Paul
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What’s more, if Caesar was now presented with a Roman citizen (who happened to be Jewish) coming to complain of his treatment in Judaea, might that not fuel the Roman desire to deal with those troublesome Jews once and for all? Might it not also awaken echoes of Claudius’s decree? Might the Jews once again find themselves unwelcome in Rome, just a few years after returning to their homes and their livelihoods? Might this spark the kind of anti-Jewish backlash we saw when the mob beat up Sosthenes in Corinth or when Alexander tried to speak to the crowd in Ephesus? Paul would be only too aware of this danger. He was eager to head it off before it could begin.
He would not, in fact, have been the first Jew to make a journey to Rome in order to register a protest about the state of affairs back in Judaea. Archelaus, the heir of Herod the Great, had gone to Rome to receive his kingdom sixty years before. Augustus had granted Archelaus his wish, though in a modified form, installing him as “ethnarch” rather than “king.” But not long afterward a combined delegation of Jews and Samaritans went to Rome to protest, and in AD 6 Archelaus was banished.9 That story, with a different twist, is probably reflected in Jesus’s parable about a king going away, receiving kingly authority, and coming back to face local opposition, though Jesus was thinking then of a different kind of kingdom and different opposition.10
So was there now going to be trouble? Was Paul’s appeal to Caesar going to pull down the roof on top of the Jewish community in Rome and Judaea? Might that not undermine all the things he had been trying to accomplish in his letter? He had written what he did in order to prepare carefully for his own arrival in Rome at last. But the delicate balance of what he had said three years earlier might now be jeopardized by the realization that he had come because he had appealed to Caesar.
So Paul insisted to the Jewish elders in Rome, as he had insisted in every speech he had made in Jerusalem and Caesarea, that he was a loyal Jew and that his whole mission was about “the hope of Israel.” This fits so securely with the Paul we know from the letters, not least Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, and of course Romans, that we can be sure we are on solid historical ground. This is exactly the sort of thing he would have wanted to say. Of course, for him “the hope of Israel” meant both the worldwide inheritance (the king of Israel would be king of the world) and the resurrection of the dead. Paul saw both of these in Jesus and therefore saw following Jesus as the way, the only way, by which this ancient national aspiration would be achieved.
To his relief, no doubt, the Jewish elders told him that they had not received any messages about him from Judaea. Nobody had passed on warnings about him. They did, however, know about this messianic sect, perhaps because that had been the cause of their expulsion by Claudius twelve or more years before. All they knew was that everybody was saying rude things about this crazy antisocial new movement. They were indeed. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing about this period and this movement from the safe vantage point of the early second century, says with a sneer that the Christians are a group of people who hate the whole human race. “What can you expect?” he says. “All the filth and folly of the world ends up in Rome sooner or later.”11 Yes, Paul would have thought had he heard that comment: folly to Gentiles, scandal to Jews. Nothing much had changed—though Tacitus still suggests that Nero’s persecution went a bit too far. (This is rather like Trajan advising Pliny that, though of course Christians must be killed, one does not want people spying and informing on their neighbors. Standards of civilized behavior must be kept up.)12
So the Jewish elders fixed a day where they could meet Paul at more leisure and explore his message. We know the script. The subject would be the hope of Israel: the One God becoming king of all the world. For Paul, this would mean telling the story as we have seen him tell it in city after city: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers (remember Phinehas), Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and much, much more. Patriarchs, Moses, David, exile, Messiah. Crucifixion, resurrection. We can guess what is coming next. Some would believe; others would not. Paul saw with sorrow that this too was part of the scriptural promise and warning. He quoted Isaiah 6, as Jesus had done: the heart of the people had grown dull.13 He had thought all this through and laid it all out in the letter he had written to Rome three years earlier. Now here, in Rome itself, he saw it before his own eyes.
