by N. T. Wright
This paves the way for the central point of the final section, which is Paul’s appeal for unity within the scattered and quite possibly mutually suspicious churches in Rome. It is noticeable that right up to the end of this section (14:1–15:13) he does not mention the underlying problem: that some of the house-churches are Jewish and some are Gentile. (Of course, things may well have been more complicated than that. Some of the Gentile Christians may, like some in Galatia, have been eager to take on the Jewish Torah; some of the Jewish Christians may, like Paul himself, have embraced what he calls the “strong” position.) But Paul will not address the questions in those terms. “Some of us prefer to do this . . . some of us prefer to do that,” he says.
He wants the members of the Roman churches to respect one another across these differences. (We note, to ward off a very different problem in today’s contemporary Western churches, that this supposed “tolerance” does not extend to all areas of behavior, as the closing lines of chapter 13 and the equivalent sections of other letters make abundantly clear.) And, once again, he reminds them they are living out the pattern of the Messiah. The death and resurrection of Jesus is, for Paul, not simply a historical reality that has created a new situation, but a pattern that must be woven into every aspect of church life. For Paul, what matters is the life of praise and worship that now, in the spirit, couples Jesus with God the father himself. This is the worship that, when united across traditional barriers, will shake Caesar’s ideology to its foundations:
Whatever was written ahead of time, you see, was written for us to learn from, so that through patience, and through the encouragement of the Bible, we might have hope. May the God of patience and encouragement grant you to come to a common mind among yourselves, in accordance with the Messiah, Jesus, so that, with one mind and one mouth, you may glorify the God and father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah.52
The letter closes with travel plans, reflecting on Paul’s mission across the eastern Mediterranean lands. “From Jerusalem around as far as Illyricum,” he says;53 Illyricum, northwest of Thessalonica, is not mentioned in Acts or even hinted at elsewhere in his letters, though Acts says more generally “he went through those regions,”54 which might easily include northwest Greece. Central to those travel plans is the journey he is about to take to Jerusalem, bringing the collection. He asks the Roman Jesus-followers to pray for safety and that his “service for Jerusalem may be welcomed gladly by God’s people.”55 A hint, in other words, of new anxieties just around the corner.
Phoebe, then, will travel west with the letter, while he will travel east with the money. He greets around thirty people in Rome—covering the bases, we may suppose, of all the different house-churches—and sends greetings from eight friends, including “Erastus the city treasurer” and “I, Tertius, the scribe for this letter.”56 We may detect a sigh of relief from Tertius, for whom the previous hours would have been demanding in more ways than one.
There is a final warning against people who cause division and problems and then a closing benediction,57 which goes on and on a bit like the end of a Beethoven symphony. At last the letter is done. It is one of the most ecstatic and exhilarating, dense and difficult, intellectually and spiritually challenging, and rewarding writings from any period of church history and, some might argue, from anybody else’s history as well.
Corinth to Jerusalem
13
Jerusalem Again
NOW AT LAST it was time for Paul to set off to Jerusalem with the money. This great collection project, so long in the planning, drew together two of his guiding passions, two strands of hope and ambition that had been central since at least the late 40s. First, “Remember the poor”! Second, “There is no longer Jew or Greek . . . in the Messiah, Jesus.”1 Paul had set out the rationale for this project, complex and dangerous as it must have been, in 2 Corinthians 8–9 and Romans 15. Generosity was itself one of the hallmarks of following Jesus, not least because the entire drama of the gospel involved the ultimate generosity of Jesus himself:
You know the grace of our Lord, King Jesus: he was rich, but because of you he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.2
One single sentence gives us Paul’s entire vision of Jesus, as in Philippians 2 and Colossians 1, shaped as an exhortation to act with “enthusiasm and love” and serving the vital purpose of unity across the greatest of traditional divides:
If the nations have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, it is right and proper that they should minister to their earthly needs.3
In other words, the collection was designed to remind the (largely) Gentile churches of their deep and lasting obligation to the Jewish people in general and the Jerusalem church in particular. And it was designed to communicate to the Jerusalem church, and perhaps to a wider Jewish audience, the fact that the Gentile churches did not see themselves as a “new religion” and had no intention of cutting loose and creating a different kind of community. They were part of the same family and as such were doing what “family” always did—helping one another out as need arose.
Some have suggested yet another motive. According to this view, in Romans 11 Paul was hinting that one day a large number of presently unbelieving Jews would turn to the Messiah and that this event would precipitate the final day, the coming parousia of Jesus himself, the resurrection of the dead, the rescue of the old creation from its slavery to decay, the joining into one, in the Messiah, of heaven and earth themselves. “What will their acceptance mean,” he had written, “but life from the dead?”4 Paul did indeed hope for all these things. Did he link them to the collection?
