by N. T. Wright
The message generated a different vision, a new social reality. It challenged the regular Jewish taboos against fraternizing with non-Jews, not because Paul had suddenly invented the eighteenth-century ideal of “tolerance,” but because he believed a new world order was coming to birth in which all Messiah people were welcome on equal terms, in which all were assured they were the “heirs” of the “kingdom” that was even now being launched. The events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the powerful gift of the divine spirit meant that the “powers” that had held the pagan world captive had been overthrown and that pagans who now came to believe in the Messiah were free from the defilements of idolatry and immorality.
All this formed a tight nexus of One-God beliefs, on the one hand, and a new social and cultural reality, on the other. Later generations have sometimes tried to flatten this out into abstract theology. Some in our own day have tried it the other way, seeing only sociology. But these are oversimplifications. Paul’s vision, Jewish to the core but reshaped around the messianic events involving Jesus, was a hundred percent theological and a hundred percent about the formation and maintenance of a new community. And that meant trouble.
Trouble came not only from the context of southern Anatolia or even northwest Syria. A quite different view of reality obtained in Jerusalem, the city Paul knew only too well from his days as a leading young “zealot.”
Jerusalem at this time was still very much the center of the Jesus movement. James, the brother of Jesus himself, was the acknowledged and unrivaled leader; he would retain that role until he was murdered by hard-line activists in AD 62. Peter and John, the two remaining members of the three who were closest to Jesus in his last days (John’s brother James had been killed by Herod Agrippa in the early 40s), and James seem to have formed a new kind of triumvirate; “James, Peter, and John,” as we saw earlier, could be spoken of as “pillars,” the sustaining structure of the “new Temple.” They believed that Israel’s God had come back in person and was now dwelling among and within the followers of Jesus. This belief had now taken root, providing Jesus’s followers with a strong, though controversial and dangerous, sense of identity.
It was still, of course, a Jewish identity. Like Paul in southern Anatolia, but very unlike him in the conclusions they were drawing, the early community in Jerusalem saw itself as the fulfillment of the ancient promises to Israel. This is not to say that the Jerusalem church was all of one mind. Acts reveals significant divisions. But anyone living in Jerusalem in the middle years of the first century was bound to face the challenge posed by the question: When is the One God going to do at last what he has promised and liberate his ancient people once and for all from the shame and scandal of Roman rule? And since Rome was widely seen as the ultimate form of monstrous pagan rule over the people of God, how and when was the One God going to overthrow the monsters and set up, on earth, his own unshakable kingdom?
That question was far more pressing in Jerusalem than it was for Jews out in the Diaspora. It was one thing for long-term Jewish residents in a city like Pisidian Antioch or indeed Tarsus to reach an accommodation whereby they could keep the Torah themselves while being grateful that Rome had given them dispensation from the otherwise mandatory public observances, festivals, and so on. This is not to say that Jews in that situation did not dream of a different future. The scriptures still spoke of a coming time when the knowledge and glory of the One God would fill the whole world. Some Jews out in the non-Jewish world would see themselves as a secret advance guard, pointing the way to that coming time, that future “kingdom.” Most, though, would be content to find a modus vivendi that enabled them to be loyal to Israel’s God without coming into direct confrontation with the Roman authorities. But in Jerusalem things were not so easy.
We know about the situation in Jerusalem through the detailed and colorful accounts of Josephus, a younger contemporary of Paul’s. He was anything but a neutral observer. He himself was a wealthy Jewish aristocrat who claimed to have tried out the various Jewish “schools of thought” and who had served as a general in the army at the start of the war against Rome (AD 66–70) before switching sides and ending his days on an imperial pension in Rome. To read his descriptions of Jerusalem in the middle of the first century is to be plunged into a highly complex and confusing world. Different parties, groups, messianic and prophetic movements, teachers, and preachers all claimed that Israel’s God was acting here or there or in this way and anathematized, often violently, those who saw things differently or who followed rival leaders. When the Romans closed in on Jerusalem in the last months of the war, crucifying so many Jews that they ran out of timber for crosses, Josephus records sorrowfully that more Jews were in fact killed by other Jews than by the Romans themselves. And that was not because the Romans were being lenient.