There was still the hope. In his mind’s eye, he would recall the prayer he had uttered in the letter (“My prayer to God . . . is for their salvation”), the possibility he had held out (“If they do not remain in unbelief, they will be grafted back in”), and the promise to which he had clung (“ ‘all Israel shall be saved’ . . . when the fullness of the nations comes in”).14 But for the moment the pattern continued, the pattern, that is, of Paul’s whole career to date. The gospel was “to the Jew first,” but when the Jews rejected it, as most had rejected Jesus himself, “this salvation from God has been sent to the Gentiles.” This line, from Acts 28:28, directly echoes Romans 11:11 (“by their trespass, salvation has come to the nations”). Paul may himself have echoed, under his breath or in his heart, the words that end the latter verse, “in order to make them jealous,” perhaps going on to 11:14, “so that, if possible, I can make my ‘flesh’ jealous, and save some of them.” But it would be tactless to say this out loud to his visitors, at least on this first occasion. What might make them “jealous,” after all, would not be a word of teaching from him, but the sight of non-Jews celebrating the ancient Jewish hope of the kingdom, of the Messiah, of resurrection. That was, in part, why it was important for Paul that the house-churches in Rome should find their way to united worship and community, whatever it took. These issues were all intertwined.
Paul waited two years, under house arrest, for his case to come before the emperor. A strange Jewish prisoner would not have rated highly on Nero’s list of priorities. Paul was, however, free to welcome people to his quarters and to go on making the royal announcement, the true “gospel” of which the imperial “good news” was, as he believed, simply a parody. Nobody stopped him; he told anybody and everybody who would listen that the One God of Israel was the world’s true king and that he had installed his son Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, as Lord of the world. Paul taught, says Luke, “with all boldness.”15 We are not surprised; “boldness” had been the keynote of Paul’s self-description, even in the tense and contested atmosphere of 2 Corinthians 3 when the “boldness” of his apostolic proclamation had been a major theme. He had never tried to hide things. He never tried to curry favor. (Here is, no doubt, one root of what comes across in the account of the voyage as bossiness and interfering; Paul was used to saying what he thought.) He was much more afraid of not being true to the gospel than of any consequences a “bold” proclamation might have had. He was loyal to Israel’s traditions as he had seen them rushing together in the Messiah. He was loyal, ultimately, to the Messiah himself, faithful to the one who had himself been faithful to the point of death.
But what of Paul’s own death? If he arrived in Rome in AD 60, as seems the most likely, these two years of house arrest take us forward to 62. What happened then?
* * *
Two possible scenarios, very different from one another, follow from this point. In a small way, they integrate with the question of why Acts stops where it does. An early date for Acts places it as a document for use in Paul’s trial, meaning that Luke was writing it down during that final two-year period, telling the story of one “hearing” after another. The whole thing would then have been building up toward the coming appearance before Nero, with a heavy emphasis on Paul’s innocence, on his standing as a loyal (albeit messianic) Jew, and in consequence on his right as a Jewish citizen of Rome, at least as seen by Gallio in Corinth, to pursue his vocation as he pleased. A later date for Acts might indicate that Luke knew the result of the trial, but did not want to draw attention to it—especially if Paul had after all been condemned right away—because it would have spoiled his story of pagan authorities supporting,
to their own surprise perhaps, this strange wandering Jew. Or it might indicate that Luke knew Paul had been released by Nero and had been able to engage in other activity, but that his (Luke’s) own purpose had been served; that is, the gospel of God’s kingdom had now gone from Jerusalem and Judaea to Samaria and thence to the ends of the earth.16 The gospel itself, not Paul, is the real hero of Luke’s story. That, then, would be enough.
