Paul

by N. T. Wright

  When we speak of love, and perhaps also grief, there is another silence hidden within the larger silence of the Tarsus years. Everyone who reads Paul asks this question sooner or later. Was there a girl? Had he been betrothed or even married?

  We cannot tell and must not rush to fill the silence. Yet when Paul writes about marriage he says that he would be happy “to see everyone be in the same situation as myself.”21 He amplifies this, assuming his audience knows his story and thus leaving it tantalizingly unclear for later readers: “To unmarried people, and to widows, I have this to say: it’s perfectly all right for you to remain like me.”22 Why did he put it like this?

  He was writing at a time when remaining unmarried—particularly for women—was next to scandalous. Who could tell what an unattached person might get into? The dominant cultural assumption was that an unmarried adult, particularly a woman, was a social and moral disaster waiting to happen. But Paul, as we shall see, was challenging the dominant culture with the news of new creation, a new creation with different values. On the one hand, he insists (against any form of dualism that would regard the human body and its pleasures as shameful) that married sexual relations were a good gift from the Creator, to be celebrated. On the other hand, he insists that singleness, celibacy, was also a gift that pointed beyond the present world (with its need to propagate the species) to a new world altogether. And in the middle of it all Paul holds himself up as an example: “the same situation as myself.” What was that situation?

  Clearly Paul was unmarried during the time covered by his letters. Most of the traveling early Christian teachers were married, and their wives accompanied them on their journeys, but Paul was different (so also, apparently, was Barnabas).23 That leaves us with four options. Either he had never married at all, despite the fact that most orthodox Jews would have been expected to marry, usually quite young. Or he had been married, presumably during the silent decade in Tarsus, but his wife had died early, as many did, and he had chosen not to marry again. Or maybe his wife had decided to break off the marriage when she realized he really meant all this dangerous new teaching about a crucified Messiah. (“In a case like that,” he writes, “a brother or sister is not bound.”)24 Or perhaps—and if I had to guess, this is the one I would choose—he had been betrothed early on, probably to the daughter of family friends. He had come back to Tarsus eager to see her again, but also wondering how it would now work out and praying for her to come to know Jesus as he had. But she or her parents had broken off the engagement when they found out that lively young Saul had returned with his head and heart full of horrible nonsense about the crucified Nazarene. Did Saul “get over her,” as we say? Who can tell?

  He had plenty of female friends and colleagues later on, as we can see from the greetings in his letters, especially Romans. He seems to have treated them as equals in the work of the gospel, just as he insisted in a famous passage that gender distinctions were irrelevant when it came to membership in the Messiah’s family.25 But he had decided that, for him, marriage was now out of the question, not because he was a super spiritual man who had risen above that kind of shabby second-rate lifestyle (as some later Christians would try to pretend) or because he did not possess normal human desires, but because it was incompatible with his particular vocation. He gives the impression, as we read between the lines of 1 Corinthians, that he had gained mastery over his natural desires, while recognizing that such a discipline required constant vigilance.26

  Why go into this imponderable question? It is important before we launch into Paul’s public career, which we are nearly ready to do, to challenge the perennial idea that Paul was a misogynist. He did not imagine that women and men were identical in all respects. Nobody in the ancient world, and not many in today’s world, would think that. But he saw women as fellow members on an equal footing within the people of God, and also, it seems, within the public ministry of that people. He could be friends with women and work alongside them without patronizing them, trying to seduce them, or exploiting them.

  For Saul back home in Tarsus, then, the deepest heartbreak was not the loss of an actual or potential spouse, though that may have been there too. What grieved him most was the loss, in a much deeper sense, of many who were very close to him, who had known him from boyhood and still loved him dearly. If he was not a misogynist, neither was he the kind of Jew who (in the odd caricature) hated other Jews because they reminded him of himself. When Paul the Apostle thinks of “unbelieving Jews,” they are not, for him, a “theological” category. They are real human beings. One does not suffer ceaseless heartache over a faceless abstraction or a projected fantasy.

  The decade or so in Tarsus was clearly formative for Saul. How much he then guessed at his future vocation we cannot begin to imagine. But somewhere in the middle 40s of the first century—still only fifteen years or so after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and when Saul was probably somewhere in his thirties—he received a visit that would take his life in a whole new direction. What motivated him was, at one level, the same as it had always been: utter devotion to the One God and “zeal” to work for his glory in the world. But by the end of the Tarsus decade Saul had worked out in considerable detail what it meant that the One God had revealed himself in and as the crucified and risen Jesus. That meant a new dimension to his devotion, a new shape for his “zeal,” a new depth to “loyalty.” And that new dimension, shape, and depth would produce a string of hastily written documents whose compact, explosive charge would change the world.

