by N. T. Wright
If all this sounds like a recipe for social and cultural upheaval, we are on the right track. As the stories in Acts will testify—and as Paul’s letters will emphasize—anyone propagating this kind of subversive message will be the target of scorn, anger, and violence. It wasn’t too long, on his first missionary journey, before Paul would face all three.
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Luke tells the story of Paul’s first journey in Acts 13–14. Like much of Acts, these chapters are page-turners. One thing tumbles out after another, with Paul and Barnabas hurrying from city to city and stirring up excited and/or hostile crowds. Many hear the message; some believe, others are appalled. People are healed, sometimes spectacularly. Local authorities wake up to the fact that something new is going on. These chapters set the scene both for the longer journeys to which this comparatively short trip serves as a prelude and for the fierce controversy into which Paul, Barnabas, and their friends will be plunged not long after they return home.
It seems to have been Barnabas who took the lead as they set off, sailing from Seleucia (Antioch’s closest port) to Cyprus. Barnabas himself came originally from Cyprus, and the island may have appeared a natural place to launch the work they had in mind. Barnabas probably still had family connections there. The short sea voyage would have been familiar to him, as it perhaps was not for Saul; the Jews were not a seafaring people, and in their scriptures the sea is often a dark, hostile force. Barnabas’s nephew John Mark, accompanying them as an assistant and himself quite possibly a first-time sailor, would have had reason to feel comfortable in Cyprus as well, with relatives and a synagogue culture that would remind him of home.
The synagogue was the natural starting point for Paul’s very Jewish message about Israel’s long-awaited Messiah. We may assume that the substantial set piece later in Acts 13, where Paul speaks at length in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, represents Luke’s summary of the kind of thing that Paul (who turns out to be the main speaker in the party) would say in synagogue after synagogue, though as we shall see with varied reactions. We hear nothing, however, of the Jewish reaction on Cyprus, though the fact that Barnabas and John Mark returned to the island later implies that there had been some positive response, producing at least a small community of Jesus-followers. What we do hear about is what happened when the travelers reach Paphos, the capital.
Paphos, in the southwest of the island, had long since upstaged the earlier capital, the northeastern port of Salamis. The city boasted a long and important history, being particularly famous for its huge shrine of the goddess Aphrodite, commemorating her legendary place of birth. (The temple Paul and Barnabas would have seen there was destroyed in an earthquake in AD 76/77; the one you can see there today is a later replacement.) And Paphos, as the capital, was naturally enough the seat of the Roman governor.
Part of the job description of any Roman governor would have been to keep tabs on anything of special interest, particularly anything socially subversive, that might be going on in his territory. Cyprus was quite small. Word would certainly have reached Sergius Paulus about the three itinerant Jewish teachers and their unexpected message. (Luke comments drily that Sergius Paulus was “an intelligent man,” perhaps contrasting him with certain other Roman officials who appear elsewhere in the story.)4 So he summoned the travelers to hear for himself what was going on. But matters quickly became more complicated. There was another strange Jewish teacher already there, a certain Bar-Jesus, who had a local reputation as a magician. Whether this character was trying to represent “a Jewish point of view” to the governor or whether he was trying to use his magic to impress or to earn a living is not clear. The local Jewish communities themselves might well have seen him as a dangerous maverick; we cannot tell. One way or another, he seemed bent upon opposing and denouncing Barnabas and Saul and their message. And this is the point where we sense something new happening, something emerging within the personal standing and self-awareness of Saul of Tarsus himself.
