by N. T. Wright
As for the letter to Titus, the problems are compounded. It is possible that the journey from Miletus to Jerusalem in Acts 21 took a far more circuitous route than Luke indicates and that the party went around by Crete, dropping off Titus on the way. Acts 21:1–3 does, however, offer a close description of events, and we have already been told that Paul was in a hurry because he wanted to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost.25 The only other geographical detail of possible significance is that Paul tells Titus he has decided to winter in Nicopolis, a small town on (with strong Roman imperial associations) the northwest coast of Greece. Again, we have no indication anywhere in Paul or Acts that he was going in that direction, which—to repeat the point yet again—does not mean that it is either impossible or unlikely, merely that we do not have the larger picture within which a small detail like this might fit.
So, as with Paul’s putative trip to Spain, I have become more open to the possibility of a return visit to the East after an initial hearing in Rome. The problem might then be that these two, Spain and the East, might seem to cancel one another out. If Paul was to be back in Rome by the time of Nero’s persecution, facing additional hearings in difficult circumstances, two years would hardly be enough for the relevant trips, both west and east. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the persecution would not need any legal trappings. The emperor had laid the blame for the fire on the Christians, and that would be enough. Perhaps, then, one or both trips might after all be feasible; Paul might have been away either in the East or in the West when Nero was rounding up the Christians. Perhaps Paul came back sometime after 64 to find that it was all over, but that the social mood had changed and that, citizen or not, appealing to Caesar or not, he was straightforwardly on trial as a dangerous troublemaker. Perhaps. Paul had to live with a good many “perhaps” clauses in his life. Maybe it is fitting that his biographers should do so as well.
Before we can look, finally, at how Paul would have approached his oncoming death, it is important to stand back and survey the larger picture of the man and his work.
Paul’s World
15
The Challenge of Paul
WHAT WAS PAUL trying to do? What made him do it? Why did he keep on going back to the synagogue, even though they kept on beating him? Why did he keep on urging his message on non-Jews, even though they thought he was a crazy Jew and wanted to run him out of town? Why did he carry on relentlessly, with his apparent desire to be in three places at once, to write to five churches at once, to explain and to cajole, to teach and to proclaim, to travel and travel and travel some more? What was it, both about the initial event on the road to Damascus and about his subsequent sense of an inner compulsion flowing from that that kept him going? And, on the one occasion when even that ran out of steam, what was it that eventually regenerated his faith and hope? What assessment can we make of this brilliant mind and passionate heart? What motivated him in his heart of hearts, and how did the event on the Damascus Road set that in motion? And finally, out beyond all that, why did it work? Why did the movement he started, against all the odds, become in a fairly short time the church we see in the fourth and fifth centuries? What was it about this busy, vulnerable man that, despite everything, seems to have been so effective?
It may help a little to explain why Paul has not had an easy ride in the modern church and world if we recall his moment of greatest crisis in Ephesus, where he experienced terrible depression and then the regeneration of faith and hope. Those who like their metaphysics or philosophy simple and clear-cut will find, like Festus in Caesarea, that when they hear Paul, they find it all so complicated and confusing that they want to wave it away angrily—it’s just a lot of madness. Festus has had plenty of successors in the modern world. Those who like their religion, or indeed their friendships, served at medium temperature may find Paul’s personality hard to take: at once eager and vulnerable, both bold and (in his own words) “in your face” and then liable to serious self-doubt (“Was it all for nothing?”). One might suppose that, as a friend, he was, as we say, high maintenance, though the reward would be high performance.
But are those even the right questions to ask? Why should Paul’s ideas and personality be placed on the Procrustean bed of our modern likes and dislikes? He might well have a sharp retort for any such suggestion. Why should he not question our criteria, our ideas, our preferred personality types? Where does one even start to ask such questions?
For Paul there was no question about the starting point. It was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfillment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true “image”; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God—so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism, one would worship and invoke Jesus as Lord within, not alongside, the service of the “living and true God.” Jesus, the one for whose sake one would forsake all idols, all rival “lords.” Jesus, above all, who had come to his kingdom, the true lordship of the world, in the way that Paul’s friends who were starting to write the Jesus story at that time had emphasized: by dying under the weight of the world’s sin in order to break the power of the dark forces that had enslaved all humans, Israel included.
Jesus, who had thereby fulfilled the ancient promise, being “handed over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification.”1 Jesus, who had been bodily raised from the dead on the third day and thereby announced to the world as the true Messiah, the “son of God” in all its senses (Messiah, Israel’s representative, embodiment of Israel’s God). Jesus, therefore, as the one in whom “all God’s promises find their yes,” the “goal of the law,” the true seed of Abraham, the ultimate “root of Jesse.”2 Jesus, then, the Lord at whose name every knee would bow. Jesus, who would reappear in a great future event that would combine the sense of a true king coming to claim and establish his kingdom and the sense of the long-hidden God at last being made visible. Jesus, whose powerful message could and did transform lives in the present time ahead of the final moment when he would raise his people from the dead. And, in and with all of this, Jesus not just as the label to put on an idea, a theological fact, if you like, but as the living, inspiring, consoling, warning, and encouraging presence, the one whose love “makes us press on,” the one “who loved me and gave himself for me,” the one whom to know, Paul declared, was worth more than all the privileges that the world, including the ancient biblical world, has to offer. Jesus was the starting point. And the goal.
