Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  Paul first came to Jerusalem from his native Tarsus (in modern-day southern Turkey) to study in one of Jerusalem’s four hundred synagogues. Although Paul might have begun his Pharisaic career in Greek-speaking Hellenist synagogues, his teacher, at least according to Acts, was Gamaliel, one of the most respected instructors of his day. As a Pharisee, Paul lived the Law, promulgated the Law, and menaced those who broke it. This history was evidently part of Paul’s baggage, as even the author of Acts, Paul’s most enthusiastic biographer, writes of the man barging into the homes of Christian believers, serving as accuser during their various trials, and approving of their stoning.

  It has often been argued that Paul seems to know little about Jesus’s earthly life. He rarely refers to his sayings, teachings, or biographical details. But all one can say definitively is Paul did not often find the occasion to write extensively about these things. He was not, after all, writing his letters to convince anyone of Jesus’s existence. Paul probably had a clear idea about the broader details of Jesus’s life, seeing that he was an enthusiastic opponent of the faith for its first three years and was bound to have heard the stories. When it came to Jesus, Paul had no written gospel or record of events. What we know he did have was a visionary experience on the road to Damascus, during which he claimed to have encountered, in some manner, a deity he often calls “Christ Jesus.” (The notion of Paul’s being knocked from his horse during that vision is extra-scriptural and was probably first added to Christian legend by Renaissance-era painters such as Caravaggio.) Paul believed this revelation, received no more than three years after the crucifixion, was an occasion of both personal and global significance. He is insistent in his letter to the Galatians that his personal experience of Jesus was not taught to him as a tradition but rather actively experienced—so much so he makes sure to stress his lack of connection to the Jerusalem church and the original followers of Jesus. After Jesus “called me through grace,” he writes, “I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me.” This is Paul’s first indication in the letter that he and the Jerusalem church are not necessarily interested in the same thing.

  He then tells the Galatians a story. Three years after his visionary experience of seeing Jesus, and after spending time in Arabia and Damascus (the purpose of which is undisclosed, though we can assume they were missions), he finally went to Jerusalem “to visit Cephas.” The verb he uses to describe his meeting with Peter, the infinitive form of which is historesai and from which we derive the word “history,” can mean either “get information from” or “become acquainted with.” Whether Paul was seeking information or acquaintance, he stayed with Peter for fifteen days—a short visit, given the rigors of travel in ancient times—and he is careful to note that he “did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother,” the leader of Jerusalem Christianity.

  Paul follows this story with a studied portrayal of himself as a loner away from Jerusalem for fourteen years. Then, “in response to a revelation,” he returned to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus sometime around the year 50. Barnabas was a Jewish Christian closely connected to the Jerusalem church—according to Acts, he introduced Paul to the Jerusalem leadership—with an interest in preaching to Gentiles that was as fervent as Paul’s. Titus was a Gentile Greek. Paul, “though only in a private meeting,” conferred with the Jerusalem church’s “acknowledged leaders”: James, Cephas, and John, whose identities he feels no obligation to explain, which suggests they were familiar figures among the Galatian Christians. What was discussed on this long-delayed return to Jerusalem, Paul writes, was circumcision and whether his self-understood mission as apostle to the Gentiles, which he had now been pursuing for a decade and a half, was “in vain.”

  Paul had problems in Jerusalem. At his private meeting with Cephas, John, and James, a group he calls the “false brothers” wished to circumcise his Greek companion Titus, who was, no doubt, resistant to the idea. As for the Jerusalem church’s leaders, Paul writes of them so irritably that he resorts to the unhappy rhetorical turn known as an anacoluthon: “And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those leaders contributed nothing to me.” Nonetheless, Paul writes that the Jerusalem church’s leaders “recognized the grace that had been given me” and extended “to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.” In other words, Paul is telling the Galatians that he has already settled with the leadership of the Jerusalem church issues of Jewish observance such as circumcision; his teachings are thus free from moral or religious error. Obviously, the traveling missionaries shadowing Paul around Gentile Christian communities disagreed.

  The gospels portray Jesus instructing the Twelve Apostles to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” and the legends of the Twelve most often find them preaching in comfortably foreskinned lands. But other passages in the gospels line up with Paul’s portrayal of the Jerusalem Christians, which is to say men who remained resistant to allowing non-Law-abiding Gentiles to join them. Matthew, for instance, has Jesus telling the Twelve during his ministry, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” While John depicts Jesus conversing amiably with a Samaritan woman, the Jesus of the synoptic gospels, Matthew and Luke especially, shows only a few ecumenical leanings prior to his resurrection.*1 Nevertheless, Matthew’s gospel famously concludes with Jesus’s command that the remaining members of the Twelve “make disciples of all nations.” (Mark’s Jesus makes a similar statement, but during his earthly ministry.) Almost certainly, Matthew’s final scene reflects the missionary imperative of a very different church from that which existed in the 50s. A decade and a half after Jesus’s death, the Jerusalem church, led by two apostles and one of Jesus’s brothers, was at the very least hesitent to open the faith to non-Law-abiding Gentiles.

