by N. T. Wright
As we know, the early Christians were technological pioneers when it came to books, abandoning the scroll with its natural limitations and developing instead the codex, the ancestor of the modern bound book. They would only have been doing that if they wanted more and more people to be able to read the books the community was producing. This insistence on education and particularly reading can be traced directly back to Paul. It is Paul, after all, who tells his churches to be grown-up in their thinking, to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. He wanted Jesus-followers not only to think the right things, but to think in the right way. Though he did not himself (so far as we know) found what we today would call “schools,” when such things came about, they would have him to thank for their underlying impetus.
All this comes down to the basic imperative that we see as the assumed norm in Paul’s very first letters and that then becomes a major and attractive feature of the church in subsequent centuries. “Remember the poor,” the Jerusalem apostles had urged Paul. “Yes,” he replied, “that is precisely what I am most eager to do.” For Paul this eventually took one particular focus, namely, the collection for Jerusalem, but all the signs are that each local Jesus community had the same priority, presumably of course because of Jesus himself. Paul congratulated the Thessalonians on their practical “love,” agapē, and urged them to work at it more and more. “Do good to everyone,” he wrote to the Galatians, “and particularly to the household of the faith.” “Celebrate with those who are celebrating, mourn with the mourners.” “Shine like lights in the world.” The gospel itself was designed to generate a new kind of people, a people “who would be eager for good works”; in fact, the new kind of humanity that was brought to birth through the gospel was created for the specific purpose of “good works.”21 This point has often been missed when people have read the phrase “good works” as meaning simply “the performance of moral rules,” especially when that in turn has been played off against “justification by faith alone.” Morals matter, faith matters, but that isn’t the point here. Paul’s emphasis here is all about communities through whose regular practice the surrounding world is made a better place.
A glance at the second and third centuries is enough to confirm that all these things, particularly when we see them together, offer good explanations for the spread of the Christian communities. These Jesus-followers, strange though their views might have seemed to those around, antisocial though some might have supposed them to be, were doing things that really did transform the wider society. By the end of the second century, Roman officials were not particularly aware of the nuances of Christian teaching, but they did know what the word “bishop” meant—it meant someone who kept on agitating about the needs of the poor. And at point after point these strands of community life went back to Paul. He had planted these seeds. He died long before most of them began to sprout, but when they did, a community came into being that challenged the ancient world with a fresh vision and possibility. The vision was of a society in which each worked for all and all for each. The possibility was that of escaping the crushing entail of the older paganism and its social, cultural, and political practices and finding instead a new kind of community, a koinōnia, a “fellowship.” A family.
As the historical question invites the theological one back into the room, no wonder the theologians of the second and third centuries often emphasized, when speaking about the crucifixion of Jesus, their belief that on the cross he won the victory over all the dark powers. That wasn’t just a theological theory about an abstract “atonement.” It was the necessary foundation for the lives of the communities in which they lived and worked. The communities could exist only because the old gods, much as they might try to strike back, really had been overthrown. Mammon, Mars, and Aphrodite had been shown up as impostors. Caesar himself was not the ultimate Lord. The theology was hiding under the historical reality, the political reality. These communities were demonstrating, on the street, in the home, in the marketplace, what it meant to follow a different Lord, to worship the One God.
It was Paul too who provided some of the major intellectual infrastructure for this community. Here again this was not because the other major intellectual constructs of the ancient world had run out of steam. The Stoics, the Epicureans, and the up-and-coming Middle Platonists had serious, articulate, and in many ways attractive spokespeople. With hindsight, however, Paul’s Jesus-focused vision of the One God, creator of all, was able to take on all these philosophies and beat them at their own game. They were all, in the last analysis, ways of understanding the world and ways of finding a coherent and meaningful human path within it. When later generations wanted to articulate the Christian version of the same thing (which was, to say it once more, the Jewish version with the Jesus-based reframing), it was to Paul that they looked for help. Of course, other sources remained vital. The prologue to the Gospel of John, a piece of writing that I think would have had Paul himself on his knees, is an obvious example. But it was Paul’s robust engagements with the triple traditions of Israel, Greece, and Rome and his translation of them all into the shape of Jesus and the spirit (Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the spirit as the agent of resurrection, the ultimate hope of Israel) that offered a platform for the great thinkers of subsequent generations.