Up to this point Saul has been, it seems, the junior partner, himself a protégé of Barnabas. But now he steps forward, filled, so it seems, with a new kind of energy (the kind of surge that he and other early Christians attributed to the holy spirit), and denounces Bar-Jesus in fierce and uncompromising terms: he’s a deceitful villain, a son of the devil, who is taking God’s plan and twisting it out of shape. Strong language like that is easy to utter, picking up traditions of invective and hurling them at an opponent. But these words are backed up with action in the form of a curse of temporary blindness. Suddenly the magician finds himself groping around in darkness—the story has an obvious flavor of just retribution, the spellbinder being himself spellbound—and the governor, confronted with a new kind of power, believes what the travelers have been saying. He was, as Luke comments, “astonished at the teaching of the Lord.”5 Why, wonder readers, the “teaching,” not the “power”? Presumably because, though many people could perform strange tricks, the power of the travelers seemed to come not from themselves, but from the one about whom they were “teaching,” the one whose death, resurrection, and enthronement had revealed him as the true Kyrios. With the explanation came the power. And, with this, Saul appears to come of age. He is not now simply a teacher or prophet working within the church as in Antioch. He is out on the front line and finding sudden energy and focus to meet a new kind of challenge.
He emerges not only as the new spokesman, but with a new name. Luke changes gear effortlessly: “Saul, also named Paul.”6 From now on this is how he will be referred to and, in Acts and the letters, how he will refer to himself. Why the change?
“Saul” is obviously a royal name, that of the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin. Saul of Tarsus, conscious of descent from the same tribe, seems to have reflected on the significance of the name, quoting at one point a passage about God’s choice of King Saul and applying it to his own vocation.7 Some have speculated that he deliberately set aside this name, with its highborn overtones, in order to use a Greek word connected to the adjective paulos, “small, little”—a sign, perhaps, of a deliberate humility, “the least of the apostles.” Well, perhaps. Others have supposed that he simply chose a name better known in the wider non-Jewish world, shared even by the governor in the present story. Like most Roman citizens, Saul/Paul would have had more than one name, and it is quite possible that he already possessed the name “Paul” and simply switched within available options. It is worth noting as well, however, that in Aristophanes, known to most schoolboys in the Greek world, the word saulos was an adjective meaning “mincing,” as of a man walking in an exaggeratedly effeminate fashion. One can understand Paul’s not wishing to sport that label in the larger Greek-speaking world. One way or another, “Paul” he would be from now on.
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Our suspicions about John Mark feeling at home in Cyprus are accentuated by what happens next. The travelers sail north from Paphos and arrive on the Pamphylia coastline (south-central Turkey in modern terms). They land at the port of Perga, whereupon John Mark leaves them and returns to Jerusalem. This leaves Paul with a lasting sense of betrayal and suspicion: later on, when Barnabas tries to launch another trip and wants to give Mark a second chance, Paul refuses point-blank to take someone so obviously unreliable. The episode raises other questions too. What precisely did an assistant have to do on such a trip? Look after travel arrangements, accommodations, money? Slip out unnoticed to shop for supplies? Carry extra luggage containing scriptural scrolls? In any case, Paul does not forget, and this will be part of the later rift with Barnabas. The two, though, move on, heading north from Pamphylia on the coast to the inland region of Pisidia, part of the Roman province of Galatia. They arrive at the city known at that time as “New Rome,” Pisidian Antioch.
The reason Pisidian Antioch was thought of as “New Rome” had to do with its recent colonial history. The civil wars that had scarred the Roman world after the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC had left tens of thousands of mili
tary veterans in Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere. Many of them would in any case have been from countries other than Italy in the first place, but all of them, having signed on for active service, would expect to be rewarded. The last thing Rome wanted was such people coming to Italy, let alone to Rome itself; Rome’s population was already swollen, causing unemployment and a regular threat of food shortages. Augustus therefore founded colonies for these ex–service personnel well away from Italy. Pisidian Antioch was the most important such colony in the region, retaining its name (Antioch) from its earlier foundation, though now officially renamed Colonia Caesarea (“Caesar’s Colony,” a telling name in itself) when the province of Galatia, of which it formed the most substantial southern city, was founded in 25 BC.
