by N. T. Wright
The second thing, the sharp edge of all this energy, is his blunt, up-front habit of telling it as he sees it no matter who is confronting him. He will say “Boo” to every goose within earshot and to all the swans as well. There is a reason why Saul of Tarsus, in his early days in Damascus, is the one getting into trouble, just as there is a reason why the Jerusalem apostles then decide to pack him off home to Tarsus. He confronts Peter in Antioch. I have suggested that the only reason he doesn’t say more at the Jerusalem Conference is because Barnabas would have persuaded him to hold back.
He is the kind of man you want on your side in a debate but who may just alienate more sensitive souls. He confronts the magistrates at Philippi; he is itching to speak to the vast crowd in Ephesus; he tries to explain himself to the Jerusalem mob that had been trying to lynch him; he rebukes the high priest. He knows how to turn the factions in the Sanhedrin against one another. He lectures the Roman governor himself about justice, self-control, and the coming judgment. He tells the ship owner where he should and shouldn’t spend the winter, and then says, “I told you so” when it all goes horribly wrong. He spots the sailors who are trying to bolt and tells the centurion to stop them. As a companion, he must have been exhilarating when things were going well and exasperating when they weren’t. As an opponent, he could cause some people to contemplate murder as their only recourse.
People today write doctoral dissertations and business books about how successful companies and not-for-profit organizations begin. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred there is someone like Paul hammering away from the start, getting things off the ground, confronting local authorities, raising money, persuading co-workers about what needs to be done, never losing the vision. Someone who will take the bull by the horns. Someone who will go on and on insisting on what to do and how to do it until it happens.
With all this, there is something disarming about Paul’s vulnerable side, which explains why, despite his relentless and in-your-face energy, people loved him, wanted to work with him, and wept when he left. When he says that his heart has been opened wide, that there are no restrictions in his affections for his churches, it rings true.15 His honesty shines out. With Paul, what you see is what you get, even if it isn’t what you wanted. You know where you are. You know he will do anything for you, because (he would say) God has done everything for him in the Messiah.
He will never ask anyone to face anything he hasn’t faced himself, up to and including horrible suffering and hardship—which he will then use as a visual aid in proclaiming the gospel. That is why his claims about himself are so credible. When he says he was gentle as a nurse in Thessalonica, we believe him. When he writes the poem about love, we know that the Corinthians would have recognized a self-portrait. When he tells the Philippians, over and over, to rejoice and celebrate, they know that, given half a chance, he would be the life and soul of the party. He modeled what he taught, and what he taught was the utter, exuberant, self-giving love of the Messiah.
People may sometimes have wished he would not give them quite so much of himself—life would not have been dull when he was around, but it would not have been particularly relaxing either—but they would have acknowledged that when they were with him, they saw truth more clearly because they saw it in his face and felt the love of God more warmly because they knew it was what drove him on. He was the sort of person through whom other people are changed, changed so that they will themselves take forward the same work with as much of the same energy as they can muster. If loyalty to the One God and his Messiah was Paul’s watchword, one of the reasons why the strange movement he started thrived in the coming days was because his associates were, for the most part, fiercely loyal to Paul himself. He loved them, and they loved him. That is how things get done. It is how movements succeed.
All this helps to explain at one level why things happened the way they did. But within two or three generations (as happens with the founders of companies and charities) this personal memory would have faded. What kept Paul’s influence alive then and thereafter was, obviously, his letters. The flow of words in his daily teaching, arguing, praying, and pastoral work is captured for us in these small, bright, and challenging documents. They (the conclusion is hardly original, but it’s important nonetheless) are the real answer to the question, drawing readers as they do into Paul’s lecture room, into his crowded little shop, into his inner circle, into his heart. It isn’t just their content, strikingly original and powerful though that is. He wasn’t just, as many have wrongly suggested, synthesizing the worlds of Israel, Greece, and Rome; his was a firmly Jewish picture, rooted in Israel’s ancient story, with Israel’s Messiah in the center and the nations of the world and their best ideas brought into new coherence around him. Nor was he simply teaching a “religion” or a “theology”; if we were to do Paul justice today we ought to teach him in departments of politics, ancient history, economics, and/or philosophy just as much as in divinity schools and departments of religion.
What matters, I think, is the way in which the letters cover so many moods and situations, the way in which, like the great music of our own classical tradition, they can find you at every stage of life, in every joy and sorrow, chance and challenge. I am reminded of one of the finest British journalists of the last generation, Bernard Levin, who spoke of how the great composers had accompanied him through his life: “Beethoven first, for the boy who wanted to put the world to rights; Wagner next, for the man unable to put himself to rights; Mozart at last, as the shadows lengthen, to confirm the growing belief that there is a realm ‘where everything is known and yet forgiven.’”16
Thus, for Paul one might say: Galatians, for the young reformer eager to defend the gospel and attack the heretics; 2 Corinthians, for the adult sadly aware that things are more complicated and disturbing than he had thought; Romans at last, to remind us, despite everything, that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in King Jesus our Lord.”17 Like the psalms he knew so well, Paul’s letters wait for us just around the corner, to take our arm and whisper a word of encouragement when we face a new task, to remind us of obligations and warn us of snakes in the grass, to show us from one angle after another what it might mean to live in the newly human way, the newly Jewish way, the way of Jesus, to unveil again and again the faithful, powerful love of the creator God.
