Paul

by N. T. Wright

  After working our way through the main letters, seeing the way Paul relished laying it all out, making the connections between different biblical themes and tying them all together with Jesus and the spirit, we may find any suggestion that he would be omitting bits and pieces faintly ridiculous. One might as well accuse Gustav Mahler of making his symphonies too short. But it wasn’t just a matter of Paul enjoying the big picture and the little details. The way he puts it implies that holding anything back would make him guilty of jeopardizing people’s salvation. He was innocent; he had told them the whole story. And, like a refrain, he reminds them of his tireless labors among them and of the way in which he worked with his own hands to support his preaching and teaching. They had had plenty of time to observe him, night and day, and they would know that he had earned his own keep and had not been angling for special treats or favors.

  But Paul wasn’t simply reflecting on his own time in Ephesus. He was also warning the elders about what might be waiting for them just around the corner. He had, he says, often warned them with tears about the dangers all around them, and now he could see those dangers looming all the larger. The world of idolatry and immorality was powerful and insidious, and there were many, including perhaps some who had once professed Christian faith, who were being drawn into it. It had happened in Corinth, and it would happen again in various places. Paul grieves over any who even start down that road, and he urges them, with powerful emotion, to turn back. In particular, he has given them an example by his own refusal to be drawn into the snares of materialist culture. He wasn’t in this preaching and teaching business for money, and nor should they be.

  This personal testimony seems designed to rule out, or to head off before it can get going, the kind of criticism he had experienced behind his back after he had left Corinth. But, all the same, Paul knew that difficulties lay ahead. The elders from Ephesus were like shepherds, put there to guard a flock of sheep, and since the flock in question was “the church of God, which he purchased with his very own blood”—one of the most striking early Christian statements of the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion—they must take great care.13 There would be wolves. There always are. Some of them would be former shepherds themselves—perhaps some among those listening to him right now!—who would distort the truth and draw people away after them. Perhaps half of Paul’s letters were written because this sort of thing had already happened, in Galatia, in Corinth, and elsewhere. It wasn’t a new problem. It remained acute.

  But this farewell address wasn’t simply about Paul and about the dangers facing the church. It was about God and about Jesus. It would hardly be true to Paul if these were not the ultimate focal points. “I commit you to God,” he says, “and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and give you the inheritance among all those whom God has sanctified.”14 God’s word of grace was the powerful word of the cross, the life-transforming word of the gospel, the word that started in the ancient scriptures and told the story reaching forward to the explosive new event of Jesus himself. And it was Jesus himself whom Paul invoked at the end. Just as the Jerusalem leaders had urged him to “remember the poor,” so Paul urged the Ephesians to “work to help the weak,” since Jesus himself had said (in a saying unrecorded elsewhere), “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”15 That was how the church was to be known—as the community that modeled the outgoing, generous grace of God. That was how it would confront the principalities and powers who were all out for their own ends. That was why, no doubt, the wolves would come in to snatch what they could; this kind of community was by its very nature vulnerable, and would always be. Loyalty would be contested. But God’s grace and God’s word were stronger, and like good wholesome food they would build up the church’s strength, nourishing the believers and their leaders so that they would indeed “inherit the kingdom,” the worldwide inheritance promised to the Messiah and his people.

  Paul explained that this would be his last visit. He had other plans now, and he did not envisage any return to Asia Minor. They were upset, distraught, but his mind was made up. His face, like that of his master, was turned toward Jerusalem, but then, unlike Jesus, toward Rome.

  They knelt down to pray. Then, after more embraces, they brought him to his ship.

