Reading the Bible again for the First Time

by Marcus J. Borg

  The second reason for the small size of Paul’s communities was space limitation. These communities were “house churches” whose members met in private dwellings of two kinds: tenements (often with shops on the ground floor) or villas. A tenement or shop house church might meet in a space as small as ten-by-ten feet or as large as ten-by-twenty feet and thus could accommodate only a small group of people. A villa house church (possible only if one of the converts was wealthy enough to own a villa) would meet in the courtyard of a villa, which might accommodate as many as a hundred people.31

  Paul’s strategy also included moving on. Though he remained in Corinth and Ephesus for a couple years each, he generally moved on to a new city soon after a local community had been established. He also used a teamwork approach, not only traveling with other missionaries but also incorporating any Christians who already lived in a city into his efforts.

  Paul’s Letters Paul’s letters were an integral part of his life as an apostle and community-founder. Through them he kept in touch with his communities after he had moved on.32 They represented him in his absence, and they were read aloud in the gathering of the community. They were not intended for the silent reading of individuals but were addressed to the community, which heard them together.

  Paul’s letters are “conversations in context”—conversations with communities he founded in the context of his life as an apostle of Jesus.33 Indeed, they are only one-half of a conversation, for in them Paul is most often responding to a letter he has received from a community or to news of that community he has heard by other means.

  This recognition is essential to reading the letters, and it has more than one implication. It means that we should not see Paul’s letters as a summary of his message. With one exception (Romans), Paul does not use his letters for that purpose, since he is writing to people who have already heard his message in person. Thus the content of his letters has little to do with what he thinks most important and more to do with specific issues arising within his communities. The agenda for Paul’s letters is set not by him but by them. This helps us to understand why his letters often treat issues that seem obscure or relatively unimportant to us—why, for example, he spends more time writing about whether women should be veiled in Christian gatherings, or whether one may eat food that has been sacrificed to idols, than he does writing about the teaching of Jesus.34

  Moreover, as Paul responds to a letter he has received, he sometimes quotes or echoes words from it. When we do not realize this, serious misunderstanding can result. A classic example occurs in I Corinthians:

  Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.35

  How much of this is Paul’s point of view? In particular, does the second sentence—“It is well for a man not to touch a woman”—express Paul’s position, or is it a point of view expressed in the letter to which he is responding? Ancient Greek does not use quotation marks, so the text does not tell us.

  If we see it as Paul’s point of view, then it follows that Paul sees sexuality as less desirable than abstinence and his acceptance of sexual behavior as a concession to human weakness. Through most of the Christian centuries, the passage has been read this way (no wonder, then, that Paul has been thought of as anti-sex and that Christians have often struggled with sexuality). But if Paul is quoting from a letter sent to him, then he is countering the statement rather than affirming it. (Try it; note the difference it makes to put quotation marks around the second sentence.) Modern scholars are virtually unanimous that this is the correct way to read it.36*

  The Post-Damascus Paul: His Message

  Now I am sitting beside a small stream just outside the city wall of ancient Philippi in northern Greece. It is very quiet here. Though Philippi was an important city in antiquity, it is now a magnificent ruin, and few people are here on this day in May. The meadows around the ruins are full of red-orange poppies. According to the book of Acts, it was next to this stream that Paul made his first convert in Europe. Her name was Lydia, and she was a businesswoman and a dealer in purple cloth, much prized in the ancient world. She was, Acts tells us, a “worshiper of God,” a God-fearer, one of those Gentiles attracted to Judaism and the God of Israel.

  And as I sit here, I wonder, What did Paul say to Lydia? Acts does not tell us. It compresses the story into a few verses:

  On the sabbath day we [referring to Paul and his missionary companions Silas and Timothy, and possibly the narrator as a fourth] went outside the gate [of Philippi] by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. Then she and her household were baptized.37

  So what did Paul say to her? My question may seem fruitless to some, because we do not know the answer and have no way of learning it. But to me the question seems useful, for it raises the more general question of what Paul’s message was. What was it that appealed to a Gentile God-fearer like Lydia to such an extent that she became part of a new form of Judaism?

  I assume that Paul talked to her more than once. It is hard to believe that Lydia made such a momentous decision after one conversation. As a God-fearer, Lydia would have known something about the practices, beliefs, and hopes of Judaism, including the notion of a messiah. Her familiarity with Judaism would have been the framework for their conversations.

