by N. T. Wright
Some of the Jewish community in Ephesus had begun to spread rumors about what this “Messiah cult” was doing. From later writings we can guess at the kind of innuendo that went around, sneering comments about what these Jesus-followers were up to behind closed doors, with men and women meeting together and talking a lot about a new kind of “love,” not to mention the disturbing gossip about eating someone’s body and drinking their blood. So Paul realized, as he had done in Corinth, that he could no longer treat the synagogue as his base. It was time to move elsewhere. Perhaps this was the time he refers to in the first letter to Corinth with the metaphor of the arena, suggesting that he had “fought with wild animals at Ephesus.”20 This letter was written while things were going well, with no shadow of the trouble that haunts the second letter. It is very unlikely that he had literally been thrown to wild beasts. He seems to be referring to some great tussle with opponents, though we cannot now tell who they were or what the issue was.
Anyway, he rented a local lecture hall belonging to one Tyrannus, and for two years he divided his time between his tentmaking business and the public exposition and discussion of the faith. Ephesus being Ephesus, another center both of trade routes and culture, this was an excellent way to disseminate the message. People came from far and wide, spent time in the city, and then went on their way. In a culture without print or social media, people simply chatted about anything strange or new that they had come across in their travels. “Yes, I’ve just come from Ephesus; and you’d never believe it, but there’s a strange group there apparently saying . . .”
We can see how this worked in one close-up example. At the start of Colossians Paul thanks God that in Colossae, a small town inland from Ephesus, there is now a community of people who love one another across the deep divisions of ethnic, social, and cultural divisions. “Epaphras,” he says, “gave us the news about your love in the spirit.”21 Epaphras was one of Paul’s fellow workers in Ephesus, and he had been into the inland regions to spread the good news there, returning to Paul to declare that the power of the good news was evident all over the place; the gospel was “producing fruit and growing in all the world.”22 Philemon himself, now one of the leaders in the Colossian church, owed Paul his very life; this presumably means that Philemon had heard and believed Paul’s gospel on a business trip to the metropolis. If the gospel was at work like this in Colossae, there is every reason to suppose that it was also at work in other towns and cities in the region, nearby places like Laodicea and Hierapolis and many others of which we know less.
In Ephesus itself, Paul’s work appeared to be going from strength to strength. In his letters Paul and his hearers seemed to be able to take for granted the fact that sometimes the living God did remarkable things not only in their hearts and minds, but also in their bodies. Remarkable healings, signs of a new creation breaking in to the old world in ways not normally expected, were never the real center of attention and in any case were always mysterious (people still got sick and died, and prayers for healing were not always answered positively). But in Ephesus it seems that Paul’s launching of the church was accompanied by healing powers that went beyond what might have been expected or experienced elsewhere. Luke reports, as a seemingly strange temporary phenomenon, that handkerchiefs and towels that had touched Paul’s skin possessed healing properties.23 Paul’s very name was being spoken of with awe, and some were indeed using it to powerful effect. Some local Jewish exorcists, sons of a high priest, were coupling the names of Jesus and Paul in their efforts to expel demons, until one particular demon-possessed man answered them with the famous line, “I know Jesus, and I am well acquainted with Paul; but who are you?”24 Tales like this, says Luke, spread around the area. Luke himself comments that the name of Jesus was held in great honor, but we cannot imagine that the name of Paul was not also being venerated.
Paul must have loved those days. He was busy in the shop and busy teaching. People crowded into his lectures, brought sick people for healing, and turned to look as he went by. Jesus was Lord, and he was his apostle.
The community at large, it seemed, was being transformed. In a city famous for its different levels of power, a natural magnet for people who knew how to manipulate unseen forces to their advantage, the power of the gospel, of the announcement of Jesus as the true Lord, was having a remarkable effect. In one scene that must have shaken that world to its core, a substantial group of magicians made public confession of what they had been up to and brought their valuable magic books to be burned.25 The dark arts were being smoked out of hiding, almost literally. All those prayers that Paul had prayed, invoking the name and the power of the crucified and risen Lord, were having their effect. Ephesus, even more than Corinth or the cities of northern Greece, was turning into a living example of what the gospel could do, not just in a few individuals here and there, but in an entire community.
But the dark powers do not give up so easily. Something terrible happened that resulted not only in imprisonment, but in crushing despair. Since Luke has foreshortened his account here as elsewhere, we cannot be sure exactly when this took place. The positive, early phase of Paul’s time in Ephesus ends with the burning of the magic books. That is when Paul decides to revisit Greece, going overland through Macedonia and then down to Corinth;26 so he sends Timothy and Erastus on ahead.27 All Luke says then is that Paul “spent a little more time in Asia,” and that may be when everything suddenly went horribly wrong.
On balance, though, I think it more likely that the catastrophe happened after the riot that Luke so graphically describes in Acts 19:23–41. Luke says that Paul was able to leave town “after the hue and cry had died down,”28 but that hue and cry might well have included not only the riot he describes, one of his splendid set pieces, but also the time that he does not describe, the disaster that struck, perhaps in the aftermath of the riot, just when Paul thought he had once again escaped real trouble. If you take on the shadowy powers that stand behind the corruption and wickedness of the world, you can expect the struggle to take unexpected and very nasty turns.