  What Paul describes as “a private meeting” with the Jerusalem leadership in Galatians later becomes, in Acts, a plenary gathering in which all the important figures in the Jerusalem church take part. Included among the participants in Acts’ version of events are “believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees,” which is to say Jewish Christian scribes who insisted that Gentile believers “be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.” But after listening to Paul and Barnabas describe “all the signs and wonders that God had done through them,” James the brother of Jesus announces, “I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God.” The two meetings, as described by Paul and Acts, cannot be reconciled. In Galatians, Paul meets with a small group and his mission is accepted without qualification. In Acts, it is a community-wide meeting that ends with a hugely significant doctrinal readjustment.

  After James’s decision, according to Acts, a new missionary letter addressed to various Christian communities, which outlines community expectations about the Law, is drawn up, in which Paul is mentioned and sanctioned as an accepted messenger. The letter also censures “certain persons who have gone out from us, though with no instructions from us,” persons who have “said things to disturb you and have unsettled your minds,” which sounds very much like the types of missionaries who are damaging Paul’s reputation in Galatia. One of the bearers of the Jerusalem church’s letter is sent to tell Gentile Christian communities that the Jerusalem Christians will not further burden them with any rules other than “essentials” such as abstaining from meat sacrificed to idols, drinking blood, and fornicating. In his letters, Paul never mentions any such decree, and a number of his teachings confound its suggested ground rules; many scholars thus suspect Luke created Acts’ Jerusalem conference episode to smoothen the intra-Christian bumps revealed by Galatians, a letter Luke might or might not have been aware of when writing about Paul several decades later.*2 N
evertheless, the point is clear: James the brother of Jesus, the leader of the world’s first Christian community, still had to come to a decision to allow non-Law-abiding Gentiles into the faith.

  “The strategy of two distinct missions with independent ground rules,” the scholar John Painter writes, “might have been an attempt to find a diplomatic solution to a difficult problem….Had it been possible for the two missions to remain separate and distinct…the solution might have worked.” But what Paul set into historical motion with his Gentile mission was too overwhelming for a theological two-state solution.

  II.

  “Pillars” (styloi in Greek), the word Paul uses in Galatians to describe the Jerusalem leaders, was probably a term used by the Jerusalem church itself, though it does not occur in scripture before or after Galatians. Going by its Temple imagery, we can assume the term was conceptually Jewish. As Paul relayed to the so-called Pillars his desire to continue his mission to the Gentiles, he must have been keenly aware of their enduring connection to Judaism.

  Soon after Paul’s meeting with the Pillars, which, again, was around 50 CE (at least half a decade before Galatians was written), Peter visited Paul at Antioch (in modern-day Turkey), the former capital of the Seleucid Empire and the wealthiest, most important city of the Roman Empire’s eastern provinces. Antioch was home to Paul’s first major congregation—it was also where the term “Christian” was first coined by outsiders to describe the movement—and its Christian community contained an admixture of Gentile and Diaspora Jewish believers in Jesus. Shortly behind Peter, though, came “certain people from James,” who, in Paul’s account to the Galatians, shamed or intimidated Peter into abandoning the table he shared with Gentiles at the common meal. Until the arrival of James’s people, the Jewish Christians of Antioch shared their meals with Gentiles, apparently unconcerned about any questions of doctrinal purity. While Peter might have been personally fond of this openness—there is evidence throughout the New Testament that Peter was remembered as having shown interest in Gentile Christians—he could not bring himself to flout the Law before the vicarious eyes of James the brother of Jesus, his fellow Pillar of the Jerusalem church.

  After Peter abandoned the Gentile table, Paul writes he “opposed him to his face”—a ploy that might have backfired, for “the other Jews joined [Peter] in his hypocrisy,” including Barnabas, who had hitherto been one of Paul’s closest associates. Let us say that the account in Acts of the Jerusalem conference is accurate; James still dispatched brothers to monitor Paul in Antioch. Whatever the case, we know from Paul himself that he, at least, believed he had come to an “agreement” with James and the Pillars about his Gentile mission, but this agreement was rather more tenuous than Paul understood. So who were these “false brothers,” this “circumcision faction,” sent to spy on Paul? Paul does not name them and implies they were a cabal within the Jerusalem church. What is clear is that they had authority, and it is not a speculative leap to imagine they represented the interests of James the brother of Jesus.

  While the row at Antioch concerned dietary law, it was the circumcision debate that resurfaced in Paul’s Galatian churches. The fact that the Galatians’ visitors made a bunch of Gentiles contemplate undergoing the supremely unappealing ritual of circumcision goes some way toward establishing the respect with which the Galatians greeted their visitors and the fear these visitors inspired in them. While the Galatians’ visitors were what we today would broadly understand as Christians, they were Jewish Christians who believed the only way into their faith was through circumcision and other Judaic rituals—Christians in the apparent way James the brother of Jesus, if not Peter himself, was a Christian.

