Paul

by N. T. Wright

  The biblical writers of “histories” only seldom draw explicit moral lessons from the stories they tell. The classic example is Absalom’s rebellion, which follows soon after David’s adultery and the murder of Uriah. The connection is not made explicit, but there is an obvious link between David’s casual attitude toward sexual liaison and human life, on the one hand, and the sexual malpractice and murder that precipitated the rebellion, on the other. And in the book of Ruth, to take a happier example, the narrator does not say, “And this was what God did next.” We are simply told that Ruth and Naomi arrived at Bethlehem at the time of the barley harvest, and we are left to discover that this was the time and the means by which, against all expectation, Ruth would find a husband. One may also recall, in this connection, that wonderful plot-changing line in the middle of the book of Esther: “That night the king could not sleep.”4

  Something similar may be going on in Luke’s narration of the journey that Paul and Silas now take, a journey from Antioch all the way to Corinth, probably to be dated from late 49 to early 51. After Timothy joins the party in Lystra, the three then move on, but without a real sense of direction. They try one thing, then another. The only divine guidance they get is negative: not this way, not that way. They go north, it seems, through Phrygia and Galatia, with the spirit forbidding them to go west into the province of Asia (the southwest coastal areas focused on Ephesus). Then they try to go through Mysia into Bithynia, the area up by the Black Sea, but again they are not permitted to go there. Like the children of Israel in the wilderness looking for the pillar of cloud and fire, they are relying on the spirit of Jesus, and the spirit appears to be allowing them to wander this way and that without a clear sense of guidance. It looks as though Paul had been expecting to work his way around some of the main parts of Anatolia, planting more churches as he had done in Galatia. But it wasn’t to be.

  It takes two verses for Luke to tell us all this, but the areas the travelers were covering were not small. Granted the roads they seem to have been taking, they journeyed at least three hundred miles after leaving Antioch to the point where they arrived, puzzled and weary, on the far northwestern shore of Mysia. It probably took them several weeks. Early on in the trip, they had visited the churches in South Galatia and had been encouraged by what they found. After that, there seems to be no more activity, either evangelistic or pastoral.

  One could say that this was a good time for Paul and Silas to get to know one another better and for them both to act as mentors and guides for Timothy, who had been invited to join them as they passed through Lystra. But one could also say, and perhaps Luke is saying this, that this is what happens when someone makes hasty decisions in a hot temper. If so, this will not be the only cooling-off period of Paul’s ministry. He seems to have learned from these times, but the learning was usually painful.

  The bright spot in this otherwise puzzling period was Timothy himself. Timothy was from Lystra, where Paul had healed the crippled man and been mistaken for a Greek god. Paul was by this time in his late thirties or early forties (assuming he was born by AD 10 at the latest). Timothy, most likely in his late teens or early twenties, must have seemed like the son that Paul never had. Certainly a bond of understanding and mutual trust developed between them of the sort that happened with few others.

  Timothy was the son of a believing Jewish woman and a Greek father. So, says Luke, Paul circumcised him “because of the Jews in those regions, since they all knew that his father was Greek.”5 Paul’s action here has perplexed many readers. We cast our minds back to the time when Paul and Barnabas, going to Jerusalem with famine relief, took Titus with them. Despite intense pressure from the hard-line Jerusalem activists who wanted to have Titus circumcised, Paul stood firm. Paul stressed this point when writing to the Galatians.6 In his mission in Galatia and then back in Antioch, Paul had stoutly resisted any suggestion that Gentile converts should be circumcised. He had gone to Jerusalem to argue for this principle and had won the day. But now he circumcises Timothy. Why? Is this not inconsistent? What is Paul’s justification?

  Here we see the start of the tricky policy that Paul spells out in 1 Corinthians 9. Everything depends on motivation. If someone says that Titus has to be circumcised because otherwise he won’t be able to join the family at the table, Paul will object, saying Titus is a believer and he belongs there. But he wants to take Timothy with him on the next phase of his work, and that will involve going again and again into synagogues. It seems unlikely that synagogue officials would go to the lengths of making a physical check on whether newcomers had been circumcised, but Paul wants to be able to assure any doubters that all the members of the party are in fact officially Jewish.

  This is what he means when he says, “I became like a Jew to the Jews, to win Jews. I became like someone under the law to the people who are under the law, even though I’m not myself under the law, so that I could win those under the law.”7 That is in itself an extraordinary statement. How could Paul become “like a Jew”? He was a Jew. The answer must be that, when seeking to work with Jewish communities or individuals, he would behave Jewishly, taking care to observe taboos for the sake of his work, not because he believed God required it of him for his standing as part of the messianic family.

  He was treading a fine line, risking the charge of inconsistency at every turn. But, as with the foundational question of belonging to the Messiah’s people, what counted for Paul was the gospel itself. He wanted to be able to continue his practice of worshipping in the synagogue and taking every opportunity to expound Israel’s story (Abraham, Exodus, David, then the unresolved “exile”) with its new and shocking messianic conclusion. And for that purpose Timothy, along with the rest of the party, would have to be a bona fide Jew.

