The Triumph of Christianity Page 7

  We obviously don’t know what Paul actually saw. How can we possibly know? What he fervently claimed was that he saw Jesus himself, alive again. Believers would say that was because Jesus actually appeared to him. Unbelievers would say he imagined it. Either way, it is crystal clear that he believed he did see Jesus and that this radically changed his thinking.

  THE IMPLICATIONS OF PAUL’S VISION

  It is easiest to understand Paul’s subsequent missionary activities and evangelistic message by realizing how an appearance of the living Jesus would force him from “fact” to “implications.” For him the “fact” was that Jesus was alive again, as he knew from having seen him. From there Paul started reasoning backward. This backward reasoning must have proceeded through a number of steps ending in a remarkable place: Paul came to believe that he himself had been chosen and commissioned by God to fulfill the predictions of Jewish Scripture. Divinely inspired prophecies delivered centuries earlier were looking forward to his day, his labors, and him personally. Paul cannot be faulted for thinking small.

  Here is how the thought process appears to have worked.14 Paul started with the “fact” that Jesus was alive again. Since Paul also knew that Jesus had died by crucifixion, his reappearance meant that he had experienced a resurrection. God performed a miracle by raising Jesus from the dead. If God raised Jesus from the dead, that would mean that Jesus really was the one who stood under God’s special favor, the one chosen by God. But if he was in God’s special favor, why would God let him be executed? Would God require him to be tortured to death? Is this what God does to the one he favors? What does he do to his enemies?

  The matter was even more complicated for Paul, because Jesus did not die just any death or even just any excruciating death. He was killed on a wooden cross. That was a particular problem, because Paul knew full well that Scripture itself pronounces God’s curse on anyone who dies on a tree, as Paul himself indicates in Galatians 3:13; quoting Deuteronomy 21:23: “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” If Jesus was the one blessed by God, how could he be the one cursed by God? Paul drew what for him was the natural conclusion: Jesus must not have died for anything he himself had done wrong, since God favored him. He was not being cursed for his own deeds. He must have been cursed for the deeds of others.

  As a good citizen of the ancient world, and a good Jew in particular, Paul was perfectly familiar with the theology of sacrificial death. Living beings, including four-footed animals, are chosen to be sacrificed for a variety of reasons: to honor God, to appease God’s anger, or to cover over the sins of others. They are not killed because they themselves have done anything to deserve death. Jesus, then, must have been a sacrifice, one who suffered not because of his own misdoings but because of the misdoings of other people. Why was that necessary? As Paul continued to think backward, he concluded Jesus’s death must not have been an accident or a gross miscarriage of justice. His death must have appeased God’s anger toward others or covered over their sins. If that was the case, then his death must have been part of God’s own plan for dealing with the human race. People needed a sacrifice for their sins, and Jesus provided it. God then honored Jesus’s act of sacrifice by raising him from the dead.

  Then came a further and all-important thought. If the salvation of God came by the death and resurrection of Jesus, this must be how God had planned all along to save his chosen people. That must mean that salvation could not come in any other way—for example, by the zealous adherence to the prescriptions of the Jewish law. If salvation could come by belonging to the covenantal community of the chosen people, or by keeping the Law of Moses, there would be no reason for God’s messiah to have suffered an excruciating death. Following the law thus must have no bearing on how a person stands in a right relationship with God.

  That in turn had inordinately significant implications. If the law had no bearing on a person’s standing before God, then being a Jew could not be required for those who wanted to belong to God’s people and enjoy his gracious act of salvation. The only requirement was trusting in the sacrificial atonement provided by Christ. That in turn meant that the message of salvation was not for Jews alone—although it certainly was for them, since it was through the Jewish messiah sent to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the plans of the Jewish god as set forth, Paul came to realize, in the Jewish Scriptures. But the message was not only for Jews. It was for all people, Jew and gentile. And it came to gentiles apart from observing the Jewish law.

  Thus, to be members of God’s covenantal people, it was not necessary for gentiles to become Jews. They did not need to be circumcised, observe the Sabbath, keep kosher, or follow any of the other prescriptions of the law. They needed only to believe in the death and resurrection of the messiah Jesus. This was an earth-shattering realization for Paul. Prior to this, the followers of Jesus—the first Christians—were of course Jews who understood that he was the messiah who had died and been raised from the dead. But they knew this as the act of the Jewish god given to his people, the Jews. Certainly gentiles could find this salvation as well. But first they had to be Jewish. Not for Paul. Jew or gentile, it did not matter. What mattered was faith in Christ.

