Paul

by N. T. Wright

  Paul had other ideas. “Don’t harm yourself!” he yelled. “We’re all still here!”12 The jailor called for lights and rushed into the prison. It seems that his panic was not only because of the penalty he might face for letting prisoners escape, but because he knew, as the whole town would, that Paul and Silas were there on some kind of a religious charge, and he would have been aware of traditions in which angry gods used earthquakes to make their displeasure known. That explains not only his panic but also his trembling question: “Gentlemen,” he said, “will you please tell me how I can get out of this mess?”13

  The traditional translation of his question, “What must I do to be saved?” makes it sound more like a plea from a seventeenth-century Puritan anxious about how to go to heaven. But the language of “salvation” worked at several levels in the ancient world. The slave girl whom Paul had exorcised had been shouting out that the travelers were announcing “the way of salvation.” The Roman Empire offered “salvation” to its subjects, meaning rescue from war, social upheaval, and destitution. Later in Acts, when Luke is describing the shipwreck, he speaks of the whole company being “saved” in the very concrete sense of being rescued from drowning. So it is natural to take the jailer’s panic-stricken question at the most obvious level: he wants the nightmare to end and to avoid any trouble. But then there is the deeper level, at which believing in Jesus would at once give the jailer and his household membership in the family that was already celebrating Jesus’s victory over sin and death. And there is the ultimate level: Luke and Paul both believed that one day God would rescue the whole creation from its “slavery to decay,” bringing it and all Jesus’s people into the full and final new creation.

  How much any of this flashed across Paul’s mind at such a bizarre moment it is hard to say, though with his quick wit and his overall sense of an integrated cosmic divine plan he would in principle have been able to glimpse it. What he says works at all these levels: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be rescued—you and your household.”14 The jailer is only too glad to bring Paul and Silas into his house and let them explain what this actually means. He fetches water and washes their wounds; they reciprocate by baptizing him and his household, perhaps with the same water. The near tragedy turns into a celebration as the whole family shares a meal. What happened to the other prisoners we have no idea.

  There follows another of those moments when Paul’s companions must have thought he was pushing his luck. At first light, the magistrates sent word to the prison that Paul and Silas were to be released and should leave town. Paul objected, producing a trump card that must have sent shock waves through the locality. “We are Roman citizens!” he says. “They didn’t put us on trial, they beat us in public, they threw us into prison, and now they are sending us away secretly? No way! Let them come themselves and take us out.”15 He is on safe ground. Roman citizens were entitled to full legal rights. Public beating and imprisonment without trial was normal practice for noncitizens, but in the case of citizens this would have been enough to turn the tables and get the magistrates themselves into serious trouble, should Paul have chosen to follow it up. (Roman officials would know this well, ever since Cicero’s prosecution of Verres in 70 BC; Verres’s crowning fault was the crucifixion of a Roman citizen.)

  Another irony: the original charge was that he was teaching customs it wasn’t lawful for Romans to adopt, but by the end Paul is accusing the magistrates themselves of illegal behavior against Romans. It is, of course, a wonderfully confusing situation, but that is the kind of thing to expect when a new world is breaking in on the old one. It ends with a public apology and with the magistrates, clearly at a loss to know what to do next, imploring Paul and Silas to go away. They take their time about complying, first visiting Lydia’s house and conversing with the group of believers there.

  When they go, it is not clear whether Timothy and Luke go too (though Timothy has at least caught up with Paul by the time the apostle is in Beroea). But Luke, in the next scene, no longer writes “we.”

  * * *

  Philippi was an important city in its own right, but Thessalonica, Paul’s next port of call, was even more so. It was on a main crossroads, and its role as a port at the head of the Thermaic Gulf to the west of the Chalcidice Peninsula guaranteed it prosperity. It was the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia, and the Roman general Pompey had used it as his base in the civil war. It was not, in Paul’s day, an official Roman colony. That would come two centuries later. But it was clearly a major center of Roman influence.

  Thessalonica, unlike Philippi, had a Jewish population of sufficient numbers to sustain a synagogue. Luke’s summary of what Paul said on the three Sabbaths he spoke there conforms both to the earlier summaries, particularly Paul’s address in Pisidian Antioch (Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope), and to Paul’s own repeated statements in his letters. The message can be summed up in two basic points: first, the scriptures point to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah; second, Jesus was and is that Messiah. The message was accepted by some of the Jews, several of the God-fearing Greeks, and quite a number of the leading women. It also appears from Paul’s first letter to Thessalonica, written not long after this initial visit, that many in the young church there had been polytheistic pagans and had “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”16 Clearly this was a significant group of both Jews and Gentiles.

