit, which had been promised in the scriptures and then again, only a few years before, by Jesus’s own forerunner, John the Baptist. These early Jesus-followers were not naive “enthusiasts.” Already within the first decades it became necessary to challenge some claims about the work of the spirit and to warn against the likelihood of deceit, and indeed of self-deceit. But we cannot understand the things that now happened unless we allow that Saul and the others really did believe they were being led and energized by the personal presence of the One God.
It was out of such leading that Barnabas and Saul found themselves being commissioned for their first joint project. One of the spirit-led “prophets” in Antioch, a man named Agabus, warned the community that there was a famine coming over the whole Mediterranean world. (Various pieces of evidence point to the occurrence of this in AD 46.) The reaction to this news tells us a lot about the way the community instinctively thought. We might have imagined that a warning like this would have resulted in knee-jerk inward-looking anxiety. Should they stockpile food? Should they do what Joseph did in Egypt, storing grain in the good years to last through the bad? The Jesus-followers in Antioch resolved at once not to do that. Instead, they would look out for those community members worse off than themselves. And that meant Jerusalem. Jerusalem was where Jesus’s first followers had sold their lands and pooled their resources and where now, after a decade or two of hostility from the authorities and probably their own wider communities, they were struggling to stay alive.
The Antioch-based Jesus-followers knew what they had to do. They had never supposed themselves to be independent of the Jerusalem Jesus-followers. Those of us who are used to multinational organizations, including “churches,” may need to consider just how unusual the next step was at the time. Just as Antioch was the first place where we see a genuine effort at a new kind of transethnic community life, so in this action Antioch was the first place to demonstrate that the followers of Jesus thought of themselves as a translocal community with mutual responsibilities. The only possible parallels are the network of synagogue communities (but they were not transethnic) and the Roman army and civil service (but they all, though incorporating non-Romans, bore the stamp of Caesar). What might it mean, farther on down the track, to belong to a new kind of worldwide community? That too was to prove a huge question, to which Saul of Tarsus would make a characteristically innovative response. And this, once more, points ahead to the remarkable long-term results of Saul’s project.
So Barnabas and Saul were sent from Antioch to Jerusalem with a gift of money for the Jerusalem believers. The date was probably AD 46 or 47. Despite other traditional ways of putting the historical jigsaw together, I assume that this is the same visit that Saul, writing later as Paul, describes in Galatians 2:1–10. It makes sense. He went to Jerusalem, he says, “by revelation,” presumably referring to the prophetic warning of Agabus. His own account of the visit ends with the Jerusalem leaders urging him to go on “remembering the poor.”4 That admonition certainly applies more widely. Right from the start, the Jesus-followers believed they had a special obligation toward “the poor” in general. But it was also focused on the Jerusalem community in particular.
When Paul himself describes the visit, however, he takes the financial purpose almost for granted and focuses on what else had happened while he was there. He had now been working in Antioch for a year, in addition to whatever public work he may or may not have done in Tarsus. During that time he had been energetically speaking about Jesus to non-Jews as well as Jews and encouraging the community, Jew and non-Jew alike, to live as a single family. What would the Jerusalem leaders think of this brave new experiment? And if they didn’t like the look of it, what would that mean? Had Paul been wasting his time?
This possibility seems to have haunted him at various stages of his work; he worried that he might have been wast
ing his time, running the race “to no good effect.”5 This is an allusion to Isaiah 49; in v. 4 of that chapter, the “servant,” the one tasked with bringing God’s light to the nations, wonders if perhaps he has “labored in vain” or “spent his strength for nothing and vanity.” The fact that Paul expresses this particular anxiety in this scriptural language means, of course, that he knows in theory what the answer ought to be. But he says it anyway, here in reference to the trip to Jerusalem, then again in his anxiety over the Thessalonians while waiting in Athens, and again in writing from Ephesus to the Philippians.6 He keeps on coming back to it, like the tip of the tongue finding its way to a sore tooth. Perhaps it’s all been for nothing? But then, following the prophetic train of thought, he might reason that because the “servant” voiced the sentiment, perhaps the feeling was part of the task. But still he couldn’t help wondering . . .