  As I try to imagine what Paul most likely said, three things occur to me. First, Paul would have told her that Jesus was the messiah. But for this to mean anything to her, he would also have had to tell her about the kind of person Jesus was. Otherwise, the claim that Jesus was the messiah would have been a cipher, a claim without content. Thus I assume that what Jesus was like—his subversive wisdom, his healings, his passion for social justice for the poor and marginalized, his indictment of the domination system, his goodness—mattered to Paul and would have been central to his message.38

  Second, after telling her about Jesus, Paul would have said, “And then the rulers crucified him.” As Paul emphasized in his writings, and I will emphasize later, “Christ crucified” was utterly central to Paul. And third, I imagine Paul would have told her his own conversion story: that he had been hostile to Jesus and the Jesus movement; that Jesus had then appeared to him in a vision, just as he had appeared to others; and that this meant that God had vindicated Jesus as messiah and Lord.

  There would be more, of course, especially that the community of Jesus was open to both Jew and Gentile: that one could become part of this Jewish community without observing the sharp boundaries that separated Jews from Gentiles. This was certainly part of the appeal of Paul’s message.

  Paul may also have told her that the end of the age was at hand. He believed that Jesus would return soon, though the heart of his message does not seem to have been, “Repent, for the last judgment is coming soon.”39* He does not sound like an “end of the world” evangelist as we think of such people today. His emphasis seems to have been that God through Jesus had inaugurated a new age and that the rule of “the powers” (including the reign of the Roman empire) would soon be over.

  I have begun by trying to imagine Paul’s conversation with Lydia because, as already mentioned, I do not think that Paul’s letters contain the whole of his message. Nor do I think that he replaced the message of Jesus with his own. Rather, I think that he added to the message of Jesus his own post-Easter and post-Damascus convictions and conclusions. Like other major figures in the biblical tradition, he conveys a message that has both religious and political meanings, both spiritual and social dimensions. To some of the central themes of Paul’s post-Easter under
standing and message I now turn.

  “Jesus is Lord”

  For Paul, the central meaning of his experience of the risen Christ was “Jesus is Lord.” Both affirmations—Jesus lives, and Jesus is Lord—were immediate inferences from his Damascus Road experience; indeed, perhaps one should say that they were given with the experience. Thus for Paul the resurrection of Jesus was not primarily about an afterlife through the defeat of death. Nor was its central meaning that we also will be raised someday; as a Pharisee, the pre-Damascus Paul had already believed that. Rather, Easter meant, in an affirmation that Paul shared with the Jesus movement as a whole, “Jesus is Lord.”

  Paul refers to Jesus as “Lord” (Greek: kyrios, pronounced “kurios”) with great frequency. He uses that designation more often than “Son” or “Son of God,” for example; indeed, he uses it more often than any other affirmation about Jesus other than “Christ” (meaning “messiah”), which for Paul is virtually Jesus’ second name. For Paul, “Jesus is Lord” is the primary confession of Jesus’ significance and status.40

  The connection between Jesus’ resurrection, his status as Lord, and the cosmic extent of his lordship is magnificently made in a passage from Paul’s letter to the Philippians that is probably based on a pre-Pauline hymn of praise. Immediately after it speaks of the death of Jesus, it affirms that God “exalted” Jesus, which means “raised up”; and it then speaks of Jesus’ dominion as Lord as extending through all three levels of the three-story universe of the ancient worldview:

  Therefore God also highly exalted him

  and gave him the name that is above every name,

  so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,

  in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

  and every tongue should confess

  that Jesus Christ is Lord,

  to the glory of God the Father.41

  In the first century, “Lord”/kyrios had a range of meanings along a “spectrum of dignity.”42 Four of these meanings are the most relevant:

  It was a term of respect—one that could, for example, be used to address a teacher. This use is reflected in the synoptic gospels when Jesus is occasionally addressed as Lord.

  It was a term used by slaves to address their master.

  It was used as a term for gods, including the God of Israel. In particular, in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, kyrios was used as the name of God.

  It was also one of the titles of the Roman emperor: Caesar is Lord.

  Thus, in Paul’s world, calling Jesus “Lord” had both religious and sociopolitical meanings (and the two were connected in ways that we often separate in the modern world).

  Though I think Paul would agree that Jesus as teacher may properly be addressed as “Lord,” as the first meaning suggests, this use does not play much (if any) role in Paul’s message. But the rest of the meanings are present.