  * * *

  Paul could never say he hadn’t been warned. People kept telling him he was in for trouble in Jerusalem. The travelers changed ships at Patara, on the coast of Lycia in southwest Asia, and then headed for Tyre on the Syrian coast. The Jesus-followers there urged Paul not to go to Jerusalem, but he would not be deflected. They continued via Ptolemais, just a little south, and ended up at Caesarea, staying with Philip and his daughters. There Agabus, a prophet from Jerusalem, warned Paul that the Judaeans in Jerusalem would tie him hand and foot and hand him over to the Gentiles. Everyone pleaded with Paul not to go. But we are not surprised, knowing him as we now do, that he resisted. It broke his heart that they were so affectionate and concerned for him, but he was quite prepared not only to be tied up, but to die for the name of Jesus, if that should prove to be God’s will. They relented. The travelers moved on. Finally they arrived in Jerusalem at last. It was, most likely, the early autumn of AD 57.

  No one who has made that journey, in ancient or in modern times, forgets it. The Holy City. Jerusalem the golden. The place where the living God had promised to put his name, had promised to install his king as ruler of the nations. The place where, Paul believed, these promises had come true—with Jesus enthroned outside the city wall, doing once and for all what only Israel’s One God could do and then being exalted as Lord of the world. How could he not go there one more time?

  But how could he possibly go to Jerusalem in full public view when so many in the city, including so many Jesus-followers who were “zealous for the law”—as Paul himself had been!—would hear about his coming and react with anger and perhaps violence? This was a problem for the Jerusalem leaders as much as for Paul. One would have hoped that the collection would have provided a welcome sign of mutual acceptance, but to our frustration Luke never mentions it. We simply do not know what happened to the money. Reading Paul’s letters, watching him carefully organize the collection and its equally careful transportation, we are like people watching all but the last ten minutes of a great sporting event on television, when a sudden power outage stops us from finding out who won.

  Luke was not writing to answer our questions. Perhaps he wanted to distract attention from the whole episode. Perhaps Paul and his friends had presented the money, only to have it refused on the grounds that it came from “tainted” Gentile sources. Or perhaps it was accepted, but made little difference to the public perception of Paul and his missionary activity. Perhaps, as sometimes happens, this unexpected and generous gift divided the local church between those who wanted to receive it in the spirit it was given and those who were afraid they were being bribed into overlooking or colluding with what they saw as Paul’s notoriously lax attitude toward the Torah. (Perhaps there were long memories of the earlier visit when Paul and Barnabas had come to Jerusalem with money—and also with Titus, whom some had wanted to circumcise.) In any case, since for this period we are entirely dependent on Luke for information and since he has chosen not to mention the collection at all, we cannot tell. We can only hope. (Nor, for that matter, does Luke mention Titus. That is a well-known problem to which there is no obvious solution, but it is no more problematic than the small-scale puzzles one repeatedly meets in ancient history.)

  When Paul and his friends arrived in Jerusalem at last, they stayed with Mnason, who like Barnabas was originally from Cyprus. The Jerusalem leaders, while welcoming the news of what Paul and his colleagues had done in the years since they last met, came up with a plan to quiet any potential anti-Pauline feeling in Jerusalem before it even got going. What they proposed was that Paul join four others who had taken a vow and would undergo a rite of purification in the Temple. This was a variation on the earlier theme
where Paul, after his first visit to Corinth, had taken a vow. As before, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Paul would have continued, as a Jesus-follower, with various Jewish devotional practices designed to direct the mind and heart toward worship, humility, and service.

  The Jerusalem leaders hoped their plan would head off the “zealots” among the local Jesus-followers. Those “zealots,” after all, were firmly convinced that, because of Jesus, God was now going to complete his long-term plan to get rid of the hated Gentile rulers and give freedom to Israel once and for all. But if other people claiming to follow Jesus were going soft on their devotion to God and his law, and teaching yet other people to go soft on it as well, then the whole divine purpose would be in jeopardy. So what Paul needed to do was to demonstrate his loyalty to the law by joining a group who had taken a vow of purity. He could share the same vow and actually pay their expenses as well (a good use for some of the collection monies?). Then it would be clear that the rumors and gossip about him, all the accusations that he was teaching people to ignore the law, were untrue.

