Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part Three)

The first two portions of this essay can be found in the archive to the right under October 2009.

Intertwined into Paul’s discourse on the nature of sin and the judgment that must accompany it is the difficult question of how redemption under the Law (for Jews) and redemption through Faith (for non-Jews) can be reconciled. The early Christian congregations were largely composed of what Luke repeatedly refers to as God-fearing pagans. As Jews, and thus the worship of the One God, spread throughout the Mediterranean, peoples who prided themselves on being universally religious (and universally tolerant) saw little reason to exclude the Jewish God from the potential options of gods to be acknowledged and, under certain circumstances, worshipped.

The unique covenant between the Jews and their God, however, made it impossible for non-Jews to fully participate in worship and the process of going from Gentile to Jew was a perilous journey, especially for adult men. What Paul was providing, through his Gospel, was an opportunity for those God-fearers not only to participate fully and more easily in the worship of the Jewish God but also to do so in a manner that he puts forward as inherently superior to the original model. None may hope to fully obey the law but all who would believe can receive baptism and salvation in the name of Jesus Christ.

Still, it would be both impolitic and a little ridiculous for him to assert that the Law was always an inadequate tool for salvation. After all, Jesus himself was a Jew who observed the Law as were all of Paul’s ancestors. Consequently, he must create a model that both embraces and repudiates the Law. He begins, writing that:

All who sin apart from the law will perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. [Acts 2:12,13]

Despite his assertion here that there is an equal dispensation of grace for those who follow the law as those who might, instead, become righteous through a belief in Jesus, he continues later to suggest that the law was only given by God so that humanity might understand that it was sinful. It did not free anyone from their sinful nature as Paul laments that though “I delight in God’s law…I see another law at work…waging war against the law of the mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work in my members” [7:22,33]. As long as the mind remains trapped in the body of sin, it, at best, remains in a constant stalemate with impure urges. Righteousness achieved through belief in Jesus, however, yields something different and, by Paul’s reckoning, better.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit. [8:1-4]

The last of Paul’s central themes in his Epistle to the Romans is Love. Paul’s first examination of love focuses God’s love for humanity. God’s wrath is directed at the sin, though his judgment upon it is meted out upon the sinner. His love, however, is saved for his obedient creations and, Paul writes, that God “has poured out his love into our hearts” [5:5] and that He “demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” [5:8]. It is because we are beloved by God that He has slowly unfolded a plan for our redemption, despite Adam’s disobedience that allowed sin and death to reign in His stead.

Paul’s primary concerns about love, however, reside in his assertion that believers should espouse and manifest it as evidence of their transformation through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. “Love,” he insists, “must be sincere” [12:9] and the believer should:

…let no debt remain standing, except for the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law…whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. [13:8-10]

Love, for Paul then, is not only an expression of the Holy Spirit at work inside of an otherwise turbulent human nature but is a pathway to peace. This stands in ideological opposition to the prevailing Roman ideology that Peace might only be obtained through Victory. As such, Christianity is offered not only as an alternative to a half-righteousness through a half-observance of the law but also to a world seemingly consumed by never-ending war in search of a peace that never comes.

Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part Two)

The first part of this essay can be accessed in the archives under October 2009.

Having defined sin as turning away from God, Paul creates a causal relationship between sin and death by offering Adam’s mortality as precedent and every death since as proof of sin’s universality. The “wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity” [1:29] that one normally associates with sinful behavior is presented more as a symptom of death than sins in and of themselves. By the reasoning, Paul writes, that “death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command” [5:14].

It is during this first period that Paul finds the inspiration for his own gospel of salvation for the Gentiles. Though no Law yet existed, Abraham was able to attain righteousness (or cleansing of sin) through his faith in the existence and omnipotence of God. This justification (literally, to be made just) through faith serves as Paul’s model for non-Jewish salvation as he notes that “Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness” [4:9] As Abraham exhibited that faith before he entered into the covenant with God, outwardly manifested through circumcision, “he is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised, in order that righteousness might be credited to them” [4:11].

As for the Law, Paul argues that it serves only to make one aware of sin, while doing nothing to compensate for humanity’s inherently sinful nature. In fact, The Law made being human (or at least being Jewish) more intolerable as it defined precisely what actions were sinful so that those who broke it (ie everyone) could understand why they were being punished with death. For Paul, that is what law does. It defines negative behavior and then assigns the appropriate punishment for it. Deprived of the option of being truly cleansed of sin, humanity is/was lost to a spiral of unmet expectations.

We know that the law is spiritual, but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living with me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my spiritual nature. For I have the desire to do good, but I cannot carry it out. [7:14-18]

The only solution, by this arrangement is in becoming a slave to something other than sin; a new possibility created by God in the resurrection of Jesus. Just as Abraham’s righteousness was “credited to him” by virtue of his faith in God and exhibited outwardly through circumcision, so may the believer, then, have righteousness credited to them by virtue of their faith in Jesus the Christ, as exhibited through a baptism in his name. Now while we can easily understand while the ritual pruning of a man’s foreskin might impress the sincerity of his faith upon an otherwise skeptical God, what is it about baptism specifically that conveys righteousness upon its recipients?

The key, for Paul, is remarkably simple in its construction. Death is the sentence for sin which itself is universal to the human condition. In dying, Jesus paid the literal price for his own sins (death) but, in resurrection, is now free from humanity’s sinful nature. Baptism in his name, then, is a baptism “into his death” [6:3], creating a new state of righteousness wherein one’s “old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—as anyone who has died has been freed from sin” [6:6,7].

The first half of that argument is so easily answered by common sense that it is hardly an argument at all for no reasonable person, whatever their belief, could argue that the dead might be capable of continuing to sin past the end of their life. This argument only remains ironclad, however, if one does not suppose that a person might be raised from the dead because, as far as anyone could really tell, it had never happened. That is what makes the belief in Christ’s resurrection so critical to the foundation of Christian belief. If one can believe that God made a special exception in raising Jesus from the dead and allowed him to ascend into heaven with his now-sinless nature intact, then it is just as reasonable to assume that He did so in order that humanity might be baptized into that death that they might escape their hitherto inescapable sinful nature as well. In that belief, the believer dies to their old self and is reborn, with Jesus’s sinless nature indwelt within them, into a new condition by which they are no longer a slave to sin but a slave to righteousness.

In one sense, sin carries out its own form of Judgment in that it is the root cause of death. Salvation from sin, according to Paul, goes beyond merely freeing the believer from their naturally sinful state. If justice can be said to exist, then it must exist in its highest form within any God responsible for creating all things. This means that in addition to death, which is caused by sin, sinners must also undergo a separate judgment by God whereby they are again punished for their sins. Those with clearly formed pictures of fiery lakes and eternal damnation may be surprised to find how vague Paul is, at least in his Epistle to the Romans, about when that judgment will take place and what form it will take.

In the opening chapter, Paul underscores the urgency of his gospel by proclaiming that the “wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men” [1:18]. Initially, it appears that this wrath is the catalyst for all the forms of evil and depravity that humans naturally embrace, with the final judgment being death itself, the “wages” of all sin. Later, though, Paul adds on a second component when he speaks of “the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” [2:5]. He reveals no details about when this day of judgment is due to occur, only saying that there “will be great trouble and distress for every human being who does evil” [2:9] on this day when “’God will give to each person according to what he has done’” [2:6].

The foundation of Paul’s theology is that everyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, has committed sin and, because of that sin, is condemned to die. Paul believes that Jesus will return to usher in a new era of divine peace on Earth and that, in so doing, would reunite the living and the dead for judgment under God’s authority. While evidence outside of the Epistle to the Romans also suggests that Paul believed this would happen within his lifetime, he is vague about that aspect of Jesus’s return saying only that it would “take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ as my gospel declares” [2:16].

