THE LIFE OF PAUL

PAUL: THE JESUS MOVEMENT LAUNCHED IN THE ROMAN WORLD

Historically, Paul was the most important figure in spreading to the wider Roman world the movement that began with Jesus and came to be known as Christianity. He is also important literarily, since no fewer thaqn thirteen of the Christian scriptures were written by him or are attributed to him. Also, in the Book of Acts Paul is the central figure.

In studying the career and writings of Paul it is helpful to have in mind the chronology of the successive emperors from the time of Jesus' birth til Paul's death:

Augustus 30 B.C.E.--14 C.E.

Tiberius 14-37

Gaius (Caligula) 37-41

Claudius 41-54

Nero 54-68

PROBABLE CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF PAUL

Year(s) C.E.

10 Born

33-35 Converted

34-38 Three years in Arabia

37/38 Initial visit with apostles in Jerusalem

38-47 Active in Antioch and Syria

47-49 Active in south Galatia

50-51 In Corinth during rule of Gallio

50-51 Council in Jerusalem

52-54 Active in Ephesus

53-55 Writes letters to Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians

55-56 In Corinth

56-58 Writes Letter to the Romans

60 Arrested in Jerusalem and imprisoned in Caesarea

62-63 Imprisoned and executed in Rome

THE CULTURAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL SPHERE OF PAUL'S CAREER

Paul's letters reveal him to have much in common with other Jews of the Diaspora during the first part of the first century C.E. In general his thought remains faithful to the biblical heritage. Yet in many details, his writings show substantial influence from the hellenistic culture that permeated the eastern Mediterranean world in his day. Fortunately, Paul includes in his letters some details of his own background in Judaism, as well as of his conversion experience. In Phil. 3:5-6 he describes his Jewish heritage, which he represents as based on his historic and linguistic roots--born of the people Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, and Hebrew-speaking parents--as well as his fidelity to Jewish practices, evidenced by his parents having circumcised him on the eighth day and by his own commitment to the Jewish law. The approach to the law with which he identified was that of the Pharisees: that is, the commitment to maintain the ritual boundaries, transferred from the temple cultus to personal life, that mark off the people of God as pure and obedient. It is wholly in keeping with this outlook that his arguments in two of his major letters, Galatians and Romans, deal with the definition of the covenant people.

The scene of Paul's conversion is Damascus, the largest of the cities of the Decapolis and the oldest city in Syria. Although he does not say whether he was residing in Damascus, he reports that he tried to destroy the church there (Gal.1:13-17). Clearly he regarded the church as a basic threat to what he, as a Pharisee, was persuaded was the purity of God's people. To an outsider, the "church" and the "synagogue" in Damascus--or anywhere else--would have looked very similar: both were voluntary, unstructured gatherings of people who believed that the tradition of Israel, as set forth in the scriptures, was coming to fulfillment among them. To understand and to enter into the purpose of God for his people, both groups met regularly for study of scripture, prayer, and above all for table fellowship, in which they celebrated their common life as God's chosen people. The basic difference was that, as a result of the activity of Jesus, the "church" set aside ritual and cultic requirements for membership and welcomed marginal Jews and even gentiles into its common life. This is why Paul was persuaded that loyalty to the tradition required him to take the initiative in destroying the church.

It is paradoxical that someone with this set of values would become convinced that God had called him to take the initiative in carrying the Christian message to the gentiles. In Acts we are given more details of Paul's conversion experience, but in his letters Paul tells us only that "God was pleased to reveal his Son in me" (or "to me"; Gal. 1:16). Elsewhere he notes simply that, like the other apostles, he has "seen Jesus our Lord," risen from the dead (1 Cor. 9:1, 15:7). What was important for Paaul werre not the circumstances or details of his vision of the risen Christ but the fact that his vision occurred, that it corresponded to the experience of those who had followed Jesus during his lifetime, and that it resulted in his special divine commissioning as the primary apostle to the gentiles. Following this vision, he withdrew to "Arabia," by which he could mean the territory east of the Jordan or east of Syria, and then he returned to Damascus (Gal. 1:17). Only after three years did he confer with Peter (Cephas) and James (Jesus' brother) in Jerusalem, and they acknowledged that he and they were preaching a common faith, and "glorified God" that their former enemy had become a co-worker (Gal. 1:18-24). Paul describes his activities following his initial visit with James in Jerusalem as having taken place in the "regions of Syria and Cilicia," and he specifies that he was unknown to the churches in Judea, which was the district where Jerusalem was located.

When did his conversion and early Christian activity occur? From the few chronological details that Paul offers in his letters (three years until the first visit to Jerusalem; fourteen years until the next) we can infer that he had spent seventeen years of evangelistic activity in Syria and southern Asia Minor by the time he launched his wider work in Asia, Greece, and to the west. The fact that when he reached Greece there were already Christians there who had been driven from Rome by the decree of Claudius provides a highly probable date: about 50 C.E. This means that Paul must have been converted at least seventeen years earlier--that is, in the early thirties. This would have been within a year or two of Jesus' crucifixion, which requires us to assume that there was a church in Damascus at that early date which was large enough and ethnically inclusive enough to attract the hostile attention of the dedicated Pharisee Paul. This conclusion supports the Gospel report that the message of Jesus reached the cities of the Decapolis during his lifetime (Mark 5:20, 7:31).

