by N. T. Wright
We watch, then, as Paul follows the pattern that has already emerged. His message and mission remain firmly anchored in the traditions and hopes of Israel, and he naturally begins with the synagogue, presumably employing some version of the narrative we saw him displaying in Antioch (Abraham, the Exodus, David . . . and Jesus). He receives an enthusiastic reception from some hearers and predictably implacable hostility from others. But there are two other features that emerge in these three cities and also in the letter Paul wrote to these churches not long afterward.
First, Paul’s message of a new age dawning, of new creation suddenly leaping into life, is dramatically symbolized by a burst of healing activity. When Paul writes to these churches later on, he refers to the powerful signs that had been performed and it seems were still being performed in their midst.13 We should be careful, by the way, about the modern word “miracle” in this connection. People often think of “miracles” as the “invasion” of the natural order by a force from outside. That wasn’t how the early Christians saw it. For them, dramatic and otherwise inexplicable healings were seen as evidence of new creation, of the Creator himself at work in a fresh way. This is especially clear in the incident in Lystra to which we shall return presently.
The second feature of this part of the trip is suffering. The community leaders in Iconium, Jews and Gentiles alike, try to attack Paul and Barnabas and even to stone them.14 Paul himself is stoned and left for dead in Lystra.15 As they go back through the region after their initial foray, the message they give is stark: God’s kingdom is indeed breaking in, but belonging to that new age, that new divine rule, will mean undergoing suffering. The “present age” and the “age to come” are grinding against one another, like upper and lower millstones, as God’s new world is brought to birth. Those who find themselves seized by the message of Jesus will be caught in the middle and will thereby provide in themselves further evidence of the message, the news that the crucified Messiah is now the Lord of the whole world.
The paradoxes of Paul’s apostleship are thus laid bare right from the start of his traveling career. There is a sense in which all the writing that would later flow from his pen becomes a complicated set of footnotes to the reality he was already discovering and modeling. When Paul writes to the churches in Galatia and refers to his first visit to them, he mentions that it was “through bodily weakness that I announced the gospel to you in the first place.”16 Some have speculated that he was seriously ill at the time. Those who invoked epilepsy or serious migraines as “explanations” for the Damascus Road incident have naturally invoked them here too. As another alternative, some have suggested that when he goes on to say that the Galatians welcomed him so warmly that, had it been possible, they would have torn out their eyes and given them to him, this is an indication that he suffered from some kind of sickness of the eyes.17 That, I think, is a case (and not the only one) of modern readers failing to spot a well-known first-century metaphor.
I think it far more likely that the poor physical condition to which Paul refers is the result of the violence to which he had been subjected. In the ancient world, just as today, the physical appearance of public figures carries considerable weight in how they are assessed. Someone turning up in a city shortly after being stoned or beaten up would hardly cut an imposing figure. The Galatians, however, had welcomed Paul as if he were an angel from heaven or even the Messiah himself.18 As Paul would later explain, the bodily marks of identification that mattered to him were not the signs of circumcision, but “the marks of Jesus”—in other words, the signs of the suffering he had undergone. When, later on, he faces suffering at other levels as well—including what looks like a nervous breakdown—he will, through gritted teeth, explain that this too is part of what it means to be an apostle.19
Another theme that resonates throughout Paul’s public career first emerges here in Lystra. He would have been well aware, from his early days, of the non-Jewish religious culture of ancient Anatolia: many gods, many “lords,” many tales of divine goings-on, traceable all the way back in the classical world to Homer, but then diversifying into local legends and folktales. One such, reported by the Roman poet Ovid, tells of the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes wandering unrecognized in the region. Later inscriptions from the area indicate that these two divinities were subsequently celebrated there.20 So it isn’t surprising that, when Paul dramatically heals a man who had been crippled from birth, the locals assume that the old stories have come true: Zeus and Hermes have appeared at last. (Luke, in an interesting bit of local color, tells us that the crowds are shouting out their welcome in the local Lycaonian language.) Since Hermes is the “messenger of the gods,” and since Paul seems to be doing all the talking, they assume that Paul is Hermes. That, by process of elimination, means that Barnabas must be Zeus. Before the apostles know what is happening, the local cult swings into action. The priest of Zeus brings out a procession to meet them. He has oxen and garlands, all the paraphernalia for a great sacrifice. There is no doubt music and dancing. They find themselves in the middle of a classic pagan celebration.