  Once Paul came to realize this, he was blinded yet again by a further insight. Throughout the prophets of Scripture can be found predictions that at the end of time God would bring outsiders into the fold of the people of God as gentiles flock to the good news that comes forth from his chosen ones, the message delivered through his Jewish people. The prophet Isaiah had said:

  In days to come, the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the world of the LORD from Jerusalem. (Isaiah 2:2–3)

  The prophecy of Isaiah was coming true in Paul’s own day. Or consider the words of the prophet Zechariah:

  Many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem . . . . In those days ten people from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” (Zechariah 8:22–23)

  God had predicted that gentiles would come to the salvation that transpired in Jerusalem. Where had Jesus been killed? Jerusalem. How was the message to go forth? It would be preached by Jews, or a Jew, to outsiders. Paul may well have thought specifically of famous words about God’s special servant, spoken by the Lord himself, again in the book of Isaiah:

  I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness. I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness . . . .

  I will give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. (Isaiah 42:6–7; 49:6)

  Who is this one who was “called in righteousness” to preach God’s salvation as a “light to the nations”? Remember how Paul describes his conversion experience in Galatians 1: God “called me through his grace” and “in order that I might preach him among the gentiles” (Galatians 1:15–16). Paul was the one God had called to take his message of salvation afield. Paul’s calling to preach was anticipated in the Jewish Scriptures. Paul himself was the fulfillment of prophecy. He was the one God had chosen to bring salvation to the world, through his proclamation of Jesus’s death and resurrection.

  A number of scholars over the years have suggested that, rather than speaking of Paul’s “conversion,” we should instead speak of his “call.” Part of the logic behind this suggestion is that it is misguided to think Paul left one religion, Judaism, in order to adopt another, Christianity. It is widely acknowledged among Pauline scholars today th
at this is absolutely right. As Paul’s recent biographer, J. Albert Harrill, has expressed it, “Paul thus did not change from Judaism to ‘Christianity’ in the sense of a faith apart from the religion of Israel.”15 In other words, Paul did not see himself as switching religions. He came to realize that Christ was the fulfillment of Judaism, of everything that God had planned and revealed within the sacred Jewish Scriptures. God had not abandoned the Jews or vacated the Jewish religion; Christ himself had not opposed the Jewish faith or proposed to start something new. Christ stood in absolute continuity with all that went before. But, for Paul, without Christ the Jewish faith was incomplete and imperfect. Christ was the goal to which that faith had long striven, and now he had arrived. And Paul was his prophet.

  Even while granting that Paul saw himself principally as one who was “called,” we should not jettison too quickly the term “conversion” for what he experienced. True, in his own eyes he did not stop being a Jew or think he was preaching a message at odds with Judaism. But he did “turn around”—the literal meaning of “conversion”—making a radical change in his understanding of that religion and, even more obviously, in his understanding of Christ, rejecting his earlier view of Jesus as condemned by God and coming to see him as God’s messiah. And so possibly it is best to consider his experience as both a call and a conversion.

  Whatever terms we use, it was a cataclysmic change, astounding in its heightened self-understanding. God had commissioned Paul to take this gospel message to the gentiles. For Paul, this was not merely an interesting career choice. It was the completion of God’s plan for the human race. Paul’s mission had been predicted by the prophets of old, in anticipation of the coming kingdom of God. Paul was to bring the history of the world to its preordained climax.

  PAUL’S MISSIONARY STRATEGY

  The received wisdom that Paul engaged in “three missionary journeys” derives from the accounts in the book of Acts. The final two-thirds of the book (chapters 13 to 28) are principally devoted to these journeys and the arrest and trials of Paul that came in their wake. In his own writings, Paul never mentions a specific number of missionary endeavors, but at one point he does intimate a missionary strategy. In what was probably the last of his surviving letters—and the only one addressed to a church that by his own admission he did not found, the letter to the Romans—he looks back on the missionary work already done: “I have completed my preaching of the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem to Illyricum” (Romans 15:19).

  Here Paul is sketching an arc of missionary proclamation from the capital of Judea to the northwestern Balkans. As it turns out, nowhere in his letters does Paul indicate that he spent time in Jerusalem trying to convert anyone; on the contrary, he makes it quite clear that he understood himself to be the missionary to the gentiles, leaving the Jewish mission to the disciple Peter and others (Galatians 2:7–9). We also have no record of him taking his mission to Illyricum. We do, however, have clear and certain evidence that he established churches in areas between these two points.16

  It cannot be stressed enough that Paul’s mission was entirely to cities, at least so far as we know.17 That only makes sense: Paul clearly wanted to reach as many people as possible. Unlike Jesus, who preached in hamlets, villages, and remote areas of rural Galilee, Paul focused on urban centers, where populations were the most dense. His letters mention Christian communities in such places as Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Colossae, Laodicea, Ephesus, and the region of Galatia.

  Among other things, this means he was traveling a lot. One scholar has pointed out that, in the book of Acts alone, Paul’s journeys cover some ten thousand miles.18 That is not implausible. The Roman road system was extensive and well maintained and it was a time of virtual peace on the interior of the empire. Ancient ships could cover a hundred miles a day; ordinary travelers on foot probably fifteen or twenty. On the whole, international travel was more popular and feasible in the Roman Empire than at any time in previous history, and more than in all the centuries to follow until the Industrial Revolution.

