by Tom Bissell
By the time of the Galatian crisis, at some point in the early 50s, Paul’s churches were spotted throughout modern-day Greece, Macedonia, and Turkey. Some were in small towns, such as Philippi, and some were in cities, such as Corinth and Ephesus. Most were centers of trade, predominantly Greek speaking, and connected by magnificent Roman roads. Paul’s Law-less, entirely Christ-based gospel was spreading, and the worried, confused leaders of the Jerusalem church clearly felt they had to do something to bring it into line. Thus the delegation to Galatia was dispatched, at James’s order, to revisit with Paul basic cultic issues that had been addressed so imperfectly in Jerusalem, and which visit Paul later represented to his Galatian converts as sabotage.
IV.
To Roman Catholics, Peter is the foundation of the Roman church, which was and is Paul’s church, formed and driven by Paul’s ideas. Yet Peter, according to Paul’s ancient witness, understood himself as the apostle to the circumcised.*4 Protestants, on the other hand, reject the idea that Jesus intended Peter to begin a papal line to forever hold sway over the Christian world and instead claim Paul’s visionary, personal experience of Jesus as the true crystallization of Christian faith. Yet Paul himself was suspicious of visions. His own experience led him to appreciate visions but with the secondary recognition that they could be abused. In his letter to the Colossians, he writes, “Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on…worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause.” Paul’s work within young and necessarily unstable churches had convinced him that visions could be employed to justify any new thing that the visionary had seen, and apparently the Colossians were having visions that Paul was leading them astray. (Later, the Gospel According to John would be even more strident on this issue: Jesus calls anyone who claims to have seen Heaven during a vision a liar.) Historically speaking, then, it is possible that both Catholics and Protestants have claimed for themselves inappropriate apostolic guarantors.
For those who do not hold to the tenets of any Christian orthodoxy, Paul is among the more maligned figures in early Christianity. Nietzsche, for instance, referred to him as a “morbid crank” guilty of “the falsification of true Christianity.” Not often appreciated are the cultural force fields into which Paul routinely crashed. Let us imagine the man having some success with pagan Gentiles. For these people, becoming a member of a self-identified Christian group was unlike any other association in the ancient world. Paul is never more likable in his letters than when he discusses the transfiguring power of his faith and the lives he has seen it change. Much of Paul’s epistolary warmth comes from his faith in the inclusiveness and egalitarianism of early Christianity. The official titles that distinguished important members in other cultic groups are absent from Paul’s letters.*5 Two words Paul regularly employs are “brother” and “sister,” which is one of the ways scholars have separated Paul’s genuine letters from those written in his name by his followers. The undisputed Pauline letters use “brother” or “sister” almost five dozen times, the disputed letters fewer than ten times.
Enter Paul’s opponents, who swooped in on these delicate communities to make unbending demands such as circumcision, keeping the Sabbath holy by refusing to work, and refusing to purchase meat from pagan butchers. The average Jerusalem Christian might have had little frame of reference for the complications early Gentile believers in Jesus faced in non-Jewish milieus. In predominantly Jewish communities like Jerusalem, such exclusivity and separateness could be indulged, but in his slow, painstaking work of winning pagan hearts, Paul could not realistically ask Gentiles to avoid pagan butchers: at the time, almost all butchers were priests of one stripe or another.*6 He could not ask Gentiles to keep the Sabbath holy: virtually all of them would have worked for pagan employers and quickly lost their jobs. This issue came up in the Roman church, and Paul sensibly addresses it in his letter to the Romans by saying, “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds.” (In Mark, a Paul-like Jesus tells the Pharisees, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath.”) The group against whom the thoroughly pragmatic Paul stands in opposition is, again, almost certainly a delegation from the Jerusalem church, which is led by at least two apostles and the brother of Jesus. The peculiar dialectic of the first Christian leaders unable to agree on such seemingly fundamental issues would probably strike the average Christian of today as utterly inexplicable.*7 Most would probably want to know whose views are closer to those of Jesus. Despite writing in closer historical proximity to Jesus than the gospel writers, Paul is unable to make even one explicit citation of Jesus’s words to support his positions. Yet the writers of the gospels later use Jesus’s words to buttress many of Paul’s positions. The chicken thus contemplates its egg.
