by N. T. Wright
It has been fashionable in modern times to imagine that the early Christians saw the coming judgment as the literal “end of the world,” the collapse and destruction of the planet and perhaps the entire cosmos as we know it. This letter, though full of lurid imagery, makes it clear that that cannot be right. Paul warns the Thessalonians not to be unsettled by anyone saying or writing in a letter that purports to be by Paul “that the day of the Lord has already arrived.” The “day of the Lord,” in other words—the new, Jesus-focused version of the ancient Israelite hope for “the day of the Lord”—will not mean the end of the present space-time order. One would not expect to be informed of such a thing through the Roman postal system. As so often in Jewish writing of roughly this period, what sounds to us like “end-of-the-world” language is used to denote and refer to things that we might call major world events, the sudden rise and fall of ruling powers and the like, and to invest those events with their inner, God-related significance.
Classic examples are found in books like Isaiah, where the language of the sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven is deployed to denote the fall of Babylon and to invest that event with its “cosmic” significance, which is that the powers of the heavens are shaken!19 Or take the case of Jeremiah, who in his early days had prophesied that the world would return to chaos. Since the Temple in Jerusalem was regarded as the focal point of creation, of heaven and earth coming together, this was the appropriate language to use when speaking prophetically of a time when the Temple would be destroyed.20 Jeremiah spent many years worrying about whether he was after all a false prophet, not because the world had not come to an end, but because the Temple had not fallen.
This is how such language was used across many centuries in the Israelite and Jewish culture, which had always believed in the close link of “heaven” and “earth” and found it natural to use the language of “natural disasters” to bring out the significance of what we might call major sociopolitical upheavals. Actually, we do the very same thing, speaking of a political “earthquake” or of an election producing a “landslide.” Our own metaphors seem so natural that we forget they are metaphors. Other people’s metaphors, alien to our way of speaking, are often misinterpreted as though they are not metaphors at all. No doubt Paul faced the same kind of problem, moving as he did within a complex and confusing range of cultures.
So what was he really saying to the Thessalonians when warning them about the coming “day”? The best way of taking his strange, allusive language is to see it as the natural extension of what he says back in 1 Thessalonians 5. There, we recall, he had warned about those who say “peace and security,” but who would face sudden ruin. This can only be a coded reference to the imperial propaganda put out by Rome, which, claiming to have gained control over the whole world, offered its citizens an assurance of safety far beyond its power to deliver. Paul already knew—the whole Jewish world already knew—what that might look like in reality. Paul was writing this letter while Claudius was emperor, but everybody knew what his predecessor, Gaius Caligula, had tried to do.
He had nearly achieved it. Becoming emperor in his middle twenties, Caligula had become increasingly erratic and megalomaniacal, insisting on divine honors in Rome itself, something his predecessors Augustus and Tiberius had been careful never to do. One thing stood in his way: the permission given to the Jews to worship their own God in their own way. He planned to do to Jerusalem what Antiochus Epiphanes had done two centuries earlier, only more so; he would convert the Jerusalem Temple into a great shrine focused on a giant statue of himself. He would be the divine image in the holy place.
Like his grand plans for the Corinthian canal, this didn’t happen. Caligula was assassinated in January AD 41. His name was removed from public records, and his statues were destroyed. But for many Jews who knew their scriptures, not least the prophecies of Daniel, there was a sense that the great evil, the vast, chaotic, and horrible “mystery of lawlessness,” had been thwarted once, but would return. Something was holding it back, “restraining” it, for a time.21 What did that mean? Some have thought Paul meant that Claudius, a very different kind of emperor, was following a different kind of policy, but that when he departed another Caligula might arise. Others have supposed Paul was referring to the power of the gospel itself, that the work of announcing Jesus as Lord was establishing a bridgehead into the power structures of the world, so that when the great evil returned it could be properly defeated. Paul’s purpose, in any case, was not to encourage the Thessalonians’ tendency toward lurid apocalyptic speculation, but to assure them that, despite fears and rumors, God was in charge. Jesus was indeed the coming world ruler, and they, as his people, were secure.22
He had one more message for them, again reminding us that the church was from the first a community of mutual support. Here, within twenty years of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, was a “family” already running into the problem of people taking advantage of generosity, of agapē! Paul’s instruction here is brisk: those who won’t work shouldn’t eat.23 This no doubt made the point at the time, but for us the important thing is perhaps what Paul and the Thessalonians were all taking for granted: that the followers of Jesus were to live as “family,” with all that this entailed in mutual support. Paul stressed the responsibilities of the individual: “Do your own work in peace” (as Paul himself had done, deliberately setting the example), “and eat your own bread.”24 The modern Western church has taken individualism to an extreme, and there are great strengths in focusing on the challenge to every single church member, both to believe and to work. But for Paul this did not undermine, but rather gave appropriate balance to, the more foundational reality, that those who belonged to the Messiah were “brothers and sisters.”