  This plan has the same sense of naïveté about it that we recall from the letter drafted after the Jerusalem Conference nearly a decade earlier. Like a British politician who never stirs out of Westminster or an American banker who never travels away from Wall Street except to visit other banks in Frankfurt or Tokyo, there is a sense of unreality, of the Jerusalem leaders failing to see how the complexities of real life might ruin the neat ideas.

  And, indeed, the Jerusalem leaders do now remind Paul that they had written to the Jesus-believing Gentiles about keeping away from anything to do with idolatry and immorality, including meat that had been sacrificed in pagan temples. One can imagine Paul’s heart sinking at this reference to the document that had really been designed, like the supposed “division of labor” in Galatians 2:9, as an expedient to allow mutual recognition while things went forward. He knows, from years of facing actual pastoral situations in Corinth, Ephesus, and elsewhere—and from hammering out the first theological principles that related to those situations, particularly in 1 Corinthians 8–10 and Romans 14–15—that things are much more complicated than the “apostolic letter” had allowed. He has remained true to the absolute prohibition on idolatry and immorality. But he has come to the conclusion, on good biblical grounds, that all meat is in fact “clean” and that nothing is “impure” unless someone’s bad conscience made it so.16 The “letter” had been well intentioned, but the realities on the ground meant that it could only ever be a starting position. Was the new plan, Paul must have wondered, going to be a similar mixture of good intentions and unreal expectations?

  His own position on the matters covered by the “letter” was not, after all, a mere pragmatic compromise. It was a statement of strong theological principle. Some early Christians would have agreed with him, pointing out that the line he was taking had the backing of Jesus himself, or at least of Mark’s view of what Jesus had meant at one point. In Mark, Jesus’s cryptic remark about things passing through the stomach and out of the body without causing defilement is taken to indicate that “all foods are clean.”17 Paul had, in any case, moved on a long way since the Jerusalem Conference. His churches had been taught to think theologically at a depth far beyond what was implied in the rather simplistic “letter.” He must have felt like a serious musician who, having played in top concert halls around the world, returned home and was invited to admire someone playing a few old tunes in the pub down the road. He could understand and respect what they were saying, but he knew a larger world.

  But maybe, just maybe, their new plan might work. He goes ahead with the ritual of purification. He makes the declaration. (Those who suppose that the “real Paul,” being a good Protestant, would never have done anything like this have missed the point. Paul’s gospel did not make him opposed to the Temple and its sacrificial system. Just because he believed that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, that did not mean that following the Levitical code was now sinful.) The purificatory ritual takes a week—it must have seemed a very long week to Paul and his anxious friends—after which Paul and the other men enter the Temple. Has the ruse worked? Have they gotten away with it? Will the Jerusalem church be spared the embarrassment—and more than embarrassment—of being associated with a notoriously traitorous character? Will Paul be spared the outcry that might so easily follow?

  The answer is no. Only now it’s even worse than they had feared. They had been worried that Paul would be accused of fomenting lawbreaking among diaspora Jews. The actual charge is one higher. He is now accused of deliberately defiling the Temple itself. In trying to avoid a road accident, they have stepped on the accelerator rather than the brake. They would have done better to keep Paul away from the Temple altogether. The evidence for the charge of attempted defilement is of course circumstantial and slight, but that wouldn’t stop an angry crowd. The trouble began, Luke explains, with some Jews from Asia, people who had known of Paul in Ephesus. (Everybody in Ephesus, we recall, had known who Paul was.) So much, Paul might have thought grimly, for coming back for the festival. Lots of other Jews had had the same idea; people came to Jerusalem from all over the world of the Diaspora. Some of them, already hostile to him, would think the worst. And so much for trying to calm people down by coming into the Temple however carefully, however ritually pure.

  These diaspora Jews now formulate the charge that will resonate throughout the next five chapters of Acts. Here he is, they say; this is the fellow who’s been going around the world teaching everybody to disobey the law and to disregard the Temple! (How Paul must have longed to explain to them the difference between abolition and fulfillment. But then, as now, when people are angry, they can read things whichever way they please.) And here he is in person, they say. Not content with charging around the world spreading this anti-Jewish heresy, he’s come here to Jerusalem and has brought his pagan friends into the Temple so that he can prove his point by polluting our holy place . . .

