by N. T. Wright
We are not told. Paul himself never mentions this trip. Luke describes it in a single verse: “Then he went up to Jerusalem, greeted the church, and went back to Antioch.”32 Our sources give us the sense of a lull before the storm.
Journeys Through Asia Minor
10
Ephesus I
WE DON’T WANT to keep you in the dark,” Paul wrote to Corinth, probably in AD 56, “about the suffering we went through in Asia.”1 Our problem is that though Paul wanted the Corinthians to know about what a bad time he had had, he doesn’t say what exactly had happened. We, at least, are still in the dark. Apart from what Paul says in this letter we have only hints and guesses. Luke, wanting no doubt to tone down any serious trouble that his principal subject had faced, gives graphic descriptions of various things that Paul did in Ephesus, the main city in the province of Asia, and of the famous riot in the theater with a vast crowd shouting “Great is Ephesian Artemis!” (as well they might; the Temple of Artemis, on the northeast side of the city, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world).2 But nothing in his account of Paul’s time in Ephesus suggests anything out of line with what we have come to expect, which is that Paul preaches the Messiah in the synagogue, opposition mounts, there are threats and disturbances involving local magistrates, and Paul finally has to leave town.
But 2 Corinthians tells a different story. With this, we probe into a dark place in Paul’s life, and perhaps a dark place in his heart and mind. Some have even suggested that his theological position changed radically as a result of these experiences. I do not think that is the case, but we are now approaching a quite new stage in our investigation about what drove him on and how what he had seen of Jesus on the Damascus Road had left its transforming mark on his life, his heart of hearts, and his outward vocation. We may also be pointing ahead, from this darkness, to the extra question of why on earth Paul’s work turned out to be, in historical and human terms, so ultimately successful.
These questions are already raised by what he says at the start of 2 Corinthians:
The load we had to carry was far too heavy for us; it got to the point where we gave up on life itself. Yes: deep inside ourselves we received the death sentence.3
If somebody came to see me and said something like this, I would recognize the signs of serious depression. This was not just an outward death sentence—the Paul we have come to know could have coped with that reasonably well—but one “deep inside ourselves.” (The “we” in this letter is clearly a way of referring to himself. Though he mentions Timothy as being with him in writing the letter in 1:1, what he says is so personal and intimate that we must take it as a roundabout way of talking about himself while perhaps shrinking from the shocking immediacy of the first-person singular.)
He goes on at once to describe his eventual reaction to this inner death sentence: “This was to stop us relying on ourselves, and to make us rely on the God who raises the dead.”4 He can look back on the darkness now and see it within a larger rhythm of God’s mercy, but at the time he was completely overwhelmed by it. He returns to the theme more than once in the letter, and in chapter 4 what he says is especially revealing:
We are under all kinds of pressure, but we are not crushed completely; we are at a loss, but not at our wits’ end; we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are cast down, but not destroyed.5
Yes, but the point of what he said in the first chapter was that at the time he had felt that he was crushed completely; he did find himself at his wits’ end; he did feel abandoned; he did feel destroyed. It is only with hindsight that he looks back and says, “But I wasn’t, after all.” In his first letter to Corinth Paul uses the image of the boxer; if we were to develop that, the present case looks as though he had received what he thought was a knock-out blow and expected to wake up, if at all, in a hospital; but here he is, still on his feet. How did that happen? Paul being Paul, he interprets this entire sequence of events as part of the meaning of being the Messiah’s man: “We always carry the deadness of Jesus about in the body, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our body.”6
It isn’t only these very revealing passages. When we read 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians in quick succession—especially in Greek, though I think the point still comes through in translation—we are aware at once that something has happened. The style is different. People have run all kinds of tests on Paul’s writing style, including using computer technology to analyze the way the sentences work and so on. That tells its own story—the variation across the complete collection of letters is not that great, despite what some have suggested. But these two letters, written to the same church and within two or three years of one another at most, are strikingly different to the naked eye. The first, dealing with all kinds of problems in the Corinthian church, is cheerful, upbeat, expository, sometimes teasing, and challenging, but always with a flow of thought, a confidence of expression. The second, though it too can tease by the end, feels as if it is being dragged out of Paul through a filter of darkness and pain.
In the second letter, he repeats himself like an old-fashioned gramophone record clicking on the same phrase:
The God of all comfort . . . comforts us in all our trouble, so that we can then comfort people in every kind of trouble, through the comfort with which God comforts us. . . . If we are troubled, it’s for the sake of your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it’s because of your comfort. . . . Just as you’ve shared in our sufferings, so you will also share in our comfort.7
He doubles back on himself, modifying and correcting what he’s just said:
We are not writing anything to you, after all, except what you can read and understand. And I hope you will go on understanding right through to the end, just as you have understood us already—well, partly, at least!8
He adds phrase to phrase like someone picking up heavy bricks one by one and placing them laboriously in a wall:
Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like the many, peddlers of the word of God, but as from sincerity, but as from God, in the presence of God, in the Messiah, we speak.9
Nothing in 1 Corinthians—or in Galatians or the Thessalonian letters, for that matter—sounds and feels like this. We are listening to a man dictating from a heart that, though now lightened in various ways, has been heavier than it knew possible. He sounds exhausted.