  There is one more addition to the party, and again Luke asks us to read between the lines. (There are many different theories to explain this, but the simplest is likely to be the best.) Paul and the others have arrived at Troas, the port on the edge of a mountainous area in the far northwest of modern Turkey. Troas, near the site of ancient Troy, stood on the edge of the Hellespont, the narrow waterway, four miles wide, famous in ancient history for separating the Greeks and the Persians and in modern literary history for Lord Byron’s successful attempt to swim across it on May 3, 1810. Troas had been a strategic city in the time of Alexander, but it had suffered considerably during the Roman civil wars, and its importance had diminished—except insofar as it was the obvious port for anyone wanting to cross over into mainland Greece.

  It may be, of course, that Paul and the others had come there because, having been forbidden to go elsewhere, they had already decided that they should probably move into quite different territories. It may even be that Paul had had some thoughts of heading straight for Rome following the Via Egnatia, which they could pick up at Philippi in northern Greece, and then making for the crossing between western Greece and the heel of Italy. But as I read Luke’s description of this whole sequence of events, I think something else was going on. I think Luke knew that when Paul, Silas, and Timothy reached Troas, they were weary, disheartened, and puzzled. And I think that the reason Luke knew this was because this was the point at which he joined the party himself.

  This is far and away the simplest explanation for the fact that his narrative suddenly says “we” instead of “they.” Paul had a vision in the night (as so often, one receives guidance when it’s needed rather than when it’s wanted). A man from Macedonia was standing there, pleading, “Come across to Macedonia and help us!” (This itself strengthens my view that Paul had not previously thought of doing this, but had hoped to this point to plant more churches throughout what we now call Turkey.) So, says Luke:

  When he saw the vision, at once we set about finding a way to get across to Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the good news to them.8

  There are other theories, of course. There always are. But Occam’s razor is still helpful: always go for the hyp
othesis requiring the fewest extra assumptions. So, although it is perfectly possible that the “we” passages in Acts are, say, part of a source available to a much later author, it is equally possible, and in my judgment more plausible, that “we” here is the author’s signature. Luke turns up among those sending greetings in three Pauline letters (Colossians, Philemon, and 2 Timothy). We cannot be certain, but the signs suggest that the person who joined the party at Troas was the same person who later on wrote the story down.

  ***

  Philippi offered a different sort of challenge from the ones Paul and Barnabas had met on the earlier journey. It had been founded, or strictly speaking enlarged and refounded, out of an earlier settlement, by Philip II, king of Macedon from 382 to 336 BC, the father of Alexander the Great. The area was important in antiquity because of good-quality gold mines, of which Philip made considerable use. But the most significant event in Philippi’s history came in the early stage of the Roman civil wars, when in the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC Mark Antony and the young Octavian Caesar defeated Brutus and Cassius, who had killed Octavian’s adoptive father Julius Caesar two years before. Antony and Octavian then enlarged the city once more, establishing it as a Roman colony to settle veteran soldiers. (As with Pisidian Antioch and the other South Galatian colonies, Rome was anxious not to have old soldiers coming to Italy claiming or simply seizing land as a reward for loyal service.) Philippi is one of the better preserved of Paul’s cities, and one can still see the layout of streets, a fine theater, and the Via Egnatia going by on its way from Rome in the West to Byzantium in the East. It is, in other words, right on one of the major routes for civic and trading purposes. Paul and his companions reached Philippi after a straightforward crossing via the island of Samothrace and the port of Neapolis.

  One of the big differences between Philippi and the earlier cities of Paul’s mission was that there was no synagogue. That became significant when the locals identified Paul as a Jew; it looks as though the city knew just enough about Jews to be prejudiced against them. (How often must Paul have been stung by this. He had grown up familiar with the normal Gentile sneers against his people, and now he heard them again.) There was, however, a proseuchē, a “place of prayer” where a small number of Jews and “God-fearers” (non-Jews who wanted to join in synagogue worship) would meet regularly. This is where, after a few days settling in, Paul and the others made a start.

  Their first convert was a businesswoman from Thyatira, Lydia by name, described as “a seller of purple.” Her occupation, and actually her name as well, fit with her place of origin, Thyatira, a city in Asia Minor, in the district of Lydia. There a technique had been developed to procure the prestigious purple dye from the root of the madder plant, a much cheaper way of producing the dye than extracting it from shellfish, as was done elsewhere. The implication is that Lydia was a woman of independent means: she was the head of a household, perhaps indicating that she had been widowed or divorced. Her story of response to the gospel appears the most straightforward of any in Acts: “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.”9 She was baptized with all her household and insisted on inviting the whole party, Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Luke, to come and stay at her home.