  What had Paul done? Luke explains that these men from Ephesus had seen him in the city with Trophimus, another Ephesian and a Gentile, and assumed that Paul had taken him into the Temple, past the sign that warned Gentiles to keep out. The assumption was false, but the damage was done. Paul, we may assume, braced himself wearily, knowing what to expect, like someone bathing in the sea who, too late, realizes that a huge wave is bearing down on him and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. With a rush, people in the mob seize him and start to beat him up. He is kicked and punched, slapped and scratched. He only escapes with his life because the Roman tribune on duty, hearing the uproar, quickly intervenes and arrests him. The tribune can’t figure out what the problem is (here, as with the riot in Ephesus, most of the crowd has little idea what is really happening), so he gives the order for Paul to be brought into the barracks. The soldiers carry Paul over the heads of the angry crowd. They reach comparative safety. We sense the door being shut, the roar of the mob still audible but now at bay.

  How Paul could talk coherently after all this is not clear, but he has come too far to lapse into passivity now. He wants, above all, to be able to speak to the people. They are zealous for God and the law; he is zealous for God and his son—and he remembers only too well the time when he thought just as they do. They are his people, the kind of people over whom he had grieved,18 for whom he had prayed,19 the people who, he believed, might not forever “remain in unbelief.”20 If he cannot speak to them, who can? After all, Paul has recently stayed up all night explaining to an eager group in Troas what the scriptures really meant, how it all fitted together, why his own mission was part of the plan stretching back to Adam and Abraham and forward to the ultimate renewal of heaven and earth. He has just written it out, a few weeks before, with great care and artistry, in what he must have known was a work of literary skill as well as theological and pastoral power and passion. He wants, he yearns, he longs above all things at that moment to be allowed to say all this to th
e angry crowd.

  So he asks the tribune for permission. Actually, he begins by asking permission to speak to the tribune himself, which sets in motion an odd little dialogue. The tribune has assumed that Paul is the Egyptian rabble-rouser mentioned by Josephus and other Jewish traditions, the man who had led a band of hopefuls into the desert with promises that he would accomplish God’s coming liberation. It isn’t quite clear whether, hearing Paul speak Greek, the tribune has his guess confirmed (an Egyptian might be expected to speak Greek) or whether, hearing Paul speak a better standard of Greek, he is now questioning his original assumption. But it gives Paul the opportunity to introduce himself, to say that he is a Jew from Tarsus. No wonder he can speak good Greek. His native city is a place of culture and renown. So, having gotten that sorted out, he requests, and is granted, permission to speak to the crowd who a minute before were baying for his blood.

  * * *

  It was a noble effort, but it was doomed to failure. Paul’s speech from the steps of the Roman barracks gained attention when the crowd realized he was now speaking in the local language, Aramaic. They listened politely, perhaps in a mixture of suspicion and surprise, as he rehearsed his early life, not least his zeal for the law in Jerusalem itself. The story of his meeting with Jesus is of course spectacular, as is the immediate sequel, in which the devout, law-observant Ananias comes at the Lord’s bidding to enable the opening of his eyes. So far, so good.

  But then came the critical moment, the moment where Paul needed to expound the fulfillment of the scriptural promises about all nations coming to worship Israel’s God. He longed in particular to explain that to them and then to explain the ways in which this inclusion of Gentiles was the true fulfillment of the Torah predicted by Moses and the prophets. He was itching to explain as well how it was that Jesus the Messiah, as promised by God to King David, was the ultimate means by which the great Temple promises had come true, how the divine glory was dwelling bodily in him and by his spirit dwelling also now in his followers. Paul had not been cynically breaking the law. He certainly had not been defiling the Temple. He deeply respected and cherished them both. He had been loyal. But when God sends Israel a crucified Messiah . . .