* * *
As we think back to the experience of the Galatian cities and then of Thessalonica and Beroea, we might imagine that Paul’s work in the Corinthian synagogue would result in riots, in the stirring up of local hostility from whatever quarter, and in his being run out of town. For whatever reason this didn’t happen, and indeed things took a much more hopeful turn all around. He did meet the predictable opposition, but by that time Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, had himself become a believer, which must have caused quite a stir both in the Jewish community itself and more widely in Corinth as a whole. When eventually it was no longer possible for Paul to work in the synagogue, one of the converts from among the God-fearers offered an alternative meeting place—his own house, right across the street. Once more, if Paul had been a shrinking violet he might have sought a less confrontational position. But that was never his style.
Around this time too Paul had a vision of Jesus himself encouraging him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Speak on, and don’t be silent, because I am with you, and nobody will be able to lay a finger on you to harm you. There are many of my people in this city.”25 Visions like this, in the modern world as well as the ancient, are not normally luxuries. Paul needed assurance that he was in for a longer haul than in most of his previous cities.
Paul may, then, have been asking for trouble by holding meetings across the street from the synagogue. But, once more, he not only got away with it, but, as with his public apology in Philippi, he came out even better. After over a year of his teaching and pastoring in Corinth, the remaining synagogue members—the Jews who had not, like Crispus, decided to follow Jesus—made a concerted attack on the apostle. We recall the ironies of the two earlier charges, which must have resonated with Paul’s own sense of a new and paradoxical identity. In Philippi, he had been accused of teaching Jewish customs that would be illegal for Romans; in Thessalonica, he was accused by the Jewish community of teachings contrary to Caesar’s decrees. Here things were less specific but still, in a proud Roman colony, potentially threatening. He was accused of “teaching people to worship God in illegal ways.”26
The tribunal to which he was taken was that of Gallio, the brother of the f
amous philosopher Seneca. Gallio had been appointed by Claudius to be proconsul of the province of Achaea; an inscription from Delphi dates this fairly exactly, indicating that Gallio finished his term of office in AD 52. The normal term of office was a single year, though some stayed longer; the probability is that Gallio had arrived in late 51. Paul’s eighteen months in Corinth probably lasted from sometime early in 51 to sometime late in 52.
What might his Jewish opponents have meant by “worshipping God in illegal ways”? We cannot be sure, but an interesting and revealing answer suggests itself. The Jewish communities had official permission to worship their own God. From what we know of Paul’s prayers, he regularly used Jewish-style formulations but included Jesus in them. The best-known example, which I think was very important to Paul, is the prayer he quotes in the first letter to Corinth incorporating Jesus into the central monotheistic prayer, the Shema: “For us there is one God, the father, . . . and one Lord, Jesus the Messiah.”27 This was bound to be offensive to Jews who did not see Jesus either as Israel’s Messiah or as the embodiment of Israel’s God. It ought, therefore, so the accusers suggested, to be regarded by the Roman authorities as “illegal,” going beyond what had been authorized. Rome had, so to speak, given permission for a lodger to bring a piano into an apartment; Paul was bringing in a small orchestra.
It is possible, though less likely, that they might also have hinted that to call Jesus Kyrios or “son of God” and to regard him as the true king of Israel was potentially seditious against Rome itself; that is, Paul’s small orchestra included a trumpet summoning the troops for battle. And the accusers would have had a point. If Paul was adapting the permitted liturgies in a new form, claiming that this was the fulfillment of the Jewish way of life and the hope of Israel, this might well be going beyond what Rome thought it had sanctioned in permitting Jewish worship. And calling Jesus by titles that Caesar had made his own was throwing caution to the winds.
This proposal is confirmed, I think, by Gallio’s response. Gallio was not interested in the Jewish charges. He stopped the case before Paul could say anything; perhaps he had heard about his loquacity and was not prepared to sit through a lengthy exposition of Jewish and Christian teaching. There was to be no repeat of the Areopagus discourse. Gallio declared that the charges had nothing to do with actual illegal or vicious conduct. They were matters internal to the Jewish community, “a dispute,” he says, “about words, names, and laws within your own customs.”28 As far as Gallio was concerned, if Paul wanted to adapt Jewish styles of prayer by adding this or that name or title, that was up to him. Gallio refused to be a judge of such things. They would have to sort it out themselves.
This was a momentous event in the history of the church, and one wonders if even Paul had seen it coming. What it meant was that, unlike the authorities in the other territories he had visited, the official Roman governor of southern Greece (“Achaea”) had declared that being a Jesus-follower was to be seen as a variation of the Jewish way of life. At a stroke, this drew the sting that had been part of the pain in Galatia. It meant (among other things) that when non-Jewish Jesus-followers absented themselves from the civic cult—which, we note once more, could hardly remain hidden in a proud Roman city—they would be able to claim the same exemption as their Jewish neighbors.
