by N. T. Wright
So what happened? There were some parallels with the problem in Philippi. But there it had been easy enough; after a night in the cells, he pointed out that he was a Roman citizen and had been beaten and imprisoned without a charge or a trial. Things may have been more complicated this time, and perhaps he decided that to play the “citizen” card again might be unwise. Depending on the charge, it might not have been enough to get him off. So he allowed the tide of hostility to do its worst.
It looks, in short, as though someone managed to succeed where Demetrius the silversmith had failed. Or perhaps Demetrius and his colleagues took the hint from the town clerk and manufactured a charge against Paul, suggesting that he was in fact guilty of blasphemy against Artemis or her great shrine. (Perhaps Paul, hearing tales of a statue falling from heaven, had poured scorn on such ideas.) Paul’s robust monotheism had led him to sail close to the wind in Athens. Maybe this time he had taken his hand off the tiller at the crucial moment as the wind shifted.
And perhaps some people to whom he looked for support let him down. The hints in the letter to Philippi (written most likely toward the end of this imprisonment) suggest that it wasn’t just pagan hostility that landed Paul where he was. Local people he had considered friends turned out in reality to be enemies, or at least rivals. One way or another, Paul found himself in prison, on a charge that might very easily have meant death. Like Samson shorn of his hair, he was suddenly powerless. The riot was just the noisy prelude. The dark powers had other ways of striking back at someone who dared to encroach on their territory with the essentially Jewish message of the One God redefined around the shocking message of the crucified and risen Messiah.
As we have seen, prisons in the Roman world were not normally used as a place of punishment, but only as a remand center to keep people who were coming up to trial—though, since that might well take some time, it would have had the effect of punishment in advance of sentence. No effort was made to look after prisoners. If they wanted food, friends would have to bring it. Later, by the time we find him writing letters, Paul clearly had some friends attending to his needs—and at least one friend who was thrown into prison with him—but it is quite possible that for some time after his arrest his friends may not even have known where he was or may have been too frightened, granted what had happened, to be associated with him.
It doesn’t take too long with little food and water for the spirits to sink. Paul and Silas had sung hymns in the jail at Philippi, precipitating the earthquake and their sudden change of fortune. I presume that Paul prayed and perhaps sang in the jail in Ephesus. Some of the ancient psalms fit his situation exactly. Some of the early Christian poems, not least those celebrating Jesus as Lord, would have been in his head and his heart as well. But when, after a few days and then a few weeks, nothing much seemed to have happened, it would have been easy for him to get to the point we noticed in 2 Corinthians 4, where in retrospect it seemed as though he was crushed, abandoned, destroyed, and at his wits’ end. No earthquake came to his rescue. He may well have been subject to regular beatings. He may have been cold, perhaps ill. All this is of course speculation, but we have to give some sort of account for what he says as he looks back to this dark moment as well as the other evidence that locates at least some of the Prison Letters in just this period.
When he mentions, in greeting Prisca and Aquila, who have now moved back to Rome, that they “put their lives on the line” for him, we have no means of knowing what the emergency was or how they risked their lives on his behalf.49 The chances are that it was something to do with the terrible plight into which Paul had now fallen. Perhaps they were the ones who eventually plucked up courage, said their prayers, and went to the magistrates to testify that their star prisoner was being held on a fraudulent charge. That might have been enough to get them arrested as accomplices, but perhaps they did it anyway.
How long this shocking period lasted we do not know. As we saw, Paul was in Ephesus most likely from middle to late 53 till early or middle 56, apart from the short and highly unsatisfactory visit to Corinth. At some point after that visit he had sent Titus to Corinth with the “painful letter,” but we cannot be sure when that was done and hence how long there might have been between that moment and his eventual release and subsequent travels. There is easily enough time in that schedule to fit in all the activities described in Acts, including the riot plus at least one significant spell in jail. In any case, as we try to assess Paul’s mental and emotional state, we might reflect that it would have taken only a few weeks of prison, where he was subjected to various kinds of mental and physical torture, including having no idea how long he would be there, to get him into the condition he describes in 2 Corinthians 1.
For reasons that will become clear, I think Paul interpreted his imprisonment as the revenge of the powers into whose world he had been making inroads. He was used to confronting synagogue authorities; he knew how to deal with Roman magistrates. He knew Jewish law and Roman law just as well as they did. He was easily able to turn a phrase and win a rhetorical point and perhaps a legal one too. But in this case he had sensed that something else was going on. The forces ranged against him were not simply human. He had stirred up a hornets’ nest with his powerful ministry in Ephesus. Think of all those magic books going up in smoke. Just as Jesus warned his followers not to fear those who could merely kill the body, but rather to fear the dark power that could wreak a more terrible destruction,50 so Paul was learning that human authorities, though important in themselves, might sometimes be acting merely as a front for other powers that would attack through them. And, though he had taught, preached, and celebrated the fact that in his death Jesus had defeated all the dark powers and that in his resurrection he had launched God’s new creation, that dogged belief, seen from the cold and smelly depths of a prison, with no light at night, flies and vermin for company, and little food in his stomach, must have been tested to the uttermost and beyond. Hence the despair.