When we ask why Paul, with seventy or eighty pages of text to his name in the average Bible, has succeeded far beyond the other great letter writers of antiquity—the Ciceros, the Senecas—and for that matter the great public intellectuals and movement founders of his day and ours, this range of writing, from the urgent to the winsome, from the prophetic to the poetic, from intellectual rigor to passionate advocacy, must be central to the answer. The man who could write Philemon and Romans side by side was a man for all moments.
Yes, within a generation people were grumbling that he was sometimes hard to understand and that some folk were taking him the wrong way. That happens. But it is no accident that many of the acknowledged great moments in church history—think of Augustine, Luther, Barth—have come about through fresh engagement with Paul’s work. Even those who think that those great men too partially misunderstood Paul will acknowledge the point. Paul had insisted that what mattered was not just what you thought but how you thought. He modeled what he advocated, and generation after generation has learned how to think in the new way by struggling to think his thoughts after him. His legacy has continually generated fresh dividends. It is a challenge that keeps on challenging.
All this is at the heart of who Paul was and why he succeeded. Of course, Paul himself would say that the One God was behind it all. Of course, skeptics might retort that since Alexander had made Paul’s world speak Greek and the Romans had made travel easier than ever before, conditions were right. “So what?” Paul would have said. If the Messiah was sent “when the fullness of time arrived,”18 perhaps Greece and Rome were part of the preparation as well a
s part of the problem. I do not think, however, that Paul would so readily have agreed with those who have said that people were getting tired of the old philosophies and pagan religions and were ready for something new. The problem in Ephesus was not that people had stopped worshipping Artemis and so were ready for Paul’s message, but that Paul’s message about the One God had burst on the scene and stopped the worship of Artemis. Social and cultural conditions can help to explain the way things worked out, but they cannot explain it away.
A better explanation may be found in the new way of life, the new kind of community, that Paul was not only advocating, but making possible through his writings. Paul emphasizes, in letter after letter, the family life of believers, what he begins to call, and subsequent generations will usually call, “the church,” the ekklēsia. Not for nothing does he repeatedly emphasize the unity and the holiness of the church. Nor is it irrelevant that he highlights, and even apparently celebrates, the suffering that he and others would and did endure because of their loyalty to Jesus. These tell a different story from the idea of bored ex-pagans looking for something different to do with their “religious” side. This is about a new kind of community, a new kind, we dare to say, of “politics.”
Politics is about the polis—the city, the community—and how it works, how it runs. Sophisticated theories had been advanced in Paul’s day, often by theoreticians (like Cicero and Seneca) who were also hands-on members of the ruling elite. The main feature of Paul’s political landscape was of course Rome. Rome had united the world—or so it claimed. But that unity, a top-down uniformity in which diversity was welcomed as long as it didn’t threaten the absolute sovereignty of Caesar, was always creaky, and often ugly. The “diversity” was, after all, still seen in strictly hierarchical terms: men over women, free over slaves, Romans over everybody else. Rebels were ruthlessly suppressed. “They make a wilderness,” sighed the Briton Calgacus, “and they call it ‘peace.’”19
In this imperial world there appeared, in groups of six here and a dozen or two there, through the energetic work of this strange man Paul, a vision of a different kind of community owing allegiance to a different Kyrios, offering a different vision of unity, hosting a different kind of diversity. Unity and diversity were the pressure points for Paul, both for the individual communities (such as the church in Corinth, challenged by Paul’s vision of the Messiah’s single but very diverse “body”) and for the worldwide “family” (such as the churches of Gentiles and Jews, both challenged by Paul’s collection project). But what Paul had been doing was undoubtedly “political” in the sense that he was founding and maintaining an interrelated network of communities for which the only analogies, as we saw earlier, were the synagogue communities, on the one hand, and the Roman army and civil service, on the other. But Paul’s communities were very different from either.
However, they had—and Paul’s work and lasting achievement is unthinkable without this—the deepest of roots. Paul’s Messiah communities were not simply a freestanding innovation. Rome traced its story back nearly a thousand years; Augustus had been careful to have his court poets and historians explain that his innovatory rule was the appropriate climax to Rome’s long history and noble traditions. The synagogue told and retold the still longer story that went back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to Moses and Joshua, to David and Solomon. Paul told that story too and regularly explained to his communities that they had been grafted into that great tradition. His communities may have been a novelty in one respect. In other respects, they were claiming—he was teaching them to claim—that they were Abraham’s family. This, in Paul’s work, was as much a social and communal strength as it was a theological one.