Almost certainly not. He did not say in Romans 15, “I am going to Jerusalem with the collection, so please pray that they will welcome it, so that a great many presently unbelieving Jews will turn to Jesus as Messiah and that Jesus will then return.” He asked them to pray simply that he would be delivered from the unbelievers and that the Jerusalem church would welcome what he had done. In any case, he was planning, as soon as he could, to go on to Rome and then Spain. Though we may be sure that all Paul’s plans carried the footnote “If the Lord wills” and that all his assessments of God’s purposes had the word “maybe” or “perhaps” attached to them, as in Philemon 15, it seems unlikely that he would be thinking that God really wanted him simultaneously to go to Rome and then on to Spain and to give money to Jerusalem so that the parousia could happen at last. In fact, not only is it very dubious to suggest that he was proposing in Romans 11 a large-scale Jewish conversion that would precipitate the Lord’s return, but the suggested link with the collection is one that Paul never made and, granted his other plans, would certainly not have made.
Paul was not the only Jew to collect money for Jerusalem from diaspora communities. The Jewish Temple tax, designed to support the work of the Jerusalem Temple itself, was levied on Jewish communities around the world. The rate was set at two drachmas for every adult male. This was not only a practical necessity for the maintenance of a huge building and its regular round of worship. It meant that even those who could not themselves go to Jerusalem to worship were nevertheless joining in with Temple worship at one remove. There is evidence that under Rome the civic officials took some care for the safe delivery of the money, and pilgrims heading for Jerusalem regularly traveled in sizable groups.5 Without that, a well-known annual shipment of money would be an obvious target for highway robbery or indeed embezzlement.
Those were problems of which Paul was obviously well aware, but before we address that it is interesting to ask whether he saw his collection as in any sense a Jesus-shaped version of the Jewish tax. He cannot have been unaware of the parallel. Granted that the Jerusalem leaders were known as the “pillars”—however much Paul might raise an eyebrow at the thought!—he must have realized that sending money to support the Jerusalem church was, in a sense, helping to keep the “new Temple” standing. But if he made anything more of this, we do not pick it up in his letters.
; More to the point is his careful organization of a group to take responsibility for the money and its safe delivery. We saw earlier the problem when one person was entrusted with delivering money; in that case, Epaphroditus brought the Philippians’ gift to Paul in Ephesus and then was prevented by illness from returning at the expected time, arousing suspicions. So Paul assured the Corinthians, early on in his planning, that he would write formal letters to accompany the people they approved to send to Jerusalem with their gift. At this time, it wasn’t clear whether he would himself go with them.6 By the time he wrote 2 Corinthians, he saw even more clearly the need for complete transparency at every stage of the project. Titus and the unnamed companion would be assisting in the work, Paul said, “both for the Lord’s own glory and to show our own good faith,” because “we are trying to avoid the possibility that anyone would make unpleasant accusations about this splendid gift which we are administering.”7 Everybody knows today, and everybody knew then, that money is sticky; people who touch it tend to come away with some of it on their hands. Not only must that not happen; it must be seen not to have happened.
Paul had originally intended to sail directly to Syria.8 That might have made transporting the money a lot easier. But he became aware of a plot against him and decided instead to go by land once more, around northern Greece. By the time they set off (probably in late summer 57), the party had grown. Northern Greece was represented by Sopater (perhaps the Sosipater of Rom. 16:21) from Beroea and by Aristarchus and Secundus from Thessalonica. The churches of Galatia were represented by Gaius from Derbe. Asia, in other words Ephesus and the surrounding country, was represented by Timothy, Tychicus (Paul’s messenger to Colossae and Laodicea a year or so earlier), and Trophimus. Aristarchus had been with Paul during his Ephesian imprisonment.9 Timothy was of course originally from Lystra in Galatia, but he had by this time worked consistently in Ephesus and was able to be regarded as a representative of Asia. We assume, from the “we” in Acts at this point, that Luke was in the party at least from Philippi; perhaps, since nobody else from that important church is mentioned in the list,10 he is taking that role. We are surprised too that, despite 1 Corinthians 16, there was no official representative from southern Greece. Perhaps they knew some of these men well enough to trust them. The point of having such a sizable group is obvious. Not only would there have been comparative safety in numbers; these seven would have been able to report back to their respective churches that the money had been delivered safely.
But how did they transport it? This is a difficult question. There was no unified banking system in his day that would have allowed Paul and his friends to deposit a large sum in Corinth or Ephesus or elsewhere and then to draw out an equivalent sum in Caesarea or Jerusalem. That might have been possible in Egypt, where a network of royal or state banks had developed branches in local areas. Similar systems were in place in parts of Italy. But even had there been an integrated international system within the larger Roman Empire, banking involved deposits, loans, and credit, not long-distance credit transfers. So how was it done? How did they take the money?
