Introductory
Lectures on Matthew and Epistle to the Romans
[The following is the text of
lectures and notes prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina
University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada (now Vancouver Island University), for
students in Liberal Studies. The lecture was first delivered in January 1996,
but extensively revised several times after that. The last revision was in
December 2001. This text is in the public domain and may be used, in whole or
in part, by anyone, without charge and without permission, provided the source
is acknowledged. For comments, questions, corrections, and so on, please
contact Ian Johnston]
[References to the Gospel of
Matthew and the Epistle to the Romans in the following text are to The New
Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, edd.
Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (NY: Oxford University Press, 1977)]
A. Introduction
Sometime between 9 BC and 4 BC Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem,
in the Roman province of Judea. About thirty years later he began a public
ministry, moving around through the cities and towns of Palestine attracting
attention with a remarkable new public message. After a ministry of about three
years, he was arrested, tried, and crucified (c. 30 AD), a standard punishment
for lower-class political troublemakers. For the Roman authorities the
execution of a public political nuisance was routine, one in a continuing
series, especially in Palestine, and for the Jewish priestly authority (the
Sanhedrin) the crucifixion marked the end of a nasty little incident, prompted
by the appearance of yet another sectarian Jewish movement (of which there were
at the time at least two dozen).
Ever since that time, however, the followers of the movement which
arose out of Jesus’s ministry have been disputing its
significance, and these disputes and the various resolutions to them have
played an enormously important role in shaping what we call Western
Civilization. No other argument or series of arguments has had a more decisive
effect on what we have become. The history of how the teachings of this
relatively obscure person became, hundreds of years later, the basis for the
official religion of the Roman Empire through the Roman Catholic Church is, in
my view, the most fascinating narrative in the history of Western culture.
The two texts we are studying this week, the Gospel of Matthew and
the Epistle to the Romans, are two of the earliest and most important
extant written contributions to the arguments over the nature of Jesus Christ
and the meaning of his mission. It is vital to realize that both documents
originate in a climate of dispute, some 25 to 35 years after the death of
Jesus, and both seek (in different ways) to interpret the life and message of
Jesus of Nazareth, so as to put a particular interpretative construction on
what believers will derive from his preaching and, thus, how they ought to conduct
themselves as followers of Jesus Christ, that is, as Christians. These two
texts, in other words, are not disinterested documents, since they are seeking
to define what it means to be a Christian, who qualifies for inclusion in the
new religious group, and thus who is excluded. They are, in a very real sense,
more concerned with theology and doctrine than with history. And when I read
these documents together, the thing that holds my attention most immediately is
the argument going on between them, something which is all the more intriguing
because it seems that neither Matthew nor Paul has clearly worked out for
himself some of the key issues in his position.
For both documents are very ambiguous in some crucial places and
have given rise to huge disputes, providing fuel for a number of different “messages.”
Even a cursory knowledge of the history of interpretation of these texts
reveals radical ambiguities at the heart of the them.
Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, for example, has been used as key document
in establishing the necessary authority of the Church and of Church discipline
(in, for example, Augustine) and, by contrast, as a key document in stressing
the importance of freedom from such authority (in, most notably, Martin
Luther). If one had to pick a single Christian document which has been the
focus for the fiercest doctrinal disputes throughout the history of
Christianity from the beginnings right up to the present century, the Epistle
to the Romans would be an obvious candidate, and a detailed study of the
different interpretative constructions put on Romans through the ages
would provide a more comprehensive insight into the history of Church doctrine
than would a study of any other Biblical text. Even today, the disputes
continue.
What I would like to do in this lecture is to call attention to
three problems which these two documents seek to address. I don’t want to
explore complex questions of context (except as brief digressions) or go into
the even thornier problem of the reliability of the gospel and the epistle as
we have received them (for it seems clear that there may have been considerable
tampering to fit with later doctrines). Taking the documents as we have
received them, I want to explore three questions which arise out of the texts and
sketch out the range of answers to these questions which the texts provide.
The single most important initial point I would invite you to
consider as a result of this lecture—a point better illustrated by the
comparison of these two texts than by any other pair I can think of—is the
crucial importance of how the significance of particular events depends above
all on how they are interpreted rather than on any single determinate meaning
clearly emerging from the historical facts as best we can confirm them. That
point is especially the case in the years following the work of a charismatic
new political or religious leader, as his followers seek to codify the nature
of the leader’s “message.” In such a process, there is very commonly a conflict
between different factions in the group, and such a conflict will offer
differing interpretations of how the followers should now behave, how they
should further the cause.
Such a conflict can highlight a particular problem faced by a
small revolutionary group: How do its members expand their numbers without
compromising the original sense of revolution? How can they resist assimilation
(i.e., retain their sense of having something significantly different from the
culture around them) and at the same time avoid being so exclusive and strictly
obedient to a different set of ideals that they attract no new members and
simply remain a slowly diminishing fringe group? Put in terms of the debate
between Matthew and Romans, how exclusive should the Christians
be in admitting new members, how closely should they link their faith to
existing Jewish traditions, how compatible should Christianity be with
non-Jewish traditions? And so on. The survival of the small Christian
communities in Palestine and throughout the eastern Mediterranean would depend
on the answer to such questions (in other words, the answers to these
questions, although framed in terms of religious doctrine and ethical conduct,
carry an urgent political weight).
B. The Presentation of Jesus
The first point I wish to focus on (in our comparison of Matthew
and Romans) is the way the two texts emphasize different things in their
presentations of the central figure in the new religion, on Jesus Christ
himself. An appreciation of these differences will encourage us to see the
different religious and political visions in these two influential writers.