Thus when Paul declares the necessity of salvation, he is essentially arguing on two different fronts simultaneously. Humanity must be saved from its own sinful nature because the effect of sin is death and death, as we all know, is bad. Humanity must also be saved from God’s judgment by being justified into righteousness through baptism into Jesus’s death. As Jesus became sinless and righteous in transcending death, so must each believer embrace the atonement that his death represents in order to shield them from God’s holy judgment. Without the resurrection, none may hope to become righteous enough in God’s eyes to avoid punishment but, in seeking righteousness through Christ, all may hope to receive “glory, honor and peace” [2:10].

Great Books: Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Part One)

Epistle to the Romans by Paul of Tarsus
Time: Written in the middle of the first century of the Common Era.
Location: Most probably Corinth.
Great Ideas: Sin, Judgment, and Love

This essay will quote from the New International Version of Romans which can be found in its entirety online here.

Paul’s contributions to the New Testament are so tantalizing because he represents the first time that a shaper of the gospel of Christ is allowed to speak to us directly. This is not to say that no one had written on or about Christ before Paul fired up his amanuensis and became, in the literary sense, himself immortal. There is evidence that a variety of documents (a “Sayings” Gospel, a “Miracles” gospel, a “Cross” gospel) were produced by the early fold of believers who emerged on the other side of Jesus’s crucifixion and proclaimed his resurrection. Those writings, however, were eventually synthesized, redacted, and expanded upon by writers who were approaching the topic decades after the fact; each with their own brand of theology to promote and set of narratives to which they attended. The Gospels, in this sense, represent work by committee even if the final product was penned and shaped by one man or woman’s hand.

More treacherously, from a critical analysis standpoint, not every Epistle attributed to Paul is inarguably his own work. An examination of the merits of the various sides of that particular argument is in order if one seeks to fully appreciate who Paul was and what his message means. That discussion is only necessary, however, if one is writing on the whole of Paul’s work or writing about an Epistle whose authorship might be worthy of some scrutiny. Gratefully, no doubt for writer and reader alike, we are not.

Paul’s Epistle to the Romans must be appreciated as one of the cornerstones of Christian theology, if not the document that defines what Christianity is and how it differs from the Jewish and Hellenic traditions that Paul synthesizes even while repudiating them. It captures a tectonic moment in the development of human thought in a manner that is passionate and unimpeachably sincere; sometimes breathtaking in its concise but elegantly structured arguments. It bears the voice of a mind possessed by genius which, if Romans' historical bonafides weren’t already impeccable, might be the most compelling argument for its attribution to as an actual work of Paul’s.

It is a work that serves many functions. It is a declaration of Paul’s intention to assert his theological influence on the congregation of believers who lived in Rome. It is an introduction to the basic principles of his unique gospel (or “good news”) for those who would hear it. It includes pragmatic advice on how to deal with different tensions that might arise within the church. It deals directly with the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and Paul draws heavily from the Torah to legitimize his claim that Judaism should cede to The Way described in his gospel of baptism in the death of the resurrected Jesus Christ. While all of these goals shape and contribute to the Epistle to the Romans, three Great Ideas adequately house most of Paul’s themes and provide us with adequate structure to examine the work thematically rather than in a more limited linear fashion. To this end, we’ll examine Paul’s writings in Romans on the topics of Sin, Judgment, and Love.

The first task that a writer (whether physicist, theologian, or philosopher) must face in dealing in abstractions is to define, with as much precision as language might allow, the parameters of their interpretation of a given term. Paul’s gospel hinges its urgency upon the idea that every human being is sinful and is in need of redemption through Jesus in order to escape God’s judgment. To accept even the premise of the argument, the onus is on Paul to first explain what sin is and why salvation from might be necessary before we might consider the efficacy of the solution that he provides to its inexhaustible influence.

Though his descriptions of behaviors that arise from sin are more eye-popping on the page (and thus more likely to distract the reader from the simplicity of his message), Paul lays a definition on the line in the very first chapter, writing that:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men were without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator…{1:20-25]

Those hoping for an Aristotelian clarity that might read like, “Sin is the product of X,Y, and Z” will, of course, be disappointed by the layers that must be parsed in order to get at Paul’s meaning. Recall, however, that he is a Hellenic Jew writing to an audience of Greek, Jewish and Roman Christians. Not all of them accept as fact, as Paul certainly did, the indisputable literality of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, yet all must be able to accept the salvation equation as applicable to their own worldview.

To a converted Jew, like Paul, the equation is most simple. Though Adam had “clearly seen” God’s “eternal power and divine nature,” he chose to exchange “the truth of God for a lie” by eating from “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” [Genesis 2:17] from which God had forbidden him. Paul reinforces this idea of sin entering the world through Adam’s disobedience later when he remarks that it “entered the world through one man” [5;12]. Interpreted more radically, Adam did not sin against God in his act of disobedience for sin did not yet exist and, by Paul’s reckoning, only God may create something from nothing. In committing an act from which he was forbidden, Adam placed his own interest above that of God’s, serving at the behest of “created things rather than the Creator” with the “created things” in question being himself. In so doing, he exchanged “the truth of God for a lie” and thus, sin was born in the fundament of human nature.

To a converted Greek, the task was more complex. For in the ascent and decline of classical Greek culture, a god’s position in the grand scheme of things was subject to constant revision. Though Zeus was acknowledged as the king of the gods, he was eclipsed in public acclaim by many others, including Athena, Apollo, and later Dionysus. Many philosophers questioned openly the existence of the gods and, while their worship remained an important part of Greek culture, reason became a god of its own, producing irrefutable knowledge that, in many cases, supplanted what could only before be believed. As Greek political influence waned, however, so went the assuredness that knowledge was a better ally than gods, imaginary or otherwise, whose power could not be resisted. Luke puts this very idea into Paul’s mouth in the Acts of the Apostles as he visits Athens and entreats its philosophers and believers alike to join him in worshiping the Unknown God who:

…made the world and everything in it [and who] is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. [Acts 17:24]

By the same logic, Paul suggests that since the creation of humanity, all nations have been able to see “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature” but have allowed that vision to become distorted into images derived from nature, from animals and from humanity itself. Without the Law, given solely to the Hebrews as part of their unique covenant with God, Greeks were left to do the best they could with the information they had and things didn’t turn out too well. Now, their gods had been subsumed into Roman ones along with the rest of their once-dominant culture. Turning away from a supposed innate human understanding of God’s eternal qualities in favor of the gods’ more mercurial ones would, by this interpretation, be the source of sin.

It bears mentioning that something fundamentally new had been emerging in the Mediterranean culture in the century surrounding the time in which Jesus and Paul both lived, taught, and died. While the Persian and Egyptian cultures, long before the time of Alexander, had embraced the idea of mortals actually achieving godhood while they yet lived, the Mediterranean culture (excluding Egypt) had shown great resilience to the idea. Greek and Roman culture alike preferred elevating only the rarest of mortals to the status of divinity and usually conferred upon their death, rather than as justification for the authority of their reign. Every would-be conqueror from Thrace to Rome might claim divine parentage but men were men and gods, for the most part, remained gods.

In the span of one long lifetime (or two average ones), the lure of divine authority as a tool of governance had proven too tempting to endure and the Romans began incrementally importing these ideas into the Roman culture and all the places that it touched. Moreover, even as their claim to living divinity became more strident, the Julio-Claudian Caesars became more depraved in their abuse of common decency in the governance of their people. How difficult an argument was it for Paul to make to Greek or Roman alike that if this was their people’s conception of a god, then it was tragically deviant from the “eternal power and divine nature” that were inherent in “God’s invisible qualities?”