  One member in particular, Jason, gave hospitality to Paul and Silas and then faced the brunt of the anger that was aroused when, as in Galatia, some of the synagogue community decided that enough was enough. A mob was stirred up, bent on violence, but the traveling missionaries could not be found. What matters here, though, is the political nature of the charges that were thrown around as all this was going on:

  “These are the people who are turning the world upside down!” they yelled. “Now they’ve come here! Jason has had them in his house! They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar—and they’re saying that there is another king, Jesus!”17

  Once again the charges are complicated. A Jewish objection to the apostles’ message (we Jews are not convinced that Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah) is easily translated into a charge of sedition against Rome (if there really is a Jewish Messiah, then according to scripture such a person will rule the whole world). Another king, indeed! Mixed in with that there may be a hint of the problem we identified as one key element in the Galatian situation: if non-Jews were abandoning idols and coming to worship the God of Israel, but without formally becoming Jews in the process, then they were indeed disobeying Caesar’s decrees. Only genuine Jews had that permission.

  Does this mean, then, that Paul and the others really were “turning the world upside down”? Broadly speaking, yes it does. Exactly in line with Jesus’s own announcement of God’s kingdom, which took normal political values and power structures and stood them on their heads, Paul and his friends were announcing and modeling in their own lives a different way of being human, a different kind of community, and all because there was a very different kind of “king.” Of course, one would not expect a mob to understand the finer points of the early Christian message. But Luke, summarizing the accusation, seems content to allow the muddled pagan crowd to say more than they know. In any case, Jason and his friends are bound over to keep the peace, while Paul and Silas are smuggled out of town by night and sent on to Beroea, fifty miles or so to the west, but off the main route. They leave in a hurry, with a sense that the little body of believers is under threat.

  The first letter Paul wrote back to this community, most likely in late 50 or early 51, makes it clear that in the relatively short time he had been with them they had established a close and loving bond. “We were gentle among you,” he writes,

  like a nurse taking care of her own children. We were so devoted to you that we gladly intended to share with you not only the gospel of God but our own lives, because you became so dear to us.18
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br />   He was snatched away from them, he says, “in person though not in heart,” because he “longed eagerly, with a great desire,” to see them “face to face.”19 So strong was this feeling that when Paul reached Athens soon afterward, he sent Timothy back to Thessalonica to see how things were going, and he returned with good news, which Paul reports to the Thessalonians: “You always have good memories of us, and . . . are longing to see us, just as we are to see you.”20

  These short references, an intimate exchange very soon after Paul’s initial visit, tell us a great deal about Paul’s way of life, his style of teaching and pastoral engagement—and also perhaps about his own personal needs. The split with Barnabas, the long and apparently aimless journey through central Anatolia with all its nagging uncertainties, the sense of arriving in a new culture, the shock of public beating and imprisonment—all this would have left him vulnerable at quite a deep level. In that context, to sense the genuine, unaffected love and support of people he had only just met, to discover through the work of the gospel a deep bond for which the language of “family” was the only appropriate description—all this must have given him comfort and strength.

  As he had worried in early days about working in vain, so he wonders, by himself in Athens, whether all he had done in Thessalonica was wasted effort.21 Once more, the fact that he expresses this anxiety in terms of Isaiah’s “servant” theme doesn’t mean that the anxiety was any the less real. Paul looks back on his time in northern Greece with, no doubt, some shocking memories, but with an overarching sense that he now belongs with those communities and they with him. This, however, needs reinforcing with news. Antioch, his original base, is far away. What he is discovering is not exactly a new home—he would never spend very long in northern Greece—but a place where he has left part of his heart. A place from which he might derive either real encouragement or devastating disappointment.

  So Paul, Silas, and Timothy head south rather than west. I rather think that this meant a change of plan. I suggested earlier that Paul had not originally intended to cross over the Aegean Sea into Greece. But once he was there, sensing a positive response to the gospel of Kyrios Iēsous in these very Roman cities and finding himself on the Via Egnatia, it must have been tempting to continue all the way to the port of Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic coast, to cross over to Italy, and to make straight for Rome. But the violence of the opposition in Thessalonica and the fact that he had to leave town in hurried secrecy would have made it difficult to proceed openly along the great east–west highway. Instead, the party set a different course, slightly south of west, and soon arrived in Beroea.

  The stay in Beroea is short, perhaps shorter than the few weeks in Thessalonica. The city is at this time a major center of the imperial cult as well as the headquarters of the Macedonian “confederation.” As in Thessalonica, there is a synagogue, but the Jewish community here takes a quite different approach. They are prepared to listen carefully and in a generous spirit to what Paul is saying and to work through the scriptures he was expounding to see if what he said fitted the texts. We imagine them sitting down with him, sharing hospitality, and looking carefully at the story of Abraham, at the drama of the Exodus, at the anointing of David, at the Psalms and the prophets who pointed forward through the darkness of exile to the possibility of a new dawn. That shared study sounds like a promising start. Many of the Jews become believers, as do some of the Gentiles, notably some of the well-born women. They are, perhaps, among those who would find the synagogue culture to be a welcome change from the surrounding pagan world. The clear, strong ethic and the simple, almost stark, belief in the One God contrasted sharply with the ordinary life of the Roman world. Paul insists, writing later to Corinth, that among the believers “not many were nobly born.”22 But “not many” does not mean “not any.” The small groups of Jesus-followers were mixed socially as well as in gender and ethnic origin.