Looking back with hindsight after his release, he explained to the Corinthians that this was to make him trust in the God who raises the dead.51 Not, of course, that he had not believed and trusted this God before, but now it was put on the line in a whole new way. So how did he get back to that point of trust? Did he just go on gritting his teeth and saying, “I must trust the God who raises the dead” until it happened? I doubt it. That kind of so-called positive thinking was not Paul’s style. I think something more specific was at work.
We noticed, as Paul was on his way back to Jerusalem and then Antioch after his early time in Corinth, that his praying was rooted in the Jewish traditions of prayer but now focused on Jesus. We saw this as he breathtakingly adapted one of the main Jewish daily prayers, the Shema, so that it now expressed loyalty to the “father” and the “Lord” together.52 So if Paul had these prayers forming and taking shape in his mind and if, as we know, he had an enviable gift for vivid and fluent language, we might not be surprised if his prayers from the depths of despair began to develop from biblical roots into Jesus-shaped expressions, and from Jesus-shaped expressions into more formal and shaped invocations and celebrations that, recalling the ancient biblical celebrations of God’s sovereignty and victory, now placed the sovereign lordship of Jesus himself at the center.
I think that, like a plant in harsh winter, Paul in prison was forced to put his roots down even deeper than he had yet gone into the biblical tradition, and deeper again, still within that tradition, into the meaning of Jesus and his death. The roots slowly found moisture. From the depth of that dark soil, way below previous consciousness, he drew hope and new possibilities. The fruit of that labor remains to this day near the heart of Christian belief.
I think, in other words, not only that the four Prison Letters were all written from Ephesus, but that the writing of them grew directly out of the struggle Paul had experienced. Their vision of Jesus the Messiah, sovereign over all the powers of the world, was Paul’s hard-won affirmation of th
e truth he had believed all along but had never before had to explore in such unpromising circumstances. And I think that as he pondered, prayed, and heard in his mind’s ear phrases and biblical echoes turning into poetry, he began to long once more to share this vision with those around him. And with that longing and that prayer he found he was, at an even deeper level than he had known before, trusting in the God who raises the dead. The poems of Philippians 2 and Colossians 1 and the sustained liturgical drama of the first three chapters of Ephesians all bear witness to this celebration—not of Paul’s faith or stamina, but of the victory of God and the lordship of Jesus. As he says in 2 Corinthians 4, right after a passage that belongs very closely with the poem in Colossians 1, “We have this treasure in earthenware pots, so that the extraordinary quality of the power may belong to God, not to us.”53 That, I think, was what was going on while Paul was in prison.
Some have suggested that this whole experience was in effect a “second conversion,” in which Paul finally learned the humility that had previously eluded him. I do not subscribe to this view. Things are more complicated, and indeed more interesting, than that. But I do think that his long-held practice of Jesus-focused prayer, taking the ancient scriptural poems and patterns and finding Jesus at their heart, was crucial in helping him to find his way out of despair and back into hope. Christology and therapy go well together, even if, like Jacob, an apostle may limp, in style and perhaps also in body, after the dark night spent wrestling with the angel.
Ephesus
11
Ephesus II
I THINK PHILIPPIANS was the first of the Prison Letters to be written (perhaps in 55?), and this is why. In the first chapter Paul is still quite uncertain how his trial is going to go. The Messiah is going to be honored one way or another, he says. He “is going to gain a great reputation through my body, whether in life or in death.”1 Paul has thus turned the tables on his accusers and judges. He declares that his imprisonment is itself serving the purposes of the gospel, since people are talking about him and his message. Even those who are trying to make extra trouble for him (who are they? It isn’t clear) are simply drawing attention to the message of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. He writes as if it is now up to him to choose whether he will live or die, and he has learned how to face both options with equanimity—though he believes he will in fact be released, since there is still so much work for him to do, even though he “would really love to leave all this and be with the king, because that would be far better.”2
The occasion for the letter is that Paul wants to thank the church in Philippi for a gift of money. The distance from Philippi to Ephesus is about three hundred miles as the crow flies; Epaphroditus, the Philippian messenger who had brought it, would have come a somewhat longer distance, whether by sea or by land. But then there was a problem. Epaphroditus got sick, seriously ill. The Philippians must have wondered what had happened. When you entrust a significant sum of money to someone and the person never reappears, you start to ask questions. Paul is answering those implicit questions, and more. He explains that Epaphroditus, who is now going to take the return message back to Philippi, has been a faithful fellow worker who has risked his life in the royal service.3
But the heart of this short letter is Jesus himself. Paul urges the Philippians to let their public behavior match up to the gospel, which will mean sharing the Messiah’s suffering—as Paul himself has done and is doing. In particular, he urges them to cherish and guard their unity and their holiness. He knows only too well (if he had not already, the recent experience with Corinth would have taught him) that a community composed of people from very different social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds will find all sorts of interesting reasons for divisions, perhaps over seemingly unrelated issues. Every such impulse must be resisted. And he knows too well, again with all too many Corinthian examples, that the behavior of Jesus’s followers can pick up inappropriate coloring from the pagan world around them. That too must be resisted.