Author Sketch: Paul of Tarsus

Paul (the Apostle, also known as Saint Paul)
Born in Tarsus sometime shortly before or after the beginning of the Common Era
Died between 62-65 CE in Rome
Work under Consideration: Epistle to the Romans.

Other things that happened in Paul’s lifetime:

Herod Archelaus is deposed as ethnarch of Judaea and the territory, annexed by Rome.
London is founded.
Caesar Augustus dies and is succeeded by Tiberius, Caligula and Nero.
Buddhism introduced to China by the Emperor, Ming-Ti.


The writer known as Paul is one of the more elusive figures of history. Unlike our two previous New Testament writers (Matthew and Luke), there is absolutely no doubt that a man named Paul once existed and was responsible for at least some of the works credited to him as an author. Though he never met Jesus, the man who walked the Earth, Paul was instrumental in moving the gospel of his resurrection beyond its Jewish sectarian roots and into the free market of ideas wherein it eventually spread like wildfire from one end of the Roman Empire to the other.

Also unlike Jesus, Paul, as a writer, operated on the periphery of history—our image of him a composite formed from autobiography, demi-hagiography, anthropology, and good old fashioned guessing. He was born in Tarsus sometime just before or after the beginning of the Common Era. It was already an ancient city when Saul (or Paul as he would later be known) was born, with roots stretching back at least seven hundred years that had been molded by nearly every ascendant empire along the way, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman alike. It was known, in Paul’s time, as a center of learning, attracting philosophers and rhetoricians to schools that flourished against its metropolitan backdrop.

Of the many disharmonious “facts” assumed about Paul by various writers, there is little dissent on the fact that he was, indeed, Jewish, probably born into the tribe of Benjamin. Assuming that his father was a practicing Jew, we can also assume that Paul was educated in written Hebrew and, quite possibly, spoken Aramaic. He describes himself in the Epistle to the Galatians as “advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age” and “extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” [Gal. 1:14, NIV]. At some point fairly early in his life, Paul left Tarsus and came to Jerusalem, presumably to be closer to the temple to further his studies. By all accounts, including his own, he became involved in the persecution of the Nazarene sect, also referred to as The Way, which proclaimed the forgiveness of sins through the resurrection and name of Jesus the Christ. Luke suggests in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul had authority given to him by the temple to imprison followers of the Way and, is shown, at one point to be part of a mob that stoned the believer, Stephen, to death.

On a journey to Damascus to persecute followers of the Way, Paul claimed to have had an auditory hallucination wherein Jesus commanded him to go and preach his gospel to non-Jews. Paul preached the gospel of the resurrection in Christ’s name, by his own account, for three years, before returning to Jerusalem and meeting with the heads of the church there. Eventually, Paul entered into a missionary partnership with Barnabas, an elder from the Judean church, to begin spreading the gospel outside of the Jewish homeland. They found their greatest success together in Antioch where, in time, a church of sufficient size and influence to rival the original movement was founded and cultivated. Using Antioch as a base of operations, Barnabas and Paul spread the gospel through Syria and Asia Minor, creating seed churches wherever they could convert believers.

Later, Paul headed a mission of his own that spread the gospel further into Greece until he was able to establish a strong church at Ephesus. The exact details of how Paul wound up in Rome, only to be made into a scapegoat by Nero for the great fire in 64 CE and executed, are unclear. While Luke claimed that Paul was a Roman citizen, little extracanonical evidence has surfaced to support this claim. By whatever means, it is widely accepted that Paul was a part of the Roman church if not its sole and proprietary founder.

Though some of his writings are still with us today, Paul is something of a cipher onto which the reader is able to project his or her own ideas about Christianity. Some read in his writing an obviously rabbinical understanding of the Torah and cite his teachings as the clear link of continuity between Judaism and Christianity. Others, perhaps less invested in his identity as a Jew, see his mission to preach among the Gentiles as a rejection of Judaism, both as a religion and as a culture. Classicists find in his work writings an obvious synthesis of Jewish religion and Greek philosophy. It is perhaps this stereoscopic quality to his writing that has contributed to its endurance among the canon of Western thought for nearly two thousand years since his passing.

Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Eleven)

Parts One through Nine of this essay can be found to the right of the screen in the archive under September 2009 and Part Ten in October 2009.

The last seven chapters of the Acts of the Apostles are the most difficult to analyze from a truly objective standpoint. Much like the cornerstone of the Christian faith, the subject of Jesus’s resurrection, there’s no good middle ground to occupy as one reads it because the answer to the question of whether or not Paul was actually a Roman citizen is ultimately an unknowable one. Entire books, in fact, have been written, both for and against, on this very topic and yet, slightly less than two thousand years later, there is no incontrovertible proof for either case. Many, however, on both sides of the argument, take what evidence they have, add a smidgen of belief or disbelief and come away with the sense that they do, in fact, have incontrovertible proof. If, for example, one believes that every word in the Bible, by virtue of its inclusion in the Bible, is absolute truth, then there is only one interpretation available. In contrast, if one believes that every word in any book must be examined from a number of perspectives (historical, contextual, literary, etc) to determine its meaning, as opposed to its literal veracity, then the question becomes more difficult (as in, nigh impossible) to resolve.

In recounting the details of Paul’s journey from Miletus to Jerusalem and all that happened after, Luke reverts back to the “we” voice in describing the ordeal, often including almost insignificant details that give it that “You were there” quality. Luke includes the name of every city that Paul visited on the journey, like mini-shout outs to the Christian communities along the way, until, in the eighth verse of chapter twenty-one, Paul finally arrived in Caesarea. All along the way, believers begged Paul not continue on to Jerusalem, increasing that sense that something bad awaited him at the end of the road. Just in case this theme might be lost on less diligent readers, Luke recounts a meeting with the prophet Agabus that spells it right out.

Coming to us he [Agabus] took Paul’s girdle and bound his own feet and hands, and said, “Thus says the Holy Spirit, ‘So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man who owns this girdle and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.’” [21:11]

When Paul eventually arrived at Jerusalem, we are told that he was “received warmly by the brethren” but, curiously, only James is mentioned by name among them. Paul shared with them, first hand, stories of his ministerial success and, by Luke’s account, they “glorified God” [21:20]. This celebration was short-lived, however, as, they responded to Paul with a dire warning about his reputation among the Jews of Jerusalem.

“You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; they are all zealous for the law, and they have been told about you that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs. What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come.” [21:21, 22].

While the prophesy from Agabus might lead the reader to believe that it is the unconverted Jews who pose Paul the greatest threat, a careful reading of that passage suggests that it is the converted who, in fact, are the danger. They suggested to Paul that he, along with four of the brethren, should engage in a week-long ritual of purification, including sacrifice at the temple, in order to exhibit his deference to the Law in a public way. Though Paul followed through on their suggestion, it was to no avail as “Jews from Asia” incited the crowd against him and, as it had so many times before, a riot broke out and Paul was nearly killed. In line with Luke’s thematic development for the second half of Acts, it was Roman authority that stepped in and prevented Paul from being murdered by the mob. Not able to make any sense of why the mob was trying to kill Paul, the tribune removed him from the temple and tried to get a sense of what was going on from him. Paul replied only that he was “a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city” [21:39] before asking that he be allowed to address the crowd that had just tried to murder him moments earlier.

We have already analyzed the largest portion of Paul’s defense before the people in an earlier section of this essay, as it recounts the story of his conversion on the road to Damascus. The people took little interest in Paul’s story, insisting that he be killed until their ruckus compelled the tribune to again remove Paul and, this time, to be “examined by scourging, to find out why they shouted thus against him” [22:24]. Just as the soldiers were about to torture the “truth” out of Paul, he, once again, dropped the bomb upon which the plausibility of much of the rest of the book rests.

“Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman citizen, and uncondemned?” When the centurion heard that, he went to the tribune and said to him, “What are you about to do? For this man is a Roman citizen.” So the tribune came and said to him, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” And he said, “Yes.” The tribune answered, “I bought this citizenship for a large sum.” Paul said, “But I was born a citizen.” So those who were about to examine him withdrew from him instantly; and the tribune also was afraid, for he realized that Paul was a Roman citizen and that he had bound him. [22:25-29].

Believing, at least according to Luke’s account, that he had inadvertently imprisoned and nearly beaten a Roman citizen without due process, the tribune called together “the chief priests and all the council” to meet with Paul and, one presumes, bring this tumultuous disagreement to an end. This meeting, while hardly bringing the controversy to a close, does reveal some interesting things not only about Paul (or what Luke wishes us to believe about Paul) but also the fault lines along which the factions of the temple were arrayed. Paul astutely observed that as some of those who stood in judgment over him were Pharisees while others were Sadducees and exploited the differences between them to break up the united front that they all once represented against him. With the council unable to reach a decision in concord in regards to Paul’s claims, the tribune again orders Paul back to the barracks where he could be protected by Roman authority. Luke also writes that Paul received a message from the Lord, saying “’Take courage for as you have testified about me at Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also at Rome’” [23:11]. Though Luke (and presumably Paul before him) attributes this message to the Lord, it is not included among those words of Christ printed in red to indicate the divinity of their source.

With the religious authority at Jerusalem effectively deadlocked, a plot arose among the Jews to kill Paul. Paul’s nephew caught wind of this plot and, once again, Roman authority intervenes to remove Paul from Jerusalem to Caesarea, the Roman seat of governance, in order to protect his life. With this move, Paul’s fate passes from the hands of the unnamed tribune into those of the governor, Felix who, in turn, summoned those who would accuse Paul to a special session at Caesarea to determine his guilt or innocence. This time, Paul’s accusers are named as Ananias, the high priest, along with “some elders and a spokesman, one Tertullus” [24:1]. After having dispensed with the formal niceties of sucking up to Roman law, they laid out an arguably weak case against Paul, accusing him of being “an agitator among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes” [24:5] and of having profaned the temple. Rather than offering evidence of these claims, they insisted that “by examining him yourself you will be able to learn from him about everything of which we accuse him” [24:8].

Though it is clear from Luke’s writing that Paul considered himself and other Christians to be believers in something distinct from traditional Judaism, he played the part of the innocent shrewdly in his own defense.

This I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing in everything laid down by the law or written in the prophets, having a hope in God which these themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust…Now after some years, I came to bring to my nation alms and offerings. As I was doing this, they found me purified in the temple, without any crowd or tumult. But some Jews from Asia—they ought to be here before you and to make an accusation, if they have anything against me. Or else let these men themselves say what wrongdoing they found when I stood before the council, except this one thing which I cried out while standing among them, ‘With respect to the resurrection of the dead I am on trial before you this day.’” [24:14-21]

Felix, unlike the tribune before him, is said to have “a rather accurate knowledge of the Way” [24:22] and, rather than settling the matter at once, had Paul put under what might be called loose arrest. While waiting for a tribune named Lysias to arrive, Felix is said to have summoned Paul a second time to plead his case in private. Luke also suggests that this was Felix’s not-so-subtle way of letting Paul know that if he would but bribe him adequately, that this whole matter might disappear overnight. In the course of just a few verses, two years pass and Felix was replaced by another governor, Festus, while Paul languished in legal limbo.

Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Ten)

Parts 1-9 of this essay can be accessed in the archive to the right of the screen under September of 2009.

In some ways, Paul’s ministry at Ephesus followed the all-too familiar contour of beginning in the synagogue where he angered the devout Jews and peeled off followers from among the God-fearing Gentiles until he (symbolically or not) abandoned the Jewish audiences and taught only among the Gentiles. However, Luke also offers stark contrasts between Paul’s mission and that he shared before with Barnabas. First, as he had before at Corinth, Paul spends a good deal of time (over two years) in Ephesus. The early strategy of raising a ruckus, establishing a seedling church, and then get beat up or run out of town is replaced by another; namely, preaching in the synagogues until resistance reaches a certain level and then moving the ministry in the home of well-placed citizens in the city that can provide legal and social protection while deeply planting the teaching of the church into those followers over a longer period of time.

Luke emphasizes a more supernatural side of Paul’s ministry during his time in Ephesus. While this trend continues to surface as Paul’s ministry moves on from Ephesus, Luke’s description of some of his time there offers a tantalizing glimpse at the effect of Paul’s residence there over a longer period of time.

God did extraordinary miracles through Paul. Handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them. Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon possessed…The evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know and Paul I know about, but who are you?” Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. When this became known to the Jews and Greeks living in Ephesus, they were all seized with fear, and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high honor. [19:11-13,15-17]

Neither of these stories highlight Paul’s own supernatural agency but more how people’s impression of him opened up the possibility of miracles through faith. The simplest explanation for this is that Paul’s reputation, in some cases, may have exceeded the reach of his own teachings and encouraged people on the outer ring of the circle of believers to project their own ideas and beliefs on to him. This could be and was only possible because Paul spent a considerable amount of time among the people of Ephesus and built up a certain cult of personality that had been lacking in his early missionary efforts.

After his successes at Ephesus, Paul decided that it was time to head back to Jerusalem, by way of Macedonia and Achaia. Before his departure, the obligatory riot against the believers there had to erupt but this time, the disturbance was instigated not by unconverted Jews but by the idols makers of the city who saw Paul’s teachings as dangerous to the future durability of the vocation. The details that Luke includes in the story are notable in their departure from nearly every other act of mob violence that had occurred up to that point. Paul’s disciples are dragged into the public theater and threatened. But, as Luke writes:

Paul wanted to appear before the crowd but his disciples would not let him. Even some of officials of the province, friends of Paul, sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater. [19:30,31]

Most notably, Paul is increasingly shown as having friends in high places who can protect him from these mobs. In the end, it was not Paul but “the city clerk” [19:35] who calmed the Ephesians and not by the authority of God, but by the authority of Law, specifically Roman law.

"If then, Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody, the courts are open and there are proconsuls…As it is, we are in danger of being charged with rioting because of today’s events, In that case we would not be able to account for this commotion, since there is no reason for it." [19:38,40]

Thus, indirectly, Paul is shown to be under the protection of Roman law and, more importantly, the Gentiles are portrayed as being intrinsically more reasonable than the “Jews” who mobbed up on Paul every chance they got.

After leaving Ephesus, Paul returned to Macedonia (Philippi) and, after spending some time “speaking many words of encouragement to the people” [20:2], he then moved on to Greece. His plans to sail to Syria were stifled “because the Jews made a plot against him” and so he returned to Macedonia again, this time collecting disciples to join him in his journey and, in time, they all met in Troas.

It is at this point that Luke resurrects the “we” voice in discussing their travels and, as before, the story of Paul’s journey makes an uncharacteristic shift towards the supernatural with Paul as the agent rather than merely the inspiration. Luke tells the story of Eutychus, a young believer in Troas, who, while listening to Paul’s teaching, fell asleep and, inconveniently, out of a third story window to the ground below. Though Eutychus “was picked up dead,” Paul rushed to him and, embracing the young man, cried out, “’Don’t be alarmed…he’s alive!’” [20:10]. While less dramatic than Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead after having been buried for some period of time, this is the first time that Paul is shown to raise the dead and, factual or not, strengthens the narrative ties that link Paul’s march toward Jerusalem with that of Jesus before him.