  Tarsus to Antioch

  4

  Antioch

  THE VISITOR WHO came to Tarsus looking for Saul was Barnabas. It was Barnabas, we recall, who had vouched for Saul on his first post-Damascus visit to Jerusalem. One of the minor heroes of the book of Acts, the generous-spirited Barnabas was originally from Cyprus, a Jew from the tribe of Levi. His actual name was Joseph, but Luke explains that the Jesus-followers in Jerusalem gave him the nickname Barnabas, which means “son of encouragement.” Some people have the gift of enabling others to flourish. Barnabas was one of those.

  So when the Jerusalem leaders received disturbing news about fresh developments in the Jesus community at Antioch and they wanted to send somebody who would understand both the outlook of Greek-speaking communities and the concerns of the Jerusalem church itself, Barnabas was a natural choice. In Antioch a wall had been breached. A crack had appeared in an age-old dam. Should it be mended at once? Or was this a sign that the One God was doing a new thing? To see why all this mattered, and why this question in Antioch shaped the way Saul would see things thereafter—and hence one of the reasons why the movement that came into being through his work became so extraordinarily successful—we need to take another step back. We need to understand the inner dynamic of Jewish life within its wider cultural setting.

  The wall in question, the wall that had been breached, was the division between the Jew and the non-Jew. This division, from the Jewish point of view, was greater than any other social or cultural division, more important even than the other two distinctions that ran through the whole ancient world, those between slave and free, on the one hand, and male and female, on the other. As we noted earlier, the question of how high the wall between Jew and non-Jew should be and of what sort of dealings Jews ought to have with those on the other side was controversial then, just as it is today. Different people, and indeed different Jewish community leaders, would draw the line at different places. Business dealings might be fine, business partnerships perhaps not. Friendships might be fine, intermarriage probably not. Lines would be blurred, broken, and then drawn again, sometimes in the same place, sometimes not.

  Underneath it all, however, there was always a sense of difference, of “them” and “us.” Social and cultural indicators would be the visible markers. What you ate (and what you didn’t eat), who you ate it with (and who you didn’t eat it with)—those would be the most obvious, but there were others too. Non-Jewish writer
s of the time sneered at the Jews for their “Sabbath,” claiming Jews just wanted a “lazy day” once a week. The fact that Jews didn’t eat pork, the meat most ordinarily available, looked like a ploy to appear socially superior. Jewish males were circumcised, so if they participated in athletic training in the gymnasium, which normally meant going naked, they might expect ribald comments.

  Beneath these social indicators was the more deep-seated non-Jewish suspicion that the Jews were atheists. After all, they didn’t worship the gods. They didn’t turn out for the great festivals, they didn’t come to the parties at the temples, and they didn’t offer animal sacrifices at local shrines. They claimed there was only one true Temple, the one in Jerusalem, but rumors abounded, going back to the time when the Roman general Pompey had marched into the Holy of Holies, that the Jews had no image, no statue of their god. Hence the charge of atheism. And the problem with atheism wasn’t so much theological beliefs. People believed all kinds of strange things, and the authorities let them get on with it. No, the problem was severely practical. The gods mattered for the life and health of the community. If bad things happened, the obvious reason was that the gods were angry, probably because people hadn’t been taking them seriously and offering the required worship. People who didn’t believe in the gods were therefore placing the city, the whole culture, or the whole world at risk.

  The Jews had their answers for all this, not that many non-Jews even tried to understand them. Saul of Tarsus would have grown up knowing these debates well, and during his time in Tarsus and after his move to Antioch he must have heard them repeated with wearying familiarity. Our God, the Jews would have said, is the One God who made the whole world. He cannot be represented by a human-made image. We will demonstrate who he is by the way we live. If we join the world around in worshipping the local divinities—let alone in worshipping the Roman emperor (as people were starting to do when Saul was growing up)—we will be making the mistake our ancestors made. (Actually, a significant minority of non-Jews admired the Jews for all this, preferring their clear, clean lines of belief and behavior to the dark muddles of paganism. Many attached themselves to the synagogue communities as “God-fearers.” Some went all the way to full conversion as “proselytes.”) But the Jews were clear about the fact that, if they compromised with the pagan world around them, however “compromise” might have been defined in any particular city or household, they would be giving up their heritage—and their hope.

  The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last. On a good day, many Jews would think of the One God bringing peace and justice to the whole world. On a bad day, some might think of the One God finally giving the Gentiles what they deserved, rescuing and vindicating his ancient people Israel in the process. So what would Jewish people, particularly in a diaspora community like Antioch or Tarsus, think of the suggestion that the One God had done what he promised by sending a crucified Messiah? What would this mean for Jewish identity? Was this good news simply for Jewish people, or might it be for everyone?

  Syrian Antioch, even more than Tarsus, was exactly the kind of place where this question would come quickly to the fore. (We call it Syrian Antioch to distinguish it from other cities with the same name, such as Pisidian Antioch in southern Turkey, where Paul would later preach. They all go back to their founding by Antiochus Epiphanes in the early second century BC, just as the many ancient cities called Alexandria look back to Alexander the Great in the late fourth century.) This Antioch stood on the river Orontes, about 250 miles north of Jerusalem, in the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. It was a major crossroads and trading center not far from the coast, poised between east and west, north and south, much like Venice in the high Middle Ages.

