The Triumph of Christianity

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Modern scholarship has landed on a solution that is both sensible and supported by Paul’s own words.20 In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul recalls preaching while engaged in manual labor: “For you remember, brothers and sisters our labor and toil; during night and day we labored so as not to burden you, preaching to you the gospel of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:9). When he refers to his toil here, it is not to his toil of preaching: it was toil that kept him from having to be supported financially by others. He was working both a day and a night job. So too in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul stresses that he and his missionary companions engaged in a life of “labor, working with our own hands” (1 Corinthians 4:12). Later he reminds them how he and his companion Barnabas had “to work for a living” (9:6).

  And so the question is, how are we to imagine the relationship between Paul’s daily work and his missionary activity? New Testament scholar Ronald Hock has argued the most persuasive case: Paul was preaching on the job.21

  Support for this view comes from the book of Acts, which indicates that Paul was a professional “tentmaker” (Acts 18:3). Some scholars have thought this word can have broader applicability, referring to some kind of leather-goods work. (Tents were made from animal skins, but so obviously were lots of other things.) There is no certainty on the matter. But it does appear that Paul was a craftsman of some kind. If so, we can have a good idea of how he proceeded from one town to the next establishing churches. If he was a leather- worker Paul would have had a mobile profession. He would have taken his knives, awls, and other tools of the trade with him from one place to the next. When coming to a new town, he would meet up with others in his line of work. Commonly the professions were centered in one part of the city or another. He would choose an apt spot, rent out a space for his workshop, probably secure an apartment in a floor above for living quarters (this was common in city dwellings: a multilevel building of this sort was called an insula), and open up for business.

  It is in some such context that he would have “preached night and day” to the Thessalonians. People would come into his shop for business and he would talk to them about religion. Businesses as a rule were far more casual in that way than today. People could spend a long time in conversation. Paul, by his own account, was at it at all hours. Obviously he would not be able to convert someone the first time they met, on the spot. He was urging pagan people to give up every religious tradition and cultic practice they had ever known. That took time. But he had time. He had to work—he was at it before dawn to after dusk—and while working with his hands he was preaching the gospel.

  One can imagine that he was rarely successful. But it would not take a lot of success to make a big difference. For one thing, it was a common feature of ancient life for the head of a household—the senior adult male—to make the family’s decisions when it came to religion. Convert the head of the household, and you converted the entire family. Modern Christians might say that the wife and children of a convert should not really be counted as converts because it was not their choice. Even so, new religious traditions and forms of worship would be introduced into the household and everyone in it would participate. In many or even most situations, over a period of months or years, other members of the family would surely come over mentally and emotionally as well. Thus one convert could translate into numerous others.

  One other factor to consider is the high population density of ancient cities. The modern city of Antakya in southeastern Turkey has just over two hundred thousand inhabitants and by most modern standards is crowded. In Paul’s day it was called Antioch and it had twice that population. But you could walk around its circumference in an afternoon. The average population density in Roman cities was about two hundred persons per acre, matched today in only the densest inner cities. There was little space and even less privacy. One result was that news could spread very quickly indeed. And rumor. And gossip.22

  If someone adopted a completely new set of religious traditions—abandoning the traditions and worship that everyone else followed more or less without question—any such conversion would no doubt spark comment, curiosity, and interest. Maybe enough interest to see what it was all about. More people would start showing up in Paul’s workshop. He would not convert the majority of them by any stretch of the imagination. But he would convert some. Heads of the household would then convert their families. The church would be planted and start to grow.

  Soon Paul would be satisfied that the planting season was finished, and he would head off to the next city to start all over again. This would go on for years, possibly for three decades. We will never know how many churches Paul started, but he is explicitly associated with about a dozen in his writings. Possibly there were many more.

  We are still left with the question of what Paul would say to potential converts that would prove at all convincing. As we will see more fully in the next chapter, these people were pagans who worshiped numerous divine beings by local customs that had been handed down over the centuries and that everyone simply took for granted. Temples to pagan gods would be found everywhere throughout a major city, and in the temple would be idols—statues of the gods—that represented a kind of physical representation of the divinity itself. Outside the temple would be an altar on which to perform occasional sacrifices to the god—or, rather, to watch someone else do so. People could frequent as many temples of as many gods as they wanted. They would also worship their own family gods. And participate in worship of the emperor and of any of the gods that the Roman state itself promoted. In any city at any time there was a rich, fertile, and extraordinarily textured set of cultic traditions. Paul’s mission was to convert people from these pagan traditions to be believers in Jesus. What did he say and how did he convince anyone?

