Like all the early believers in Jesus, Paul knew better than to imagine that Jesus’s resurrection had brought about the end of suffering. They were living at the beginning of the end-time that Jesus’s victory had initiated, but of the actual end they “knew not the day nor the hour.” Though they would certainly be surprised to be informed that two thousand years would pass without a sign of Jesus’s return, they were not crackpot millenarians who thought they could calculate exactly what would happen next and when it would happen. The majority of early converts came from the same stratum of society that Jesus had come from: they were working-class artisans and had neither the leisure nor the inclination to imagine themselves exempt from any of the ills “that flesh is heir to.” They would be “in the world but not of it”: they would continue to occupy whatever position was their lot, cheerfully accepting its sufferings, but they would not allow themselves to be infected by the cynical, self-serving values of the world they found themselves inhabiting.
They would live in this world and share its sufferings, as Jesus had done. These sufferings, however, were not merely to be endured but welcomed as if they were each individual’s share in the sufferings of Jesus, in whose sufferings, because he is the new Adam, we all have a share. “All of us,” writes Paul in his final epistolary instruction, “when we were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death.” In baptism, in our immersion, we descend, as Jesus did, to the depths of human misery. But our trajectory, like his, is opposite to the movement of classical tragedy. For we, like Christ, arise from the depths of our baptism to new life: “Thus, by our baptism into his death we were buried with him, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too should begin to live a new life. For if we have been joined to him by dying a death like his, we shall surely be joined to him in his resurrection; realizing that our old self was crucified with him, so that the self that belonged to sin might be destroyed and we should be freed from the slavery of sin.… If we died with Christ, then it is our belief that we shall live with him, too. We know that Christ has been raised from the dead and will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For by dying, he is dead to sin once and for all, and now the life that he lives is Life-with-God. In the same way, you must see yourselves as being dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
Baptism, as presented by Paul, has none of the magic power of automatic salvation that it would come to have for medieval and many modern Christians. It does not effect the inner transformation that only God’s grace and individual human response can effect. Baptism is an outward symbolic ritual that dramatizes the inner transformation—the conversion or turnabout that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, the metanoia or opening of the heart that Jesus asked for. For each human being, this “death” comes in a different guise. The sin that I must die to if I am to live God’s life will be quite different from the sin that you must die to.
It is interesting to consider how, even in my truncated quotation about baptism’s symbolic death (taken from Paul’s letter to the Jesus community in Rome, a community he did not found), Paul circles around his own thought, repeating himself with variations, straining to get his meaning across. This is because he is trying to get his audience to go deeper. He is elaborating on the primitive kerygma—the simple sentences that constituted the creed of the early Jesus Movement—and he is unsure exactly how to go about it, unsure how his words will be received and whether his intended audience, whom at this point he has never even met, will comprehend or misconstrue them. He is, in short, saying something new, albeit based on declarations that all Messianists would have understood; and when a writer has something new to say, he must always be anxious about its reception. Here, as in so much of Paul, we are watching original theology in the making.
The “death to sin” that Paul speaks of is basically a relinquishing of power; it is to live a life that is the opposite of the lives of the Alexanders and the Caesars and all the “gods.” Now, you may say, most of his hearers had little chance of imitating such exalted and august models. But Paul makes clear that the power plays of the Great Ones are imitated over and over again in the lives of little ones—through acts of petty cruelty. But those who have “died with Christ,” who have allowed themselves—at least vicariously—to experience all the depth of human suffering, can never stoop to gaining advantage over another, even if the other is clearly in the wrong. “Sisters and brothers,” Paul admonishes the Galatians, “even if someone is caught red-handed, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one with all gentleness—and watch out that you don’t end up in the same position yourself! Carry one another’s burdens: this is the way to fulfill the ‘Law’ of Christ.”
Just a little before this he had told the Galatians not to go “snapping at one another and tearing one another to pieces” (which some of them must have been doing). Even though “you were called to be free, do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but be servants to one another in love, since the whole Law [of Moses] is summed up in a single commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.” In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus, questioned by a Pharisee who wants to expose him, is asked: “Rabbi, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?” Jesus answers: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” Paul appears to be alluding to this probably well-known Jesus anecdote in his admonition to the Galatians.6 But he omits love of God! So, within a few decades, love of neighbor, now tagged as the “ ‘Law’ of Christ,” became—within Pauline circles and no doubt far beyond—the ultimate and only guide for a believer’s conduct.