Trying to guess Luke’s motives for stopping here does not, then, take us very far. We are left, like some postmodern novelists, with the possibility of writing two or even three endings to the story and leaving readers to decide. There are, of course, traditions that Paul was martyred in Rome; you can still see his chains, so it is claimed, by the tomb where he is supposed to lie, in the church of St. Paul Outside the Walls. Once, in October 2008, I heard the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra there, playing Bruckner’s magnificent Sixth Symphony as a command performance for Pope Benedict, who sat enthroned in the middle surrounded by a large number of cardinals. The music was impressive, but it provided me no clue, of course, as to whether Paul is really buried there.
So the options divide, and then divide again. The first and most obvious is that Paul was killed in the persecution of Christians that followed the great fire of Rome in AD 64. Since most of the Christians, as we mentioned, lived on the impoverished southwest bank of the river, and since the fire was confined to the wealthier northeast side, they were an easy target—people would say, they must have started it, since their own homes were untouched! (In any case, since they didn’t worship the gods, any disaster was probably their fault.) It is perfectly possible that Paul and perhaps Peter as well were among the leaders rounded up and made to suffer the penalty for a disaster whose actual origins have remained unknown from that day to this. Paul, as a citizen, would have been entitled to the quick death of beheading with a sword rather than the slow, appalling tortures that Nero inflicted on many others or the upside-down crucifixion that tradition assigns to Peter. But even then, if Paul were killed in 64, that leaves two more years after the two that Luke mentions. Would that have been enough time for a visit to Spain?
Quite possibly. There was a regular traffic between Rome and Tarraco, quite enough to justify, if not finally to vindicate, the enthusiastic advocacy of some today in the historic Catalan town of Tarragona. (Tarraco was the capital of Hispania Tarraconensis, which since the time of Augustus had stretched right across the north of the Iberian Peninsula to the Atlantic coast.) We can see why he might have wished to go. The original temple to Augustus had been replaced in Paul’s day with a dramatic terraced complex for the imperial cult, in which the main temple was easily visible from several miles out to sea, as is the present cathedral on the same site. If I am right in suggesting that Paul was eager to announce Jesus as king and Lord in places where Caesar was claiming those titles along with others, then Tarraco, in the province at the farthest reaches of the world, would have been a natural target.
I am inclined now to give more weight than I once did to the testimony of Clement, an early bishop of Rome. Writing about Paul in the late first century, he says:
After he had been seven times in chains, had been driven into exile, had been stoned, and had preached in the east and in the west, he won the genuine glory for his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world and having reached the farthest limits of the west. Finally, when he had given his testimony before the rulers, he thus departed from the world and went to the holy place, having become an outstanding example of patient endurance.17
“The farthest limits of the west” would of course mean Spain. Clement could have been simply extrapolating from Romans 15, and it would suit his purpose to give the impression of Paul’s worldwide reach. But he was a central figure in the Roman church within a generation of Paul’s day. He is writing at the most about thirty years after Paul’s death. It is far more likely that he knew more solid and reliable traditions about Paul than we, discounting him, can invent on our own.
The other alternative at this point is that Paul, given his freedom at a hearing in 62, changed his mind from what he had said in Miletus (about not showing his face in that region again) and more conclusively in Romans 15:23 (having no more room left for work in the East). This too is possible. Paul makes a great play in 2 Corinthians about having the right to change his mind. Just because he had said before that he would do this or that, he might nevertheless do something else when the time came. He would follow God’s leading in the moment. All his plans carried the word “perhaps” about with them.
But to what end? Why go back to the East? If he did make it to Spain, could he not then have gone north? Might we not have had the chance of a Pauline version of Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem” (“And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?”). Perhaps on reflection it is as well that we do not. How do we fit together the travel details in those most tricky of Pauline pieces, the so-called Pastoral Letters?
I have kept these back until now because they are, in my judgment, far harder to fit not only into Paul’s travel plans, but into Paul’s writing style than any of the other relevant material. (Some earlier generations thought that Paul wrote the Letter to the Hebrews. The standard objection to this—that the theology of the letter is so unlike Paul’s—is considerably overstated; but there is no evidence that he had any hand in it.) Granted, as I said before, writers may easily change their style between one week and the next, between one work and the next. But the changes required for us comfortably to ascribe to Paul the letters we call 1 Timothy and Titus, especially, are of a different kind to those required for us to accept Ephesians and Colossians; more too than those required for us to recognize those two other very different letters, 1 and 2 Corinthians, as both from the same hand.