The goal? Yes, because Paul never wavered in his sense that Jesus would reappear. He would “descend from heaven,” though to get the flavor of that we have to remind ourselves that “heaven” is not “up in the sky,” but is rather God’s dimension of present reality. Jesus would come from heaven to earth not—as in much popular fantasy—in order to scoop up his people and take them back to “heaven,” but in order to complete the already inaugurated task of colonizing “earth,” the human sphere, with the life of “heaven,” God’s sphere. God’s plan had always been to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Jesus, which meant, from the Jewish point of view, that Jesus was the ultimate Temple, the heaven-and-earth place. This, already accomplished in his person, was now being implemented through his spirit. Paul always believed that God’s new creation was coming, perhaps soon. By the time of his later letters he realized that, contrary to his earlier guess, he might himself die before it happened. But that the present corrupt and decaying world would one day be rescued from this state of slavery and death and emerge into new life under the glorious rule of God’s people, God’s new humanity—this he never doubted.
This, moreover, gave his work its particular urgency. Here there has been a serious misunderstanding throughout the last century. Insofar as there was a view we might label “apocalyptic” in Paul’s day, he shared it. He believed that Israel’s God, having abandoned the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile and never having fulfilled his promise to return in visible and powerful glory, had revealed himself suddenly, shockingly, disruptive
ly, in Jesus, breaking in upon an unready world and an unready people. Paul believed that this had happened not only in the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection and the gift of the spirit, but in his own case, and perhaps in other cases, in a moment of blinding and life-transforming glory. He believed in a new creation already begun and to be completed in the future. He believed that a great transformation had taken place in the entire cosmos when Jesus died and rose again, and he believed that a coming great transformation would take place at his “return” or his “reappearing,” the time when heaven and earth would come together at last.
The last few generations of students and clergy have often been taught, however, that Paul, and indeed Jesus and his earliest followers, believed two things about all this: first, that this coming great event would involve (in some sense or other) the end of the known world, and, second, that this coming event would take place within a generation. So, because the world did not end after the first Christian generation, it has been common coin, particularly among those who have wanted to distance themselves from early Christian ideas in general and Paul’s in particular, to say, sometimes with kindly and sometimes with patronizing intent, that “They expected the end of the world and they were wrong, so perhaps they were wrong about a lot of other things too.” The irony of this position is that the idea of the “end of the world” is neither biblical nor Jewish nor early Christian. It comes from the secular world of nineteenth-century Europe fueled by dreams of revolutions past and still to come. When, toward the end of that century, some writers began to take seriously the Jewish contexts of the kingdom language of Jesus and his first followers, they were attuned not to the way such language worked in the first-century Jewish world, but to the way such language worked within current European ideologies. They projected that back onto Jesus, Paul, and the rest. It made a good story at the time, particularly when Europe then plunged into a horrendous, “apocalyptic” century with wars, rumors of wars, and worse. But this didn’t help with the essentially historical question of what motivated Paul.
What, then, caused the urgent note in Paul’s eschatology? The main point is that the long-awaited event could occur at any time, not that it had to occur within a specific time frame. The event that was to occur within a generation was not the end of the world but, according to Mark 13 and the parallels in Matthew and Luke, the fall of Jerusalem. This was woven deep into the structure of early Christianity in a way that until recently, with the rise of contemporary studies of the Jewish world of the time, was not usually appreciated. But Jerusalem, and the Temple specifically, had always been seen as the place where heaven and earth met; so much so that when Isaiah speaks of “new heavens and new earth,” some commentators will now say, without the need for much elaboration, that this is referring to the ultimate rebuilding of the Temple, the heaven-and-earth building.3
Of course, that would in turn point ahead to heaven and earth themselves being renewed and ultimately united. But the Temple, and before that the Tabernacle in the wilderness, had always had that meaning, a forward-looking signpost to the Creator’s ultimate intention. It was clear enough in the gospel traditions: Jesus had warned that the Temple was under judgment; not one stone would be left upon another. That would indeed be “the end of the world”—not in the shallow, modern sense of the collapse of the space-time universe, but in the Jewish sense that the building that had held heaven and earth together would be destroyed. As Jeremiah had warned, chaos would come again.
I have suggested above that in 2 Thessalonians Paul had seen this moment coming, quite possibly through a Roman emperor doing what Caligula had so nearly done. The monsters—presumably the ultimate monster from the sea, Rome itself—would draw themselves up to their full height, demolishing the heaven-and-earth structure that had (according to Jesus) come to embody Jeremiah’s “den of robbers.” Jesus, as the true Lord, would then set up a kingdom of a different sort, a kingdom that could not be shaken. But if this was going to happen within a generation—if Jerusalem was going to fall to the Romans—then Paul had better get busy, because he knew, better perhaps than any of his contemporaries, what reactions such a terrible event would produce.