  The announcement of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Lord seems to have caused no difficulty in the small Jewish meeting place. But trouble of a different sort was not far away, taking a form that Paul would meet at least once more. On the way to and from the proseuchē, the group encountered a girl who had what we might describe as “second sight,” but what Luke refers to as “a spirit of divination.” She was a slave girl who by telling oracles (“fortunes,” we might call them) made a good living for her owners. Unfortunately both for the owners and for Paul, something about his party and its message attracted her attention. As in some of the scenes in the Gospels in which spirit-possessed people shouted out Jesus’s secret identity, so this girl announced to all and sundry in a loud voice: “These men are servants of God Most High! They are declaring to you the way of salvation!”10

  The phrase “God Most High” would ring bells with people. Many in the ancient world, fed up with the complex muddle of pagan gods and goddesses, came to believe in a single ultimate power, a “most high” divinity. The phrase “the way of salvation,” though, is a bit of a tease. “Salvation” was something the Roman Empire claimed to offer its citizens (rescue from civil war, social unrest, and so on), but the phrase could also refer, in some philosophies, to the “rescue” of souls from the wicked world of space, time, and matter. The early Christians, of course, had a robust view of “salvation” that was neither of the above. There is a sense here, as in some other passages, of someone saying more than she knew.

  One might think that there was little harm in this poor girl shouting after the group day after day, but it was not the kind of attention Paul and his friends wanted. Eventually, as with the magician in Cyprus, Paul turned to the girl and, in the name of Jesus, commanded the spirit to leave her, which it did then and there. One can imagine the looks passing between Silas, Timothy, and Luke. Was this another case of Paul blowing his short fuse and getting himself and everyone else into trouble? So it seemed.

  It didn’t take the girl’s owners long to realize that their line of business was finished. She wasn’t going to be giving any more oracles or telling any more fortunes; they wouldn’t be making any more money from her special ability. (This is one of many occasions in Acts where we wish we knew what happened next. One would like to think that perhaps Lydia rescued the girl and adopted her, because her other options would not have been good, but we have no information.) But instead of complaining that Paul had taken away their livelihood, the girl’s owners jumped straight to a charge that was, in our terms, both “civil” and “religious,” though with the emphasis on the first. They grabbed hold of Paul and Silas (why them; did Timothy and Luke melt into the crowd at that point?), dragged them into the public square, and presented them to the magistrates. “These men,” they said, “are throwing our city into an uproar! They are Jews, and they are teaching customs which it’s illegal for us Romans to accept or practice!”11

  We may hope that Paul, despite his plight, was alive to the irony. The anger and violence he had faced in Galatia and the opposition to his missionary strategy in Jerusalem and Antioch had been instigated by Jewish groups, furious that he seemed to be disloyal to the ancestral traditions. Now he was accused of being a Jew teaching people to be disloyal to Rome!—a charge that might resonate uncomfortably in a world where it was known that the Jewish people had rebelled against Rome before and might well do so again.

  Of course, the motive for the charge was clear, even though the underlying sequence of thought was bewildering. Paul’s exorcism of the girl (an initially “religious” problem) quickly translated into loss of income (an economic problem), and this was turned, vengefully, into the accusation that Paul and Silas were Jews (an ethnic problem) who were teaching customs that it would be illegal for Romans to practice (a political problem). The last of these is a genuine puzzle, since it isn’t clear that any Roman law prohibited Romans from adopting Jewish practices; many did so with impunity. The only sense that can be made of it—always supposing that Luke himself thought it made sense, which perhaps he didn’t—might be that the gospel message about Jesus, which demanded that people stop worshipping “idols” and turn to the living God, could be seen as a Jewish message urging people to abandon the imperial or state cults.

  With that, the accusers might just have had a point. It is clear from the charge, however distorted, that some kind of gossip about the group had already been going around Philippi, as one would expect. These strangers really were teaching a Jewish message, a message about Israel’s God doing something dramatic, installing Israel’s Messiah as the world’s true Lord. So, though the accusers’ argument and conclusions were flawed at every turn, there was more than a grain of truth in what they ended up saying.
<
br />   Without waiting for any formal process—an omission that would come back to haunt them—the magistrates had Paul and Silas stripped, beaten with rods, and thrown into prison. (Again, we wonder why only Paul and Silas were picked out. Timothy and Luke must have appeared to be of lesser importance or have managed to hide in Lydia’s house or elsewhere.) So far as we know, this was Paul’s first taste of prison. It would not be his last.

  In Paul’s world, unlike ours, prison was not a “sentence” in itself. It was where magistrates put people while they decided what to do with them. No provision was made for the prisoners’ welfare. They had to rely on friends or family to bring them food and other necessities. Sanitation would be minimal; rodents and other vermin would be normal. The company would not be one’s first choice of friends. A few days in such a hole might well make one hope for almost any punishment, a heavy fine, or banishment at least, if only one could get out of the horrid place.

  Paul and Silas did not have long to wait. What follows reads like a sequence from a movie or a somewhat overwritten thriller. The two men were praying and singing hymns at midnight. After their ordeal and with their feet in the stocks, there was not much chance of sleep, though one wonders what the other prisoners thought of being kept awake in this strange manner. That, however, was the least of their worries, since they suddenly felt the whole building shaking. Northern Greece is an earthquake zone, and suddenly the whole prison shook. This was bad news for the jailer. He was responsible for keeping the prisoners under lock and key; with doors bursting open and chains being loosened, the poor man feared the worst. He did what many a junior Roman official would think of doing in the circumstances: he drew his sword and was about to take his own life rather than face the torture and possible death he might expect for failing his duty.