by N. T. Wright
It never occurred to me at that stage to ask what exactly Paul thought he was doing, or why. Why did he go in the first place? Why did he go to those places rather than anywhere else? Why (according to Acts at least) did he usually begin by speaking in a synagogue? If I had thought about it, I would probably have said simply that he believed God wanted him to tell people about Jesus and that one had to start somewhere. (That is no doubt true enough at one level, but quite unsatisfactory.) A little later on someone pointed out to me that Paul tended to concentrate on major population centers, relying on the movement of people and trade in and out of the great cities to help spread the word. That too is fair enough, but it still leaves some of the fundamental questions unaddressed. Here, as we watch him launch the career of a traveling missionary for which he is famous and that provides the context for his equally famous letters, we arrive once more at our basic questions. What made him tick? And why did it work?
His practice of beginning in synagogues—where he usually met anger and hostility once people realized what he was talking about—poses our other main question in a new form too. The puzzle of what happened on the Damascus Road isn’t just a puzzle about one transformative moment in Paul’s early experience. It colors, and in turn is colored by, the thorny issue of the relationship between the message Paul announced and the traditions of Israel—and how those traditions were perceived and lived out in the wider non-Jewish world of ancient Turkey and Greece. Was Paul really a loyal member of God’s ancient people? Was he rebuilding the house or pulling it down about his own ears? This question would quickly become the source of serious tension not only between Paul and local Jewish groups, but between Paul and some of the other Jesus-followers.
At one level the answers are obvious. Paul went on a mission to tell people about Jesus; he believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of the scriptures, that he had been crucified, raised from the dead, and exalted to God’s right hand. Yes, but this fails to address the underlying questions. As I said earlier, I assumed for many years, and many readers will still assume, that the only real point of it all was to get people to “believe” in this Jesus so that they would be “saved” and “go to heaven when they died.” But this was not the concern that drove Paul and Barnabas. I have labored this point elsewhere, but it still needs saying as we watch Paul set off on his complex crisscrossing travels.
The early Christians did not focus much attention on the question of what happened to people immediately after they died. If that question came up, their answer might be that they would be “with the Messiah”1 or, as in Jesus’s remark to the dying brigand, that they might be “with him in paradise.” 2 But they seldom spoke about it at all. They were much more concerned with the “kingdom of God,” which was something that was happening and would ultimately happen completely, “on earth as in heaven.” What mattered was the ultimate restoration of the whole of creation, with God’s people being raised from the dead to take their place in the running of this new world. Whatever happened to people immediately after death was, by comparison, unimportant, a mere interim. And however much it might seem incredible, the early Jesus-followers really did believe that God’s kingdom was not simply a future reality, though obviously it had a strong still-future dimension. God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.
This is closely connected with the idea that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. A glance at Jewish history in this period will reveal that if someone were to claim that the Messiah had arrived, this would not be merely what we would call a “religious” claim. It would mean that the One God was acting at last to fulfill his ancient promises, and the mode of that action would be to set up a new regime, a new authoritative rule. When Rabbi Akiba declared in AD 132 that Simeon ben Kosiba was God’s Messiah, this meant that Simeon was now the ruler of a small Judaean state in rebellion against Rome. (That “kingdom” lasted for three years before the final disaster, but it shows how the logic works.) If someone went about the communities of diaspora Jews declaring that God had at last sent Israel’s Messiah, this would not have seemed at the time to be a message either about “religion” (the Messiah was never supposed to start a new “religion”!) or about “life after death” (devout Jews had long believed that God would take care of them hereafter). Nor would it involve a new philosophy. It would be what we would call “political,” though as always for the Jews of the day this would also be profoundly theological. It would be perceived as the announcement of a new state of affairs, a new community owing allegiance to a new Master, the unveiling, at last, of the covenant faithfulness of the One God. That is exactly what Paul intended.
Paul’s message was, of course, new in another way as well. It was not simply the replacement of one political power with another (Jesus rather than Caesar). Indeed, Paul’s vision of the kingdom both was and wasn’t what people often mean today by “political.” If by “political” you mean the establishment of a rule of law backed up by police and/or military sanctions—as in an ordinary state today—then clearly what Paul was announcing was not that kind of thing at all. If by “political” you mean a system whereby one person or group imposes its will on others across a geographical area, raising taxes and organizing society at large in a particular way, then obviously nothing in Paul’s career points in that direction. But if you use the word “political” to refer to a new state of affairs in which people give their ultimate and wholehearted allegiance to someone other than the ordinary local ruler or someone other than Caesar on the throne in Rome—and if you call “political” the establishment of cells of people loyal to this new ruler, celebrating his rescuing rule and living in new kinds of communities as a result—then what Paul was doing was inescapably “political.” It had to do with the foundation of a new polis, a new city or community, right at the heart of the existing system. Paul’s “missionary” journeys were not simply aimed at telling people about Jesus in order to generate inner personal transformation and a new sense of ultimate hope, though both of these mattered vitally as well. They were aimed at the establishment of a new kind of kingdom on earth as in heaven. A kingdom with Jesus as king. The kingdom—Paul was quite emphatic about this—that Israel’s God had always intended to set up.