Matters were not helped by the sequence of inept Roman governors sent to keep the peace during the period. There were times—not least under the two kings named Herod Agrippa, both of whom were friendly with the Roman imperial family—when some must have hoped for a settlement, a live-and-let-live arrangement. That would never have been enough for the zealous young Saul of Tarsus, who longed for the ultimate kingdom of God. The Jerusalem of the 40s, 50s, and 60s was home to an entire generation who took the hard-line view, hating the thought of compromise with the pagans and looking for something more like Hezekiah’s heaven-sent victory over Sennacherib or the overthrow of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. What must it have been like to be a Jesus-follower in a Jerusalem like that?
What mattered, once again, was loyalty. Whose side are you on? Are you an out-and-out zealous supporter of the One God and his Torah, ready to do whatever is necessary to defend God’s honor and establish his kingdom—or are you a compromiser? Are you ready to do deals with the pagan world when it suits you? Are you prepared to go soft on your true allegiance, choosing to overlook the fact that the pagans worship idols and behave in unmentionable ways as a result? That, after all, was how the wilderness generation had behaved; remember Balaam, remember the Moabite women, remember Phinehas and his “zeal”—and the great covenant promises that Phinehas received as a result (“It was reckoned to him as righteousness”). The scriptures were quite clear that utter loyalty to the One God meant refusing all compromise with the pagan world. The social and cultural pressure to affirm that ancient loyalty and to be seen to abide by it was intense. Now think what it would have been like to be a follower of Jesus in that world. You would face a very different challenge from those faced by Jesus-followers in Syria or Turkey.
If, as we have seen, the Jerusalem church had by this time established a sense of identity as some kind of counter-Temple movement, this did not mean its members were being “anti-Jewish.” If anything, they were putting themselves on a par with many other groups who regarded the present Temple hierarchy (the wealthy, aristocratic Sadducees, including the high-priestly family) as a corrupt and compromised bunch, out for their own ends and too eager to do deals with the Romans. The early Jerusalem church seems to have lived in some ways like other groups who believed that God was ushering in “the last days”—whatever they may have meant by that. In the excitement of the early stages, they had shared their property communally; this eager social experiment may well have contributed to their later poverty. They lived a life of prayer, fasting, community, and care for the poor and widows. So far as we can tell they conformed faithfully to Jewish law. From this point of view, they must have seemed to many onlookers like a strange messianic variation on the Pharisees’ movement, coupling a fierce loyalty to Israel’s One God with their own belief, as yet perhaps comparatively inarticulate, that the One God had revealed himself in and as the crucified and risen kingdom-bringer, Jesus himself.
I doubt if anyone, even Paul himself, could have written the book we would all like to read—a careful analysis of exactly which groups in Jerusalem believed what, how their various hopes and expectations lined up, which scriptural texts they used, and
so on. But they all believed in the hope of Israel—the hope for a great divine rescue, which for the Jesus-followers had already been launched though obviously had not yet been fully implemented. They all believed in utter loyalty to Israel’s One God. Fierce division existed over what precisely that loyalty should mean, but it would have taken a bold maverick to suggest that there might be forms of loyalty in which Israel’s ancestral traditions, focused on the Torah, would not play a central role. According to Acts, it was Peter himself who first broke the taboo and went to preach to and to share table fellowship with non-Jews; he received strong divine validation for this radical move and persuaded his suspicious colleagues in Jerusalem that this had been the right thing to do.1 But this move too seems not to have been thought through with regard to what they believed about Jesus himself. It was a pragmatic decision. This is how the spirit had led; therefore this must be what God wants.