This fits as well with the remarkable moment in the first letter to Corinth when Paul reveals one of the sources of his self-discipline. One of the best-known things about Paul’s thought is his view that when a person has come to faith in Jesus as the risen Lord, that event is itself a sign of the spirit’s work through the gospel, and that, if the spirit has begun that “good work” of which that faith is the first fruit, you can trust that the spirit will finish the job. That is what he says in Philippians 1:6, and it coheres with his larger teaching elsewhere, particularly in Romans 5–8. But Paul knows that this does not occur when disciples sit back, relax, and allow the spirit to do it all, with no human effort involved. On the contrary. Think of athletics, he says; those who go into training have to exercise great self-discipline. This applies to him too:
I don’t run in an aimless fashion! I don’t box like someone punching the air! No: I give my body rough treatment, and make it my slave, in case, after announcing the message to others, I myself should end up being disqualified.7
Has he, then, been “running in vain”? He lives with the nagging question. At one level, he knows the answer perfectly well. The truth about Jesus, the power of God at work in the gospel announcement, the presence of the spirit, the witness of scripture—all these point in the same direction. But at another level, Paul has to go on asking the question. And he has to go on making his body a disciplined, obedient slave.
This to-and-fro between natural anxiety and scripturally sourced encouragement is made more complex by the human dynamics of the visit to Jerusalem, raising as they do an issue with which Paul would struggle in the years to come. “Here is the money. Now, by the way, are you happy with our present policy?” Paul would have been the first to say that just because you give generously to others does not mean you are compelling them to agree with your policies or practices. But underneath that question there lies a deeper one. This gift of money, he would be implying, demonstrates that they are part of one family, one partnership, one koinōnia. That Greek word is often translated “fellowship,” but in Paul’s world it also meant, among other things, a business partnership, which would often overlap with family ties. Paul would be asking them, at least by implication, to realize that this koinōnia is what it is because in Jesus the One God has done a new thing. He would be asking them to recognize that through Jesus the One God has created a new sort of family, a community that leaps across the walls our traditions have so carefully maintained, as it has now spanned the miles between Antioch and Jerusalem.
This question, posed implicitly when Barnabas and Saul went to Jerusalem, had one particular focal point. They had not gone alone. They had taken with them a young man, a non-Jew who had become an eager and much-loved follower of Jesus, a member of the fellowship in Antioch. His name was Titus. Did Barnabas and Saul realize that Titus was likely to become a test case? Did they realize they might be putting him in a difficult position?
That, anyway, is how it turned out. The main leaders in Jerusalem, according to Paul, were happy with the line Antioch had been taking. Non-Jewish believers were full members of the family. But some other Jesus-followers in Jerusalem were not content. They realized that Titus was a Greek, a non-Jew. He had not been circumcised; he was not therefore a “proselyte,” a non-Jew who had fully converted (there were debates at the time as to whether even circumcision made someone a real Jew, but for most it would have been sufficient). They realized that Barnabas and Saul were insisting that Titus be treated on equal terms as a full member of the family, including sharing in the common meals. This group was horrified. “This is precisely the kind of pollution,” they said, “that the One God wants us to avoid! Fraternizing with pagans is what landed our ancestors in trouble! If the One God who has raised Jesus is going to fulfill his promises and establish his kingdom on earth as in heaven, setting us free from all enemies and earthly ills, he certainly won’t be doing so if we compromise on purity! Either we stay with two tables, one for Jewish Jesus-followers and one for Gentiles, or Titus will have to be circumcised. He will have to become a full Jew if you want him to be recognized as a full member of the Jesus family.”
Barnabas and Saul stood firm. The problem was not so much the embarrassment and physical pain that circumcision would cause Titus. It was a point of theological principle. It was, so Paul declared later, a matter of “freedom”—a loaded word, a Passover word, the slogan for so much that Jews such as Saul had hoped and prayed for. But now, with the new “Passover” of Jesus’s death and resurrection, a new sort of “freedom” had been born. The freedom for all, Jew and Gentile alike, to share membership in the new world, the new family, the new messianic and spirit-led life. And if that was the new “freedom,” then anything that challenged it was a form of slavery. These people want to enslave us, Saul concluded. They want to reverse the Passover moment, to take us back to Egypt. Titus was spared.