By the end of 2 Corinthians, though, he has cheered up. There are signs that the letter is actually being written while he was on the road around northern Greece, on his way from Ephesus to Corinth by the land route, and that he has had good news on the way. But at the start and at several points in the letter, we are made aware that something has happened that has marked his heart, his mind, and his language in the same sort of way that the stoning and the beatings had earlier marked his face and his body. As a translator, I sensed all this when, within a couple of months in the spring of 2002, I moved from the first letter to the second. The second one is much harder Greek, perhaps the hardest in the New Testament and certainly in Paul. It ties itself in knots.
So what had happened? Some have looked back to a hint in the first Corinthian letter where Paul describes himself facing danger every hour and even “dying” every day: “If, in human terms,” he says, “I fought with wild animals at Ephesus, what use is that to me?”10 He is speaking about the future resurrection and stressing that without that hope there would be no point going through what he is going through. But it all still feels quite upbeat, and the “wild animals” are likely, here at least, to be a metaphor for the hostile reception he was, by now, well used to. He is positive about his present work in Ephesus; there are splendid opportunities, he says, as well as serious opposition.11 But it looks as though what he describes as his “boast” of suffering was about to come true in ways, and in depths, he had not expected.
The best guess—it remains a guess, but it’s the best one—is that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus and put on trial for his life. And that ma
de a “perfect storm,” because it followed hard on the heels of a nasty shock from Corinth. The church there had turned against him.
The evidence for an Ephesian imprisonment, not mentioned by Luke, is strong. In the little letter to Philemon, Paul asks Philemon to “get a guest room ready” for him. Philemon lived in Colossae, about 125 miles inland from Ephesus on the river Lycus. Though Paul was still in prison, by the time he wrote this letter he was hoping that, through the prayers of his friends, he would be released. When that happened, he was planning to pay Philemon a visit, not least, we may suppose, to find out what had become of the former runaway slave Onesimus. We will return to that question, but for now that mention of a guest room is vital.
Other than Ephesus, the only places where we know Paul was in prison are Caesarea12 and Rome. When he was in Caesarea, he had already said farewell to the churches around the Aegean shoreline. When he was in Rome, he was intent on going farther west, to Spain.13 Even if he had changed his plans and decided in Caesarea to revisit Ephesus or had decided in Rome to return to the East one more time, it is not likely that his primary destination would have been a small town up the Lycus valley. So the guest room in Colossae provides the telltale hint that Paul was in prison in Ephesus.
The fact that Luke doesn’t mention this then becomes significant in itself, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that failed to bark in the night. Luke is content to report Paul’s stoning, beatings, and other attacks and legal charges. He tells us about the imprisonment in Caesarea and the house arrest in Rome. Ephesus must have been a darker moment. It was, perhaps, less clear-cut. Elsewhere, one could tell the story of Paul as a loyal apostle and evangelist who was falsely accused and then, when the authorities saw sense, released. This was murkier. And that fits with the mood that Paul reports at the start of 2 Corinthians. It is noticeable as well that 2 Corinthians has several thematic links with Colossians. This would fit with Colossians being written not long before Paul’s release from prison and 2 Corinthians not long afterward.
This also makes sense of Paul’s avoiding Ephesus on his final journey back to the East. Luke explains at that point that he didn’t want to spend much time in the area, since he was eager to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost, and that may well also be true.14 But to sail right by the city where he had spent two or three years appears more than simply a scheduling problem. Paul was never one to shirk a battle, but by this time he may have realized that one had to pick which battles to fight and which ones simply to avoid.
What, after all, do we know about Ephesus? As well as being the home of the magnificent temple of “Ephesian Artemis,” it was in this period the proud host of the imperial cult. Local officials in various towns and cities would vie with one another for the privilege of sporting a new temple to Rome and/or Caesar (and of course for the economic perks that would go with that status). Ephesus was given that honor twice in the first century and once more two centuries later. In addition, Ephesus was famous as the home of all kinds of magic, the dark and powerful arts that were always popular on the edge of mainstream paganism. When Acts describes converted magicians burning their secret books as evidence of the impact of Paul’s teaching,15 this makes sense precisely in Ephesus. But it would also make sense to imagine a backlash. And when the dark forces strike back, they do not play fair.
I therefore agree with the several scholars who have insisted that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, and I suggest that this makes best sense of all the evidence—as well as providing a location from which he wrote not only his letter to Philemon but also the other Prison Letters, including Ephesians itself. That letter, as I shall suggest presently, is a circular written to churches in the area and is therefore couched in more general terms than normal. But it was also in Ephesus that Paul experienced what we might call the “Corinthian crisis.” This had several elements, and though it may now be impossible to ascertain all the details of what had happened, the key points stand out. For our purposes, what really matters is the effect all this had on Paul himself and the way he responded to it. Because these two things are going on at the same time—trouble in Ephesus itself and trouble in relation to Corinth—we will have to move backward and forward between the two in order to understand why Paul felt as if he had received the death sentence.