When Paul left Troas, he made a meandering journey from there to Miletus and then summoned the elders of the church at Ephesus to join him for a final meeting before he left for Jerusalem. This meeting is momentous in the Acts of the Apostles as it draws the book’s second act, as it were, to a close. Pragmatically, it is notable that Paul called for the elders of Ephesus as it shows that this was the congregation he considered to be his own or, more generously, the congregation of which he thought of himself most a member. His message to them can, itself, be broken into three parts: a declaration of his works among them, a prophecy of his impending arrest and eventual execution, and a moving recognition that this would likely be the last time they were see one another. The details of these speeches reveal not only a great deal about Paul’s ministry but also what elements of it Luke wants us to remember as the book moves into its final section.

I served the Lord with great humility and with tears, although I was severely tested by the plots of the Jews...I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus. [20:19,21]

And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to Jerusalem, not knowing what will happen to me there. I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me. [20:22,23]

Now I know that none of you among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom will ever see me again…Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified. [20:25,34]

These passages bear all the hallmarks of a transition from one period into the next, careful recapitulating the important themes of Paul’s second mission while heightening the reader’s anticipation of what comes next. It should come as little surprise that the chapters following exhibit a marked shift in tone with the establishment of new formulas and altered perspectives and voices from which the story is narrated.

Great Books: Acts of the Apostles (Part Nine)

Parts 1-8 of this essay can be accessed in the archive to the right of the screen under September of 2009.

After leaving Philippi, Paul and Silas traveled to Thessalonica where Luke tells us that “there was a Jewish synagogue” [17:1] in contrast with Philippi where there was none. The sequence of events upon their arrival is so familiar to us by now that the scant specifics that Luke shares about Paul’s message to the Thessalonians is of more interest than the eventual “Jewish” mob that forms and chases them out of town by threat of violence. They quickly moved on to Berea where Luke tells us that the people “were of more noble character than the Thessalonians” [17:11] and were more receptive to, at least, debating with Paul over the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity. Like Derbe before it (on Barnabas and Paul’s initial mission trip), violence is only shown to erupt when “Jews in Thessalonica heard that Paul was preaching the word of God at Berea” [17:13] and again turned “the crowds” against him. While no specific act of violence is described (again in contrast to previous and similar episodes), the outcome is novel enough to bear examination.

We’ll set up this analysis with the observation that after Paul and Silas are forcibly ejected from Philippi, Luke drops the “we” phrasing of Paul’s movements that began after the mission into Macedonia.

After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. [16:10]

When they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica where there was a synagogue. [17:1]

If we are to place some meaning in Luke’s specific usage of both voices, then it is reasonable to wonder if “Luke” wasn’t left behind in Philippi, perhaps as a teacher to help grow the church seeded there. This casts inevitable doubt on the absolute historicity of those events upon which he is reporting but is not a primary witness. The predictable sequence of events in each new place that Paul visits (right down to the variations on the basic theme that occurs first in Derbe and then reenacted at Berea) is suggestive that Luke is more interested in forming an archetype that journalistic reportage anyway. Moreover, as we will see once Paul begins his inexorable journey towards Rome, when Luke does include himself by the usage of the “we” voice, the story does not become more plausible but, in fact, more laden with the patina of myth-making as already evidenced by Silas and Paul’s miraculous non-escape from prison and declaration of Roman citizenship at Philippi.

It is with this spirit of genial skepticism about historicity that we then re-engage Luke’s narrative. After the unruly Thessalonian Jews had riled up the Bereans against Paul’s teaching, Luke writes that, “the brothers immediately sent Paul to the coast, but Silas and Timothy stayed at Berea. The men who accompanied Paul brought him to Athens and then left with instructions for Silas and Timothy to join him as soon as possible” [17:14,15]. With no other information about who these “brothers” might have been, the simplest explanation is that it was the newly converted at Berea who, in fact, paid for Paul’s passage to the coast. This might also explain why Silas and Timothy are left behind and told only to join him in Athens as soon as they could. With no specific act of violence described to propel Paul from the city, we might even imagine him frustrated with the slow progress of this mission (in contrast to that he shared with Barnabas) and, perhaps, his relative lack of financing. How severe was the schism that arose between Paul and Barnabas? Did it effect his ability to count upon the church at Antioch to bankroll both his and Barnabas’s mission to Cyprus (of which we hear absolutely nothing) with equal vigor?

Upon Paul’s arrival in Athens, we run into a story unit that is strangely asymmetrical in comparison to most others in the Acts. Unsurprisingly, Paul was “distressed to see that the city was full of idols” [17:16] but his usual act of preaching the gospel in the synagogues is met is not met by the usual histrionic hostility that accompanies nearly every other mission story. In fact, Luke ignores Paul’s mission to the Jews and God-fearing Gentiles altogether and focuses, instead, on Paul’s debates with philosophers in the marketplace and, ultimately, in the Areopagus in Athens. The Areopagus was, in fact, a court for trying certain kinds of legal cases in the city, but at no point does Luke suggest that Paul is on trial for anything. The dialogue between Paul and the sages of Athens is presented as more of an exchange of information between equals as Luke writes that:

Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas) [17:21]

In Paul’s response, though embroidered with some sharp writing, there is exactly one idea that would have represented any meaningful departure from what Jews had been saying in Athens for a long time prior to Paul’s visit. At the end of a speech about the nature of God, Paul adds that, “He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead” [17:31] though he only refers to the object of this resurrection only as “the man he has appointed” to “judge the world with justice” [17:31]. Though Luke does name a few believers gained from this trip, no mention is made about seeding a church or any meaningful outbreak of violence. More importantly, Paul leaves Athens before Silas and Timothy’s arrival, begging the question of whether (in a city of Athens’ size, jammed to the walls with philosophers, magicians, Jews, atheists, and every other imaginable variety of believers in something), Paul found little ground on which to plant the faith and elected to move on to more fertile soil.

Now separated from his traveling companions, Paul made his way to Corinth where he threw his lot in with a Jewish couple named Aquila and Priscilla who had recently emigrated to the region from Rome. If we had any doubts about the solvency of Paul’s missionary efforts at this point, Luke essentially confirms it in the opening verses of chapter eighteen when he writes that “Paul went to see them, and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them” [18:2,3]. This is the first time in the Acts of the Apostles that we hear of Paul engaging in manual labor to earn his keep though it is feasible he was making tents in Tarsus when Barnabas brought him back into the ministry. After an unspecified amount of time, Silas and Timothy finally arrived to join him, Paul is said to have “devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ” [18:5]. Luke indicates that Silas and Timothy came to Paul from Macedonia, not Berea where he left them. Perhaps their delay in joining Paul was due to a trip to the church at Philippi to secure fresh funding for their mission?

At first, the course of events in Corinth follow the standard Pauline form. Paul began preaching in the synagogue. The unconverted Jews grew angry until Paul disavowed them, declaring that their “blood be on your own heads! I am clear of my responsibility. From now on I will go to the Gentiles’” [18:6]. Allied with a Gentile named Titius Justus (notice the conspicuously Roman name), Paul established a long-term church in Corinth, spending over a year and a half, by Luke’s account, teaching there. At some point, the inevitable Jewish uprising against him landed him in the court of proconsul Gallio on a charge of “persuading people to worship God in ways contrary to the law,” by which we can presume they meant the law of Rome and not the law of the temple. But, before Paul can even defend himself, Gallio dismissed the case as frivolous. In a rare reversal of fortunes, it is the ruler of the synagogue, Sosthenes, who is taken out in front of the court and beaten. Whatever the actual course of events may have been, it is probably not without reason that Luke chooses Corinth to indicate Paul vindication by Roman authority against the Jews that perpetually harassed him.