There may, in other words, have been a different kind of vacuum into which the Jesus message made its way. It was not so much a matter of people giving up an old “religion” and then finding a new one. Nor was it explicable as dissatisfaction with existing philosophies and the discovery of the new one that Paul was teaching. Rather, people who were used to one kind of political reality, albeit with its own history and variations, were glimpsing a vision of a larger united though diverse world—and then, as they looked around them, they were discovering at the same time that Rome, after all, could not really deliver on its promises. When the new communities spoke of a different Kyrios, one whose sovereignty was gained through humility and suffering rather than wealth and conquest, many must have found that attractive, not simply for what we would call “religious” reasons, but precisely for what they might call “political” ones. This looked like something real rather than the smoke and mirrors of imperial rhetoric.
Paul did not, of course, have the time or the need to develop his picture of the differentiated unity of the Messiah’s body into a larger exposition of the church as a whole. He had not articulated a political theory to match that of Aristotle or his successors. But it was that kind of social experiment—developing a new way of living together—that the churches of the second and third century were attempting. And when you ask what inspired them to do what they were doing, the lines go back to Paul. Paul’s stress on unity, to be sure, stemmed from his theological vision. It was not mere pragmatism. But it also had, and Paul probably realized that it had, the power to generate an alternative social and cultural reality, to announce to the watching world that Jesus was Lord and Caesar wasn’t. What Paul was articulating in his letters, often in haste and to meet particular crises, was being reused to encourage Jesus-followers to glimpse and practice a refreshingly new kind of human society.
If the fact of a different kind of cross-cultural social diversity-in-unity had a powerful appeal, the same is true of holiness. This is counterintuitive for modern Westerners, who generally resent from an early age the fussy moralisms of home, school, and church: How could a new and demanding standard of behavior ever be attractive? In the ancient world, however, this was good news for many, especially for those—women, the poor, ethnic minorities, slaves, children—who were most vulnerable to the normal patterns of pagan behavior. This perception seems to lie behind the sneaking admiration (mixed, to be sure, with bemusement) that came from the famous second-century doctor Galen. In his only mention of the Christian movement, he comments on two points that to him made the followers of this strange new cult appear to be crazy: they believed in the resurrection of the body, and they didn’t sleep around.20 The two went together. The human body was attaining a new dignity, a new valuation. Nobody had imagined that kind of way of life. Paul taught it; the early Christians were modeling it.
In particular, those who have studied the life of the church in the second, third, and fourth centuries have emphasized that, again against the expectations of our own day, the Christian message provided a much better prospect for women than the pagan world could. For a start, there would be more of them. Pagans routinely practiced infanticide for unwanted children in general and girls in particular, but the Christians followed the Jews in renouncing such behavior. The consequent shortage of marriageable girls in the pagan world and the surplus of them among the Christians resulted in many marriages between Christian women and pagan men, who might then either convert or at least give consent for the children to be brought up as Christians. And, once again against the common perceptions of our age, the fresh evaluation of the role of women, though it came ultimately from Jesus himself, was mediated not least through Paul—the Paul who listed several women among his colleagues and fellow workers (including one “apostle”), who saw early on that in the Messiah’s family there was ultimately no “male and female,” and who entrusted Phoebe with the responsibility of delivering and almost certainly expounding the letter to the Romans.
Now we must pursue a parallel train of thought. If we simply focus on unity and holiness we may miss the fact that Paul’s communities were essentially outward looking and that the face they turned outward was the face of active care. Medicine in the ancient world was almost entirely reserved for those who could afford it; wi
thin a few generations, the Christians were setting up hospitals and caring for all within reach. When a plague struck a town or village and the rich and respectable retreated to their country houses away from the risk of infection, the Christians would stay and nurse the sick, often at the risk of their own lives. Nobody had ever dreamed of living like that before. Paul doesn’t mention this kind of social imperative, but it belongs with the work of healing, which characterized his own ministry, at least from time to time, and it flows directly from the things he says about the life of the community whose members were like shining lights in a dark world.
In the same way, education in the ancient world was almost entirely for the elite. Jewish boys were taught to read and write; they would, after all, need to study the Torah. But a great many ordinary pagans were either functionally illiterate or able only to read what was required for daily tasks. Some estimates put the level of literacy at between 20 and 30 percent; some of the older Greek cities and islands had a tradition of elementary education for citizens, but for many people, again especially for women and slaves, this would have been minimal. The early Christians, however, were enthusiastic about education, and particularly reading. When we ask ourselves what the “teachers” in Paul’s communities were teaching, I suspect that part of the answer was “reading,” since if they were teaching the converts (as they surely were) the scriptures of ancient Israel, this would have involved basic skills that many of those converts had hitherto lacked.