However, if we were to make a start, it ought, in my judgment, to be with 2 Timothy. If this were the only “Pastoral” letter we had, I suspect it would never have incurred the same questioning that it has endured through its obvious association with 1 Timothy and Titus. Second Timothy claims to be written from Rome in between two legal hearings; Paul has been lonely and bereft, though Onesiphorus, a friend from his time in Ephesus, has come to Rome, searched for him, and found him.18 Onesiphorus contrasts sadly with “all who are in Asia,” who, Paul says, have turned away from him—presumably to something more like the message urged upon the Galatians in the late 40s. But where is Timothy? He cannot now be in Ephesus if he needs Paul, in Rome, to tell him what is happening there. And where has Paul been?
He speaks of leaving a cloak at Troas.19 This would fit easily enough with the earlier trip from Corinth to Jerusalem; Paul might well have been absentminded after an all-night preaching session enlivened by someone falling out of a window. But if he had wanted to send somebody to retrieve the cloak, he would have been far more likely to do that from his two-year imprisonment in Caesarea than to wait until he was in Rome. Indeed, had it not been for the mention of Onesiphorus looking for Paul in Rome in 2 Timothy 1:17, a case could have been made for the letter being written from Caesarea, though other details would remain puzzling. He speaks of sending Tychicus to Ephesus, which might work if Ephesians and Colossians were after all written from Rome, not Ephesus itself, though as I said earlier that raises other problems. He sends greetings to Prisca and Aquila; maybe they had moved back one more time from Rome to Ephesus, but if so, they hadn’t stayed in Rome very long. He says that Erastus had stayed in Corinth, whereas in Acts 19:22 he goes ahead of Paul to Macedonia. He mentions leaving Trophimus behind, ill, in Ephesus, whereas according to Acts 21:29 he is with Paul in Jerusalem. None of these, individually or taken together, is historically impossible. It may be that the comparatively easy convergence we have seen between Paul’s other letters and the narrative of Acts has lulled us into thinking that we know more than we do. But it does seem to me that if 2 Timothy is genuine, then it certainly implies some additional activity back in the East, despite Paul’s earl
ier plans, after an initial hearing in Rome. And it implies that this time, unlike the situation reflected in Philippians 1, Paul really does believe he is facing death at last:
I am already being poured out as a drink-offering; my departure time has arrived. I have fought the good fight; I have completed the course; I have kept the faith. What do I still have to look for? The crown of righteousness! The Lord, the righteous judge, will give it to me as my reward on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have loved his appearing.20
We can easily imagine Paul writing that—as we can the next passage, where he comes across as tired, anxious, weary of having people who let him down (“Demas . . . is in love with this present world!”21). If 2 Timothy is genuine, then, it reflects a complex journey—and a return to Rome—of which we know nothing else.
First Timothy seems altogether brighter, somewhat like the contrast we see when we move back from 2 to 1 Corinthians. Timothy is in Ephesus,22 and Paul is giving him instructions about his work there. Much of the instruction in this letter could have been given, in its basic content, at any time in the first two centuries; there is little to connect it directly with Paul, or indeed with Timothy either. Hymenaeus and Alexander are mentioned as blasphemers who have been “handed over to the satan,”23 as Paul recommended doing with the incestuous man in 1 Corinthians.24 Hymenaeus then crops up in 2 Timothy 2:17, this time in company with Philetus, this time over a more specific charge: “saying that the resurrection has already happened.” We are left looking at small fragments of a jigsaw puzzle for which we have far too few pieces and no guiding picture to show us what might belong where.