Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History)

by Cahill, Thomas

  In their different ways, both Jewish and Greek intellectual traditions laid great stress on breaking things down into their component parts for the sake of minute analysis—what contemporary literary critics might call “deconstruction.” For the Jews the objects of analysis were halakha and haggada, the laws and stories inscribed in their holy books; for the Greeks the objects to be parsed were ideas about the nature of the universe. But both traditions prized serious reflection, careful analysis, and the ultimate fruit of these mental processes—understanding. Paul, the inheritor of both traditions, was able to bring to the somewhat amorphous enterprise of the Jesus Movement intellectual tools beyond the scope of its relatively uneducated devotees, such as women and fishermen (even if spiked with the sophistication of the occasional tax collector).

  Over the last century much has been made of Paul as the inventor of Christianity, the man who took the unfocused, anti-intellectual messianism of the bubble-headed followers of Jesus and constructed it into an effective theological weapon, which Christians would eventually use to beat not only the Jews but the whole of the ancient world. This is only partly true. Paul did not invent the faith of the early Church in the continuing reality and presence of Jesus. If Paul became in his own lifetime the most articulate spokesman for this faith, he was never much more than an articulator who knew how to zero in on the most essential elements of his argument and could thread his discourse with the welcome colors of his own very personal experience. If Paul had never left the Pharisaical school, the Jesus Movement that became Christianity would have survived and probably even prospered (if with a more limited scope), but it would have been a Christianity that lacked (at least for some time) Paul’s intellectual edge as well as his emotional edginess.

  For beyond his education, by which he intertwined antiquity’s most rigorous intellectual traditions, we cannot neglect to consider the man’s natural temper: neither flatterer nor diplomat, neither charmer nor salesman, Paul was not the sort of man you would immediately associate with the effort to pitch a new idea, let alone a whole new worldview and way of life. Devoid of small talk, anecdotes, and the sort of chatter that puts people at their ease, Paul was an either/or kind of guy, an absolutist for whom the matter under discussion would always be All or Nothing. An intellectual overachiever, pushed repeatedly to success by a keenly competitive father, Paul had no time for ordinary social niceties and neither gave nor expected to receive normal social comforts. One can imagine him sitting uncomfortably in some conventional parlor, staring penetratingly at his hostess while trying to find some Meaning in her inquiry as to whether he took one lump or two.

  But the combination of intellectual and emotional relentlessness that constituted Paul’s personality made this unlikely man the perfect vehicle for this moment in the development of the Jesus Movement. Had he appeared a little earlier—say, soon after the “raising” of Jesus and the descent of the Spirit—his intellectual ardor would probably have been too much for an inchoate community of simply educated disciples who were just beginning to get their minds around these inexplicable events. Once they had got their bearings again, come to understand what had happened as a coherent story, and begun to give voice to their unique experiences, they were—whether they knew it or not—ready to hear from someone more intellectually incisive than they, someone who could give a more precise formulation to these experiences, someone who was part of them but also part of the larger world of which they had only limited knowledge. Had Paul arrived on the scene much later than he did (when the movement, settling down as an elaborated organization with defined structures, had become the Church it would become), his emotional edginess—his intolerance for muddleheadedness, his knowing when he was right and you were wrong, his essential abstraction from the details of ordinary life—would have made him a poor candidate to be an organization man; and he would soon have been isolated and eventually cast aside.

  WHAT DID PAUL CONTRIBUTE substantively to the development of the Jesus Movement? Though—from Peter, Ananias, and who knows how many oral “memoirists”—he must have known thoroughly the major events of Jesus’s life (and many of its minor anecdotes as well), Paul, unlike the four evangelists (who finished their work a decade or more after his time), never set himself the task of collecting and anthologizing the oral tradition. These stories, which when Paul began to write (about the year 50) probably seemed so fresh that no one had yet thought to write them down, were the meat and drink of the Jesus Movement: they were talked about endlessly and retold in “improved” versions by travelers from other communities; they provided illustrations for sermons in Jesus-centered synagogues, where the incidents and prophecies of the Jewish scriptures were read as foreshadowings of the life of the Messiah; they were extolled and summarized in new hymns devised by the more creative members of the Messianic assemblies. And the central events of the Jesus “reality”—his death and resurrection, his sending of the Spirit, his hoped-for coming again—were memorialized in ritual baptisms and in “the breaking of the bread,” the haggadic reenactment of the Last Supper which took place not in the synagogue but in some private home where the disciples consumed bread and wine as Christ’s body and blood, according to his own instructions.2

  Paul, building on all this information (and doubtless some misinformation), already in general circulation among the small Jesus-centered communities of the Roman empire, sets himself the task of being not another storyteller but a theologian—that is, someone who can articulate clearly the intellectual affirmations that lie behind the stories. Of course, some theologizing was already under way. Peter and the others had constructed a simple thought-structure, which came to be called the kerygma (or “proclamation”) and which served as a kind of intellectual container for the stories. But it was primitive and—from the vantage point of the complicated Jewish and Greek intellectual systems—underdeveloped: The man Jesus’s teaching and all the acts of his life (such as his healing miracles) had been given definitive approval by God himself, who has raised this Jesus from the dead. Jesus is, therefore, not only the promised Messiah of the Jews but has shown forth in the words and deeds of his life what God expects of each human being. He is the model whom we all must imitate. The proof that Jesus is risen is the living testimony of eyewitnesses, whose credibility may be established by meeting and questioning them, people such as Mary Magdalene (“Come over and say hello to these people, Mary; they’re interested in hearing what you saw”), Peter and the Twelve, and now—as one “born out of [the proper sequence of] time”—Paul.