Pisidian Antioch was the home of a good many first-century senators and other high-ranking Romans, including the Sergius Paulus whom Paul and Barnabas had met in Paphos. As is the way with colonies, the city did its best to imitate Rome in its architecture as well as its style of government, its public holidays, and its entire ethos. By the middle of the first century AD, when Paul and Barnabas arrived, the city center was dominated by a vast complex of buildings focused on the imperial cult. This featured the temple itself along with several other buildings and a massive triumphal arch celebrating the victory of Augustus over the Pisidians. Other typical Roman buildings, including an aqueduct and a theater, are still visible there today. What’s more, this was one of the places where one could see, displayed at great length on public buildings, the remarkable autobiographical work Res Gestae, “Matters Accomplished,” which Augustus had inscribed in Latin and Greek in several locations including the Galatian capital Ancyra, farther north. Rome was not noted for subtle political statements. The entire city of Antioch made the very obvious point about who was in charge and about the “religious” implications of the new imperial reality. Caesar and Rome were the central focus of worship, a worship that would bind together the city and the region and give it security by linking it so obviously to its ultimate patron.
All this is part of the backdrop to the long address that Luke ascribes to Paul in the synagogue at Antioch.8 Luke, as I have suggested, presumably intended this to be seen as typical of what Paul would have said in one synagogue after another. Earlier scholarship used to cast doubt on whether such speeches were really compatible with what we know of Paul from his letters. This speech in particular, focusing so strongly on Jesus as the true descendant of King David, came under that kind of suspicion when scholars tried to maintain that Paul gave little thought to Jesus’s Davidic messiahship. Since, however, there are good reasons for reversing that verdict, we are free to explore the speech not only in its obvious Jewish context but within the larger framework of “New Rome.” What did it mean to proclaim the King of the Jews in such a context? What did it mean for Paul to be doing that?
Paul must have felt that he’d been preparing for this kind of moment all his life. He was going to tell the story of ancient Israel in a way that everybody would recognize, but with a conclusion nobody had seen coming. He would focus on God’s original choice of King David and on the promise that God would eventually send a new David. So he moves rapidly from Abraham to the Exodus, to the settlement of the land, and then to Samuel, Saul, and David himself. He then jumps to the story of Jesus, carefully highlighting the fulfillment of the Davidic promises as witnessed by Jesus’s resurrection—for which purpose he quotes key texts from the Psalms and the prophets.9 He is covering all the bases: the story of the Torah (the first division of the Hebrew Bible) is backed up with the Prophets and the Writings (the second and third). And the climax is that the long hope of Israel has been fulfilled. The law of Moses had ended in a puzzle. Deuteronomy had warned about Israel’s long-term covenant unfaithfulness and its results. But now there was a way through. Moses could only take them so far, but now God had broken through that barrier. “Forgiveness of sins” had arrived in space and time, a new reality to open a new world. But, as with Moses, would the present generation listen? Paul’s speech ends with another prophetic warning: something new is happening, and they might just be looking the wrong way and miss out on it entirely.
This was, of course, dramatic and revolutionary. Paul had sat through many synagogue addresses in his youth, and he must have known that people simply didn’t say this kind of thing. He wasn’t giving them a new kind of moral exhortation. He certainly wasn’t offering a new “religion” as such. He was not telling them (to forestall the obvious misunderstanding about which I have spoken already) “how to go to heaven.” He was announcing the fulfillment of the long-range divine plan. The Mosaic covenant could only take them so far. The story that began with Abraham and pointed ahead to the coming Davidic king would, so to speak, break through the Moses barrier and arrive at a new world order entirely. No Jew who had been brought up on the Psalms (not least Psalm 2, which Paul quotes here and which other Jews of his day had studied intensively) could miss the point. If the new David had arrived, he would upstage everything and everyone else—including the New Rome and its great emperor over the sea. This was both exciting and dangerous. Small wonder that many of the synagogue members, both Jews and proselytes, followed Paul and Barnabas after the close of the synagogue meeting. Either this message was a complete hoax, a blasphemous nonsense, or, if it was true, it meant the opening up of a whole new world.