The other major difference between what happened in Corinth and what had happened in Paul’s earlier legal and quasi-legal conflicts is that the mob—always a volatile element in a crowded city—saw which way the wind was blowing and took out its frustrations not on Paul and his friends, but on Sosthenes, the new synagogue ruler. Gallio, who could easily have sent in officers to stop the beating, did nothing.29
* * *
Shortly after that, Paul left Corinth, though we have no idea why. He seems to have wanted to get to Jerusalem, perhaps for a particular festival. Perhaps for that reason he had taken a vow, preparing himself in a traditional way for a special act of worship. Acts states, with a suddenness that has taken some interpreters by surprise and made them wonder whether the real Paul would ever have behaved like this, that while Paul was at the eastern port of Cenchreae awaiting his departure by sea, he had his hair cut off because of this vow. The odd thing about this, at one level anyway, is that one might expect the haircut to be scheduled for the end of a special time (during which the hair had grown freely) rather than at the start; unless, of course, the vow was going to take some time, in which case (and remembering that in 1 Cor. 11 Paul disapproved of men with long hair) it might make sense to have it cut at the start of the period of purification, so that even with a long subsequent period of growth it would not get too long.
The other odd thing, at a deeper level, is that interpreters of Paul for many years have come to him with the assumptions of modern European Protestantism, in which the idea of doing something so “Catholic”—or so Jewish!—as taking a purificatory vow that might require a special haircut was unthinkable. But these are simply modern prejudices. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith has nothing to say about the rightness or wrongness of particular devotional practices. Since Paul obviously still saw himself as a loyal Jew, worshipping the God of his ancestors albeit in the new dispensation launched by Israel’s Messiah, there was no earthly (or heavenly!) reason why he should not engage in particular practices. The truly odd thing, however, is that Luke, after mentioning this out of the blue, says nothing more about it, though it connects at long range with the other purificatory rituals that Paul undergoes on his final arrival in Jerusalem in Acts 21:22–26.
So Paul sails away, with Priscilla and Aquila accompanying him (nothing is said about Silas or Timothy), and crosses the Aegean to Ephesus, where Priscilla and Aquila stay on. Paul makes a brief visit to the synagogue there (we know the script by now: Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope, Messiah), but he is eager to get on his way. He sails to Caesarea, from there travels up to Jerusalem, and then returns to Syrian Antioch. The trip is probably to be dated in late 52, and the final leg of it, traveling north from Jerusalem to Antioch, in early 53.
While he was traveling—on the sea, on the roads—he prayed. We know this. When he tells people that they should “never stop praying,” this can hardly be something that applies to everybody else but not to himself.30 But how do you go on praying all the time? Is it simply ceaseless chatter, a stream-of-consciousness monologue (or indeed dialogue) with the God who through the spirit was as present as breath itself? This may have been part of it, but reading back from the letters Paul wrote over the next three or four years I think we can be much more precise and focused. At several points in his letters he seems to be adapting Jewish prayers and liturgies to include Jesus in recognition of the new life that had erupted into the ancient tradition. We know from many passages in the letters that he prayed the Psalms, focusing them on Jesus; Jesus was the promised king, the ultimate sufferer, the truly human one who would now be crowned with glory and honor. We can guess, from the easy way he weaves it into his argument, that the astonishing adaptation of the Shema prayer had already been Paul’s daily, perhaps thrice-daily, way of invoking Jesus, of expressing his loyalty to him and his kingdom: For us there is one God . . . and one Lord . . .31
So too the “benedictions” in Jewish liturgy (“Blessed be the God who . . . ”) had become part of his celebration of the way in which the One God had fulfilled his purposes in Jesus. They were Exodus prayers, kingdom prayers, messianic prayers, Jesus prayers. Paul’s experience of articulating the crazy, nonsensical message about Jesus and watching as it grasped and gripped and changed people’s lives had given him concrete reasons to pray like this, to invoke the name and power of Jesus, to seek his protection, his guidance, his encouragement, his hope, to know his presence as the focus of what in Paul’s earlier life he had experienced as the covenant love of the One God.
It is easy as we follow the outward course of Paul’s life to forget that the inward course was just as important. But unless we step to one side from his rele
ntless journeyings and imagine him praying like this, praying as he and his friends break bread in Jesus’s name; praying as he waits for the next ship, for the turn of the tide, for the right weather to sail; praying for sick friends and for newly founded little churches; praying as he makes his way toward what may be a wonderful reunion with old friends or an awkward confrontation with old enemies—unless we build this into the very heart of our picture of this extraordinary, energetic, bold, and yet vulnerable man, we will not understand him at all. In particular, we will not understand what happened next.
At every stage of this journey, from his extraordinarily successful missionary venture around the Aegean back to Jerusalem and Antioch, we would like to know what happened. Where did he stay? Who did he meet? What was said, how was he received, what scriptures did they study together, was there fresh agreement or new tension? Did he get back together with Barnabas? Did he meet John Mark, and if so, what did they say to one another? Did he report back to James and the others in Jerusalem about the practical difficulties of organizing and maintaining communities of faith across cultural boundaries—and, in particular, about the ways in which the letter written by the Jerusalem church at the conference a few years before both was and wasn’t helpful in real-life situations? Had James written his own letter (“the Letter of James”) by this time, and did they discuss justification, faith, works, and the significance of Abraham? Was it on this visit that, realizing both the hardship faced by the Jerusalem church and the sense that the Jesus-followers there had only the sketchiest idea of who their far-flung brothers and sisters actually were, Paul conceived the plan for a large-scale collection to bring real relief to Jerusalem and to function as a sign of unity across the miles and the cultures?