At this point all the deep-seated instincts and theology of two lifelong devout Jews come into play. This is exactly the kind of idolatry against which the Jewish world had always reacted. Early Jewish tales of the call of Abraham himself stress his background in polytheism and how he had given it all up to follow the call of the One God. The law of Moses warns repeatedly against any kind of compromise with pagan worship. Paul, steeped in the Torah from boyhood, would never forget the threat posed by Balaam when he sent in the Moabite women to tempt the Israelite men to commit idolatry, the moment when Phinehas burned with the “zeal,” the moment when Elijah faced the Baal worshippers. Later challenges reinforced the point. The deepest revulsion of the Jewish monotheist was reserved for this kind of thing and all that went with it. Jews from that day to this have accused Paul of compromising with paganism. But this scene makes it abundantly clear that, if Paul ever appears to be sailing close to the wind (he would say that this was a false conclusion, but many have drawn it), this was not because he was becoming some kind of pagan by the back door. He was as fierce and zealous a monotheist as anyone else. He reacts to finding himself in the middle of a pagan celebration like a man in a pit of snakes. This is not a good place for him to be.
Nor was this simply a knee-jerk reaction to “other people’s religious practices.” Throughout his mature work we see evidence that Paul had a well-thought-out critique of the world of pagan philosophy and religion, rooted in his belief in the One God as the creator of the world. Paganism, he believed, was simply a parody, people worshipping forces within the natural world without realizing that they owed their very existence and such charm and power as they possessed to the creator who had made them in the first place—and that to worship these forces was the quick route to slavery and dehumanization. Completely consistent with his slogan of “turning from idols to serve a living and true God,” Paul insists not only on that challenge but on the underlying narrative: that for a long time this God has allowed the nations to go their own way, but now something new has burst onto the scene.
Paul and Barnabas rush into the crowd and, disrupting the careful liturgical procession and interrupting the music, they do their best to explain that this is precisely what their message is not about. They, Paul and Barnabas, are not gods but ordinary humans, and the whole point of their visit is to tell everybody to turn away from such foolishness. The “gods” the local people are invoking are lifeless idols, but they, the apostles, are bringing them news of a God who is alive. He is the Creator; he is the one who supplies humans with all they need. And something has happened to make this message urgent: this living God, having for a long time allowed the nations to go their own way, has now done something to unveil his power and his purpose. That’s why it is time to turn away from all this playacting and experience the power and love of the God who puts all the gods to shame.
When we set this incident
alongside the opening synagogue sermon in Acts 13, we see clearly how the inner logic of Paul’s mission actually works. On the one hand, he is declaring to the Jewish community, and thereafter to all and sundry, that the long-awaited fulfillment of Israel’s hope has arrived. The story that began with Abraham—the story, that is, of how the One God was addressing the deep problems of the whole human race and hence of creation itself—had reached its goal. Israel’s God had defeated the forces of darkness that had held the nations captive and, in a majestic second Exodus, had brought Jesus through death to resurrection and had thereby declared him to be David’s true son, Israel’s Messiah, and the world’s true Lord.
But, on the other hand, if all this is true, then this does not mean that the Jews are wrong and the pagans are right. On the contrary, the powers that have gripped the pagan world and the fake “gods” that these “powers” have used to deceive the nations have been overthrown. Zeus, Hermes, and the rest have been shown up as shams. They simply do not exist. Any “power” that they have comes not from their own quasi-divinity, but from the fact that humans, worshipping them, have given to the malevolent forces that use their name as a cloak the authority that God always intended humans themselves to exercise. That is why, as we have seen, if these “powers” are overthrown and if the long-awaited new creation has begun under the rule of the Davidic king, then the nations of the world are to be invited to join the people who worship the One God, just as the Jewish people themselves are invited to welcome their Messiah and to discover, as Paul insisted in Antioch, that the puzzling ending to Moses’s own words to Israel in Deuteronomy 27–32 has been dealt with. The story that could get no farther because of Israel’s ongoing rebellion and hard-heartedness has arrived at its new destination. That which couldn’t be dealt with under Moses has now been dealt with once and for all.21
The transition is swift. One minute the Lycaonians are ready to worship Paul; the next minute they are ready to stone him. If this seems extreme—but then who are we to judge a totally different culture?—it may be explained more easily than we might imagine, and not only on the principle of the fickleness of crowds (like those who shouted “Hosanna” on Palm Sunday and then “Crucify!” a few days later). Rather, Paul had accomplished an extraordinary feat of healing. That could not be denied. But if he was not to be identified with one of the Greek pantheon, then who was he? Some kind of magician?
One person’s miracle is another person’s magic, and someone performing powerful deeds without proper sanction may be a dangerous deceiver. Jesus himself had been accused of being in league with the devil. Deuteronomy had warned Israel about that kind of thing, and a puzzled pagan crowd would be ready for a similar explanation. Perhaps Paul was bewitching them, dazzling them with magic tricks in order to prey on them. Such a person would be better off out of the way altogether, and the mixture of zealous Jews and angry local pagans leaves Paul for dead under a hail of stones. “Once I was stoned” he says later.22 Once would have finished off most people, but for whatever reason Paul lives to tell the tale, perhaps by being knocked unconscious early on and so being left for dead.