  If Jesus is Lord, masters of slaves are not. In a passage to which I will return, Paul affirmed the second meaning of “Lord”/kyrios, saying that in Christ Jesus “there is no longer Jew or Gentile, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.”43 In calling Jesus “Lord,” Paul also affirmed that the risen Christ participated in the power and authority of God and that the other gods were not lords—the third meaning of “Lord”/kyrios.44

  This affirmation and negation also countered the imperial ideology in which “Lord”/kyrios (in its fourth meaning) referred to the Roman emperor. When applied to the emperor, the term not only highlighted his political role but also suggested divine status. Thus to say “Jesus is Lord” meant “Caesar is not Lord”; the statement affirmed the status of Jesus even as it challenged the imperial domination system. There is, as recent scholarship shows, an anti-imperial theology at the center of Paul’s understanding of the lordship of Christ.45 Religion and politics are combined for Paul, as for Moses, the prophets, and Jesus: the domination system is not lord. Rather, Jesus, whom God has vindicated and exalted as the disclosure of God, is Lord. Thus the affirmation claims both our religious and our political loyalties.

  “In Christ”

  The short phrase “in Christ” is one of the two most important metaphors Paul uses for his vision of the Christian life. (The other is “justification by grace,” which we will consider next.) In his letters, Paul uses “in Christ” (including the phrase “in the Lord”) 165 times and the roughly synonymous phrase “in the Spirit” about twenty times. As a metaphor for the Christian life, “in Christ” has several dimensions of meaning. I begin with its opposite.

  Life “in Adam” Paul is a dialectical thinker; he often thinks in contrasts or oppositions. The opposite of life “in Christ” is life “in Adam.” The two metaphors refer to different and sharply contrasting ways of life: humanity “in Adam” is nothing like humanity “in Christ.”

  Life “in Adam” is one of Paul’s primary metaphors for the human condition. Within the sacred imagination of the Hebrew Bible, Adam is the first human, the being whose primal act in the Garden of Eden began the human story of grasping, exile, sin, and death. Adam sought to seize or grasp equality with God.46 The result was exile from paradise and lost intimacy with God. Life “in Adam” is thus the life of separation or estrangement from God.

  It is also the life of sin and death, which Paul says came into the world through Adam. What does he mean by this? Does he mean simply that, beginning with Adam, people started sinning and dying, and they have been sinning and dying ever since? No, his language is too strong for that: he calls sin and death “powers” that have “dominion” over us. What does he have in mind? Is sin a “power”? Do we experience it as a “power”?

  I do not know if everybody does, but I strongly suspect that Paul did—and that’s why he uses this language.47 To explain by contrast, there is a “free will” understanding of sin: we are free in each situation to choose right or wrong. When we choose the wrong, we have sinned. But this is not how Paul understood matters. Rather, life “in Adam” is life under the dominion of sin. Sin controls us; we are not free.

  Paul describes the lordship of sin over life “in Adam” in an extended and powerful passage. Though sometimes interpreted autobiographically, the “I” of the passage is best understood as referring to what life “in Adam” is like for anybody. It is a life of bondage and internal conflict.48

  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. The good that I would do, I do not do; but the evil that I would not do, that I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

  Life “in Adam” is “captive to the law of sin”; it is not free. For Paul, we are not sinners because we do wrong things; rather, we do wrong things because sin rules over life “in Adam.”49 Paul concludes this impassioned passage with the words, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”50 Paul’s metaphor of life “in Adam” thus combines central images for the human condition in the Hebrew Bible: sin, death, exile, and bondage.

  Life “in Christ” Life “in Christ” is the opposite of the above. It is the new way of being that Paul knew in his own experience and that he sought to incarnate in the life of his communities. To be “in Christ” is to be free, no longer enslaved to the dominion of sin and death.51 Strikingly, “freedom” is for Paul one of the most central characteristics of the Christian life. It means being reconciled with God and thus brings the end of exile.52

  To be “in Christ” is to live in the presence of God as Christ lives in the presence of God. In language that continues to echo the theme of creation and Adam, to be “in Christ” is to be a new creation:

  Whoever is in Christ is a new creation. Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to God through Christ.53

  The contrast between life “in Adam” and life “in Christ” is the same as P
aul’s contrast between “life according to the flesh” and “life according to the Spirit.”54 The contrast is not between physical life and spiritual life, as if the former were bad and the latter good. “Flesh” here does not mean our physical bodies, as if there were something wrong with physical existence or enjoying our bodies. Rather, “life according to the flesh” and “life according to the Spirit” refer to “life in Adam” and “life in Christ” as two ways of living our embodied existence. Paul’s list describing the former does include what are often thought of as bodily sins: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, drunkenness, and carousing.” But it also includes traits that cannot be reduced to indulging our bodies: “idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, and envy.”55

  On the other hand, the characteristics of life according to the Spirit—life “in Christ”—are “freedom” and “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” They are not achievements of the will but “the fruit of the Spirit.”56 Even more compactly, in the familiar language of Paul’s great love poem in I Corinthians 13 set in the context of spiritual gifts, life in the Spirit is marked by “faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.”57