[Incidentally, I am not concerned here to argue questions of
historical chronology. The evidence seems to indicate clearly that the Epistle
to the Romans was written first, addressed to a group of Christians living
in Rome (i.e., outside of Palestine)—about 25 years after Jesus’ death. The Gospel
of Matthew seems to have been written in Palestine by a Palestinian
Jewish-Christian, about 15 years after the Epistle to the Romans,
perhaps as a response to it or to the position it advances. The considerable
gap of time between the death of Jesus and these writings might indicate a
growing sense that the second coming of Jesus was not going to occur as quickly
as originally anticipated and therefore some written documents were necessary
to clarify and preserve the new faith, especially now that those with a memory
of Jesus’s ministry were disappearing. For a more
specific chronology, see below.]
One of the first thing one notices about Matthew’s account
(especially in comparison with Romans) is that the former really
stresses Jesus’s human and social and ethnic
identity: he is born in a particular place, identified as from Nazareth, has a
family, is associated with the mission of John the Baptist, a charismatic
preacher who seems to have come from an austere Jewish sect, and is given
specific cultural label by those who come into contact with him. The extensive
genealogy with which Matthew begins seeks to fix Jesus’s
identity in a long line of human ancestors, the royal house of Israel: 14
generations from Abraham to David, 14 generations from David to the Babylonian
Captivity, 14 generations from the Babylonian captivity to Jesus Christ. We
should have no doubt, reading Matthew, that Jesus is, first and
foremost, a Jew, a member of the nations of Israel, with essential connections
to the most important aspects of the past history of the Israelites.
There is also in Matthew a much stronger emphasis than in Romans
on Jesus Christ’s human identity, his incarnation into a living, suffering
member of humanity. In this connection the ambiguous phrase “Son of Man” which
appears over thirty times in the Gospel of Matthew, most immediately
seems to stress the humanity of Jesus Christ—he is a fully realized human
being. This sense is particularly strong if we read Matthew without
reference to other Biblical texts, in which the term “The Man” has a wide range
of different meanings. The constant emphasis on the Son of Man, together with
the strong identification of Jesus in a human context, creates a continuing
stress in Matthew on the humanity of Christ as a particular, suffering
human being.
In Matthew’s account Jesus is a prophet, identified most
immediately as someone claiming the powers and the status of the long tradition
of prophets in Jewish history and in Old Testament literature. When he asks the
disciples in Chapter 16, Verse 13, about how the public perceives him, they say
that he is viewed as a new John the Baptist or Elijah or Jeremias,
a human being with a special commission to wake the Israelites up to their
spiritual duty and to perform special acts of healing. With such figures Jesus’s audience was well acquainted through their
traditions, so the most obvious interpretation of his identity for many of his
listeners is to see him as a Jewish prophet.
And Jesus’s acts most of the time in Matthew
as a prophet rather than as a teacher (at least in the Socratic sense), since
he is much more concerned to announce the truth he brings than to argue people
into a realization of his message. Jesus acknowledges that his message is
difficult, that many people will not understand it or refuse to accept it, but
he makes no detailed attempt to explain himself. His characteristic way of
ministering to the people is to simply tell them what they must do, amplifying
that with various parables or miracles which do not admit of argument. When
people ask for some sign of his identity, he repeatedly refers them rather
cryptically to the sign of Jonah (the prophet who was swallowed by a whale and
emerged to write tell the story).
The name Jesus means in Aramaic the equivalent of the Hebrew
Messiah (the Greek word for Messiah is Christ), again a vital figure in Jewish
traditions. The Messiah (meaning the anointed one), according to Old Testament
traditions, is a human figure who will liberate Israel from oppression. There
is no suggestion of divine origin for this figure, but he will be someone
specially favoured by God. In that sense, he will be selected by God, an
adopted Son of God perhaps. The Messianic figure is as important politically as
theologically, since the political liberation of Israel is an important part of
his achievements.
English translations of Matthew does not use the term
Messiah, but early in the narrative the connection is made, when the birth of
Jesus is linked to the ancient prophecies of the arrival of a Messiah: “And
you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers
of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel”
(2:6). So throughout Matthew’s account of Jesus life, the Messianic prophecies
are present, nowhere more so that in the crucifixion when he is given the
ironic Jewish title Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudorum
(Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).
However, Jesus does not in Matthew identify himself in the
traditional Messianic terms. In fact, he seems to downplay the possibilities of
a political rebellion and urges the followers to render unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar’s. And in announcing and then living through his death, he is
clearly denying the people’s common expectations of Messianic triumph over the
secular enemies. In that sense, his mission must have been a great
disappointment to those who viewed him in the light of Jewish traditions.
Jesus accepts this designation as a traditional Jewish prophet,
but he makes much larger claims for his identity. For Matthew presents
Jesus as claiming a very special authority. He is not just another prophet,
although he is that. He speaks with special divine sanction as the Son of God,
who is not only a human being bringing a divine message but a divine figure
himself, who will return to judge the community of believers and non-believers:
“For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and
then we will repay every man for what he has done” (16.27). And
repeatedly in Matthew’s account God the Father endorses his son, “This is my
beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (3:17). And Jesus, in his continuing
disputes with the Pharisees, invokes an authority which no one has ever heard
of, his eternally divine status, which gives him pre-eminence over the law and
the prophets: as Matthew says, “For he taught them as one who had authority,
and not as their scribes” (7:29) or, in Jesus’s own
words, “For the Son of man is lord of the sabbath”
(12:8).
Now, this is something very different from Jewish traditions or
from pagan religion—human prophets and a human Messiah were part of ancient
Jewish literature, and dying and rising gods were commonplace in pagan rituals.
But here we have a remarkably new combination, a figure both eternally divine
(in the past and future) and at the same time fully human at a unique moment in
history. Hence arises in Matthew a central paradox of Christianity—the
Incarnation—the dual nature of Christ, a son of God, a fully realized and
pre-existing divine essence and a historically living and suffering human
being, who suffered and died in a fully human sense and at a particular
historical moment, but who rose again and will return in glory to bring justice
to the community.