Paul’s repeated emphasis on freedom—that we who are freed by Jesus’s cross-and-resurrection are no longer slaves but sons—gets him into repeated trouble. He receives grim reports of his converts among the Galatians, a Celtic tribe settled in Asia Minor between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and who like all Celts were extremists—and hardly experts in subtle distinctions. So Paul finds he must advise them that their new freedom doesn’t really include attending “orgies and such things,” which are only occasions for relinquishing one’s newfound freedom and putting oneself under the power of heedless passions. Under the heading of “such things” Paul includes a laundry list of favorite Galatian pastimes, “whoring … idolatry and witchcraft … faction-fighting and malice, drunkenness.” Sounds like the Celts, all right.
But if the Galatians sometimes get things skewed, the Corinthians never seem to get things right. Corinth, vindictively destroyed by the Romans in the second century B.C. but reestablished by Julius Caesar as an exile for undesirables, had become a boomtown, full of retired army grunts, resettled freedmen, and assorted misfits and refugees from more conventional lifestyles, a place where anything might happen. To his Corinthian converts, who were always giving him hives, Paul sent his most eloquent exposition of the life of a true believer, hoping that with such a detailed description they would finally get things straight. This is Paul’s “Hymn to Love,” a Himalayan peak of world literature:
And now will I show you the best Way of all.
If I speak all the tongues of men and angels, but speak without love, I am no more than booming gong or clanging cymbal. If I can prophesy and fathom all mysteries and knowledge, and if I have so much faith that I can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all my possessions to the poor7—and even my body that I may boast—but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy or boast or think highly of itself. It is not rude. It does not insist on its own way. It does not take offense, nor does it keep any record of wrongs. Love does not enjoy evildoing but enjoys the truth. It bears all things, trusts all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. Prophecy will cease. Tongues will be stilled. Knowledge wi
ll fail. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the Fulfillment comes, the partial will be done away with. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I saw as a child, I thought as a child. When I became a man, I put away the things of a child. Now we see as in the distorted reflection of a glass, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know as fully as I am known.
For now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of all is love.
Could the Corinthians miss the point of this large and humble essay, in which Paul, admitting what he does not know, sets out so clearly that the life of the believer is to be—at least ideally—a series of acts of generosity toward others without regard to self-indulgence or self-seeking? Well, the Corinthians were a difficult bunch. They required additional visits and several letters (not all of which have come down to us). Even in this letter you can read between the lines Paul’s anguish at how many things they have bollixed up.
They have allowed themselves to be split into factions, one of which encouraged a more “spiritual” form of belief in Jesus, a belief that did not take serious account of his humanity and suffering—a point of view that Paul, always the Jew, always aware of the physical dimension, cannot stomach. These “spirit” people think themselves superior to the others and possessors of special wisdom. They may be forerunners of the Gnostics who in the second century will deny that Jesus was ever anything so base as a human being; he was rather a spiritual apparition who seemed to die. To the smug superiority of the “spirit” people and their rarefied “wisdom,” Paul opposes the “folly” of the bloody cross:
Do you not see that God has shown human wisdom to be foolishness? Since, in the wisdom of God, the world was unable to recognize God through its “wisdom,” God was pleased, through the foolishness of our preaching of the Gospel, to save those who believed. For … we are preaching a crucified Christ [not a “spiritual” one], to the Jews a stumbling block they cannot get past, to the gentiles foolishness.… [But] God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness [that is, Jesus crucified] is stronger than human strength. Consider, sisters and brothers, how you were called: not many of you are wise by human standards, not many influential, not many of noble birth. No, God chose the fools to shame the wise, God chose the weak to shame the strong, he chose the common and contemptible—indeed those who count for nothing—to reduce to nothing all those who count for something,8 so that no one may boast before him.
These proto-Gnostics, whose influence on the impressionable Corinthians Paul is trying to quash, had dreamed up any number of kooky variants on his teaching. Since they had entered the time of fulfillment—since they were now perfect—they could look down their noses at the imperfect: those without gnosis, or secret knowledge, those who could not speak “in tongues,” those trapped in marriage (of all things). Since they were now by their baptism free, they could do as they liked. While exalting the single life, they seem to have had no problem with incest and other sexual irregularities—on the supposition that the perfect do perfectly and the free do freely. (E. P. Sanders, one of America’s most cherished biblical scholars, once characterized the Corinthian attitude as: “Christ has come—whoopie, bend over!”) Nor were they adverse to taking one another to court, not exactly the best way to build community. “Your self-satisfaction,” writes Paul with considerable understatement, “is ill-founded.”