It remained easy, then, for most of the Jerusalem-based Jesus-followers to see their movement as a Jesus-focused variation on the Jewish loyalist agenda. God might, to be sure, bring in some non-Jews. That had always happened in Israel’s history, as the book of Ruth and various other passages made clear. But one could hardly imagine that the God whose scriptures warned constantly against covenant disloyalty would suddenly declare the Torah itself redundant.
But that is what many in Jerusalem, including many Jesus-followers, believed that Paul had been teaching. We see this later on, when Paul returns to Jerusalem for the last time in the mid-50s after his extensive travels in Greece and Turkey. Having just written the letter to the Romans, the greatest early Christian treatment of the complex covenant dealings of Israel’s One God with his people, Paul finds himself speaking to an angry mob for whom the merest mention of “going to the Gentiles” is clear evidence that he is a careless compromiser.2 This kind of reaction to garbled rumors, both in Syrian Antioch and in the new churches of southern Anatolia, was, it seems, already alive and well in the mid-40s. After all, Jews, including Jewish Jesus-followers, traveled regularly to and from Jerusalem. Something so strange and dramatic as the message about Jesus and the effects it was having would be an obvious topic of conversation. The word would get out that Paul and Barnabas, not content with belonging to a strange mixed community in Syrian Antioch, had been going around the world telling Jews that they no longer need to obey the law of Moses! If Paul was really saying that God had made a way through the problems that Moses had left behind him—that now they could be “justified” from all the things that were still a problem under Moses3—then this was basically saying that the Torah itself could be set aside. Who could tell what appalling results might then follow?
All this focused on the covenant sign of circumcision. Some Jews in Paul’s day had tried to “explain” the practice of circumcision by pointing out its moral effects, suggesting that cutting off the foreskin would reduce lust. I know of no evidence that this actually worked, though the strong Jewish taboos against sexual immorality certainly had a restraining effect by contrast with the normal non-Jewish approach. But for centuries before Paul’s time circumcision had come to have a strong symbolic value. Going back to Genesis 17 and strongly reinforced at various points in the Pentateuch, the eighth-day circumcision of male babies was the mandatory sign of covenant membership. Some other nations had had similar practices, but by Paul’s day the phrases “the circumcision” and “the Jewish people” were virtually synonymous. This meant that if any non-Jewish males wished to become part of the Jewish community they, like the Hivites in Genesis 34, would have had to have been circumcised.4 It is true that the prophets and Moses himself had spoken of “the circumcision of the heart” as the ultimate reality to which physical circumcision was meant to point. That deep reality was associated with the promise of ultimate covenant renewal. But nobody in the early years of the first century imagined that, if the One God really did renew the covenant, physical circumcision might be dispensed with for the non-Jews who would be included. On the contrary. Circumcision became a touchstone, a telltale symbol, a sign once more of loyalty.
When we think of loyalty and of the ways in which a tight-knit community in an overheated political situation actually functions, we realize what was at stake. The Jesus-followers in Jerusalem faced trouble from the start. Many had dispersed following the early persecution, but there was still a tight core, focused particularly on James himself. From at least the time of Stephen’s killing they had been regarded as potentially subversive, disloyal to the Temple and its traditions. Now this disloyalty was showing itself in a new way: they were allied with a supposedly Jesus-related movement, out in far-flung lands, teaching Jews that they didn’t have to obey the Torah! That was the kind of movement, loyal Jews would naturally think, that would introduce one compromise after another until any Jews still attached to it would find themselves indistinguishable from pagans. Here in Jerusalem all loyal Jews knew that the pagans were the enemy whom God would one day overthrow, just as he overthrew Pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea. But out there in the Diaspora this new movement was, it seemed, treating pagans as equal partners.
The word on the street in Jerusalem, then, would have been that these Jesus-followers were not really loyal Jews. They were letting the side down. That was how the forces of darkness always worked, and there were many in Jerusalem who would be on the lookout for the first signs of it among the local Jesus movement. Already viewed with suspicion, the Jesus-followers might be in danger. They would be hoping against hope that the Jesus movement in the wider world—not least that wild man Paul—would not land them in any deeper trouble, any guilt by association. From all that they had heard, the signs were not encouraging.