But how? The central appeal of the first half of the letter explains. Unity and holiness will come, and will only come, as the mind of the community and of the individuals within it are transformed to reflect the mind of the Messiah himself.4
The “mind of the Messiah” is then the subject of one of the greatest Jesus-focused poems of all time. Echoing Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah in particular, it tells the story of Jesus going down to the lowest depths and then being exalted as Lord of the whole world. The poem works at several levels. It expresses many things Paul believed about Jesus himself—the truly human one, the ultimate Israelite, the Servant of the Lord, the embodiment of Israel’s God in person, the reality of which Caesar was a shallow parody:
Who, though in God’s form, did not
Regard his equality with God
As something he ought to exploit.
Instead, he emptied himself,
And received the form of a slave,
Being born in the likeness of humans.
And then, having human appearance,
He humbled himself, and became
Obedient even to death,
Yes, even the death of the cross.
And so God has greatly exalted him,
And to him in his favor has given
The name which is over all names:
That now at the name of Jesus
Every knee within heaven shall bow—
On earth, too, and under the earth;
And every tongue shall confess
That Jesus, Messiah, is Lord,
To the glory of God, the father.5
This is the story of Adam (everyone), of Israel, of the One God—all in the form of a perfectly balanced poem about Jesus. The poem is cast in the idiom of a Hellenistic paean of praise for a great man, but the content is of course deeply Jewish and scriptural. It is, in fact, a poem that sums up a great deal of what Paul believed: that Jesus is the messianic fulfillment of Israel’s story, the embodiment of Israel’s One God, and hence the appointed Lord of the whole world. Its careful structure, giving full weight to the cross in the very center, encapsulates exactly what Paul most deeply believed about the gospel. It is because of the cross—the defeat of the powers—that Jesus has been exalted as Lord and that every knee shall bow at his name.
This poem, I suggest, grows directly out of Paul’s much earlier belief (already in Galatians and presumably before that as well) about who Jesus was. But, shaped by his own sustained scriptural reflection and teaching, it now draws many different elements of that biblical material into a tight structure. By celebrating the ultimate victory and power of Jesus over all other powers in the universe, Paul has meditated deeply on the fact that even at his own lowest moment “the God who raises the dead” had come down to that same point. The poem may thus have functioned as one of the ladders out of Paul’s own pit of despair long before it then functioned as the model to teach the Philippians, and the church ever since, how to think.
The poem suggests, above all, a radical redefinition of power. This was the very theme that had concerned Paul so much in Ephesus and in his first letter to Corinth. It was the subject he found himself rethinking from the ground up as he discovered that the power of the gospel belonged utterly to God and not at all to himself. Learning how to think as the Messiah had thought, Paul insisted, was the only way to radical unity in the church, and it was also the secret of how to live as “pure and spotless children of God in the middle of a twisted and depraved generation.”6
Once again, Paul is using letters to teach his churches not just what to think, but how to think. He cannot tell them everything he would like to tell them. He would run out of papyrus scrolls long before he got to the end. But that wasn’t his job. His job was to inculcate in them the mind of the Messiah. If that happened, then it would show that he had not after all been wasting his time 7 (that old worry again; Paul never seems to have shaken it off). And Paul, I suggest, came to this extraordinary expression of the Messiah’s mi
nd not least through the combination of his Jesus-focused scriptural meditation, on the one hand, and his own involuntary imitation of the Jesus pattern, on the other. He too had been humbled under the weight of suffering. He had pondered the fact that this was the means by which Jesus had attained his exaltation as Lord.
There is an awkward break at the end of the second chapter of Philippians. This is perhaps a sign that Paul, writing from prison, had intended to stop there, but that then, deciding to carry on after all, he had not had the opportunity to smooth out the transition.
The second half, though, is modeled closely on the first, particularly the poem in chapter 2. The exhortation reaches a climax at the end of chapter 3, where Paul declares that “the savior, the Lord, King Jesus” will come from heaven to transform our present body to be “like his glorious body,” since, as Psalm 8 declares, he has the power “to bring everything into line under his authority.”8 As in the similar passage in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, this is part of Paul’s belief in Jesus as the truly human one. We who live on the other side of centuries of puzzlement about “humanity” and “divinity” may sometimes be startled at how easily someone like Paul, believing that humans were made to reflect the divine image, could see the true human as the one who shared the glory that the One God had said he would not share with another.9 For Paul, this was a truth he could explore from several different angles, as we see again in Colossians. And it was, of course, a truth not simply to be gazed at in wonder, but to be used as the motivating power for a different kind of life—a life the Jewish traditions had claimed to be able to produce, but for which they turned out to be ineffective.