Now this is a very puzzling doctrine, and it is clear that even
the disciples have serious doubts at times. And Jesus’s
public, raised in the tradition of a historical Messiah who will save Israel, a
human being specially favoured and adopted by God (and thus perhaps a Son of
God in a figurative sense), clearly has trouble accepting the notion of a human
Messiah who is at the same time fully divine.
The emphasis in Paul’s account in Romans is significantly
different. For him the historical details of Jesus’s
particular identity as an Israelite are apparently unimportant. That Jesus
Christ lived a human life, suffered, and died Paul is prepared to stress. The
historical basis of Jesus’s ministry is important
(the fact that he really lived), but the particular details are not. The most
important element in Christ’s life for Paul is clearly the resurrection. So in
Paul the paradox is equally present. What is remarkably different is the way in
which Paul is not prepared to bolster claims to Jesus’s
humanity by a detailed reference to his life or to his teachings at particular
times and places. It’s as if Paul want us to forget about, or at least to place
on a distant back burner, any sense that Jesus’s
ethnic identify is important for an understanding of his mission or for a
belief in him.
Now, if we sense, from reading these two passages, that something
of an argument is going on about the nature of Jesus’ ministry, then this
difference in emphasis may stem from the fact that one of Matthew’s strongest
rhetorical points is that his story seems to be based on close personal
acquaintance with the events (or with those who were there). His Gospel seems
to claim historical authenticity (all the more since it’s natural to link
Matthew the disciple with Matthew the writer of the gospel, even though such an
identification is incorrect); whereas, Paul has no first-hand knowledge of
Jesus Christ. When Matthew appeals to and stresses Jesus’s
ethnic and national identity, he is establishing a strong and apparently
authentic cultural and personal link between the two of them. In any attempt to
persuade a wider public, such a claim carries some weight. Paul typically
appeals for his authority to his conversion experience: lacking a personal
acquaintance with Jesus during his ministry, historical events to which he can
appeal, he bases his claim to spiritual authority on his conversion and to his faith
in Jesus Christ, not from any specific cultural link or personal acquaintance
with him. For Paul, knowledge of Jesus Christ, an understanding of the figure
central to the new religion, is exclusively a personal spiritual acceptance, a
conversion to belief. It does not require any basis in a particular historical
identity.
C. What is Christ’s Message?
These reasons for these different presentations of Jesus become a
good deal clearer when we recognize that each of these writers is interpreting
Jesus’ ministry in a very particular way and that they are, on some key issues,
fundamentally at loggerheads with each other. Let me try to describe briefly
some of the main differences.
Matthew’s account presents Jesus as calling upon people for a radical
reformation in their spiritual lives by redefining their relationship with God
and by impressing upon them an immediate historical imperative. His main
message attacks very strongly traditional ritualistic practices, especially
those associated with the Temple and the traditional rites of sacrifice and
payment, and calls upon people to become even more sincerely committed to
living good lives based on good works, with a constant sense of the need for
righteousness, no matter what the cost. The strictness of Jesus’s message amazes (and occasionally even dismays) the
disciples.
It is a call to set aside traditional visions of the good life,
especially those based on mere adherence to Mosaic Law as the traditional
religious authorities have defined the practice. The precise terms of the
calling are not always clear, but the emphasis falls on a new commitment to a
spiritual perfection, free of the distractions of the flesh and the habitual
rules of the community (even of the family). The essence of this new commitment,
and something that would be very surprising to many of his listeners, is a new
conception of love: “But I say to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those
who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven”
(5:44); “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this
is the law and the prophets” (7:12).
A major difference between Paul and Matthew’s
interpretations of Jesus’s message is their account
of his attitude to the traditional Mosaic Law. In Matthew, there is strong
emphasis on the point that Jesus sees his mission as a fulfilment of what the
Law literally requires: “
Think not that I am come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, will heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless you righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (5.17-20)
In Matthew Jesus repeatedly appears to adopt the position
that he is not here to challenge the law but to see that it is followed
correctly, more strictly, so that it is not corrupted in the ways the Pharisees
and Sadducees have done through their centuries of interpretation and institutionalized
practice.
I’m not sure from reading Matthew of the extent to which
Jesus is preaching a break with Judaism or a radical renewal of the traditional
faith. On the one hand, Jesus claims the authority of teaching the law as it is
fully intended, but on the other there is a sense that the new messianic
community he is seeking to establish is going to involve a break with the
customary community religion:
And no one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; if it is, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved. (9:16-17).
Words like this and the extremely harsh language used to curse the
orthodox leaders of the religious community seem to suggest that Jesus’s vision is for a new messianic but distinctly Jewish
community to exist alongside the traditional community, not in co-operation with
it.
Paul’s emphasis is very different. As I say, he does little
to place Jesus in any sort of cultural context (other than a brief initial
mention of his descent from David). Rather than telling the story of
Jesus’ ministry he stresses again and again the essential requirement of the
Christian: faith in Jesus Christ. And he makes it clear early on that
this faith is something available to both Jews and Gentiles (not simply to the
Jews). Good works flow from faith, but faith comes first, and no record
of good works is proof of faith (admittedly what Paul says on this point is
sometimes ambiguous, but the sheer frequency with which he comes back to the
issue of faith as the radical centre of a Christian life indicates his
priorities).
With this emphasis Paul is trying to chart a clear course between
pagan ritual and the Mosaic Law. Any religious life based on pagan ritual
is a clear betrayal of one’s faith. That betrayal is
confirmed by the lapse into sins, like the worship of animals or homosexuality (1:24
to 1:26). There is thus no compromise possible with Greek pagan religion
and faith in Jesus Christ. Greek Christians will thus have to make a
clean break with their religious traditions. That seems clear enough in
the opening.