  It boasted a busy, bustling mixture of cultures, ethnic groups, and religious traditions, including a substantial Jewish population. The Roman general Pompey had made Antioch the capital of the new province of Syria, and Julius Caesar had raised it to the level of an autonomous city. With a population of around a quarter of a million, it was widely regarded in antiquity as the third or fourth city of the East, after Alexandria and Seleucia and later Constantinople. It was a classic melting pot. Every kind of social and cultural group was represented. It isn’t difficult to imagine the crowded streets, the markets selling exotic fruit as well as local produce, the traders and travelers, foreigners with strange costumes and donkeys needing food and water, the temples on every corner. It wasn’t surprising that some of the early Jesus-followers found their way there. Everybody else had, after all.

  Nor was it surprising that, once there, the Jesus-followers were eager to share the news of Jesus with non-Jews as well as Jews. They believed that God’s Messiah had launched God’s kingdom and that the new energy they discovered in announcing this message was the work of God’s own spirit, poured out in a new way, ready to embrace the wider world. If the scriptures had seen the coming king as Lord of the whole world, how could membership in this kingdom be for Jews only?

  Some of the believers who had come to Antioch from Cyprus and Cyrene saw no reason for any such limitation. They went about telling the non-Jews too about Jesus. A large number of such people believed the message, abandoned their pagan ways, and switched allegiance to Jesus as Lord. One can imagine the reaction to this in the Jewish community; many Jews would naturally have supposed that these Gentiles would then have to go all the way and become full Jews. If they were sharing in the ancient promises, ought they not to share in the ancient culture as well? What sort of a common life ought this new community to develop? These were the questions that buzzed around Paul’s head, like large worried bees, for much of his public career.

  These were, in fact, massive and fateful questions for the entire new movement. Antioch was where they came to a head. Barnabas and Saul were at the center of them. Their friendship, which went from firm to fluctuating to tragic, helped to shape Saul’s mind and teaching.

  It all began, then, when the Jerusalem leaders sent Barnabas to Antioch to see what was going on. Good-hearted Barnabas was not the sort to jump instinctively to a negative reaction, to reach for familiar prejudices just because something new was happening. He could see in the transformed lives and transparent faith of the Gentile believers that this was indeed the work of divine grace, reaching out in generous love to people of every background and origin. Barnabas shared Paul’s view that with the death and resurrection of Jesus the barriers to Gentile inclusion had gone. Now, the evidence of changed lives, of a new dynamic in worship, and above all of love (remembering that for the early Christians “love” meant a shared family life with obligations of mutual support) told its own story, and Barnabas was not going to deny it. He recognized the work of God when he saw it, and he was glad.

  Others from Jerusalem, faced with the same evidence, might have reached a different conclusion. We will meet them soon enough, urging the Jesus believers in Antioch to restrict themselves to their own ethnic groups, at least for mealtimes and perhaps even for the Lord’s meal, the “breaking of bread.” Many Jews would have assumed that Gentiles still carried a contagious pollution from their culture of idolatry and immorality. But that wasn’t how Barnabas saw it. As far as he was concerned, what mattered was the believing allegiance of these Gentiles; they were staying loyal to the Lord from the bottom of their hearts. This new community was not, then, defined by genealogy. It was defined by the Lord himself, and what counted as the sure sign of belonging to this Lord was “loyalty,” “faithfulness.”

  Here we run into the kind of problem that meets all serious readers of Paul. One obvious Greek term for “loyalty” is one of Paul’s favorite words, pistis, regularly translated “faith,” but often carrying the overtones of “faithfulness,” “reliability,” and, yes, “loyalty.” The word pistis could mean “faith” in the sense of “belief”—what was believed as well as the fact of believing, or indeed the act of believing, which already seems q
uite enough meaning for one small word. But pistis could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief, in this case that Jesus was now “Lord,” the world’s rightful sovereign. Hence the term means “loyalty” or “allegiance.” This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.

  For Paul, the word meant all of that but also much more. For him, this “believing allegiance” was neither simply a “religious” stance nor a “political” one. It was altogether larger, in a way that our language, like Paul’s, has difficulty expressing clearly. For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not. That was already the position that Barnabas was taking. He saw a single community living a common life. Saying that he recognized this as the result of divine grace is not simply the kind of pious fantasy some might imagine, since in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact. But there it was. A new kind of “family” had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus. Barnabas saw it, and he was glad.

  To say that this new project, this new community, was going to present a challenge is a gross understatement. The vibrant and excited group of Jesus-followers in Antioch was doing something radically countercultural. Nobody else in the ancient world was trying to live in a house where the old walls were being taken down. Nobody else was experimenting with a whole new way of being human. Barnabas must have realized this and must have seen that, in order even to begin to sustain such a thing, granted the enormous pressures that we might call sociocultural but that resonated also with philosophy, politics, religion, and theology, one would have to help people to think through what it all really meant. And that would mean teaching.