A venerable view of the conflict contained within Galatians, eloquently defended today by the scholar Michael Goulder, puts forth Paul as the missionary enemy of Peter and James the brother of Jesus. But this may be too simple a postulation to adequately capture the nature of early Christian confusion. The scholar John Painter proposes a complicated, more nuanced view of the likely scenario faced by Paul and the Jerusalem church. Painter identifies no fewer than six factions within the Jerusalem church and Gentile Christian movement. The first faction, comprising men like the Christian Pharisees mentioned in Acts and referred to by Paul in Galatians as “false brothers,” were Law absolutists fiercely opposed to Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. The second faction was made up of those who, in Painter’s words, “recognized the validity of the two missions but were themselves committed to the mission of and to the circumcision”; the leader of this faction, Painter proposes, was James the brother of Jesus. The third faction, led by Peter, also accepted the two missions but with a greater conceptual openness to Gentiles; from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, it seems clear Peter accepted that the two missions had different ground rules, even if the lines between them sometimes blurred, and that Gentiles were theoretically free from aspects of Judaic ritual but Jews were not. The fourth faction, which counted among its leaders Paul’s friend Barnabas, had a more open-minded philosophy on the Law; as Painter writes, “Their policy was that home rules applied when the missions intersected.” The fifth faction, led by Paul, believed in a gospel that obliterated the distinction between Jew and Gentile. The sixth faction, which comes glimpsingly into view within some of Paul’s letters, “advocated an absolutely law-free mission recognizing no constraints whatsoever, ritual or moral”; Paul’s problems with the first three factions might have stemmed from his being unfairly linked to this last and most radical Gentile Christian faction. Painter’s vision of early Christianity coheres not only with internal New Testament evidence but with the laws of human nature. In any elaborate human undertaking—and here the early Christian mission qualifies marvelously—factionalism of this kind is the rule. There is an argument to be made that the gospels themselves are products of similar factionalization.
The discrepancy between what Paul presumed to know about Jesus and who Jesus actually was became only one of the arrows in the rhetorical quiver his opponents emptied against him. In the third-century corpus known as the Pseudo-Clementine literature, an author writing under the name of Clement of Rome attributes to Peter the following statement: “Observe the greatest caution, that you believe no teacher unless he brings the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother from Jerusalem, or whomever comes after him. Under no circumstances, receive anyone or consider him a worthy and faithful teacher for preaching the word of Christ, unless he has gone up there, been approved, and, as I say, brings a testimonial from there.”
Despite the Pseudo-Clementine corpus’s pseudepigraphical authorship, such sentiment may reflect an accurate historical memory, for here is Paul, who might have lacked such recommendation, in his second letter to the Corinthians: “Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters o
f recommendation to you or from you, do we?” Later in this letter, we see evidence of the relentless whisper campaign used against Paul reducing him to his wit’s end: “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendents of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one.” Paul engaged elsewhere in similarly reckless rhetoric, even going so far as to claim that the Law came to an end in Jesus, with whom Paul, as he wrote to the Galatians, had been co-crucified. This mystical self-confidence allowed Paul to claim, among other things, that he knew Jesus better than Jesus’s own brother.
Paul’s letter to the Galatians makes any number of similarly astounding claims; its third chapter is a virtual thesaurus of Jewish blasphemy. In 3:8, Paul writes, “The scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed before you.’ ” Because, in the Jewish tradition, Gentiles did not have the Law, they were viewed by some as sinners living outside the parameters of divine sanction and forgiveness.*8 Paul nevertheless uses the proto-Jewish ancestor to show how Gentiles fit into the Judaic tradition. Hearing this read aloud, the Galatians’ visitors probably could not believe Paul’s audacity. In 3:19, Paul makes an equally bizarre claim: namely, that the Law “was added because of our transgression.” In other words, the Law was intended to provoke disobedience to God so that he would have no other choice but to send “the offspring,” Jesus, to rectify the matter.
According to Michael Goulder, Paul’s dilemma was “impossible” because he “believed two contradictory things.” The Law was God’s, yes, and as such the moral benchmark for Gentiles, but parts of it were no longer necessary. Paul often quoted the Hebrew Bible when he needed something to support his views but also believed that Jesus had rendered important parts of it obsolete. This was—and remains—a difficult argument to sustain. (The second-century philosopher Celsus was more than happy to point out the religious difficulty here: “Well, who is to be disbelieved—Moses or Jesus?”) Even Goulder, who is sympathetic to Paul, has unkind things to say about Paul’s reasoning in the third chapter of Galatians, which “is not a happy chapter. It is written by a man with his back to the wall….Even if Paul were justified in his claim that salvation is based on faith, the plain sense of scripture is that you should keep the Law as well.” The final third of Galatians finds him arguing that “the circumcised do not themselves obey the law,” a charge clearly launched out of desperation.
Anyone who has written or received a poison pen letter can chart the stages of Paul’s emotional journey throughout Galatians: factual appeal, attempted outreach, growing anger, and finally a barrage of insult. It ends with his attempting to clean the slate of the entire issue: “For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything.”
V.
Later Paul would take another run at the Law. The result was his letter to the Romans, probably his most brilliant and sustained intellectual statement, not to mention one of Western civilization’s central documents; Martin Luther considered it the “chief part of the New Testament” and “the purest gospel.” Romans is also, significantly, the one letter Paul wrote to a Christian community with which he had no direct experience. That personal distance is used to great rhetorical benefit.