But the issue of the Jewish Christians is more complex. They
may have faith in Jesus Christ, but how does this faith deal with their oldest
Jewish tradition, Mosaic Law? Under that ancient tradition, a religious
life is primarily (even exclusively) a matter of good works, that is, of
actions which scrupulously follow a clearly established set of rules handed
down from God (that is, a tradition which reverses Paul’s emphasis on the
primary importance of faith). In addition, of course, the issue of the
Mosaic Law (including circumcision) raised the sometimes stormy problem of the
extent to which that Law might be binding on all Christians (including the
Gentiles or Greek and Roman Christians).
In tackling this point, Paul in effect drives something of a wedge
between the Christian community and the most important elements of traditional
Jewish religious practice. The relationship between Judaism and the Jesus sect
in Romans appears quite clear: they are distinct, and what is essential
for the former plays no necessary role in the latter. The Law has a role
to play for those who believe in it. It can help to make them aware of
their own sin (so it is not useless), but it cannot be a substitute for
faith. The Christian life, for Paul, is based on a uniquely personal
relationship between God and the individual (a relationship based on God’s gift
of Grace), and no outer deeds or ritual practices are going to work if that is
absent.
For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal. His praise is not from men but from God. (2:28 ff)
That is the reason Paul in Romans is so concerned to fend
off the Law, while at the same time to insist on the historical connections
with the Old Testament figures and with the historical fact of Christ’s life,
particularly his resurrection. Emancipation from the Law is essential if
Christianity is to thrive among the Gentiles, and drawing a firm line between
orthodox Judaism and the new Christianity is essential if Christianity is to
free itself from its nationalistic Jewish base (thus tying its fortunes to the
future of Palestine) and to avoid the risk of being assimilated into Judaism (a
religion with, at that time, many splinter groups). Paul clearly wants
Christianity to become a universal faith.
That Paul has a political motive here seems clear at times from
his determination to flout the Jewish authorities in Palestine, to take public
issue with them, so as to convince the Gentiles that Christianity is, indeed,
something very new, and not just another Jewish sect:
Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead. (11.13)
The hostility of the Jews to Paul’s message will encourage
Gentiles, and thus help to spread the gospel. Jews may be the natural
branches on the tree, but their lack of faith has led God to break them off,
leaving room to graft on new branches from the Gentiles (11.19).
Obviously Paul is treading a fine line here, risking further offending the
Jewish-Christians, but it’s a risk he’s obviously prepared to take in order to
make his case more persuasive to the Gentiles.
One way to appreciate immediately the different thrust in Paul,
the push to universalize Christianity by emancipating it from its Jewish roots
is the acronym we derive from his writings for identifying Jesus. If in Matthew,
Jesus is called Ieusus Nazarenus
Rex Iudorum (hence the acronym INRI in many
religious paintings depicting the crucifixion), in Paul’s writing Jesus is Ieusus Christos Theou Huios Soter—Jesus Christ Son
of God the Saviour (this phrase produces the acronym IXTHUS, the Greek word for
fish, hence the early adoption of the fish as a Christian symbol). This
latter identification, it is clear, involves no ethnic or racial terms linking
of Jesus to the Jewish people. By contrast, it insists upon the universal
attributes of Jesus’ identity.
The desire to de-emphasize the Jewish roots of Jesus’ ministry
explains, for example, Paul’s interpretation of Abraham. Paul argues that
Abraham was not favoured of God because of the Covenant (a historical event
linked to the political future of Israel), but rather because of his faith. His
special relationship through faith with God was essential; his identity as an
Israelite was of no particular consequence. We cannot all be Israelites, but we
can all look to Abraham as a universal (rather than as a national) symbol of
the faith which must precede all other aspects of our relationship with God. In
that sense, Abraham is the father of us all.
[Abraham] received circumcision as a sign or seal of the righteousness which he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them. (3:11)
Paul’s treatment of Abraham illustrates his approach to the Old
Testament figures. For him they are important as types, that is, a representatives of men who possess faith and therefore
important role models. They do not derive their importance from their
historical success in establishing a particular race or nation: their success
is, by contrast, evidence of their faith and thus serves to underline the
importance of the human type they represent.
However, while the traditional Jewish understanding of the
importance of ritual and law must be reinterpreted, the connections with the
Old Testament must be retained, so that people understand that the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a unique historical event with significant
implications for the future history of the world. His story is not simply
some repetitive ritual celebration similar to the various mystery cults
associated with hundreds of divinities in Greek religion. Without that basis
the characteristic historical element in the new faith (something which sets it
apart from pagan religion) will be lost.
That is the reason, Paul spends very
little time on the narrative details of Jesus’s life
and ministry and so much time in trying to sort out the relationship of the
Christian believer to the Mosaic Law. At the same time he insists upon the
reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus. His definition of what it means
to be a Christian leaves out of account the specific teachings of Jesus, upon
which Matthew spends so much time, and insists that the essence of the new
religion is faith in the historical identity of Christ as Paul delivers it: “if
you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that
God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (10:9).
The emphasis for the believer is on being reborn through a new
experience of Christ, who is no longer a Jewish Messiah but a universal prince
of peace, who transcends and, in effect, renders irrelevant or secondary, all
questions about ethnic origins, political activity, social station, traditional
religious rituals, and so forth. Unlike Aristotle, who saw no moral life
outside a particular polis and for whom a good life can be defined only by a
very specific social context in which some people are clearly better than
others, and unlike the Messianic tradition in Jewish religion, with its stress
on Mosaic Law and the role of the Messiah as a political leader and saviour of
the children of Israel, Paul stresses the universal nature of Christianity—from
a uniquely personal spiritual encounter available to all we can then enter a
community of righteousness which extends wherever there is a group of believers
(no matter what their origins). Yes, there may be a great many details
missing about how we ought to behave in particular situations (i.e., specific
ethical guidelines), but Paul’s sense here is clearly that the first priority
has to be a strongly felt, personal commitment to Jesus Christ, an absolute
faith in God’s freely given grace. If Christians have that, then they can
follow the basic rules of living in peace and harmony amongst themselves,
obeying the governing authorities (no hint of political revolt there), and
loving their neighbours, without ceaseless wrangling over doctrinal trifles
like diet, circumcision, and other complex matters arising out of the Law’s
traditions..