These cautious historical proposals about the real-life situation faced by Jesus-followers in Jerusalem and by their colleagues (if they saw them as such) in the Diaspora offer a corrective to the oversimplifications that have all too easily crept into readings of Paul. This has been a particular problem for modern Western readers. Our philosophies have tended to split the world in two: “science” deals only with “hard facts,” while the “arts” are imagined to deal in nebulous questions of inner meanings. Equally, in popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.” Some types of Protestantism have imbibed this deeply, supposing that “the gospel” is all about inner feeling, a disposition of the heart, and not at all about outward reality or actions, whether moral or “religious.” Sometimes people have thought that this is the one and only meaning of Paul’s teaching about “justification by faith not works.” But things were not nearly so simple.
In this climate of thought it has been easy for us to imagine that we have understood why Paul was insisting that circumcision no longer mattered for membership in God’s family. Obviously, we think, he was interested in a person’s inner reality, over against those fussy legalists who thought you had to obey a string of ritual instructions! He believed, we say, in a message of love rather than law, of inward feeling rather than outward conformity, of faith in the heart rather than rule-book religion or liturgical performance. In particular, we suppose, Paul believed that God didn’t require a perfect moral obedience from people, because God in any case always preferred right feelings (including “faith”) to right actions (which might make you proud). And so we could go on.
These caricatures are themselves full of contradictions. Anyone who thinks that having right “feelings” doesn’t make people proud is singularly blind to the currently fashionable notion that what matters is a correct “attitude” on the questions of the day. But that doesn’t make the caricatures any the less powerful. And none of them will help us understand what happened when people in Jerusalem heard what Paul was doing and teaching and reacted with alarm.
* * *
Four things then happened in quick succession. First, Peter came to Antioch and shared i
n the life of the church for a while. How long, we do not know, though this and the following incidents—including the writing of Paul’s first letter, that to the churches in Galatia—must be dated around AD 48. Second, some others came to Antioch from Jerusalem, claiming to have been sent by James. This precipitated a small earthquake in the Antioch church and a controversy described by Paul himself so sharply that we blush, even at this distance, to overhear such a devastating denunciation. Third, perhaps weeks and months later, Paul received bad news from the little communities of non-Jewish believers in southern Anatolia, so recently founded by himself and Barnabas. All this is interconnected with so many tightly interlocking loops of first-century Jewish and early Christian understanding, misunderstanding, claim and counterclaim, that it makes the fourth event particularly difficult to understand, but particularly important to grapple with. The fourth event was Paul’s writing of his famous first letter, Galatians.
He then set off for Jerusalem in the hopes of sorting it all out with those who seemed to be causing the trouble. Of course, they thought he was the one causing the trouble. Controversies are always like that. Generations of Christians who have read Galatians as part of holy scripture have to remind themselves that, if Galatians is part of the Bible, it is Galatians as we have it that is part of the Bible—warts and all, sharp edges and sarcastic remarks included. Perhaps, indeed, that is what “holy scripture” really is—not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.
In any case, I do not think that when Paul began to dictate the letter (you can tell he’s dictating, because at the end he points out that he is writing the closing greeting in his own hand), he was thinking, “This will be part of ‘scripture.’” However, he believed that the One God had called him to be the apostle to the non-Jews, the Gentiles. He believed that Jesus had revealed himself to him and commissioned him with the news of Jesus’s victory over death and his installation as Lord. Paul believed that Jesus’s own spirit was at work through him to establish and maintain the life-changing communities of people whose lives had themselves been changed by the power of the gospel. And now he believed, as part of that, that he had a responsibility to state clearly what was at stake in the controversy in Antioch, in Jerusalem, in Galatia itself. His own obvious vulnerability throughout this process was part of the point, as he would later stress in another letter. His writing, just like the gospel itself, was part of a radical redefinition of what “authority” might look like within the new world that the One God had launched through Jesus.