With this victory under his belt after a longish string of disappointments, Paul sailed, along with Aquila and Priscilla to Ephesus. Though he entered the synagogue there for his usual round of debates, he abruptly left Aquila and Priscilla behind there in Ephesus and sailed, himself, on to Caesarea. Luke is very cagey in the details on this visit, saying only that he “went up and greeted the church, and then he went down to Antioch” [18:22]. By the church it is unclear if Luke means a church at Caesarea or, more likely, the elders in Jerusalem. No other detail is given. Nor does Paul’s visit to Antioch, an auspicious occasion in returning to the place from whence his mission set sail, earn more than a mention before he is off again, “strengthening” the churches in Galatia and Phrygia (from his first mission with Barnabus).

Back in Ephesus, Aquila and Priscilla must have been doing some church building of their own for Luke writes that “a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus” who “had been instructed in the way of the Lord” [18:24,25]. This sudden appearance of a charismatic teacher, schooled outside of Barnabas and Paul’s sphere of influence but not necessarily that of the Judean sect, provides some unexpected details about the contrast between these two early strains of Christian orthodoxy.

He spoke with a great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately. [18:25,26]

The obvious question is, how might a ministry based on the “baptism of John” have differed from the strain of Christianity that the new church at Corinth was embracing? Luke is kind enough to illustrate this difference in the opening verses of the following chapter as Paul returned to the Ephesus, only to find new believers, presumably won over to the faith by Apollos, in need of further instruction.

He found some disciples and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?” “John’s baptism,” the replied. Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. [19:1-7]

This account makes it sound like that there was an apocalyptic messianic tradition centered on John the Baptist that survived his death and had spread, perhaps in tandem with that of Jesus of Nazareth. It is one of the few instances where Paul is shown as a baptizer into the faith as opposed to a teacher of the gospel and, likewise, one of the only accounts of Paul presiding over the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In fact, though the early Judean church had been very specific about the two-tiered initiation of baptism and then indwelling, Luke seems to indicate that the baptism itself was the catalyst for the Holy Spirit to fill these well-meaning disciples.

Paul's Second Mission

Click to enlarge

Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Eight)

Parts 1-7 of this essay can be accessed in the archive to the right of the screen under September 2009.

With the prickly circumcision issue resolved, Paul and Barnabas’s presence was not so urgently required at the church in Antioch. Even as Paul and Barnabas began planning a trip to revisit the churches they had seeded previously, a schism suddenly appeared between them. Barnabas insisted they take his cousin, John Mark (who had bailed on them in Perga the first time) but Paul wasn’t having any part of it. So, with no other explanation, they “parted company” with Barnabas returning to Cyprus with John Mark and Paul taking Silas along with him on a tour of the new churches.

At Lystra, Paul was introduced to another young disciple, Timothy who was, likewise, selected to continue on with him and Silas. Luke adds in a confusing detail here that Timothy was born of a Jewish mother but a Greek father and, as such, was not circumcised. Before he is allowed to join the wandering ministry, Timothy was circumcised by Paul. This seems odd based on all the energy that Paul had expended to justify the faith of uncircumcised Gentiles and now, he insisted on Timothy’s adherence to the Law. Perhaps his motive was simply pragmatic. He needed Jews to convert Gentiles away from attending the synagogue. Uncircumcised, Timothy was a converted Gentile. Circumcised, he was a converted Jew.

About six verses into the sixteenth chapter, strange things start happening in the Acts of the Apostles in both a narrative and structural sense. Before moving ahead to describe the extent of these changes, it will be valuable to briefly reconsider what types of information it has delivered up to this point. The book opens with Jesus and the apostles in the forty day period after the Resurrection but prior to the Ascension. For several chapters after, it is a story about the early church in Jerusalem and the persecution that they eventually suffered at the hands of the temple authorities. With Stephen’s death, the church decentralizes with only the Twelve Witnesses remaining in Jerusalem while the elect among the converted fanning out through Judea, Galilee, Samaria and Syria to spread the message. Eventually, even Peter leaves Jerusalem to shore up support for the Nazarene sect in the outlying areas of its influence. In so doing, he sets a precedent for converting Gentiles into the tradition.

As early as Stephen’s murder, Saul (Paul) is introduced as a character and, for the first half of the book, functions as a supporting actor rather than a principal player. After being threatened with murder by pretty much anyone he spoke to after his conversion, Paul is sent to Tarsus with no recognizable orders beyond, “Don’t come back.” Later, it is Barnabas who goes to Tarsus, retrieves Paul from his exile and, together, they found a church in Antioch. One can reasonably extract from the subtext that it is the financial intervention of that church (which has yet to undergo any of the persecutions that have plagued the Jerusalem church almost since its inception) that saves Peter from execution at Herod’s hands. Whether the balance of power within the church truly did so or not, the focus of the Acts of the Apostles undoubtedly shifts to Antioch from that point forward. It details the Acts of Paul and Barnabas with almost no interest for what may or may not be happening in Judea until someone from the “old school” shows up and starts condemning folk. As long as Barnabas and Paul were working together (with Barnabas shown if begrudgingly in the text as the dominant partner), there was still a continuity tying the old church and the younger ones together. After their schism, Paul takes Silas, also from the original sect but positioned far lower in the hierarchy than Barnabas, on as a traveling companion but there is no longer any doubt about who is in charge. In short, Acts has gone from being a story about the early church after Jesus’s ascension to a narrative about what Paul did.

Nowhere is this transition made more clear than in the early portion of chapter nine where Luke writes that:

Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia to help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. [16:6-10]

Buried within that very matter-of-factly written passage is no less than three miracles of a grand order by the standards of the early chapters of Acts. First, the Holy Spirit “kept” them from moving the ministry into Asia. Second, the spirit of Jesus wouldn’t let them go into Bithynia and lastly, Paul had a clairvoyant vision of needy souls in Macedonia. Luke, however, provides no tactile details about these miracles (in stark contrast to Peter’s vision about the Gentiles for example) but speaks as if things of this nature were happening everyday and, thus, not worth cataloguing in any depth.

More importantly to the contour of the narrative, Luke strikes that unmistakable “we” in the final line and it sticks for long portions of the book up through its end. While some have argued that this was a convention of travelogues of the period, his use of the first-person plural is so pervasive as to seem deliberate which, in itself, raises new questions. Who is we? While wandering around from Asia Minor, did Paul come in contact with Luke, the supposed author of this history? If so, are we to suppose that what follows is more accurate than what came before as Luke was en eyewitness rather than a collator of historical traditions? The answer (which will likely never be known) becomes urgent as the historical plausibility of what unfolded next becomes more strained.

The journey from Asia Minor to an area north of the mainland of Greece began more calmly than most of Paul’s missionary jaunts. Entering the city of Philippi, Paul and his followers executed Jesus’s original mission strategy to the letter, locating one friendly ear (in this case “a woman named Lydia…who was a worshipper of God” [16:14]) and setting up shop in her house to reach out to potential converts. Luke is careful to note that, on the Sabbath, Paul and the companions do not go to the Synagogue (which Philippi lacked) to preach but, instead, “outside the city gate to a river, where we expected to find a place of prayer” [16:13].

Nonetheless, on the way to the river, Paul was confronted numerous times by “a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future” who insisted on following behind them, proclaiming that, “’These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.’” [16:16,17]. Luke tells us that Paul “became so troubled” that he turned around and exorcised the demon of prophesy from her in the name of Christ. Before we get to the ramifications of his actions, let’s consider for a moment what Luke is already telling us. Paul is trying to keep a low profile and is not, as he had in Asia Minor, storming into the strongholds of Jewish authority and declaring them all unclean sinners. Is Paul troubled because there is a demon inside the woman or because she is broadcasting information that he would prefer to transmit from person-to-person?