Equally, one such incident would have convinced many people that they were on a fool’s errand and ought to find less risky ways of getting their message across. But Paul’s resolve is only stiffened. His friends come around and take him into the city. He explains that this kind of suffering is precisely the sign of two worlds clashing; they are on the cusp of the new world, and if this is what it costs, this is what it costs. So he will go on.
One more visit, this time to Derbe, a little farther down the same road. Had they gone much farther along the Via Sebaste, Paul and Barnabas would have gone up the steep pass through the Cilician Gates in the Taurus Mountains and would then have dropped down to Paul’s native city of Tarsus. There may have been reasons for not doing that. Instead, they turn back to revisit the cities where they have launched these little new-creation communities, these surprised groups of people who have found themselves caught up in a movement at once so utterly Jewish and so very unlike (and therefore so threatening to) anything that local Jewish communities had thought of before. As we would expect, they encourage these little groups; they urge them to “remain in the faith,” which we could equally well translate as “stay loyal,” loyal, in other words, to the Faithful One, to the true King Jesus. They remind them, with Paul’s battered body as the obvious evidence, that the ultimate “kingdom of God,” the sovereign rule of the One God on earth as in heaven, will come about “through considerable suffering.”23 Suffering, it appears, is not simply something through which the faithful people must pass to get to their destination. It is in itself the way in which the dark powers that have ruled the world will exhaust themselves, the way in which the one-off victory won by the Messiah on the cross will be implemented in the world.
All this Paul and Barnabas now have etched into their conscious and subconscious minds. They have seen the power of God unveiled as they have told the story of Israel reaching its climax in Jesus. They have witnessed “signs and wonders” of various kinds. They have suffered and have discovered that this too is a means of the power by which God’s new age is coming to birth. And they have seen, in particular, that many non-Jews, hearing the message, have responded with delight, believed, and stayed loyal to Jesus as the crucified and risen Lord. What they had witnessed earlier in Syrian Antioch—the creation of a new community in which Jews and Gentiles were able to live together because all that had previously separated them had been dealt with on the cross—had come true in city after city.
Every element of this contributes to our initial answer to our first question about Paul’s deepest motivations. Every element of it contributes to a deeper understanding of our second question, as to the significance of what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. There is no suggestion that Paul had embraced a “religion” different from the one he had previously pursued. There is no suggestion that up to that point he had supposed that in order to get to “heaven,” one had to please Israel’s God by performing good moral works, and that he was now offering an easier way (“You just have to believe!”). Both of these suggestions—widely popular in Western thought over the last few centuries—are simply anachronistic. This is not how Jews or pagans of the time were thinking, and it certainly isn’t how Paul’s mind worked.
For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences. And if that had now happened, if the Messiah’s death had dealt with the “powers” that had held Jew and Gentile alike captive and his resurrection had launched a new world order “on earth as in heaven,” then the non-Jewish nations were not only free to turn from their now powerless idols to serve the living and true God, but their “uncleanness”—the idolatry and immorality that were always cited as the reason Jews should not fraternize with them—had itself been dealt with. The radical meaning of the Messiah’s cross was the reason, on both counts, that there now had to be a single family consisting of all the Messiah’s people. And perhaps this helps, eventually, with the other question that hovers over all study of Paul: Why did this extraordinary movement, launched by this energetic and subversive man, spread in the way it did?
All these questions need as their central point the recognition that this was neither a new “religion” nor a new system of otherworldly salvation. At the heart of Paul’s message, teaching, and life was—to use a technical phrase—radical messianic eschatology. Eschatology: God’s long-awaited new day has arrived. Messianic: Jesus is the true son of David, announced as such in his resurrection, bringing to completion the purposes announced to Abraham and extended in the Psalms to embrace the world. Radical: nothing in Paul’s or Barnabas’s background had prepared them for this new s
tate of affairs. The fact that they now believed it was what the One God had always planned did not reduce their own sense of awe and astonishment. They knew firsthand that such a program would meet stiff resistance and even violence. What they could not have foreseen, as they traveled back through the southern part of the province of Galatia and then sailed home to (Syrian) Antioch, was that the new reality they had witnessed would become a focus of sharp controversy even among Jesus’s followers, let alone that the two of them, Paul and Barnabas, would find themselves on opposite sides as that controversy boiled over.
Antioch to Jerusalem
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Antioch and Jerusalem
BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul’s world is that kind of exercise.
We have already explored, at least in a preliminary way, the different points of view that might explain the reaction to Paul’s work in the cities of South Galatia. The Roman authorities wanted to keep the peace and engender social stability. The leading local citizens, eager to put on a good face before the imperial world, did their best to work to the same end. The Jewish communities, wanting to live at peace while maintaining their integrity, cherished their special exemption from worshipping “the gods,” including, of course, the imperial divinities. These visions of stability were inevitably disrupted by Paul’s message, backed up as it was with powerful deeds, announcing the fulfillment of Israel’s scriptures in the messianic events involving Jesus.