Humanly speaking, this was of course a fragile project. It was bound to be, since its character was taken from its starting point, the Messiah’s shameful death. As Paul would later insist, the way in which the kingdom was put into effect was always going to be the same: through the suffering of its members, particularly its leaders. Paul’s journeys in Acts are full of troubles, persecutions, beatings, stonings, and the like. But this only highlights what for Paul lay at the core of the whole thing. Why now? If the world was so hostile, why not wait for a better opportunity? Why should this be the moment for the non-Jewish nations to hear the message? Did Paul not have a sense that he was walking a tightrope across the crater of an active volcano?
Part of the answer has to do with the vocation to which Paul was obedient. In Acts 26, admittedly in one of Luke’s carefully crafted scenes, we catch an authentic sense of that vocation. This, according to Luke’s report of Paul’s speech before Herod Agrippa, is what Jesus had said to him on the road to Damascus:
I am going to establish you as a servant, as a witness both of the things you have already seen and of the occasions I will appear to you in the future. I will rescue you from the people, and from the nations to whom I am going to send you so that you can open their eyes to enable them to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of the satan to God—so that they can have forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith in me.3
It would be easy, in the midst of that dense summary, to miss a central point. Like most Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus had long believed that the nations of the world had been enslaved by their own idols. They wor
shipped nongods, and in Jewish thought, rooted in the scriptures, those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization. This is what Paul means by “the power of the satan”—the word “satan” is the Hebrew term for “accuser,” used popularly and often quite vaguely to refer to the dark power that appears to grip, distort, and ultimately destroy human societies and individuals. And Paul believed that in his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth had overcome the power of darkness. Something happened when Jesus died as a result of which “the satan”—and any dark forces that might be loosely lumped together under such a label—no longer had any actual authority. (Paul explains at various places in his writings how this had been achieved; but what matters for our understanding of his mission is that it had happened, that the dark power had been defeated.) Paul’s mission was not, then, simply about persuading people to believe in Jesus, as though starting from a blank slate. It was about declaring to the non-Jewish nations that the door to their prison stood open and that they were free to leave. They had to turn around, away from the enslaving idols, to worship and serve the living God.
Being free from the consequences of the past means, of course, being forgiven, as Paul emphasizes in this passage in Acts. Forgiveness is not something the non-Jewish world had thought much about. The ancient pagan gods might decide, for whatever reason, either to punish someone or not, as the case might be; but when a god decided not to punish someone, it wasn’t thought of as forgiveness as such. That would imply, apart from anything else, a far more intimate relationship between gods and mortals than was normally imagined. One does not say, when the thunderbolt misses you and strikes the person next to you, that this means you have been “forgiven.” What is happening, it seems, is that the much more Jewish idea of forgiveness, emerging from the idea of Israel’s covenant with the One God and particularly from the notion of covenant renewal after catastrophic disobedience, was already being extended, so that the nations of the world were being included, drawn into the embrace of the creator God. The non-Jewish peoples were being invited to discover not just some blind fate to be cheated if possible and endured if not, but personal forgiveness from a living God. They were being summoned to understand themselves, for the first time, as humans who were personally responsible to a wise Creator. It is as though an orphan, brought up by faceless bureaucrats in a threatening institution, were to meet for the first time the parents she never knew she had.
What emerges from this, as the positive side of the point about the dark forces being overthrown, is the idea of a new humanity, a different model of the human race. If Jesus had defeated the powers of the world in his death, his resurrection meant the launching of a new creation, a whole new world. Those who found themselves caught up in the “good news” that Paul was announcing were drawn into that new world and were themselves, Paul taught, to become small working models of the same thing. As I think of Paul launching this new venture, the image of the tightrope over the volcano doesn’t seem to go far enough. He was inventing, and must have known that he was inventing, a new way of being human. It must have been a bit like the first person to realize that notes sounded in sequence created melody, that notes sounded together created harmony, and that ordering the sequence created rhythm. If we can think of a world without music and then imagine it being invented, offering a hitherto undreamed-of depth and power to space, time, and matter, then we may have a sense of the crazy magnitude of Paul’s vocation.