To drive home this message Paul places an enormous stress on sin
and death and on the imminent end of the world. Hence, the urgent call
for repentance and a renewed faith which prompts good works. Paul never tires
of reminding his readers of their imprisonment in sin, in the body, in the
degenerate realities of the physical world. This Gnostic strain, very
pronounced in Paul (and in Romans), some have attributed, in part, to
later interpolations. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that with Paul’s
text there enters into mainstream Christianity a harshness in attitude towards
certain aspects of life (especially sexuality) that is quite missing (for the most
part) from Jesus’s call. On this point, Paul is
explicit: his religious call is asking believers to become slaves, not to their
human nature, but to their spiritual faith.
In defence of Paul on this issue we might recall the circumstances
of these letters and his visits. He is, in effect, seeking to stiffen the
discipline within the small emerging Christian community in the midst of
competing religions, facing (in some places) a certain amount of hostility,
isolated from similar communities, and with no coordinating structure to keep
them going. His role is, in some sense, to provide a short, energizing
burst which will help sustain the faith. Paul no doubt realized, quite
apart from any of his personal beliefs (and we have no reason whatsoever to believe
that he was not being totally sincere), that a strict and challenging
discipline was necessary to maintain the identity of and morale within the
threatened community of Christians, if these groups were to survive and
prosper. A more relaxed, tolerant, and forgiving message might well have
encouraged the community simply to dissolve into the varied religious life of
its surroundings.
To sum up: simply put (too simply perhaps), the essence of Paul is
faith in the fact of Christ’s divinity and universal presence as a means for a
spiritual renewal. Cut away from all the centuries of interpretation and
doctrine (and perhaps editorial meddling), the text of Romans, as J. C.
O’Neill points out, delivers a straightforward message:
Paul taught that the righteousness God approves is attained by the man who lives by faith. If a man trusts God and believes his promises and accepts God’s gifts, above all the gift of his Son, he becomes righteous. This is no instantaneous affair but a character of life that is to be lived from day to day. The man who is faithful, who trusts and believes God, is enabled to live righteously despite his weaknesses, his lapses into sin, and his mistakes. He will in the end be found to be righteous, however much he has yet to purge away because of the sins he has committed. God gives men the choice. They may become righteous or may reject righteousness. It would be better if men never sinned, but they do, and God has revealed a way that sinners can become righteous. (20)
Paul is sometimes called the inventor of Christianity, but, as
Paul Johnson remarks (35), he might be more properly called the person who
rescued Christianity from the twin fates of being Hellenized (turned into one
more pagan cult) or Judaized (reabsorbed into
Judaism).
If we read (as we might) Matthew’s account as a response to
Paul’s teaching, then the reason for Matthew’s emphasis on the Jewish
identity of Jesus becomes manifest: Matthew wants to counter the
universalizing aspects of Paul’s teaching and to anchor Christianity much more
securely on the country of its origin
Jesus’s Message and History
One particularly important part of Jesus’s
message, and the one I want to focus on particularly, is the historical
dimension. In Matthew Jesus Christ insists that his message is urgent
because a historical revolution is at hand, the Kingdom of Heaven is about to
be realized on earth and that will be followed by the end of history, with a
final judgment and the coming of the Kingdom of God. His message is marked
throughout by this insistent eschatological call: the end of time is
approaching, so wake up to your spiritual duty. Paul has a similarly
urgent sense of time.
This urgent historical message gives the doctrine of love a
particularly violent edge, since what is at stake is the choice between the
wrath to come in hell fire (clearly in Matthew a well-developed doctrine) and
eternal life. Matthew’s account of Jesus’s ministry
calls upon people to save themselves by preparing for
the kingdom of heaven, which will be inaugurated with the return of Jesus as
Christ in all his glory or which is being inaugurated at the moment. This is a
historical promise which all those who accept Christ’s teaching should pray
for:
Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy Will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
The frequent repetition of this prayer has perhaps dulled our
sense of the intense plea it makes for the realization of this Messianic
community. In fact, the core of Jesus’s message,
especially in the Sermon on the Mount (Chapters 5, 6, and 7), the Spiritual
Charter of the Kingdom of Heaven (Albright and Mann), seems in Matthew
to be a cry for a preparation of the Messianic community, primarily to the
disciples and then to a wider Jewish audience.
Matthew makes clear that Jesus understands that his message will be
puzzling and will be resisted by many. Hence, he tells his disciples at times
to conceal his identity and not to reveal everything they know of what is to come.
And for this reason, Jesus typically speaks to the people about what is
happening in parables, in particular examples (similar, as some critics have
pointed out, to case-law examples). The favourite metaphors that keep cropping
up in these parables, of harvest, of fruit, and of a marriage, all point to a
consummation of time, when people will be called to account and history will
end. In the Kingdom of Heaven, which is almost here, the wheat and the tares
will grow together, but when the Kingdom of God arrives, the harvest will take
place, and the tares will be collected and burned.