  Paul had not been called mildly from his nets by Jesus, as had Peter, Andrew, James, and John. He had not been invited to leave his counting table, as had Matthew. He had not been gently healed from psychological torments, as had Mary Magdalene. He had been knocked off his horse and blinded, forced to stop and reconsider—everything. His theology would be as startling and overwhelming as his conversion experience.

  “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” said the Voice, and we can believe that these words were burned into the rider’s memory for the rest of his life, capable of rising to awful consciousness and shocking him anew when he least expected it. But these words must also have presented him with a conundrum: in what sense is Jesus to be identified with his followers? Paul the Pharisee already possessed rich models of identification on which he could draw. All Jews were “the children of Israel,” Abraham’s grandson, who had engendered twelve sons, who in their turn had engendered the Twelve Tribes. But Jews were also, collectively, “Israel,” as if they were part of the patriarch Israel’s body (which, in a sense, they were). All Jewish males, by virtue of their circumcision, were no longer merely single individuals but a kind of organic collectivity: they were the Circumcision. But if Jesus had come as Messiah, God’s Promised One, had he not completed Israel by bringing all the longings of the Jewish people to fulfillment? Were not the followers of Jesus, in effect, Israel renewed, Israel fulfilled, the Promise completed?

  Beyo
nd Jewish confessional considerations, were not all human beings descended from the original man, the adam, the mud-man of Genesis, raised by God from among unthinking creation to a new, a godlike level? And did not all descend, because of his disobedience, to the bent and broken world beyond the gates of Paradise, the world of disease, death, and disharmony, the world that we all inhabit? Did not Jesus, by his resurrection, by this startling proof of life beyond death, set this process of decay going in the opposite direction? Did he not, in effect, by his resurrection (and the promise of ours) reinstitute the Creation? Is he not, therefore, the New Adam, and are we not the New Creation?

  Slowly, asking himself such questions as these, plumbing all his rabbinic lore and learning, bringing to bear the precision instruments of Greek ratiocination, concentrating all his considerable energies on these thorny matters, does Paul begin to give shape to his theology. He does not do this as one might today while strolling through a university garden. He does it while walking great distances as fast as he can under a merciless sun, while being tossed about the Aegean or the Mediterranean in sickeningly unreliable vessels, while (once more) setting up his portable canvas- and leather-mending shop3 in the mobbed bazaar of a strange city. For Paul was only an accidental writer. His letters, collected in the New Testament, are almost all to the many Jesus communities that he established in his extensive travels, encouraging, admonishing, instructing them further. Before all else Paul was a relentless man with a relentless mission: to preach the Gospel—“in season and out”—to anyone who would listen, and to many who would not. Though others (probably many others) in this early period traveled to bring the Gospel to distant cities, it is Paul who, because of the sheer magnitude of his activities, is remembered as the world’s first missionary.

  For his pains, he is arrested at Macedonian Philippi, Alexander’s old capital, for daring to proselytize Roman citizens,4 stripped, and publicly flogged. In the Athens marketplace, where he had hoped to cut a figure as a wise philosopher, they make fun of him and hoot him down; others merely yawn. At Corinth, he is hauled before the Roman proconsul by Jews determined to get him in trouble (though the proconsul, unwilling to be drawn into a purely sectarian matter, dismisses the tiresome charges as “quibbles about words and names”). At Ephesus he is imprisoned for a time and, according to his own words, made to “fight wild animals.” His preaching there becomes so successful that it sets off a riot among the silversmiths, who made little statues of the many-breasted goddess Diana of Ephesus for the throngs of pilgrims (flocking to the shrine of the Great Mother at Ephesus) and who were afraid that Paul’s preaching would depress their trade. The scene, as depicted for us by Luke, is like a Shakespearean crowd scene (a mass of confusion, with the silversmiths shouting over and over “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”), but the upshot is that Paul has to depart the city in haste. Before his life is over Paul will endure additional imprisonments (one lasting two years at Caesarea Maritima because of his refusal to bribe the procurator), house arrest, shipwreck, and who knows how many physical illnesses brought on by the harshness of his travels. In his own words to his converts at Corinth: “Five times have I had thirty-nine lashes from Jews, three times been beaten with rods, once stoned, three times shipwrecked, adrift on the open sea for a night and a day; always traveling on, in danger from rivers, in danger from brigands, in danger from my own people, in danger from the gentiles, in danger in the towns, in danger in open country, in danger at sea, in danger from false brothers. I have worked unstintingly, gone many nights without sleep, gone hungry and thirsty, often without anything to eat or drink; I have been cold and naked. And, besides all this, I face day in, day out, my anxiety for all the churches. Who among you feels any weakness that I do not feel? Who among you stumbles, and I do not burn inwardly?”