All this will become much clearer as we proceed, following Paul in his initial journey to Cyprus, up into central southern Turkey, and then back again. We can date this trip roughly to AD 47/48. Two more things must be said by way of introduction to Paul’s journeys and their purpose.
First, if Paul believed and taught that with Jesus and his death and resurrection something had happened, a one-off event through which the world was now irrevocably different, so he also believed that, when he announced the message about Jesus (the “good news,” the “gospel”), a similar one-off event could and would take place in the hearts, minds, and lives of some of his hearers. Paul speaks about this one-off event with the term “power”: the power of the gospel, the power of the spirit in and through the gospel, or the power of “the word of God.” These seem to be different ways of saying the same thing, namely, that when Paul told the story of Jesus some people found that this Jesus became a living presence, not simply a name from the recent past. A transforming, healing, disturbing, and challenging presence. A presence that at one level was the kind of thing that would be associated with a divine power and at another level seemed personal—human, in fact. This then became the focal point of what we said before: people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out. (The fact that skeptics at the time, like skeptics today, could and did give different explanations of what was taking place does not alter the fact that this is what people said was happening to them, that this is what Paul understood to be going on, and that the consequences, whether they were all deluded or speaking a dangerous truth, were long lasting.)
The change was bound to be dramatic. Worshipping “the gods”—the great pantheon of Greek and Roman gods with plenty of others added on here and there—permeated every aspect of life in Paul’s world. To pull back from all of that and to worship “the living God” instead was far more than the equivalent of, say, in the modern West giving up gambling and beginning to attend church once a week. It would mean different actions and patterns of life every hour of every day. Perhaps the only way we can imagine such a thing in today’s secular world is to think what it would be like to give up all our usual machines and conveniences: car, cell phone, cooking equipment, central heating, or air-conditioning. You would have to do everything differently, only much more so. The gods were everywhere and involved in everything. In the ancient world, whether you were at home, on the street, or in the public square; attending festivals great and small; or at moments of crisis or joy (weddings, funerals, setting off on a journey)—the gods would be there to be acknowledged, appealed to, pleased, or placated. Once the message of Jesus took hold, all that would have to go. The neighbors would notice. Atheists were socially undesirable.
The most obviously powerful divinity to be given up was Caesar, and this brings us back to the question of geography, of why Paul, with the whole world open before him, went where he did. I have already mentioned the cults of Caesar and Rome. They developed in different ways across the vast Roman Empire, but the point in any case was to solidify the empire itself. People who believe that their ruler is in some sense “son of a god” are less likely to rise in revolt than people who see their rulers merely as ordinary muddled human beings. And when the good news of Jesus called its hearers to turn from “idols,” some of those idols, in towns and cities across Paul’s world, would have been statues of Caesar or members of his family. It begins to look as though Paul’s geographical strategy had a quiet but definite political undertone. Many of the key places on his journeys—Pisidian Antioch, where we will join him presently, but also such places as Ephesus, Philippi, and Corinth—were key centers of Roman rule and of Roman cult in the eastern Mediterranean. And of course he was then heading for Rome itself, and for Spain, a major center of Roman culture and influence. Connecting the dots of Paul’s journeys, actual and planned, is like mapping a royal procession through Caesar’s heartlands.
I do not think, then, that Paul’s choice of these cities was purely pragmatic, that he was picking good centers from which the message might flow outward. Nor was it simply that Paul, himself a Roman citizen by birth, would find it easier to travel within rather than outside of the vast Roman Empire, though that is true as well. I suspect that Paul was deliberately finding ways to make the point: there is one “Lord,” one Kyrios, and it isn’t Caesar. The communities of those loyal to Jesus (pistis again) that grew up as a result of his gospel announce
ment were marked by a confession of that loyalty that was extremely simple and extremely profound: Kyrios Iēsous Christos, “Jesus Messiah is Lord.” Paul must have known exactly how this would sound. He was well aware how the imperial rhetoric worked, on coins and inscriptions, in statements of civic loyalty. He was, after all, one of the half dozen most intellectually sophisticated first-century persons for whom we have evidence, up there with Seneca, Plutarch, and a select band of others. He was, after all, heir to the Psalms and prophets, which spoke of a coming king to whom the world’s rulers would have to owe allegiance. He and his communities were treading a dangerous line.
But, he would have said, a necessary line. These communities, small at first but growing, were an experiment in a way of being human, of being human together, that had never been tried in the world before. It was like a form of Judaism, particularly in its care for the poor, its strict sexual ethic, and its insistence on a monotheism that excluded the pagan divinities. But it was quite unlike the Jewish way of life in its open welcome to all who found themselves grasped by the good news of Jesus. That in itself was confusing enough for most people. Adding the element of apparent political subversion only made it worse.