As he tries to sort out each of the Corinthians’ bizarre innovations by turn, nothing sends Paul further up the wall than their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the reenactment of Jesus’s last night with his disciples before his crucifixion, during which he asked them to memorialize him in future by consuming bread and wine as his body and blood. Paul, writing to the Corinthians from Ephesus, has had word of their liturgical variations from “the house of Chloe,” probably a reference to visitors to Corinth from an Ephesian house-church under Chloe’s direction.9 It seems that Chloe and her people attended a Eucharist led by a flamboyant male transvestite and a strange woman who sported a butch haircut (never worn by women in the ancient world, except for humiliated prisoners of war). Chloe and her people were not edified. To come from Ephesus to Corinth in those days would have been a little like coming from Victorian Boston to Dodge City, where you would certainly see any number of things you had never seen before. Paul, himself the straightest of straight arrows, tries not to be too exasperated, but his impatience seeps through his instruction. Look, he writes, “I congratulate you for remembering me so consistently and for maintaining the traditions exactly as I handed them on to you”—that is, for living in freedom—but, God help us, a man should dress like a man and a woman like a woman. He is actually only reminding them of the conventions of the time (and that anything too boldly theatrical can give unnecessary scandal to more conventional palates), but he ends with the true democrat’s ultimate stance: “The decision is yours. Does it really seem right to you that a woman should pray to God with her hair exposed [something never seen in any temple or shrine of the ancient world]? Doesn’t nature itself teach you that a man with the elaborate hairdo of a woman is impossible to take seriously, whereas a woman with long hair is a glorious instance [of God’s Creation]? Wasn’t it God himself who gave her this covering [for her nakedness, as Eve in Paradise]? But if anyone wants to get into an argument over all this, then I say that we don’t—nor do any of God’s churches—have such a thing as ‘custom.’ ”
But thus, paradoxically, can customs begin; and this passage from Paul, misinterpreted by centuries of earnest literalists, is the source of the convention about hats in church (always for women, never for men). The earnest misinterpreters have managed, however, to slide over the most important—and only ageless—point that Paul has to make in this whole business about dress: “In the end—and in the Lord [that is, from the Christian point of view]—woman is not otherwise than man, and man is not otherwise than woman; and though woman came from man [since Eve came from Adam’s side], so does every man come from a woman—and everything comes from God.” More radical feminists may take exception to the sexual complementarity that may seem hinted at in these words. But equality, not complementarity, is Paul’s subject: what he is doing here is taking the Genesis account of the Creation, which was the aboriginal Jewish locus classicus on the inequality of women, and turning it on its head by subtly reminding his readers that even the Messiah needed a mother. Most of us should be cheered that here, plunk in the middle of this old-hat stuff about what to wear, we have the only clarion affirmation of sexual equality in the whole of the Bible—and the first one ever to be made in any of the many literatures of our planet.
If Paul insists (the first person in history to do so) on the essential equality of the sexes, he is downright rabid on the subject of economic equality. He is not so unrealistic as to expect that all members of the community should have the same income, but he will have no part in treating anyone according to income. “In the Lord”—that is, within the community of believers—everyone is to be treated equally. But the Corinthians have taken the agape, the “love-feast” that was held in the local house-church prior to the Eucharist, and turned it into a textbook demonstration of economic inequality. The agape was meant to serve as a Christian version of the Greek symposion10 (and its Roman equivalent, the convivium): a convivial common meal for sharing food and thoughts and strengthening the bonds of community. But the Corinthians, in their positive genius for getting things back-to-front, have made the house-church agape into an opera house of economic distinctions—from elegant box seats for the well-heeled to out-of-the-way railings for the standees. “I cannot congratulate you,” says Paul between clenched teeth, “on the meetings you hold, which do more harm than good.… When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat, since each one of you brings his own supper first, and while one goes hungry, another is getting drunk. Don’t you have homes of your own for this sort of thing? Or have you such contempt for God’s
church that you can parade shamelessly in front of those who have nothing? What do you expect me to say to you? ‘Congratulations’? Not this time.”
Despite his agitation, Paul, calming himself, attempts to make the Corinthians see why their “Eucharist” is a mockery by recalling one of Jesus’s most sacred discourses, preserved with a hushed solemnity equaled by few other aspects of the emerging Jesus tradition:
For the tradition I received from the Lord and also handed on to you is that on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body, which is yours. Do this as my memorial.” In the same way, he took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the New Covenant in my blood. Do this, whenever you drink it, as my memorial.” So, whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. It is imperative that you examine your conscience before you eat the bread or drink the cup, because anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the Body is eating and drinking his own condemnation.
Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Page 12