Like Jesus, Paul was persuaded that not all who considered themselves to be God's people really were, but that God had disclosed to the elect his purpose for the new covenant community. In short, Paul's outlook was thoroughly apocalyptic: he regarded Jesus as the agent through whom God had disclosed his plan and through whom it would be accomplished. His death on the cross and his resurrection were the ground of Paul's assurance that, through the faithful suffering of his people, God would sustain and ultimately vindicate them. This program of redemption was already in process and would soon come to conclusion. What was new about this outlook for both Jesus and Paul is that there were no ritual or ethnic prerequisites to participation in this new people of God. Paul saw the death of Jesus as the divine sacrifice through which the purification of God's people was being accomplished. The reader may see how these details are developed in Paul's letters.

Although Paul's primary convern is Jesus' redefining of the covenant people, the hellenistic influence on him is apparent in both the literary structure of his writing and aspects of the contents. When Paul describes what the Spirit produces in the moral life of the believer (Gal. 5:22), he begins with qualities that are based in the biblical tradition: love, joy, peace. But then he quickly shifts to terms which come out of Stoic ethics: patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. The argument of the Letter to the Romans builds on the assumption that, just as Jews have the law of Moses given to them by God, so the gentiles have the law within (or what Stoics would call the law of nature), which provides them with the norms by which they should live. Although he then goes on to show that both Jews and gentiles disobey the law they have received, his assumption about the law of nature is pure Stoicism. Far from finding any conflict between his convictions as a devout Jew and the insights he has gained from pagan culture, Paul draws on both to make his arguments. Similarly, Paul's style in his letters shows affinity with Jewish modes of interpretation of scripture, while at the same time he also utilizes the rhetorical style of his Greco-Roman contemporaries. For instance, he poses questions that would be raised by his opponents and then goes on to answer them--a method of argument characteristic of hellenistic culture.

The fact that Paul had this cultural mix in his background and outlook contributed in major ways to his effectiveness in reaching out to the wider gentile world. As is evident from his letters, he was articulate--even eloquent--in Greek. Although he does not detail his missionary strategy, as Acts does for him, we can infer from his letters both where he carried on his work and the degree of effectiveness he had in bringing together Christian communities that bridged ethnic, cultural, economic, and social distinctions. References in his letters link him to the district known as Galatia in central Asia Minor, as well as to Ephesus, one of the chief cities of the eastern Aegean area dominated by Greek culture and the center of the worship of Artemis, the fertility goddess. Once he crossed to mainland Greece we hear of his connections and activities in Philippi and Thessalonica in the northern district of Macedonia, as well as in Athens (1 Thess. 3:1) and especially Corinth, in the southern district known as Achaia. He mentions in writing to the Romans that his missionary activity has taken him as far west as Illyricum, on the west coast of what is now Bosnia and Croatia, and that he intended to complete the evangelization of the northern half of the Mediterranean world by going beyond Rome to Spain (Rom. 15:24, 28).

It is in his Letter to the Romans that Paul gives the most complete and systematic statement of his understanding of Christ and of the new community of faith. Although tradition has long linked the launching of Christianity in Rome with Peter, we have no firm literary or historical evidence for that claim. But the fact that for some years there had been a church there and that some of its members had been driven out under Claudius (Acts 18:1-2) shows that its founding was very early. The high mobility of some of the early Christians is apparent in that Priscilla and Aquila, whom Paul met first in Corinth and who later opened their house as the meeting place of the church in Ephesus (1 Cor. 16:19), had returned to Rome by the time he wrote his letter to that church (Rom. 16:3). Paul wants to visit his friends and the community of faith there, and apparently did so.

Ancient tradition reports that both Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome in the time of Nero (54-68 C.E.). Some scholars have suggested that Paul, after reaching Rome, went on to Spain or that he returned to the eastern Mediterranean, but these are merely conjectures. All we can be certain about is that he did return to Jerusalem with the offering he had taken up among the gentile churches of Greece and Asia Minor, as he explained in Rom. 15:25-9. According to Acts 21-8, he was awaiting trial in Rome, having been sent there by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem, in order for the allegations of his having performed acts against the peace of the empire to be weighed by the emperor himself, based on Paul's own appeal (Acts 25:10-12). He last appears in Acts under house arrest, pending the hearing before Caesar (28:30).

A COMMENT ON PAUL'S LETTER TO THE ROMANS:

Martin Luther, writing in his "Preface to the Letter of S(aint) Paul to the Romans" contained in his German translation of the New Testament which appeared in print in September 1522:

This epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament, and is truly the purest gospel. It is worthy not only that every Christian should know it word for word, by heart, but also that he should occupy himself with it every day, as the daily bread of the soul..... In this epistle we thus find most abundantly the things that a Christian ought to know, namely, what is law, gospel, sin, punishment, grace, faith, righteousness, Christ, God, good works, love, hope, and the cross; and also how we are to conduct ourselves toward everyone, be he righteous or sinner, strong or weak, friend or foe--and even toward our own selves. Moreover, this is all ably supported with Scripture and proved by St. Paul's own example and that of the prophets, so that one could not wish for anything more. Therefore it appears that he wanted in this one epistle to sum up briefly the whole Christian and evangelical doctrine, and to prepare an introduction to the entire Old Testament. For, without doubt, whoever has this epistle well in his heart, has with him the light and power of the Old Testament. Therefore let every Christian be familiar with it and exercise himself in it continually. To this end may God give his grace.

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