Although the thinkers were seldom the people who made the gospel spread—that accolade belongs to the local communities that were living out the gospel imperatives, often under the threat or the reality of persecution—the church would not have survived or thrived without their work. Theology is the backbone of a healthy church. The body still needs limbs and organs, joints and tissue. Paul, with his own image of the Messiah’s body, would have been the first to insist on that. But without a backbone the body will not survive. The survival and flourishing of the church of subsequent centuries look back to Paul’s achievement in teaching his followers not only what to think, but how to think. He knew only too well what that would cost, but he believed it was the genuinely human way, a way that would win out precisely by the power of that genuine humanness. And with that, we have our answer.
There are, then, several lines of explanation that converge on Paul himself. His was the vision of the united, holy, and outward-facing church. He pioneered the idea of a suffering apostleship through which the message of the crucified Jesus would not only be displayed, but be effective in the world. He could not have foreseen the ways in which these communities would develop. He might well not have approved of all that was done. But the historian and biographer can look back and discern, in Paul’s hasty and often contested work, the deep roots of a movement that changed the world. This is not the book to address the next question, as to what difference it might make if the church in our own day were to reassess its policies and priorities in the light of Paul’s work. We, after all, have seen the electronic revolution produce a global situation just as dramatically new, in its way, as the one the first-century world had experienced with the sudden rise of Rome. What might the church’s response and responsibility be at such a time?
But Paul’s vision of a united and holy community, prayerful, rooted in the scriptural story of ancient Israel, facing social and political hostility but insisting on doing good to all people, especially the poor, would always be central. His relentless personal energy, his clarity and vulnerability, and his way with words provided the motor to drive this vision, and each generation will need a few who can imitate him. His towering intellectual achievement, a theological vision of the One God reshaped around Jesus and the spirit and taking on the wider world of philosophy, would provide the robust, necessary framework for it all. When the church abandons the theological task, with its exegetical roots in the work of Paul and his colleagues, we should not be surprised if unity, holiness, and the care for the poor are sidelined as well.
* * *
There is one more thing on which Paul and his successors would insist, and that is prayer. We return, as we now probe cautiou
sly into the last days of Paul, to the pattern of prayer he had learned from childhood and then developed in the light of Jesus and the spirit.
Paul always knew that his labors might cost him his life. He did not expect to die at home in his own bed, even supposing that after leaving Antioch in the late 40s he ever had a place he could call “home.” Whether he faced death after the two years of his house arrest at the end of Acts or whether he made subsequent journeys before a second arrest and a final trial, I think we must see his preparation for death and the event itself when it came in relation to the life he lived, and particularly the prayers he had prayed all throughout.
There is a famous story of how Rabbi Akiba, one of the greatest Jewish teachers of all time, went on praying the Shema, declaring his loyalty to the One God and his determination to stand for his kingdom, as the Roman torturers, catching up with Jewish rebels after the Bar-Kochba revolt in AD 135, ran steel combs through his flesh until he died a horrible and lingering death.22 He continued to pray: “Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might . . .” (“soul” here means “life”). His disciples, standing by like Socrates’s friends as he drank the hemlock, asked him in awe and horror how he could go on praying that prayer even now. His answer, recorded much later but reflecting what we know of the man, is a model of wise, humble Jewish thought. All his life long, he explained, he had been troubled by the words in the prayer “and with all your soul.” He wondered what that meant and if he would ever have the opportunity to fulfill that part of the prayer. Now that he finally had the opportunity, he declared, he was going to seize it. This, then, was what it meant to love the One God with one’s life. Akiba died with the word echad, “one,” on his lips: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Echad. A statement of loyalty. Of loyalty even to the death.
In my mind’s eye I see Paul, perhaps also surrounded by friends, awaiting the executioner. He too will be praying, and it might well be the prayer of loyalty and love, of Jewish-style loyalty, of Messiah-shaped loyalty, the monotheism of the inaugurated kingdom: “For us there is One God (the father, from whom are all things, and we to him); and One Lord ( Jesus the Messiah, through whom are all things and we through him), and you shall love him . . .” It flows better in Greek than in English:
Heis theos, ho patēr, ex hou ta panta kai hēmeis eis auton,
Kai heis kyrios, Iēsous Christos, di’hou ta panta kai hēmeis di’ autou.
This is what made him who he was. This is the reality that burst upon him on the road to Damascus. This, he would have said, is the ultimate explanation for why his work, so contested, so agonizing, so demanding, so inevitably open to misunderstanding, would not go to waste, but would grow, would produce not just “a religion,” but a new kind of humanity—new people, a new community, a new world. A new polis. A new kind of love. It would do things he could hardly have dared to imagine.
He prays the prayer, over and over. He prays it with the rhythm of his breathing. He prays it with the spirit’s breath in his innermost self. He declares his pistis, his loyalty, his love one more time. One God, one Lord. One. His life’s work has been to bear witness, openly and unhindered, to the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus, and that is what he now does in prayer as the executioner draws his sword. Loving this One God with his heart, his mind, and his strength. And, finally, with his life.