* * *
Before we plunge into the darkness of what happened to Paul in Ephesus, we must return to Corinth. I strongly suspect that the sudden deterioration of relations with that church was one of the factors that sapped Paul’s confidence and laid him open to attack.
He had not been away that long, but things had clearly developed in his absence. He had had various visitors from Corinth. “Chloe’s people” had brought him news. That phrase, “Chloe’s people,” could mean Chloe herself and her actual family. But the implication is that Chloe, like Lydia in Philippi and (later on) Phoebe in Cenchreae, was an independent and probably wealthy businesswoman whose associates or slaves, also we presume Jesus-followers, would have been coming to Ephesus anyway and would then have made contact with Paul. Anyway, “Chloe’s people” brought news of a quarrelsome church in which different groups were siding with different preachers (Paul, Apollos, Cephas) and a final group (or is this Paul’s sarcastic response?) said, “I’m with the Messiah!” What was going on?
Some nineteenth-century scholars, eager to project the cultural “either/or” of modern European philosophy back onto the early church, tried to glimpse in this a major ideological cleavage between a supposed “Jewish Christianity” focused on the law (with analogies therefore to the Galatian “agitators”) and a supposedly Pauline “Gentile Christianity,” which had broken with Jewish law. Some think Peter himself was the leader of the first party. This is not only simplistic, unsubstantiated, and counterintuitive (Paul himself insists in various places that he is a “Jewish Christian”!); it is anachronistic.
The issue seems to be quite different. It has to do with style. Paul’s rebuttal of the party spirit in Corinth has very little to do with Jewish law and everything to do with “the wisdom of the world.” Hence his emphatic statement about the foolishness of God. The Corinthians, it seems, were wanting leaders whose speaking abilities would comman
d social respect. They found Paul disappointing. But, as he explains, there are different kinds of wisdom: the wisdom of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, the true, hidden wisdom that comes from God.
Here and throughout the letter Paul is teaching the Corinthians, as he had surely been teaching them in person earlier, to think eschatologically, that is, to imagine a world quite unlike the world of ordinary Greco-Roman paganism, a world in which the One God was living and active and had started up something quite new, something that would be complete on the coming day. That something involved the creation of the new Temple; the church, which the Corinthians were pulling apart in their search for the ideal clever teacher, was the new Temple, the place where the living God had come to dwell by the spirit.29 No first-century Jew could use imagery like that as a mere “illustration” of a different kind of truth. Paul’s vision of the church picked up the ancient Jewish hope of an ultimate Temple and put forth a new creation for which the Jerusalem Temple and the wilderness Tabernacle were advance signposts. This is it, says Paul. And if they belonged to it—if they belonged to the Messiah—then they should be above these petty squabbles:
Everything belongs to you, whether it’s Paul or Apollos or Cephas, whether it’s the world or life or death, whether it’s the present or the future—everything belongs to you! And you belong to the Messiah; and the Messiah belongs to God.30
And if they all belong to the Messiah—the crucified Messiah, as Paul never lets them forget—then they should expect the world’s standards to be stood on their heads. In particular (a point Paul will develop in the second letter) apostles are precisely not supposed to be people of great standing in the wider community. They are like bedraggled prisoners at the end of a triumphal procession, on their way to a shameful death. That is part of the point, but it is also the source of the power.31 This whole opening section of the letter is about power, a theme that obviously concerned Paul both as he was thinking about Corinth and as he was dealing with various sorts of power in Ephesus. The foolish gospel of the crucified Messiah is God’s power; God’s weakness is stronger than human strength; their faith, as evoked by Paul’s preaching, did not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power; and now, dramatically and with a somewhat shocking threat, “the kingdom of God isn’t about talk—it’s about power,” the “power” in question being the power Paul thinks he may have to use in confronting those who are “puffed up” with their own sense of worth and importance.32 (The charge that the Corinthians are “puffed up” is a major theme of the whole letter. This has nothing to do with Jewish law and everything to do with ordinary human pride and folly.)
So Paul comes to specific issues. Here is the man guilty of incest—and many in the church are supporting him because it shows how “free” they are as Messiah people! Paul reminds them of the earlier letter (the one that has not survived). Church discipline is vital. They are Passover people, and no moral “leaven” must be allowed in the house.33 So too with lawsuits in the church. They are the Messiah’s people, and as such they are destined to assist in the final cosmic judgment, so they ought to be able to settle local in-house disputes without using the secular courts. And, as he wrote to the Galatians, this is all about the ultimate inheritance. God’s kingdom, already established in the Messiah, will be complete at last, with the glorious worldwide inheritance promised to the Messiah and his people.34 But the whole point of the kingdom is that God is putting all things right, restoring the human race to its proper role and dignity, and those who persist in styles of life that corrupt and destroy that genuine humanity cannot inherit it. This isn’t an arbitrary bit of legalism. It is analytical truth.