He answered, “He who sows the good seed is the Son of man; the field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weap and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear. (13:38-43)
Now, this element of Jesus’s message, which has obviously and close links to the
tradition of Old Testament prophecy, is a key element in the new message. And
historically it has played an enormously important role in shaping the way
those of us who live in cultures shaped by Christianity think about time. To be
a believing Christian is to adopt a strongly linear sense of history, in which
the significance of past, present, and future is
linked to a unique historical event, the life and death of Jesus Christ, an
event which becomes the turning point of all history.
That this distinctive feature of Jesus’s
ministry is important, we can see in Matthew and Paul by the way in
which they are always concerned to link Jesus with Old Testament figures and
events. Whatever wedges Paul wants to drive between traditional Jewish practice
and the new Christian community, he is not at all willing to drop (as some
Christians were) the key historical idea that Jesus Christ comes as the
fulfillment to a long history of prophecy. The past takes on its meaning
because of the coming of Jesus Christ, just as the future is going to take
shape because of his return. In a sense, Paul and Matthew both see history, the
interpretation of the past as revealed in the Old Testament, as part of the
evidence for the faith in the future direction of history, which will (sooner
rather than later) come to an end with the Second Coming.
In Matthew’s account there is a strong sense that Jesus
Christ’s story has already been prefigured in many of the Old Testament
personalities (Adam, Noah, Abraham) or events, like the trip to Egypt or the
story of Jonah. Christ’s life and death are therefore a turning point in
history, the fulfillment of the past and the start of a new era. Thus, the
message of Jesus, as given to us by Matthew and especially by Paul, seeks, in a
way that should be familiar to us from reading the Old Testament, to transform
our basic understanding of the world from what we might call a sense in
participating in the eternal rhythms and cycles of nature (the basis for much
of pagan, especially Greek, religion) into what we might call a sense of
participating in a unique history, especially a future history.
And it may well be that a great deal of the attraction of Jesus’s message lies precisely in that historical promise,
since it announces a world that will be significantly different from the
traditional one. I suspect that nothing attracts people to Christianity more
than this call to historical thinking. We no longer have to understand
ourselves in relation to the eternal cycles of nature or present systems of
political oppression, for we are on a mission from God which will transform our
relationship to time. For those who have faith, conditions will change
fundamentally, and we will be delivered from the endless repetition of the same
hardships and follies. The attractions of such a faith for those who have no
meaningful or bearable stake in the status quo or who are longing for
some significance beyond what they already know and have participated in to me
seem obvious enough.
I think that it was Paul’s special genius to realize this point
and to insist that Christianity needed to retain that sense of a transformation
in our thinking about history (derived from the Old Testament) but also to
recognize that this sense had to be emancipated from its Jewish roots in order
to attract both Jews and Gentiles unwilling to link their religion too closely
with the Mosaic Code or with the politics of Israel (a great many Jews to whom
Paul wrote or preached did not live in Palestine). As I’ve already mentioned,
it’s as if he sensed that there were two great dangers to the new movement,
either that it would be reabsorbed into Judaism (if it remained just one more
Jewish sect) or that, if it abandoned this unique vision of history and of the
historical uniqueness of Jesus’ life, it would become just one more pagan sect
based on the story of a god who appeared, died, and will reappear.
D. To Whom is Jesus Christ Speaking?
When we read Matthew and Romans, we come across a
repeated question: Who are those to whom this message of salvation through the
new Messianic Community is addressed? We know from these two documents and from
others in the New Testament that this particular issue was of special importance.
The issue, crudely put, is as follows. Is Jesus solely concerned
with reforming the Jewish community, the Israelites? Or is his message a
universal one, aimed at all people? A key issue in this question was the
relationship of the Christian to the traditional centre of Jewish religion, the
Mosaic Law, with its more than 600 explicit instructions in everything from
rules for worship, to divorce, to dietary instructions. Was adherence to the
Law a necessary part of being a devout Christian?
Matthew, it seems, is on this point quite ambiguous. On the one hand, he
stresses Jesus’s Jewish identity and is concerned, as
I have pointed out before, to place Jesus very firmly in a Jewish context
within the Jewish state. Some have argued that Matthew is the most
traditionally Jewish of the gospels and is seeking to reclaim the Jesus sect
for Judaism. Certainly there are passages in the text which support that view,
especially Jesus’s explicit words telling the
disciples “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans,
but go rather to the lost sheep of Israel” (10:5-6) and his later words “I was
sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24).
This emphasis suggests that Jesus’s
intention is to develop from the Israelites a new Messianic Community,
alongside traditional Judaism, in preparation for the inauguration of the
Kingdom of Heaven (although even the apparently explicit statements above are
ambiguous in context, because Jesus goes against his own commission by healing
the Canaanite woman. But it’s clear that in Matthew there is less
insistence on any universal applicability of the new doctrine (although one can
find some support for it).
. . . nothing is more misleading from the standpoint of Christian history than the assumption that its Founder was engaged in the construction of a new moral code of universal applicability. . . .[T]he Great Instruction [Sermon on the Mount] is directed to the Messianic Community, first to the disciples, and then to those whom they taught. Any extended application of its provisions to a non-Christian or mixed community, however well intentioned, is a use of the material which the infant Messianic Community would have found puzzling, to say the least. (Albright and Mann)
Paul, by contrast, is seeking hard to universalize the message of
Christ. He has a special commission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles and is
particularly concerned to sort out for the community of Christians in Rome the
precise relationship between the community and Jewish traditions.
Given that Paul’s audience (in Romans and other writings)
consists primarily of Jewish Christians and Greek Christians and Roman
Christians outside Palestine, for the most part in much more sophisticated
urban centres than Jesus’s original audience, it’s
not surprising that his message seeks to reassure them about how being a
Christian does not necessarily involve any close link to Palestine or to the
Jewish authorities there (a point about which there would naturally be some
confusion and dispute within the Christian communities).