The three central Jerusalem leaders, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, and John, were content. Their view carried weight; they were known as the “pillars.” For us, that might be a dead metaphor. For them, in Jerusalem with the Temple still standing, it was making a polemical claim. The early Jesus-followers, it seems, already understood themselves as an alternative Temple with these three as its “pillars”: a new heaven-and-earth society, living and worshipping right alongside the old Temple, making the latter redundant. What Stephen had said was coming true.
That makes it all the more remarkable that James, Peter, and John were able to agree with Barnabas and Saul. Temple meant purity; and purity (for a loyal Jew) would normally have meant extreme care over contact with non-Jews. What Barnabas and Saul had glimpsed, and what (according to Acts) Peter himself had already glimpsed in the house of the non-Jew Cornelius, was a new kind of purity coming to birth. A new freedom. A new Temple. A new kind of purity. No wonder confusion abounded, especially among those who were the most eager for God’s coming act of deliverance. No wonder some loyal Jews resented Barnabas and Saul for pushing the point so insensitively—and no wonder that the two friends held their ground.
How much Saul had argued his case from scripture at this point we cannot tell. But the “pillars” shook hands with him on it. They struck a deal whose apparently simple terms (as quoted by Paul in Galatians) become more complicated the more we think about them. James, Peter, and John would work with Jewish people, while Saul and his friends would work with non-Jewish people. Put like that, it sounds easy, but it doesn’t fit the facts. It may be that the original intention was more geographical than ethnic: the “pillars” would restrict their proclamation of the Messiah to the ancient territory of Israel, while Saul would roam the world. But this hardly fits with Peter’s later journeys, whether to Corinth or ultimately to Rome. Equally, an ethnic division, with Saul carefully avoiding any work with Jewish people in the Diaspora, makes no sense either, granted that in Acts he almost always begins in the synagogues, that in 1 Corinthians he speaks of becoming “like a Jew to the Jews, to win Jews,”8 and that in the decisive opening statement of Romans he says that the gospel is “to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek
.”9
It looks as though the agreement Paul reports in Galatians 2 was a temporary arrangement, a way of mollifying the Jerusalem hard-liners, trying to reassure them that Jewish followers of Jesus, at least, would not have to compromise their own purity, would be able to carry on without straining their consciences. The whole episode, with its swirling theological, personal, and inevitably also political currents, alerts us to the overlapping complexities and challenges that the young movement was facing. Granted Saul’s unrivaled knowledge of the scriptures, we may assume that it alerted him too to the need to understand and to articulate powerfully just what it meant that those scriptures had been fulfilled in the crucified Messiah.
Barnabas and Saul returned to Antioch, their mission complete. We assume that Titus went back with them. They had another young colleague in tow as well, John Mark, a youthful relative of Barnabas and also of Peter. If the two friends were pleased with the way things had gone, that was entirely natural. They had worked well as a team. That would stand them in good stead in the surprising new challenge they would now face.
Part Two
Herald of the King
To and from Galatia
5
Cyprus and Galatia
MOST PRINTED BIBLES contain maps, and among the maps there is usually a chart of Paul’s journeys. I began to enjoy maps and map reading almost as soon as I could read, and when a schoolteacher gave us an assignment to learn about Paul’s various travels, I took to it like a duck to water. It fitted naturally with the classical studies I was already starting to pursue. I had no idea then that some of the lines I so easily traced were controversial, particularly those relating to North and South Galatia. What interested me was the restless, almost relentless way Paul seemed always to be on the move, crossing mountain ranges, fording rivers, staying in exotic places like Ephesus or Corinth, making good use of the remarkable networks of Roman roads and the almost equally remarkable opportunities for sailing across and around the Mediterranean and the Aegean. I had not at that time visited any of the places where Paul had gone. But a good atlas and a few books with photographs of the main cities and other highlights like mountain passes brought it all to life.