Small wonder too that the next Sabbath a huge crowd gathered to hear what Paul was saying. But this time the local community had had a chance to think through what it all might mean, and the signs were not good. Paul might be clever at expounding scriptures, but nobody had ever heard of a crucified Messiah, and nobody had imagined that if Israel’s God finally did what he had promised, some of the Jewish people themselves might miss out on it, as Paul (in line with scripture itself) had warned. Underneath this again there is a dark note. If, according to Paul, this new world of forgiveness had opened up to embrace all alike, non-Jew as well as Jew, what would become of the settled but still fragile place of the Jewish communities in the Roman world? Everything was going to change.
The result, as with the young Saul of Tarsus himself, was zeal—zeal for Israel’s God, zeal for the Torah, zeal against anything that might appear to be overthrowing the ancestral order. Some of the local Jews, we may suppose, glimpsed that what Paul had been saying might just be true. Most could only see the threat to their way of life, the drastic redrawing of the shape their hopes had always taken. They denounced Paul and Barnabas as false teachers leading Israel astray. Paul’s response was to quote the prophets once more, this time his regular text, Isaiah 49: “I have set you for a light to the nations, so that you can be salvation-bringers to the end of the earth.”10 The Jewish reaction itself confirmed his scripture-fueled sense that, when Israel’s God did for Israel what he had promised, then the nations as a whole would come into the promised blessing.
This naturally delighted the non-Jews who had heard his message: they were free to belong to God’s ancient people! But this in turn stiffened the Jewish reaction, and that then produced an altogether more serious turn of events. We have no idea whether Paul had made contact with the leading citizens of Antioch, though if, as some have suggested, he had come with a letter of recommendation from Sergius Paulus in Cyprus, that is altogether possible. But the aristocrats of Antioch would have been alarmed, as Romans were always alarmed, by any suggestion of strange new subversive teachings that might upset the delicate social and cultural status quo.
Paul’s message seemed to point to uncharted territory, to a new kind of “Jewish” community claiming continuity with Abraham, David, and the prophets, but now including any non-Jews who professed allegiance to the newly heralded “Messiah,” Jesus, and at the same time threatening (as Paul and Barnabas seem to have threatened) that any Jews who refused to see Jesus as their promised Messiah would themselves be missing out on this new fulfillment. Since Julius Caesar had given the Jewish people the privilege, unique among all
groups in the empire, of not being required to worship the Roman gods, it is quite possible that both groups (leading Jews and leading citizens of Antioch) would have seen at once the threat of real civic upheaval. Supposing large numbers of non-Jews started trying to claim the same privilege?
The visit to New Rome thus ends with the start of Paul’s new life: that of a suffering apostle, a visible symbol of the crucified Lord he was proclaiming. Opposition turned to violence sufficient to cause Paul and Barnabas to leave town in a hurry, symbolically shaking the dust off their feet as they did so.11 They left behind them, however, the beginnings of a new community, “filled with joy and with the holy spirit.”12 There was a sense of springtime. Something new had begun, even if the heralds of spring, like migrating birds pausing on their journey, had had to move on quickly.
The next three cities follow in quick succession, and Luke selects one incident in Lystra for particular treatment. If you traveled east from Antioch and followed the main road (the Via Sebaste) across the mountains southeast from Antioch, you would be heading ultimately for Syria via Paul’s home city of Tarsus. The first territory you would enter would be Lycaonia, and the first city you would meet there is Iconium, followed closely by Lystra, and then, a little farther, by Derbe.
This area had been part of the Roman province of Asia in the second century BC. It then became part of the new province of Cilicia in roughly 80 BC. Then, following dynastic changes among local client kings, it became part of the new province of Galatia in 25 BC. Both Iconium and Lystra were Roman colonies, used by Augustus to settle veterans in 26 BC. They never had the same importance or vast public buildings as Antioch. But their significance as centers of Roman culture and the Roman cult cannot be underestimated.