One conclusion Paul comes to in Romans is this: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.” This is hardly what we would expect the author of Galatians to argue. Some scholars have wondered if Paul, when informed of his Galatian letter’s unfavorable reception, was forced to reevaluate his beliefs. We can be virtually certain that the borderline heresies of Galatians would have been shared with the Jerusalem church, to which Paul later pledged financial support from his wealthier Gentile converts. While Acts shows Paul, on his third and final visit to “the brothers” in Jerusalem at some point in the early 60s, being “warmly” welcomed, “the Jews from Asia” (who these shadowy figures might be is not explained) are not so forgiving. “This is the man,” the Asian Jews proclaim, “who is teaching everywhere against our people, our law, and this place.” They then “seized Paul and dragged him out of the Temple,” but while “they were trying to kill him,” Paul is said by Luke to have been rescued not by the brothers of the Jerusalem church, as one might expect, but by a Roman tribune and some soldiers, who put him into protective custody. From there, Paul is sent to Rome and, according to tradition, executed, an event unrecorded by the New Testament.
Yet, from a modern perspective, the disagreement between Paul and his opponents was not that profound. Paul accepted that those who were observant of the Law before coming to a belief in Jesus could remain under the Law. But what about those who were not under the Law before coming to a belief in Jesus? Did the Law apply to them at all? Belief in Jesus meant some abandonment of strict Judaic observance, but how much and to what degree? As far as we can tell, Jesus went only so far in the minds of many Jerusalem Christians, and the place at which their Jesus stopped was the Law. Their Jesus was in some way godly, their Jesus was resurrected (Paul grants his opponents belief in the resurrection), but he did not override the Law. He was, instead, a divine sacrifice made by God in order to forgive Israel its sins and welcome Gentiles into an amended pact. Paul’s Jesus was something more powerful yet: a cosmic reboot who annihilated all earthly difference.*9 As Paul wrote to the Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
We know what happened to Paul’s church, the spires and domes of which fill the cities of the Christian world.*10 The fate of the Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem church is more difficult to locate, though like a dying star their influence continued to pulse for centuries. Roughly four decades after Paul’s martyrdom (traditionally thought to have occurred around 65 CE), Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, while on his way to his own Roman martyrdom, wrote to his fellow Christians in the city of Philadelphia. Foremost on Ignatius’s otherwise occupied mind was this: “But if anyone expounds Judaism to you, do not listen to him. For it is better to hear about Christianity from a man who is circumcised than about Judaism from one who is not.” In other words, seven decades after the death of Jesus, Christianity’s apparently subordinate relationship to Judaism was still being debated, and the agitators, as we can see from Ignatius’s letter, were not always Jewish themselves but Gentiles convinced by the arguments of Paul’s opponents.
Remnant communities filled with the intellectual inheritors of Paul’s opponents developed their own body of (mostly vanished) literature throughout the second century and in many cases used Peter and James the brother of Jesus as their mouthpieces. The Epistle of Peter to James (a pseudepigraphic epistle), for instance, attacks any Law-less gospel as false. “For some from among the Gentiles have rejected my legal preaching,” “Peter” writes, “attaching themselves to certain lawless and trifling preaching of the man who is my enemy”—a clear reference to Paul. In a now-lost second-century apocryphal work known as The Ascent of James, a figure probably intended to be Paul attacks and badly wounds James on the steps of the Temple. The story, while clearly legendary and ahistorical, further establishes the toxicity of later Jewish Christian feelings toward Paul. Other, angrier Jewish Christians apparently went so far as to question whether Paul was a Jew at all. There may be something to this. If Paul, as he claimed, underwent rabbinical training as a Pharisee, why is the Jewish scripture with which he appears familiar the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew original? Would not his professed trade of tent making—which would have presumably brought him into frequent contact with forbidden tanned leathers—have been an odd occupation for a once-devout Jew to pursue? An especially spectacular example of the Jewish disownment of Paul, deemed heresy by the fourth-century Christian bishop Epiphanius, in whose work the charge survives, claims Paul was a Greek who converted to Judaism only to win the heart
of a young woman from Jerusalem. She was said to have spurned Paul, thus poisoning him against the faith.
VI.
As for the Jerusalem and Palestinian churches, what happened to their members cannot be reduced to any one event. One problem, it seems, was money. Acts describes Barnabas selling his Cypriot farm and giving the money to the Jerusalem church, which was apparently in keen need of funds. How seriously money was regarded by the early church can be seen from Acts’ sad story of Ananias and Sapphira, who sell their property but do not donate all the money to the church. The Holy Spirit quickly strikes them dead, one after the other, for withholding.
It would appear that many in the Jerusalem and Palestinian churches believed the end of the world was near, Jesus’s return was imminent, and money would no longer have any value. This profligate, fatalism-born charity attracted many followers, perhaps as many as three thousand, a number of whom were no doubt hungry, desperate people in search of a free meal. Within years, though, the tithes ran out, and the world had not ended; the Jerusalem church’s worries about money, and supporting its increasingly embattled community, became dire. This is one explanation for why, fifteen years later, the Pillars asked Paul to use his wealthy Gentile converts to help them financially, which, Paul claimed, “was actually what I was eager to do.”*11 Paul’s last, disastrous visit to Jerusalem, which ended with him in Roman chains, was supposed to see him deliver to the Jerusalem Christians these promised tithes. The New Testament is strangely silent as to whether the money was ever received.