  The good beginning in Beroea did not last. Word got back to Thessalonica that the troublemakers had moved down the road, and those Jews who had opposed Paul in Thessalonica came after him and whipped up a crowd to make trouble once more. So Paul had to move on again, though this time it seems he was the sole target of the crowd’s anger, while Silas and Timothy were able to stay behind. It would have been possible to travel south to Athens by public roads. But the group from Beroea accompanying Paul seems to have chosen to take him by sea. He arrived at Athens and, saying farewell to his escorts, urged them to tell Silas and Timothy to join him as soon as they can.

  We have followed Luke’s account of Paul’s arrival in Europe and the short stays in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beroea. These are confirmed from Paul’s own letters. Yet Luke’s version can easily give us a false impression. By highlighting the swift events of arrival, gospel announcement, opposition and persecution, and departure, Luke has written a page-turner, but as we read it we have to remind ourselves that these things did not, in fact, happen in quick bursts of twenty-four hours. The hints are that Paul was in Philippi for several weeks at least. His letter to the church there, written a few years later, is so full of love that we cannot imagine his stay to have been as short as a quick reading of Acts might suggest. By the same token, we discover from that letter that when Paul was in prison (in Ephesus, as I shall later explain) the Philippian church sent him money—and Paul comments that they had done that as soon as he had left them, supporting his work in Thessalonica as well. Paul was clear that he was not preaching the gospel in order to earn money. But those whose lives had been changed by his preaching and teaching seem spontaneously to have wanted to support him, and the Philippians were preeminent in this. Such a desire is hardly raised by a visit of a few days.

  It is worth laboring this point, because when people in our own day wonder what made Paul the man he was and ultimately why his project succeeded, it has been fashionable to suggest that he was a difficult, awkward, cross-grained customer who always disagreed with everyone about everything. There is no doubt that he could come across like that, especially when he could see straight through the fudge and muddle of what someone else was saying, whether a senior apostle like Peter or a local magistrate like those in Philippi. But—and it is perhaps important to stress this before we see him move on to southern Greece, where relations were not always so easy—all the signs are that in the northern Greek churches Paul quickly established a deep and lasting bond of mutual love and trust.

  He would say, of course, that this came about because of the gospel. The power of the spirit, through the message and the strange personal presence of Jesus, transformed not only the individual hearts, minds, and lives of those who received it, but also the relationships between speakers and hearers. “Sharing not only the gospel of God but our own lives”23—that line tells its own story.

  Yes, it is of course Paul himself who is saying this. But it is hard to believe that Paul could write that to a group he had been with only a few weeks earlier unless he knew that they would know it was true. When we wonder what most strongly motivated Paul, we must put near the center the fact that at a deeply human level he was sustained and nourished by what he came to call koinōnia.

  As we saw earlier, the normal translation of koinōnia is “fellowship,” but that coin has worn smooth with long use. It can mean “business partnership” too; that is part of it, but again it doesn’t get to the heart. And the heart is what matters. When our words run out, we need images: the look of delight when a dear friend pays an unexpected visit, the glance of understanding between musicians as together they say something utterly beautiful, the long squeeze of a hand by a hospital bed, the contentment and gratitude that accompany shared worship and prayer—all this and more. The other Greek word for which Paul would reach is of course agapē, “love,” but once again our English term is so overused that we can easily fail to recognize it as it walks nearby, like a short-sighted lover failing to recognize the beloved; what we so often miss is that it means the world, and more than the world. “
The son of God loved me,” Paul had written to the Galatians, “and gave himself for me.” What we see as Paul makes his way around the cities of northern Greece is what that love looks like when it translates into the personal and pastoral ministry of the suffering and celebrating apostle.

  Athens

  8

  Athens

  THE PARTHENON IS probably the only building of its period to be instantly recognizable today. A glance at a photograph is enough. Everyone knows what it is, or at least where it is: Athens, the center of the classical world. Built to celebrate the goddess Athene after the victory over the Persians in the fifth century BC, the brilliantly designed marble structure, perfect in its proportions and dazzling in its location on the Acropolis, functioned for centuries as the main focal point for worship in Athens. There were of course many other temples, including the smaller but still dramatic Temple of Nike (“Victory”), built close to the Parthenon around 410 BC, and others scattered elsewhere in the city. The Temple of Jupiter, just down the hill, was vast. But the Parthenon was, and remains, in a category of its own.

  You can see the Acropolis to excellent effect, displaying the Parthenon, the Temple of Nike, and all the rest, from another steep hill a few hundred yards to the northwest. This is the Areopagus, the “Hill of Mars”—Mars was the god of war—where from early times the senior council of Athens used to meet. Athens was in that period ruled by “archons” (the word simply means “the ruling ones”), nine of whom were elected each year. When their term of office was over, they automatically became members of the Areopagus, the hill giving its name to the body that met there. Though the status and role of the body changed as political reforms came and went, it continued to be a powerful influence in Athenian public life, and it also functioned as a court to try serious offenses, including homicide, arson, and some religious cases.