Chronological Table
As with all ancient history, most dates are approximations. At several points these rely on particular arguments reflected in the text. Main journeys are in bold text; letters are in capitals.
?4 BC
Birth of Jesus of Nazareth
?AD 5–10
Birth of Saul of Tarsus
30
Crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
?33
Revelation of Jesus to Saul on the road to Damascus
33–36
Paul in Damascus, Arabia, Damascus again
36
Paul’s first post-Damascus visit to Jerusalem (Gal. 1:18–24)
36–46
Paul in Tarsus; brought to Antioch by Barnabas
40
Caligula’s plans to erect his statue in Jerusalem
41
Assassination of Caligula; accession of Claudius
46/47
“Famine visit” to Jerusalem (Acts 11:30; Gal. 2:1–10)
47–48
Paul and Barnabas on first missionary journey: Cyprus and South Galatia
48
Peter in Antioch (Gal. 2:11–21); Crisis in Galatia
48
GALATIANS
48/49
Jerusalem Conference (Acts 15)
?49
Claudius’s expulsion of Jews from Rome
49
Paul and Silas on second missionary journey: Greece
50/51
1 and 2 THESSALONIANS
51 (early)–52 (late)
Paul in Corinth
52/53
Paul in Jerusalem, Antioch; third missionary journey: Ephesus
53–56
Paul in Ephesus
?53
1 CORINTHIANS
53/54
Short, painful visit to Corinth
54
Death of Claudius; accession of Nero
?55–56
Imprisonment in Ephesus
?55
PHILIPPIANS
?55/56
PHILEMON, COLOSSIANS, EPHESIANS
56
Release from prison; travel from Ephesus to Corinth
56
2 CORINTHIANS
57
ROMANS
57
Travel from Corinth to Jerusalem
57–59
“Hearings” and imprisonment in Jerusalem and Caesarea
59, autumn
Voyage to Rome; shipwreck on Malta
60, early
Arrival in Rome
60–62
House arrest in Rome
?62–64
Further travels, either to Spain or to the East, or both?
?after 62
1 and 2 TIMOTHY, TITUS?
64
Fire in Rome; persecution of Christians
?64 or later
Death of Paul
66–70
Roman-Jewish war
68
Death of Nero
70
Fall of Jerusalem
Notes
Preface
1.All published by SPCK in London and by Fortress Press in Minneapolis.
2.Stephen Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. 2, The Rise of the Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).
3.George S. Duncan, Paul’s Ephesian Ministry: A Reconstruction (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929).
4.The New Testament for Everyone (London: SPCK, 2011); The Kingdom New Testament (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011).
Introduction
1.Gal. 1:14.
2.Gal. 1:14; Phil. 3:6.
3.Phil. 3:20.
4.Rom. 8:30.
5.Gal. 4:4.
6.Deut. 6:4.
7.Phil. 4:8, NRSV.
8.Deut. 30.
9.See Ezra 9:9; Neh. 9:36.
10.Lev. 25.
11.Exod. 40; 1 Kings 8.
12.Isa. 52:7–12.
13.Phil. 3:6.
14.Gal. 1:14.
15.Gal. 4:17–18.
Chapter 1: Zeal
1.Num. 22–24.
2.Num. 25:6.
3.Ps. 106:30–31.
4.Gen. 15:6.
5.1 Macc. 2:51–60.
6.1 Kings 18–19.
7.1 Macc. 2:49–68.
8.2 Macc. 7.
9.Acts 5:34–39.
10.Acts 7:56.
Chapter 2: Damascus
1.John Betjeman, Uncollected Poems (London: John Murray, 19
82), 68.
2.John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
3.See, e.g., Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace (London: Profile Books), 2013, esp. chap. 9.
4.Isa. 40:1.
5.Isa. 40:4–5, my paraphrase.
6.Isa. 52:8.
7.Ezek. 43:1–5; Exod. 40:34–38.
8.Mal. 3:1.
9.Gen. 15:7–21.
10.Gen. 28:10–22.
11.Gen. 40–42.
12.Dan. 2:17–49; 7:1–28.
13.Ezek. 1:26.
14.2 Cor. 4:6.
15.Gal. 3:28.
16.Gal. 1:17.
Chapter 3: Arabia and Tarsus
1.Gal. 1:15–17.
2.Gal. 1:12.
3.1 Kings 19:1–9.
4.1 Kings 19:10–15.
5.1 Kings 19:15.
6.1 Kings 19:18.
7.Rom. 11:3–4.