  PAUL’S MESSAGE

  In his surviving letters, Paul never explicates the message he had delivered to his potential converts. Obviously there was no reason for him to do so: he was writing about other matters precisely to the people he had converted, who knew full well what he had said at the time, presumably over and over again. But he does on occasion make an allusive reference back to his preaching, and as scant as these recollections are, they provide an intriguing insight into what Paul said and the rhetorical strategy he used. We find the first such reference in the earliest of Paul’s surviving writings, the letter of 1 Thessalonians.

  In fondly recalling the time he had spent with the Christians of Thessalonica (in northern Greece), Paul has occasion to remember how they, as former pagans, came to join with him in his Christian faith, how they “turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God, and to await his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, the one who saves us from the wrath that is coming” (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10). The comment is terse but illuminating.

  To convert to the Christian faith through Paul’s gospel was both more and less complicated than converting to Judaism. It was more complicated because it involved not simply coming to believe that the Jewish god was the only one who deserved to be worshiped, but also to believe that Jesus was his son, who had been raised from the dead for salvation. Even in its briefest form, this is a two-step conversion—faith in God and faith in Jesus—not one step. At the same time, these two steps were somewhat less complicated than converting to Judaism, since the convert was not then expected to join the Jewish people by adopting Jewish customs and following Jewish laws, including, most notably, circumcision, Sabbath observance, keeping Jewish festivals, and following kosher food laws.

  The first, and undoubtedly most difficult, step in converting pagans to Christianity was to convince them to turn away from the gods they had worshiped from infancy—gods that not just their immediate families but also all their friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, and, in fact, with the exception of Jews, everyone in their entire world worshiped. This would obviously be an enormous step. One would have to give up all the daily and periodic festivals, processions, sacrifices, prayers, beliefs, and p
ractices attendant to all the traditional religions they had ever known. How did Paul manage to convince anyone to do it?

  He shows how he did it in this concise recollection of 1 Thessalonians. He convinced the pagans that their idols—the statues of their gods—were “dead” and that they should instead worship the “living” God. For Paul, there was only God who was alive and active in the world. The others were completely dead and useless, inert and able to do nothing. It appears that when Paul preached to these pagans he employed the standard kind of attack on pagan gods that had been used by Jews for centuries. One of our earliest examples of this kind of attack, which shows both its rhetorical strategy and force, is in the Hebrew Bible, in a passage that Paul, with his rigorous training in Judaism, must have known intimately. It is found in the book of Isaiah, where the prophet mocks the gods of the pagans. He points out that a person who makes a god-statue, an idol, fashions it out of wood or iron, not realizing that this is all it is: wood or iron. It is not a god. It has no power. It can do nothing. It is human designed and human made. In his mockery the prophet points out that after the woodworker cuts down a tree for the material he needs to fashion his god:

  Then [the wood] can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says “Save me, for you are my god.” . . . A deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?” (Isaiah 44:15–17, 20)

  This kind of polemic would have seemed common sense to most Jews. Many pagans, it has to be admitted, would have found it either ridiculous or irrelevant, for a very simple reason. Pagans—at least, the reflective ones among them—did not consider their cult statues to be gods. They considered them to be representations of gods—visual aids, as it were—to help one focus on the reality of the god. Or, in a somewhat more sophisticated vein, they thought the cult statue was a focal point of divine energy, the place through which the god could manifest its power. But the item itself was not a god. It was an image or a conduit for a god.

  Many pagans, on the other hand, may not have thought at this level of abstraction and may simply have taken the intellectual shortcut assumed by Jewish polemicists, thinking that idols really were gods. People like that would certainly be susceptible to the kind of critique leveled by Isaiah, by Jewish polemicists after his day, and by people like Paul, who in a different moment wanted to convince them that their own gods were lifeless, powerless, ineffectual—in short, dead.

  Paul almost certainly preached some version of this message. And he proclaimed, by contrast, the glories of the living God, the one who created the heavens and the earth, the one who saved his people Israel from their slavery in Egypt at the Exodus, the one who did miracles through his prophets and who continued to do miracles among the living in Paul’s own day. But Paul also had to persuade his listeners to believe in Christ. His message was not simply about the living God but also about the living Jesus.

  In fact, Paul’s message about the living Jesus may have itself been the medium through which he preached about the living God. The notion that God is living presupposes that God is active, not just in heaven but also on earth. A living God is a God who is involved in this world. He is a God who acts in ways that appear miraculous to mere mortals. In fact, his actions are miracles. Paul preached God’s miracles as demonstrations of power available to all who believed. And he focused on one miracle in particular, as he himself indicates in the recollection I have quoted of his preaching to the Thessalonians. He preached that God had raised Jesus from the dead.

  Paul’s message to these converts began with a historical fact: Jesus was a Jewish prophet who was crucified by the Romans. There would be nothing incredible about that. Romans were crucifying people all the time. What makes this one instance stand out is what happened afterward. God raised Jesus from the dead. This is the heart and soul of Paul’s proclamation. It is one that he could speak with enormous conviction, the kind of conviction that could win converts. Paul knew that God raised Jesus from the dead because he himself had seen Jesus alive afterward.