In addressing the concerns of this mixed audience, Paul treads a
fine line between encouraging those who believe in the Mosaic Law to hold onto
it and advising those who do not wish to follow the Mosaic Code that they don’t
have to do so. For Paul the Law serves the purposes of Christ by
making us conscious of sin, but the salvation offered by Jesus Christ does not
require the law. It seems clear that the purpose here is to make Christianity
available to Gentiles and to Jews who do not want to be bound by strict
adherence to traditional law, without offending those Jewish Christians who do
not want to abandon Mosaic Law entirely.
In Romans (and in other epistles) Paul’s main concern seems
to be to urge the fledgling Christian communities to accept his views (he has
become something of an arbitrator and advisor to these small Christian
communities), so that the groups do not fall apart, quarrelling all the time
about what for Paul are details of cooperative life (especially dietary rules).
He wants his listeners to derive from his words a single common spiritual
message and to adopt the rules for living together which will enable that faith
to flourish.
Postscript
Historically, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (in 70
AD, about the same time that the Gospel of Matthew was first written)
and the further dispersal of the Jewish people from Palestine soon afterwards
removed from power the central bureaucratic authority of Judaism and enormously
weakened those who would seek to keep Christianity in the Judaic tradition. At
the time of Paul’s death these events had not occurred, and it was by no means
clear that his version of Christianity would prevail. However, after the
destruction of the temple and the further scattering of the Jews
away from Israel and the consequent weakening of the Jewish influence within
the Christian community, the writings of Paul provided a vitally important
basis for continuing the apostolic missions among the Gentiles and transforming
Christianity into the universal religion it eventually became in Europe
List of Works Cited
Albright, W. F. and C. S. Mann. Matthew.
Anchor Bible Series. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages.
Johnson, Paul. A History of Christianity.
London: Penguin, 1990.
O’Neill, J. C. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
Supplementary Notes and
Observations on the Context of St. Paul’s Teachings
[The following notes are provided
as a supplement to the above lecture]
A. Notes on Saint Paul: Chronology
c. 4 BC: Birth of Jesus
c. AD 5: Paul (originally Saul) born in Tarsus (Cilicia) son
of a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, a Roman citizen. Brought
up a Pharisee, educated in Jerusalem.
14 AD: Death of Emperor Augustus, Tiberius became emperor.
c. 30 AD: Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, ordered the
crucifixion of Jesus.
c. 35 AD: Saul emerged a bitter opponent of the followers of
Jesus; assisted at the martyrdom by stoning of St. Stephen, the leader of a
colony of Greek Jews of the Diaspora who had joined the Christians (Acts 7:58).
Paul was converted on the road to Damascus to arrest some Christians and
bring them to Jerusalem for trial. Baptized and went to Arabia (Gal. 1:17).
The story of his conversion is told three times in the Acts of the Apostles
(9:1-19; 22:5-16; 26:12-18).
37 AD: Tiberius died; Caligula became emperor.
c. 39 AD: Paul returned to Damascus, had to make secret
escape from the king in a basket over city walls (Acts 9:23-5; 2 Cor. 11:32
ff).
41 AD: Caligula assassinated; Claudius became emperor.
c. 45 AD: Barnabas and Paul went to Antioch (Acts 11:25 ff) and later
to Jerusalem to take food to Christian community during a famine. He returned
to Antioch (Acts 12:25). Afterwards the Church at Antioch sent Paul and
Barnabas out on the First Missionary Journey (to Cyprus, Asia Minor, and
back to Antioch). On this journey Paul changed his name from Saul to Paul (Acts
13:9). Paul openly proclaimed his mission to the Gentiles, an action which met
strong opposition from some Christian Jewish communities, those who wanted
Christianity to remain exclusively for Jewish people.
c. 50 BC: Paul traveled to Jerusalem for the first Council of the
Church to discuss with Peter the contentious issue of the relationship between
Jews and Gentiles in the growing Christian communities. The mission to the
gentiles was, however, recognized by the Jerusalem Church, a victory for Paul.
In addition, the Law was not to be imposed on Gentile Christians (Gal. 2:6-9;
Acts 15).
c. 53 AD: Second Missionary Journey (Asia Minor, Macedonia,
Greece, Athens, Corinth), then back to Antioch (Acts 16-18).
54 AD: Death of Emperor Claudius, Nero became emperor.
c. 55 AD: Third Missionary Journey (Acts 19-20): Ephesus
(two years), Macedonia, Achaeia, Corinth (where he
probably wrote the Epistle to the Romans, to prepare for his visit
there), and Jerusalem. In Jerusalem beaten by the mob (protesting against the
conversion of the gentiles), rescued by Roman soldiers. To protect Paul the
Romans sent him to governor Felix at Caesarea, and
kept him loosely detained awaiting trial (Acts 21:27-36; Acts 22; Acts 23 ff).
First Corinthians was probably written at this time (c. 56 AD).
c. 60 AD: Paul’s trial. Paul appealed to Rome (using his
rights as a Roman citizen). Voyage to Rome, shipwrecked at Malta. In Rome
awaiting trial, Paul wrote the Captivity Epistles.
64 AD: The great fire in Rome (Nero fiddling, etc.). Christians
blamed by Nero for the fire.
c. 65 AD: Paul martyred in Rome during Neronian
persecution. By tradition Paul was beheaded on the left bank of the Tiber,
about three miles from Rome.
c. 65 AD: Composition of the Gospel According
to Mark, by an anonymous author (John Mark?), prepared as an indication of
Peter’s teaching.
66-70 AD: Revolt in Judea. Romans began forcible suppression under
Vespasian (later emperor in 69 AD).