  This driven man (driven by his zeal for the Gospel), this caring man (attempting to sympathize with all his charges, perhaps even with everyone he met), is remembered today not so much for the effectiveness of his preaching, the warmth of his sympathy, or even the extent of his labors as for the words he left behind in his surviving letters, which are still read each Sunday in churches throughout the world—all those churches for which he felt such anxiety. Dimly, we can see him entering a new marketplace for the first time, setting up his modest booth, engaging in conversation whomever he can—potential customers, their servants, his fellow merchants. We can see him taking a room in the tiny house of some merchant from a neighboring booth, gradually gathering a small community around him, instructing them in the Gospel and watching it take root among them. Then far into the night, sometimes with the help of a friendly scribe, sometimes alone, he scratches his letters to the church-communities he has had to leave behind, trying to find the right words, the words that will catch fire in their hearts and enable them to keep going. If nothing else, the overwhelming loneliness of this man—always beginning again, always “a stranger in a strange land,” always opening and closing his letters by naming distant friends, always recalling his ties of affection to those he has had to leave behind—should impress us.

  THE ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS

  Though the Romans, forced to stop at the borders of Parthia, could not hold as much of Asia as Alexander did, they extended their empire west through North Africa and southern and central Europe, finally conquering as far west as southern Britain in A.D. 60, forty-six years after the death of Augustus. Their empire lasted much longer than Alexander’s, in part because it was geographically fortunate: the Mediterranean served as its unifying medium of trade, communication, and control.

  If the image of Paul bent over his page, filling it with inky letters, illuminated by a flickering oil lamp, is a judgment on anyone who has ever claimed to have “no time to write,” it is also a reminder of how few of us would wish to be remembered for our letters, those peculiar documents written for particular occasions, gaining only in obscurity through the passage of time. Given such circumstances, the theology that shines forth from Paul’s letters is amazing for its clarity, profundity, and even (with a few lapses) consistency of development.

  Paul begins where all the early believers in Jesus begin—with Jesus crucified and risen. This Jesus, who lived an ordinary human life, is the medium through which God has fulfilled his promises to Israel. This God, who has done these things, is the same God he has always been—the Creator of all that is (and, therefore, not just Israel’s God but everyone’s) and the Lord of history (which, in his mysterious wisdom and despite all appearances to the contrary, he is bringing to its proper conclusion). At every turn, he has entered history and transformed human possibilities: by creating the universe, by raising mankind, by choosing Abraham, by liberating Israel from Egyptian slavery, by sending the prophets. But in Jesus’s death-and-resurrection (the one cannot be separated from the other, since there is no way to have a resurrection without a death), we see God’s definitive intervention on mankind’s behalf—the great anti-tragedy. In all the tragic dramas of antiquity, whether lived or staged, we detect the same pattern: the hero, be he Alexander or Oedipus, reaches his pinnacle only to be cut down. Only in the drama of Jesus does the opposite pattern hold: the hero is cut down only to be raised up.

  This is literally marvelous and, from the viewpoint of all previous human experience, completely unexpected. The terrifying trauma of those first witnesses to the resurrection has been transmuted, upon reflection, into the very surprise we were all waiting for without knowing it or being able to articulate it. For “in Christ,” writes Paul to the Corinthians, “God was reconciling the world to himself, holding no one’s faults against them, but entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” What are the particulars of this reconciliation? “In the fullness of time,” writes Paul to the Galatians, “God sent his son, born of a woman, born a subject of the Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law, so that we could receive adoption as his children. As you are his children, God has sent into our hearts the Spirit of his son crying, �
�Abba!’ (that is, the Father).5 So you are no longer a slave but God’s child; and as his child his heir—and this by God’s own act.”

  Jesus, who referred to himself by the (at least retrospectively) ironic title “the Son of Man,” has been proved to be also “the Son of God” by virtue of his resurrection. But how do we—all the rest of the sons and daughters of Man—get to tag along in his train as the Sons and Daughters of God? How does Jesus, born of woman, redeem us (that is, buy us back from slavery), so that we can “receive adoption” as God’s children? To work this out, we have to take humanity and human flesh as seriously as Paul (and all the Jews) did. The human race—“all flesh,” as it is called repeatedly in the sacred scriptures of the Jews—is a unity. Just as all Adam’s descendants were subject to the blight of his disobedience, the advent of a perfectly obedient man—“obedient unto death, to death upon a cross”—raised “all flesh” with him. Adam—the name means “earthman,” thus signaling that he is symbolic of mankind—could not content himself with human status but wished to be “a god,” and so brought on himself and all his descendants the fall from grace and “the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Jesus, by accepting his creatureliness and all the severest limitations of fallen human status, including suffering and death, has reversed that fall. “As it was because of one man that death [and all the lesser forms of disaster, decay, and disharmony] came,” wrote Paul to his Corinthians, “so because of one man has come the resurrection of the dead. Just as all die in Adam, so in Christ shall all be revived.”