  Paul could swear to it. He did swear to it. Moreover, he was a reasonable, intelligent, clear-thinking human being. We can assume that he seemed completely honest and ingenuous. He would have been straightforward and emphatic. With his own eyes he had seen the crucified Jesus alive again. This must have been convincing to people—at least some people.

  Paul’s potential converts must have wondered why God would allow his son to die, especially a death by crucifixion, the most torturous, horrific, and feared form of execution in Roman antiquity. So Paul’s next step was to explain what the death of Jesus meant. We know how Paul explained Jesus’s death because of another recollection of his missionary preaching in a different letter, this one not to the Thessalonians but to the church of Corinth, farther south along the eastern coast of Greece. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is much longer and involved than the one to the Thessalonians. In it he deals with a large number of problems that the Corinthian church was experiencing. Near the end Paul has occasion to recall what he had preached to them—they too had been pagans—when first he converted them, a message that Paul indicates he had “received”:

  For I delivered over to you among the most important things what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve . . . . And last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Corinthians 15:3–5, 8)

  This was the core of Paul’s missionary message, as he himself says. Christ’s death was not a miscarriage of justice or a tragic accident of history: it was all part of God’s plan of salvation that had earlier been set forth in the Jewish Scriptures. Jesus died “for our sins.” In this message Paul stressed there could be no doubt about Jesus’s death, because after he died he was buried. But Jesus did not stay dead. God raised him from the dead, again in fulfillment of the Scriptures. Once more there could be no doubt, because he then appeared on several occasions to his disciples. Last of all he appeared to Paul. Paul saw him. He really was raised. If he was raised, God must have raised him. If God raised him, his death must have been by divine design. It was a death God planned and willed, because it was a death for the sake of the sins of others. It is the death and resurrection of Jesus that put a person in a right standing before the one and only God, a living God, who has done miracles in this world that he created.

  But Paul’s message did not end there. Recall from the passage in 1 Thessalonians that Paul reminded the Thessalonian Christians not only about what happened in their past—how they turned from their dead idols to the living God—but also about what was about to happen in their future. They turned to God and they now “await his Son from heaven . . . Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath that is coming” (1 Thessalonians 1:10).

  The second coming of Jesus was absolutely central to Paul’s preaching. It was not simply an afterthought. It was in fact a natural corollary to the declaration that Jesus had been raised. If he had been raised, where was he? Why wasn’t he anywhere to be seen? Paul maintained that Jesus was no longer present because he had been taken up to heaven and given a position of divine glory. But he would not reside there forever. God’s act of salvation was much, much larger than simply saving a few souls here and there. God’s plan was to redeem the entire world.

  It is crucial to remember that even before his conversion Paul was a thoroughgoing apocalypticist. He did not abandon his apocalyptic thinking when he came to follow Jesus; his apocalypticism was instead brought into his ne
w faith and formed his framework for understanding it. This world was controlled by evil forces. That was why there was so much pain and misery here. But God was ultimately sovereign and was about to reestablish his control over the world. He was soon to enter into judgment and overthrow the forces of evil—along with everyone who sided with them—in order to bring about his good kingdom here on earth. The utopia to come was to be preceded by a cataclysmic act of destruction. God’s wrath was about to strike. God would send a cosmic judge of the earth to destroy his enemies and set up his kingdom. And, for Paul, that cosmic judge was Jesus. It was Jesus whom the Thessalonians were to “await from heaven,” because he was the one who would “save us from the wrath that is coming.”

  Paul’s message, in a nutshell, was a Jewish apocalyptic proclamation with a seriously Christian twist. God was saving this world. He had destroyed the power of sin by the death of Jesus; he had destroyed the power of death by the resurrection of Jesus; and he would destroy the power of evil by the return of Jesus. It was all going according to plan. Paul knew for a fact that it was because with his own eyes he had seen that Jesus had been raised from the dead. He also knew that Jesus was soon to return. This time he would not come meekly.

  PAUL’S MODE OF PERSUASION

  It is not hard to see how Paul might convert at least some pagans with this message, given his confidence and self-assurance as one who had personally seen the resurrected Jesus. But was there anything else that made his message particularly persuasive? Here we have to rely on scant but tantalizing allusions that no doubt resonated clearly with the audience of Paul’s letters, who knew full well what he was talking about, but whose meaning can only be surmised by those of us living two millennia later. In a later chapter we will see that Christian sources of the first four centuries consistently report one and virtually only one thing that convinced people to convert to the faith. They saw, or more often heard about, miracles that authenticated the Christian message. Miracles led to faith.