* * *
When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, probably around AD 53, he had to deal with many problems in the church, and two of these in particular may have been part of the larger crisis that then ensued. He had already written a shorter preliminary letter, which has not survived, urging the believers not to associate with people who flouted the strict Jewish and Christian code of ethics, particularly relating to sex, money, idolatry, and other spheres where inappropriate behavior was rife.16 He followed this up with more specific instructions about the need to expel one particular church member who had been living with his father’s wife. Some in the church, perhaps friends of the person in question, may have thought all this too harsh by far. At the same time, there were divisions in the church; several members declared that they didn’t regard Paul as their real leader. They preferred Peter (Cephas) or Apollos instead. These two problems may have overlapped; if people were cross with the strict line Paul was taking, it might be natural for them to favor an alternative teacher. A second-order problem thus emerges.
We know about Peter (well, a bit). What about Apollos? Apollos was a powerful scripture teacher, originally from Alexandria, who had been in Ephesus just after Paul’s initial visit and had then gone on to Corinth. While Apollos was in Ephesus, it had become clear to the small group of believers that though he knew the basic facts about Jesus, he was thinking of Jesus as the extension and application of John the Baptist, rather than of Jesus as the Messiah whose death and resurrection had accomplished what John could only foresee. At that point, Paul’s friends Priscilla and Aquila had taken Apollos to one side and explained things in more detail, providing one of the moments at which we would love to have been flies on the wall. (There was a strange little sequel: in Ephesus Paul met a small group of followers of John the Baptist, and he explained to them that John’s words had come true in Jesus.)17 For our purposes the point is that Apollos had gone to Corinth after Paul had left and had made a great impression on the church, causing some members to decide that he, rather than Paul, was the kind of teacher they really wanted.
Meanwhile, Cephas himself—Peter, Jesus’s own right-hand man—had also been in Corinth. Some had decided that he was their man. People have often suggested that this may have involved a rerun of the clash in Antioch, as in Galatians 2, and that Peter might have again been trying to insist on a two-tier fellowship and a separation at mealtimes of Jewish and Gentile Jesus-followers. There is no evidence for this, but that doesn’t mean that Paul would have been entirely happy to think of Peter coming in to teach, in his absence, a church Paul had planted and looked after through the first eighteen months of its life.
Paul addresses all this in 1 Corinthians in the general terms of what we call “personality cults.” But underneath that there must have been a deeper sense of personal hurt. He was the one who had told them about Jesus in the first place. He had rejoiced as the spirit worked powerfully among the new believers. He had loved them, prayed with them, worked among them, wept with them. He must have wished that Priscilla and Aquila had still been in Corinth rather than coming with him across to Ephesus; surely they would have put people straight . . .
Anyway, Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, perhaps late in 53, and then made what turned out to be a bad mistake. He crossed the Aegean for a quick visit to Corinth.18 Though he tried to exert a measure of authority over the situation, this was rebuffed. He was made to feel decidedly unwelcome. He found it best to leave in a hurry. It was suggested to him—and unless you have been a pastor yourself, you will not know just how deeply hurtful this would be—that if he ever wanted to come back, he would have to obtain letters of recommendation from someone the Corinthians trusted.
We already
know enough about Paul to know how this would have affected him. He had had the rich experience of loving and trusting those with whom he had shared the Messiah faith and of being loved and trusted by them. That was how it had been in northern Greece, as we can tell from the letters he had already written to Thessalonica and from the letter he would later write to Philippi. But southern Greece—the place where the Roman authorities had given the green light for the gospel!—was turning against him. And if this happened at the same time that he was suddenly meeting a darker level of opposition in Ephesus itself, we can begin to understand why, as he later emerged into a battered and chastened new day, he spoke as he did in 2 Corinthians of reaching the point where he was giving up on life itself.
* * *
It had all started so well. At least, it had started in much the same way as in the cities of his earlier journeys. He had traveled, quite quickly it seems, from Antioch through Cilicia and Galatia and so into Asia. (Did he stop in Tarsus as he went by? Did he visit family? Had he once again been hoping for a change of heart, only to be disappointed? Was that part of the background to his breakdown?) Anyway, he arrived in Ephesus and began as always in the synagogue, this time for three months. A dozen Sabbaths, each ringing with Paul’s scriptural arguments and evidences: Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope, Messiah. Twelve Sabbaths, plenty of time to get into the details of Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Plenty of time to speak of a Messiah who, Paul says, “loved me and gave himself for me.”
Opposition, however, grew as the disturbing implications of Paul’s way of reading the familiar story dawned upon the puzzled hearers. Resistance hardened. This may have been one of the occasions when, submitting to synagogue discipline, Paul received the official Jewish beating of forty lashes. (Deuteronomy 25:3 specifies forty as the maximum; by Paul’s day, Jewish teachers had reduced this by one in case somebody miscounted, appearing more anxious about technical infringement than about the suffering caused.) He says he had received this five times; this itself indicates his steady commitment to working with the synagogue communities as long as he could, since he could easily have avoided the punishment by merely not turning up.19