With some fundamental issues about sexual morality briefly laid out, Paul turns to marriage itself in chapter 7. Here too the requirement is to think eschatologically. God is remaking the world from top to bottom, and everything looks different as a result.
His next topic is a very different, and very difficult, issue: meat that had been offered in sacrifice in pagan temples. In a city like Corinth, that meant almost all meat available for purchase, since temples functioned effectively as a combination of butcher’s shop and restaurant. A sacrificial animal was brought in and offered in worship to this or that deity, and then the family enjoyed the meal. What was left would be sold on the open market. Some large Jewish communities in towns like Corinth would have their own kosher butchers, but in many cases Jews simply avoided meat altogether, not simply because of the rules about blood, but because they avoided pagan worship and everything that went with it.
This is where the letter from the Jerusalem leaders in Acts 15 might have come into its own. Paul has reemphasized what that letter said about sexual morality. There is no leeway there, no principle of “tolerance” for different opinions. But what we see in 1 Corinthians 8–10, discussing idol temples and meat that had been sacrificed there, is a sophisticated and delicate discussion of the pastoral challenges involved in dealing with two different opinions, which he calls the “strong” and the “weak.” These are Paul’s technical terms. Those with “strong” consciences are those who, like him, know that idols don’t exist, so that meat offered to them is merely meat. The “weak” are those who, after a lifetime of actually worshipping idols and imagining themselves to be participating in the life of the god by eating sacrificial meat, cannot now touch the meat without feeling themselves being dragged back into the murky world of idolatry and all that went with it.
This question draws out of Paul a fundamental theological principle and a remarkable statement of how he understood his own vocation. Both need to be at the heart of any ultimate assessment of who he thought he was, of what made him the man he was.
The theological principle is a robust creational monotheism. Idols have no real existence, and as the great prayer the Shema declares, God is one. Paul knows perfectly well that in Corinth and everywhere else there are “many gods, many lords,” but his new version of the Shema upstages them all. This, as we saw, might be the prayer to which the Jewish community in Corinth had objected in their petition to Gallio; if not, it may well have been another one like it. This prayer dwells in his heart and on his lips day by day, and now as at some other times when he wants to talk about the One God, he prefers to do so by invoking and praying to this God, declaring his loyalty to his kingdom:
For us there is one God, the father,
From whom are all things, and we live to him and for him;
And one Lord, Jesus the Messiah,
Through whom are all things, and we live through him.35
This translation is a bit wooden, but longer paraphrases do not bring out the remarkable way in which Paul has adapted the Shema (“Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one”) by making “Lord” refer to Jesus and “God” refer to “the father.” This prayer contains, in compressed form, a wealth of theology, but Paul’s point in quoting it here is to emphasize the practical outworking of creational monotheism. The One God made all things, so nothing is to be rejected if received with gratitude. He returns to the same point at the end of the long discussion where this time he quotes Psalm 24:1: “The earth and its fullness belong to the LORD.”36 This is not mere pragmatics (“It will be difficult to get people to stop eating idol meat”). It is rooted in the most basic Jewish theological assertion: there is one God, creator of all.
Of course, emphasizing that point does rather undermine the normal Jewish codes in which several varieties of meat are off limits even if they have never seen the inside of a pagan temple. That is part of the paradox of Paul’s position, a paradox that, we may suppose, the Jerusalem church never fully understood (and that certainly did not square with the letter they had sent out after the Jerusalem Conference). The central section of his argument here, in chapter 9, focuses on the fact that as an apostle he enjoys “freedom”—freedom to be married, to be paid for his work, and so on—but stresses that he has chosen, for the sake of the gospel, not to make use of these freedoms. In particu
lar, and quite shocking to some in its implications:
I am indeed free from everyone; but I have enslaved myself to everyone, so that I can win all the more. 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. To the lawless I became like someone lawless (even though I’m not lawless before God, but under the Messiah’s law), so that I could win the lawless. I became weak to the weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that in all ways I might save some. I do it all because of the gospel, so that I can be a partner in its benefits.37
Paul was not as fixated on the idea of “identity” as we are in our contemporary culture. But, if the question had been asked, this passage offers a sharp answer. “I became like a Jew.” “Why, Paul,” we want to say, “you are a Jew.” “Not in that sense,” he replies. “I am not ‘under the law.’” If he were, he could never have quoted Psalm 24:1 as meaning that all foods are now acceptable. He has a different identity, the messianic identity. He is “under the Messiah’s law”; he is “in the Messiah.” The Messiah’s people, as he says in a climactic passage in Galatians, have died; they have left behind the old identities and have come into a new identity, the messianic identity.38 That is part of why the gospel is “a scandal to Jews,” but of course it nonetheless makes sense only within a deeply Jewish, and now messianic, view of the world. And, charged with his specific responsibility, Paul is able, without compromising that messianic identity, to live alongside people of all sorts, sharing their customs while he is with them.