Even supposing that Roman officials, as Josephus suggests, did keep an eye out for the annual transportation of the Temple tax, Paul could hardly rely on them to do the same for his project. If all the money collected were put into large chests or bags—always assuming it could be carried, perhaps on mules—it would be an obvious target in every port, at every wayside inn, on every lonely stretch of road. By traveling as a group (and perhaps recruiting extra traveling companions from the local areas through which they were passing to help guard them for that stretch of the journey) they may have felt sufficiently secure. On board ship, travelers had to sleep on deck and provide their own food, so we may assume that the whole company would form and maintain a tight group. It is possible that friends converted the money into a comparatively small number of high-value coins or bars of gold or silver, which could then be carried less obviously. One way or another, this was a dangerous undertaking even allowing for the normal hazards of ancient travel. They must have been glad when they eventually arrived in Jerusalem, though that is another story to which we must return.
* * *
The journey was notable for two particular moments. The first is the famous scene, a kind of tragicomedy, that took place when the group had reached Troas. On the eve of their departure for Assos on the next leg of their journey, Paul was speaking at a crowded meeting. He went on and on, later and later into the night, and a young man named Eutychus was sitting by an upstairs window in a warm room . . .
This anecdote was presumably intended to remind Luke’s readers of Paul’s healing powers, but in its sharp depiction of an otherwise unlikely scene it keeps us on track in our view of Paul himself. He had, we remember, just written Romans, itself a highly compressed account of things he could have spelled out at much more length. We can well imagine his walking through the arguments again: Adam, Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, Isaiah, the Psalms, the Messiah—with the shocking break in the story at this point: nobody expected the Messiah to be crucified and raised from the dead! Then he would go on to the promise of the worldwide inheritance and the bodily resurrection in the ultimate new creation; to the need for Jesus’s followers to be united, to renounce idols and sexual immorality; to the ways in which Jewish law was both utterly fulfilled and utterly transcended in Jesus and the spirit. And more, and more. Questions would fly to and fro, with his answers ranging across scripture, story, and missionary anecdotes. We can imagine interruptions, discussion, and the vivid debating style he had used in parts of Romans itself (“What shall we say, then?” “But supposing . . .” “Or does God only belong to the Jews?” and so on.) We can imagine the company pausing for prayer, to sing a hymn, or to allow someone to look up one of the scriptural passages Paul had been quoting from memory and read it out loud again for the benefit of the larger group. And then Paul starts up once more . . .
And Eutychus, the young man by the window, is overcome with sleep as Paul goes on and on. He falls out of the window, crashes to the ground below, and appears to be dead. Paul rushes downstairs, stoops over the young man, and picks him up, reviving him. They break bread and eat together. He then carries on with his discourse until dawn, almost as if nothing had happened.11 Then it is time to go. Some of Luke’s readers, pondering this passage, might imagine Paul as a second Socrates, discussing philosophy all night and then going about his normal business.12
The second significant moment on the journey came when the party landed at Miletus, south of Ephesus. (Like Ephesus itself, Miletus is now some distance from the sea; the mouths of their respective rivers have silted up over time.) As we saw, Luke explains Paul’s decision to bypass Ephesus itself on the grounds that he was eager to be in Jerusalem in time for Pentecost. That may well have been part of the motive, but I think it equally likely that Paul was anxious not be drawn into a difficult or dangerous situation, and that he may also have been concerned about bringing his small party, guarding a substantial sum of money, into a bustling city. These potential dangers are, indeed, reflected in the address he then gave to the elders of the church who had come from Ephesus to meet him. The distance would have been around thirty miles as the crow flies, but longer by road, perhaps two or even three days’ journey in each direction.
The speech that Luke ascribes to Paul on this occasion, like the very different address on the Areopagus in Athens, would take less than three minutes to deliver. As with that occasion, we must assume that Paul would have spoken for a good deal longer. If the elders were taking the best part of a week to travel to Miletus and back again, they and Paul would probably have wanted to take at least a full day to talk. This would have included Paul saying the sort of things we find here, only at much more length.
Paul is saying farewell, and the speech has the flavor of a final testament. He is still hoping and praying that he will make it to Rome and then to Spain. But as he contemplates the trip to Jerusalem, he has
a strong suspicion, which he takes to be given by the spirit, that he ought to be preparing for trouble in some form or other. It was therefore appropriate to look back at his own work in Ephesus and to look forward to what might now be facing the church there. No doubt Luke, wanting to present a rounded picture of Paul’s work, had his own reasons for giving this speech such space. But from it all we get a vivid portrait of Paul at work.
We see in particular Paul the pastor, out and about, visiting the homes of Jesus-followers as well as teaching in public. He remembers the suffering brought upon him because of the plots of the local Jewish community, and he refers to the same torments that had caused him to despair in those dreadful months a year or more earlier. But his message, as ever, is the same, the Jewish message reshaped around Jesus: people should turn from idols and serve the living God now made known in Jesus. That message has not changed from his early days, and it was still what a great pagan city needed to hear. He has been sensitive, ever since the Galatian crisis, to the possible charge that he might have trimmed the message down, might have given them only part of the truth and not the whole thing. No, he says, on that score he is blameless. He had not shrunk from declaring and explaining to them the entire divine plan.