After the spirit had been exorcised from the young girl, her owners dragged Paul and Silas into the marketplace, presumably to extract compensation for the loss of revenue her “cleansing” would represent to them. Predictably enough, “the crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them stripped and beaten” [16:22]. That night, as the pair sang hymns to the Lord in their cells, a great earthquake is said to have struck and the door to freedom popped open even as their chains were miraculously removed. When their jailer saw that the jail could no longer hold them, he began to commit suicide at the loss of his prisoners. Before he could, however, Paul told him they were all still there, to which the jailor responded by falling to his knees and asking them, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” [16:30].

Again, it is fruitless to argue with miracles. Whether factually accurate or merely suggestive of less-overt levers of power being manipulated, this is, in fact, the third jail break in the Acts of the Apostles and, by this point, if someone had suggested that there was now an angel with the full time position of pulling these jobs, no one would have batted an eye. The response from the authorities the following day, however, does suggest that in the interim something beyond a jail break that never actually went down had softened their position against the disciples.

When it was daylight, the magistrates sent their officers to the jailer with the order: “Release those men.” The jailer told Paul, “The magistrates have ordered that you and Silas be released. Now you can leave. Go in peace.” [16:35]

In light of Paul’s track record preaching among the unconverted, his treatment at Philippi was mild. He got a flogging and spent half the night in stocks but it is not merely the relative timidity of the indignities he suffered that makes his response to those magistrates so jaw-droppingly game-changing.

Paul said to the officers, “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.” [16:37]

Paul, a Roman citizen? To drop that into the story, some twelve chapters after his character’s introduction is the narrative equivalent of Jesus neglecting to mention he was Jew until he was about set to travel into Jerusalem. As so much of what unfolds from this point forward hinges on the question of Paul’s claim to be a Roman citizen, it actually skews one’s interpretation of the rest of the Acts of the Apostles along three lines of critical inquiry: Did Paul ever really claim to be a Roman citizen or was that a later invention? If Paul did claim to be a Roman citizen, was it true? If Paul was a Roman citizen, why did he wait until Philippi to mention it?

Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Six)

Parts 1-5 of this essay can be accessed from the archive on the right of the screen under September 2009.

As Saul and Barnabas returned to Judea with the love offering from the church at Antioch, Herod Antipas began seizing members of the sect for imprisonment and eventual execution. It is worth noting that the last few times we’ve seen Peter, it’s been back in Galilee. While he has escaped the persecution of the temple in Judea, that places him directly back in Antipas’ kingdom and, in some ways, subject to more danger than the temple might present as they had to work in concert with Roman authority. After executing James, Antipas was soundly praised by the non-converted Jews and, in response, he had Peter arrested as well. Luke is uncharacteristically vague about the exact timeline here. By placing Peter's arrest directly after the story about Saul and Barnabas bringing the money to Judea, his implication seems to be that the events with Peter unfolded well after their arrival. He ambiguously opens that section though, writing that, “it was about this same time” [12:1] that Herod began his arrests. Is it possible that Agabus’s prophesy that brought them running with money collected from the Antioch church was a veiled plea for money to help James and, perhaps, Peter himself?

According the Luke’s account, of course, it turns out that Peter didn’t need any help escaping from prison. Despite the heavy guard placed to watch Peter (who already had a reputation for miraculous escapes from jail), he is nonetheless visited on the day before his trial (and likely execution) by an angel of the Lord who helps him make his escape.

The purpose of our analyzing the Acts of the Apostles is not to go through and disprove every miracle as inauthentic. It is possible (and, indeed, many believe) that the facts it lays out are, by their very nature, beyond reproach and accept each miracle in turn as indisputable facts by virtue of their inclusion in the New Testament. However, the two passages that follow Peter’s escape from prison do suggest some interesting sub-textual readings worth at least investigating even while recognizing them as essentially speculation.

After Peter escaped from prison, Luke writes that:

He went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying. Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer the door. When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, “Peter is at the door!” “You’re out of your mind,” they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, “It must be his angel.” But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, there were astonished. Peter motioned with his hand for them to be quiet and and described how the Lord had brought him out of prison. “Tell James and the brothers about this,” he said, and then he left for another place. [12:12-17]

One can’t help but notice the paralls between this story about Peter and those surrounding Christ’s own, post-resurrection. Both are identified as being alive by a woman, who rushes to tell others who, in turn, do not believe her story. Notice also the ambiguity with which Luke glosses over where exactly Peter fled to or in whose company he might have traveled after his appearance among the disciples. More ominously, Peter is only mentioned once again in the Acts of the Apostles. Traditional church doctrine adheres to the idea that Peter eventually traveled with Paul to found the Roman church and was later executed by Nero, like Paul, for his crimes against the state. Though there is little means by which to prove this didn’t happen, the event itself, like Paul’s death is not contained within the Acts of the Apostles.

Yet, there is an event directly juxtaposed against Peter’s escape from prison about which we can know something. Herod, in some kind of political dispute with the people of Tyre and Sidon, called a diplomatic summit to resolve these differences. Upon addressing “the people” (though not clear whether Luke is referring to the people summoned to his court or just, you know, the people), someone in the crowd shouted that Herod spoke with the voice of God. Because he did not refute the man’s claim (and thus show deference to God), Herod was stricken down by the Lord for his lack of humility and “was eaten by worms and died” [9:23].

The problem is, history is pretty clear about the eventual fate of Herod Antipas and it was not death-by-angel-smiting. Instead, he was eventually found guilty of treason by Caligula and, around 39 CE, was stripped of his authority, his money, and exiled to Gaul where he died a few years later. One could make the argument that this fate might be the metaphoric equivalent of “an angel of the Lord struck him down” but then that indulgence just leads us back to questioning whether these inclusions of the “angel of the Lord” into various jailbreaks and auditory visions might not also be allegorical rather than objective in their inclusion into the story. Luke also finishes up the chapter after discussing Herod’s fate by recording that “When Barnabus and Saul had finished their mission, they returned from Jerusalem, taking with them John, also called Mark” [12:25], suggesting again that Herod’s death had already occurred before they left though his death actually occurred some years later and well-outside of the radar of history. The historical accountability of Herod’s removal does give us a framework to state with some certainty that the events described up to this point probably occurred within six years or so of Jesus’s crucifixion.

All but one section of the remaining fifteen chapters of Acts deals with Saul’s missions to recruit believers to the newly-dubbed Christian religion. It is valuable to note that, at this point in Saul’s ministry, his role is, in some ways, subordinate to that of Barnabas. Barnabas, unlike Saul, was from the original Twelve Witnesses and was one of the direct recipients of the tongue of fire via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and, by older Church protocols, one of the few authorized to oversee the two-fold initiation process of baptism and indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Strangely, though, this formula is evoked with decreasing frequency once the narrative of the ministry leaves Judea.

The evangelizing duo made their first post-Antioch ministry in Cyprus, the island upon which Barnabas was born, where they had to get past another Jewish sorcerer named Elymas. In the description of this passage, we are treated to the first usage of the name by which Saul of Tarsus would eventually be best known, Paul, and given some insights into the nature of Paul and Barnabas’s partnership.

The proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God. But Elymas the sorcerer (for that is what his name means) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith. Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas and said, “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord? Now the hand of the Lord is against you. You are going to be blind, and for a time you will be unable to see the light of the sun.” Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he groped about, seeking someone to lead him by the hand. When the proconsul saw what had happened, he believed, for he was amazed at the teaching about the Lord. [13:8-12]

Notice that Barnabas is listed first in their partnership but it is Saul who takes things to the next level and directly calls out Elymas. Elymas’s punishment also mirrors Paul’s own experience on the road to Damascus and is one of only a few examples in the New Testament of God causing blindness, rather than healing it.

Great Books: The Acts of the Apostles (Part Five)

The first four parts of this essay can be accessed from the archive on the right side of the screen under September of 2009.

Up to the conversion of Saul, the ministry of the early church was, in many ways, an extension of Jesus’s own ministry as they continued to baptize, heal, and teach among the Jews to fill a populist vacuum created by the temple’s complicity with Roman authority. Taking the Gospels and the Acts at face value, the church had taken on essentially three innovations since Jesus’s ascension; performing their miracles and teaching in Jesus’s name, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with the spiritual gifts that came with it, and the creation of a community that lived, worked, and, perhaps, dwelt apart from the Jewish society as a whole. With Saul’s conversion and acceptance into the fold, the very nature of the ministry changed though Luke places the initiative for that alteration in the hands of the leader of the early church, Simon who is called Peter.

After raising Tabitha from the dead, Peter remained in Joppa, a city not far from Lydda where he performed the miracle and, from all indicators, began seeding a new church there. Meanwhile, in Caesarea, a man named Cornelius had a peculiar vision that the voice of God was commanding him to seek out Peter in Joppa. Luke includes some interesting details about Cornelius that makes the passage worth investigating.

At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment. He and all his family were devout and God-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. [10:1,2].

Three important details about Cornelius jump out immediately. First, he is given a name, unlike the anonymous centurion who impressed Jesus with his faith from Matthew’s gospel. Second, he is not only a centurion from the Italian regiment, meaning that, in all likelihood, he was actually Roman and not just a member of the Roman army. Finally, he is described as being “god-fearing” (a term that shows up with increasing regularity as the New Testament proceeds along), meaning that though he was not Jewish, he exhibited great sensitivity to and even longing for the uniquely personal relationship that the Jewish God promised above and beyond the impersonal worship of the “pagan” gods. These facts are important not because they may or may not be factual, but because this is what Luke wants us to know about the man who would set a remarkable precedent within the early church. These qualities, in a sense, are also his qualifications.

After receiving his command from above, Cornelius sends to of his men to Joppa to fetch Peter. Peter, as it turned out was having a vision of his own. Praying on the roof of a believer’s house while he waited for a meal to be prepared, Peter had one of the most detailed visions contained within the Acts of the Apostles—a vision concerning the future of the church.

He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven. [10:11-16]

It is important to note that neither God nor Jesus are explicitly identified as the source of this vision. In fact, unlike Jesus’s words to Paul in the auditory vision that led to his conversion, these words are not given the red-ink treatment, indicating words of the divine. As the soldiers arrived at the house asking for him, Peter heard the voice again, this time identified by Luke as “The Spirit” [10:19], urging him to go with the men for they were sent, at least indirectly, by the source of his vision. When Peter arrived at Cornelius’s house, he found not only an open-minded centurion but “his relatives and close-friends” [10:24] who were, no doubt, also mostly not Jewish. The Jewish faith, of which Peter was certainly once considered a lawful and observant member, did not allow for him to meet with, let alone eat with, non-Jews. Nonetheless, Peter said:

“You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean…I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.” [10:28,34,35]

With this one rhetorical flourish, Luke would have us believe, Peter, as directed by the Holy Spirit, changed the course of not only the early church but of human history. Peter told those in the house that God had given to the people Israel a message of “the good news of peace through Jesus Christ” [10:35]. He offered a short timeline of Jesus’s ministry on Earth, including specifically that his ministry began in Galilee, spread throughout Judea, and followed that of John the Baptist. He suggests that God had “anointed Jesus with the Holy Spirit” and that Jesus had used that power to “do good and healing…because God was with him” [10:38]. He asserted that “we are witnesses of everything he did” (meaning, the Twelve are the witnesses) but leaves the identity of Jesus’s murderers conspicuously vague, saying only that “they killed him by hanging him on a tree” [10:39].

As Peter delivered this first sermon to the Gentiles, a most surprising thing happened:

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. [10:44-48]

Now, there is no disputing the idea that (before Saul) only the Twelve had the power to facilitate the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. In this sense, there are two interpretations that might be taken away from this passage. Either Peter, through his somewhat privileged connection to God, was able to extend this blessing upon them by virtue of his own will or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within these Gentiles was a completely unexpected side-effect of their being exposed to the “good news,” the literal translation of the word, gospel. Again, as with the conversion of Saul, baptism occurs only after the spontaneous indwelling of the Holy Spirit and almost as an act of decorum rather than necessity. Of course, this innovation to the ministry was the cause of great concern to the “circumcised believers” and Peter was compelled to return to Jerusalem to recount the story of what had happened and, no doubt, defend his own involvement in something that was clearly not Jewish and clearly not in observance of the Law. What was remarkable and clearly new about what he had done was that he had not converted Gentiles to Judaism. He had converted them to something quite different and this may have been the moment (though Luke explicitly places it elsewhere) that the church stopped thinking of themselves as a sect of Judaism and started thinking of themselves as Christians.

This notion is reinforced in the following section which again shifts our attention away from Peter and the Judean church and outwards into areas occupied by a great many peoples from many different backgrounds and worldviews. Luke writes that those who had been forced out of Jerusalem by the backlash from Stephen’s ministry had spread into many different lands including Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch but is careful to note that they shared the good news “only with Jews” [11:19]. Some of those converted, however, began preaching the message to Greeks living in Antioch and from among these “god-fearing” pagans, a new church began to emerge. Note that Luke never suggests that, because of what Peter did, disciples were authorized to make this transition. Instead, it is presented as almost an inevitable outgrowth of the ministry as it spread among believers separated by great distances.

When news of the somewhat unorthodox church that had developed at Antioch got back to the Twelve in Jerusalem, they sent Barnabas to investigate the validity of their faith. Heartened, we may assume, by this strange outcropping of predominantly non-Jewish believers, Barnabas went looking for the one man with a similarly unconventional conversion who might help forge a bridge between these two cultures—none other than Saul of Tarsus.

Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch. [11:25,26].

One wonders what exactly Saul was doing in Tarsus when Barnabas arrived to bring him into the ministry. No mention is made of a fledgling church at Tarsus so it is tempting to assume that Saul had merely spent the time wondering what the purpose of his conversion was if his fate, for the moment, was to sit hundreds of miles away from where his new-found faith might matter. Now, with Barnabas to mentor him in the orthodoxy of the Jerusalem sect, Saul was finally able to channel some of that unspent energy into teaching new believers. In the curious mixture of Jews and Gentiles converted to believers by the “good news,” guided in the tradition by Barnabus and steered into uncharted waters by Saul, something truly new emerged.

Chapter eleven closes with yet another curious addendum (Luke loves those), reporting that:

During this time prophets some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. One of them, named Agabus, stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.) The disciples, each according to his ability, decided to provide help to the brothers living in Judea. This they did, sending their gift to the elders by Barnabas and Saul. [11:27-29]

While a community of believers spread all over the world could not live communally as Peter and the others had done immediately after Jesus’s ascension, an early precedent was set that enrollment in the church still carried certain monetary obligations. We may accept the gift of the Antioch church as the goodwill gesture described by Luke without dismissing the pragmatic subtext that this generous gift, delivered by Barnabas (Saul’s original sponsor) and Saul to the elders in Jerusalem probably went a long way towards legitimizing Saul’s usefulness if not authority within that body.