  It is a near historical certainty that a few of Jesus’s earliest followers—and, going by Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, perhaps even members of Jesus’s family—were involved in some type of missionary effort within Judaea and a few select points beyond, the initial focus of which appears to have been Jews and other Semitic peoples but which gradually opened itself up, in some way, to Gentiles. This mission was apparently overseen by, and in close contact with, the Jerusalem mother church.*3 It is a historical certainty that Paul was involved in a wider, more diffusely governed, and better understood missionary effort, the focus of which was Gentile communities and which did not prescribe obedience to Jewish Law. These two missions sometimes cooperated but, not surprisingly, came into at least occasional conflict over matters of observance and doctrinal emphasis.

  As one of many Christian messengers, Paul began at a disadvantage. Most Greeks and Jews knew nothing of the life or teachings of the obscure Galilean healer Paul was championing as God resurrected, and it is quite clear from Paul’s own epistles that many regarded his message as something between nonsense and insanity: the words of a man who traveled too much, thought too much, and spent far too much time alone. Many who did show interest in Paul’s preaching later encountered other Christian missionaries, whereupon they discovered that a number of Paul’s views were different from those held by people who, like Peter, personally knew Jesus. Paul had no hierarchical structure beneath him, whereas Jesus’s original followers, many still living in or working out of Jerusalem, appear to have enjoyed a large and (at least initially) well-run organizational foundation. After a decade of missionary work, Paul could claim no more than five hundred followers around the Gentile Mediterranean. At the same time, the Jerusalem church claimed thousands of followers throughout Palestine. In addition, Paul was circumspect about many of the most charismatic aspects of early Christianity, such as speaking in tongues and channeling visions, largely because he feared it made Christians look foolish to outsiders. Paul’s mission, furthermore, was sometimes sabotaged: in his second letter to the Thessalonians, he has to argue against a letter the church has received that claimed to be from him. (The fact that Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians was probably not written by Paul brings the impersonation wonderfully full circle.) Paul’s greatest disadvantage, however, was his perceived authority as he competed with missionaries from the Jerusalem church whose claim to represent the message and meaning of Jesus was, on its surface, unassailable.

  Over time, the Twelve Apostles became something quite different from what the New Testament’s glancing accounts of Jesus’s original followers suggests. Their trajectory within and without the New Testament is awesomely complicated and tied to innumerable and often untrackable developments within Christian theology but basically goes like this: they begin as a Jewish eschatological idea (Twelve Apostles to judge the twelve tribes of Israel), expand into devout missionaries spreading the word to Gentiles, mature as pastoral leaders of many early churches, expire as glorified martyrs, and finally fossilize into the foundation on which orthodox beliefs were built. Paul’s ideas about Jesus ultimately won out, and his victory was no small part of the long, strange process by which the Twelve transformed from Jewish judges into Christian cornerstones.

  III.

  If one reads between the lines in Galatians, several things become clear. Those who lived in the middle of the first century and believed in the messianic fulfillment of Jesus had become a prominent movement not only in Jerusalem but beyond. Many Gentiles were attracted to this movement. Attempts were being made to work out the differences between those who wished the faith to remain predominantly Jewish in its character and those who wished to enter into some uncharted spiritual territory. Those who knew Jesus personally still possessed a corona of authority. Galatians suggests that when Paul opposed Cephas/Peter “to his face” at Antioch, he might have undergone a personal revolution in his faith. In this way, Christianity can be said to have begun not when Jesus was born, or when he was crucified, but rather during a debate about who should sit with whom during dinner.

  Given the events in Jerusalem and Antioch that preceded Paul’s arrival in Galatia, far from the reach of the Jerusalem church, it is likely that his message had begun to change and become (to the Christians of Jerusalem
at least) radicalized: it was Jesus’s death and resurrection that marked this new faith, not any observance of ancient laws. To the entirely Gentile Galatians, this must have seemed a thrilling prospect. Many Greek-speaking pagans admired the Jews, but found themselves closed off from Judaism by a series of alien cultural requirements.

  In the minds of many within the Jerusalem church, conversely, Paul might have been perceived as having traversed a bridge too far. Its leader James probably came to realize that in agreeing to Paul’s suggestion that Gentiles not undergo circumcision, he had, in effect, given Paul the perceived right to shape and alter the Jewish faith’s other, more visible rituals and rules, thereby endangering the Jewish identity and the nature of early Christianity. Paul was probably also feared by the Jerusalem Christians because of his rhetorical brilliance and the gale force of his liberating message. Of the apostles, Eusebius wrote, “Those inspired and wonderful men, Christ’s apostles, had completely purified their lives and cultivated every spiritual virtue, but their speech was that of every day….[H]aving neither the ability nor the desire to present the teachings of the Master with rhetorical subtlety or literary skill, they relied only on demonstrating the divine Spirit working with them, and on the miraculous power of Christ fully operative in them.” Paul, on the other hand, “surpassed all others in the marshalling of his arguments and in the abundance of his ideas.” While this is not historical information, its psychological canniness feels roughly convincing.