Gentile Jesus-followers would say that God had finally cut off those Jews, leaving “the church” as a non-Jewish body. Christianity would become “a religion,” to be contrasted (favorably, of course) with something called “Judaism.” Conversely, Jewish Jesus-followers would accuse their Gentile colleagues—and particularly the followers of that wretched compromiser Paul—of having precipitated this disaster by imagining that one could worship the true God without getting circumcised and following the whole Torah. And Jews who had rejected the message of Jesus would be in no doubt at all. All this happened because of the false prophet Jesus and his wicked followers, especially Paul, who had led Israel astray.
All this is supposition, but it is rooted at every point in what we know about Paul and his gospel. He was therefore determined to establish and maintain Jew-plus-Gentile communities, worshipping the One God in and through Jesus his son and in the power of the spirit, ahead of the catastrophe. Only so could this potential split—the destruction of the “new Temple” of 1 Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2, no less—be averted. This is why Paul insisted, in letter after letter, on the unity of the church across all traditional boundaries. This was not about the establishment of a new “religion.” It had nothing to do—one still meets this ill-informed slur from time to time—with Paul being a “self-hating Jew.” Paul affirmed what he took to be the central features of Jewish hope: One God, Israel’s Messiah, and resurrection itself. For him, what mattered was messianic eschatology and the community that embodied it. The One God had fulfilled, in a way so unexpected that most of the guardians of the promises had failed to recognize it, not only a set of individual promises, but the entire narrative of the ancient people of God. That, after all, was what Paul had been saying in one synagogue after another. And it was because of that fulfillment that the Gentiles were now being brought into the single family.
People have often written as if Paul believed himself to be living in the last days, and in a sense that was true. God had, in the Messiah, brought the old world of chaos, idolatry, wickedness, and death up short, had taken its horror onto himself, and had launched something else in its place. But that meant that, equally, Paul was conscious of living in the first days, the opening scenes of the new drama of world history, with heaven and earth now held together not by Torah and Temple, but by Jesus and the spirit, pointing forward to the time when the divine glory would fill the whole world and transform it from top to bottom. You would not find this vision in the non-Jewish world of Paul’s day. It is Jewish through and through, including in the fact that it has been reshaped around the one believed to be Israel’s Messiah.
Paul’s motivation and mindset, then, was shaped centrally and radically by Jesus himself as crucified and risen Messiah and Lord and by the new shape that the Jewish hope had as a result. This is why his loyalty always appeared contested. And this is where we can understand, in its proper context, what he had to say about human beings, their plight, and their rescue. This has been central to most accounts of Paul from the sixteenth century to the present, and as we look back over his life it is important to display this theme in its true colors by placing it in its historical context.
Paul had always believed that the One God would at the last put the whole world right. The Psalms had said it; the prophets had predicted it; Jesus had announced that it was happening (though in a way nobody had seen coming). Paul declared that it had happened in Jesus—and that it would happen at his return. In between those two, the accomplishment of the putting-right project first in cross and resurrection and then in the final fulfillment at Jesus’s return, God had given his own spirit in the powerful and life-transforming word of the gospel. The gospel, incomprehensibly foolish to Greeks and blasphemously scandalous to Jews, nevertheless worked powerfully in hearts and minds. Listeners
discovered that it made sense and that the sense it made transformed them from the inside out. This is the great “evangelical” reality for which Paul and his letters are famous.
Our problem has been that we have set that powerful gospel reality in the wrong framework. The Western churches have, by and large, put Paul’s message within a medieval notion that rejected the biblical vision of heaven and earth coming together at last. The Middle Ages changed the focus of attention away from “earth” and toward two radically different ideas instead, “heaven” and “hell,” often with a temporary stage (“purgatory”) before “heaven.” Paul’s life-changing and world-transforming gospel was then made to serve this quite different agenda, that is, that believing the gospel was the way to escape all that and “go to heaven.” But that was not Paul’s point. “You have been saved by grace through faith,” he writes in Ephesians. “This doesn’t happen on your own initiative; it’s God’s gift. It isn’t on the basis of works, so no one is able to boast.”4 As it stands, that statement can easily be fitted into the going-to-heaven scheme of thought, but a glance at the wider context will show that Paul has very different ideas. In the first chapter of Ephesians he insists that the entire divine plan “was to sum up the whole cosmos in the king—yes, everything in heaven and on earth, in him.”5 Here, in the second chapter of the letter, he explains the purpose of “being saved by grace through faith”:
God has made us what we are. God has created us in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared, ahead of time, as the road we must travel.6
God has made us what we are; or, to bring out a different but equally valid flavor of the Greek, we are God’s poetry, God’s artwork. God has accomplished, and will accomplish, the entire new creation in the Messiah and by the spirit. When someone believes the gospel and discovers its life-transforming power, that person becomes a small but significant working model of that new creation.