  It is difficult to discern a pattern in Paul’s travels, but his general principle appears clear. Either alone or, more commonly, with Christian companions, he would come to a new city, make converts, start a worshiping community, and instruct the new members in the basics of the faith. When he judged the church could survive and thrive on its own, he would then move on to the next place. He thus established churches in major urban settings one after the other—principally provincial capitals and Roman colonies—by converting gentiles to believe in the god of the Jews and in Christ as his son who died for the sins of the world and was raised from the dead.

  Clearly Paul seems to have understood himself to be “planting” churches, as he himself states in his letter to the Christians in Corinth (1 Corinthians 3:6). Once planted, the church would grow by accumulating new members. After Paul journeyed onward he continued to be invested in the communal lives of the churches he left behind. That is demonstrated by the letters themselves as he responds to problems that have arisen in one community or another over what to believe and how to behave. He was not one to stay too long in one location. He had a gospel to preach and he needed to take it where it had not yet been proclaimed. As he writes: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call upon one in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe if they have not heard? And how can they hear without one who preaches?” (Romans 10:13–15) He was the preacher, the one who brought the word of faith.

  The ultimate goal of his mission was, in his words, that “the full number of gentiles” would come into the faith (Romans 11:25). Paul saw himself as the one responsible for making it happen. We do not know his master strategy, given his inability to be everywhere at once. Possibly he planned to preach in one region and then the next—not in every city and town in the region, but in major urban centers—anticipating that the churches he planted would not just grow but would also fertilize the areas around them, leading to new growths and more expansion. Were that to work, the entire region, and eventually every entire region, would be filled with believers in Jesus.

  When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans from the Greek city of Corinth, he indicated that he no longer had “any room for work in these regions” (Romans 15:23). He evidently meant in the entire eastern Mediterranean, since he then mentioned his plan to use Rome as a stopping point before moving on to preach in Spain. It appears that Rome was to be a base of operations from which to evangelize the western empire. Spain was as far west as he could go. Some scholars have plausibly argued that this was his ultimate objective. Recall that Isaiah had predicted the good news of God’s salvation would be taken to “the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6, quoted by Paul in Acts 13:47). Was Spain the end of the earth? Paul may have well thought so, believing that, once he established the church there, the last days would be near when “the full number of the gentiles” had come in and “all Israel” would “be saved” (Romans 11:25–26). If so, this is heady stuff. In the words of one Pauline scholar, Paul himself had become “the central figure in the story of salvation.”19

  PAUL’S MODUS OPERANDI

  It is difficult to know for certain how Paul conducted his mission on the ground. He was moving to cities that, so far as we can tell, he had never visited before, and trying to convert strangers to the faith. He apparently succeeded a good deal. But how did he do it?

  We should not think that Paul staged “tent revivals” like a traveling American evangelist in the nineteenth or twentieth century. There is no reference to any such undertaking in his letters or even in Acts. The public speeches in Acts are almost always occasioned by a random and fortuitous event, such as a public miracle. They are not organized in advance.

  It is theoretically possible that Paul acted on a more ad hoc basis, entering a public space and preaching, as it were, from a soapbox. But that too seems unlikely, both because the success rate would surely be inordinately low and because nei
ther Acts nor Paul himself says anything of the sort.

  More plausibly, it has been suggested that Paul would attend the local synagogue during services on Sabbath and use the occasion as a visitor in town to proclaim his good news about Jesus the messiah. After making some converts, according to this scenario, Paul would then use the synagogue as a kind of base of operations to begin reaching pagans in the community.

  A strategy like this makes a good deal of sense. For someone new in town, the obvious first place to go would be where one could make contacts with people from similar backgrounds. And for a Jew who had just arrived, no better place would exist than one of the local synagogues. Moreover, as we saw at the outset of this chapter, Paul had been punished in synagogues, evidently flogged within an inch of his life on five separate occasions. Paul was no stranger to hostile Jewish environments, presumably in cities he was attempting to evangelize.

  On the other hand, it cannot be overemphasized that Paul sees himself as a missionary not to Jews but to gentiles. In addition, it would have been very difficult to use a synagogue as a base of operations if everyone there, including the leaders who wielded the power and the whip, hated you and wanted to beat some good sense into you. Also, contrary to what one might think, there is little indeed to suggest that the communities of believers that Paul addressed comprised both Jews and gentiles. When he refers to his converts’ former religious lives, it is to their worship of pagan gods. As he reminds the Corinthians: “You know that when you were pagans you were led astray by idols that could not speak” (1 Corinthians 12:2). So too when he recalls to the Thessalonians that they used to worship “dead idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). The entire letter to the Galatians is predicated on the fact that the readers are gentile Christians being told by false teachers to begin practicing the ways of Judaism. These are all churches filled with pagan converts. So where did Paul meet them?