68 AD: Nero committed suicide after being declared a public enemy
by the senate (backed by the praetorian guard)
70 AD: Jerusalem fell to the Romans under Titus (Vespasian’s
son): the Temple destroyed, the Jewish national council and high-priesthood
abolished, religious taxes diverted to imperial treasury, Judea given over to
the Roman empire (i.e., the end of the independent
Jewish state).
c. 70 AD: Gospel According to Matthew prepared (anonymous
author who complied the different stories and sayings
of Jesus). During this period the Gospel According
to Luke was also prepared, traditionally by Luke, a gentile doctor who had
become a Christian.
c. 90 AD: Gospel According to John prepared by a disciple of
John who recorded his preaching (?). The date of the writing of this gospel is
much disputed.
B. A Note on the Diaspora (Dispersion)
The term Diaspora (Dispersion) refers to the scattering of the
Jewish people throughout Asia Minor, North Africa, and Europe. It started in
the Assyrian and Babylonian deportations (722 and 597 BC) and was originally
confined to parts of Asia. Later it spread throughout the Roman Empire to
Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. By the time of the New Testament, there
were not less than a million Jews in Alexandria, in Egypt, and, although exact
figures are difficult to compute, some scholars have estimated that about 10
percent of the population of the Roman empire was
Jewish.
Until 70 AD many Jews of the Diaspora maintained close contact
with their home country, paying Temple taxes and keeping their religious
practices, observing the Law, and heeding the decisions of the religious
leaders in Jerusalem (the Pharisees and Sadducees). The destruction of the
Temple by Titus in 70 AD, the abolition of the central religious authority, and
the end of the existence of an independent Jewish state severely crippled the
ability of the Jews of the Diaspora to retain a well-developed sense of a
total, coordinated identity with a central authority in religious matters, and
this fact undoubtedly contributed enormously to the spread of Pauline
Christianity among the gentiles, since one of the major obstacles to his
missionary work, the well organized, popular, and enormously influential
politico-religious parties of the Pharisees and Sadducees, no longer existed
after 70 AD.
The term Gentile refers to non-Jewish people, largely Greeks and
Romans. However, it is important to remember that, given the dispersion of the
Jews (already very wide before Titus destroyed the Temple), many Jewish people
spoke only (or mainly) Greek or Latin and lived in a thoroughly Hellenistic or
Roman culture (e.g., at Alexandria or Rome—and had done so for generations.
Thus, it is not easy clearly to demarcate the separation between Jewish and
Greek populations in the years of Paul’s mission. Similarly, many Jews, like
Paul, were also Roman citizens, fluent in Latin and valued and thriving members
of many urban centres throughout the empire.
C. Paul’s Works
Paul’s writings generally fall into two classes: (a) the
undoubtedly authentic letters and (b) the works of the Pauline school. In the
first group belong the following texts:
First Thessalonians (c. 51 AD), Galatians (c. 54 AD), First
Corinthians (C. 56 AD), Second Corinthians (c. 56 AD), Romans (c. 57 AD),
Philippians (c. 62 AD ?), Philemon (c. 62 AD ?).
To the second group belong the following texts:
Second Thessalonians (c. 51 AD), Colossians (c. 62 AD ?) Ephesians (?), The Pastoral Letters (c. 125 AD; these
are First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus).
D. Some Observations on the Context of Paul’s Life and Writing
Jesus of Nazareth, the charismatic leader of a relatively small
and Jewish religious cult (one of a number of such sects) was executed about 30
AD, at the age of about 33. The fact that the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate,
was involved in his trial and judgment, suggests that Jesus was perceived by
some as a potential political threat in a perennially turbulent area, the Roman
province of Judea. However, other interpreters of Jesus’s
trial and execution have claimed that the crucifixion was not so much a matter
of a conflict with the Roman authorities as with the most conservative elements
in the religious establishment in Jerusalem, especially the high priestly
Sadducees.
Whatever the reason for the persecution of Jesus, after his death
some of his followers, his inner circle, continued the work of being apostles (“sent
men”) to proclaim the essential point of Jesus’s
ministry, the arrival of God’s rule on earth, manifest in the life, teachings,
and example of Jesus Christ, the historical Messiah.
These first Christians, the apostles and the people they sought to
convert, were for the most part all devout Jews, from all walks of life. There
was no attempt to break with Judaism, which already contained numerous sects,
so there was nothing particularly strange about the fact that the first
Christians were Jewish Christians and that the links between Jewish religious
practices and the new gospel teachings were very close. However, the new
Christian faith, because of its relative lack of interest in matters of
traditional ritual, was particularly attractive to many faithful Jews who did
not live in Judea, the Diaspora Jews, and who felt no particular desire to
follow the deeply rooted Jewish sense of nationhood, who wished, that is, to
loosen the very close connection between the religious life of Judaism and the
complex political issues of the independence of the Jewish state from Roman
influence and control, issues quite central to the orthodox Jewish
establishment in Jerusalem.
In this connection, it is important to remember that a great many
Jews lived outside Judea, far more, in fact, than the inhabitants of the Holy
Land, as often as not respected and valued members of trading, intellectual,
and political communities, frequently wielding through their scholarship,
business skill, and religious devotion a major influence throughout the empire
(one million in Alexandria; in total about 10 percent of the population of the
Empire). For many in this community, the attractions of a Jewish religious sect
less passionately nationalistic about the Promised Land than the religion which
existed in Jerusalem were clear enough.
The result was that the latent tensions between some of the
orthodox Jewish religious practices and beliefs and the desires of some Jewish
Christians for a relaxation of the strict rules about circumcision, diet, and
the Law became explicit. In a sense, the struggle was over control of the new
sect: Who was to determine the limits of proper religious conduct? How closely
was Christianity to be wedded to traditional Judaism? Some Christians were very
close to Jewish orthodoxy and wished to maintain the traditional practices;
others wished a creed less bound to Mosaic law. This
tension became particularly important in the crucial question of whether or not
the apostolic duties included carrying the message of Jesus to the Gentiles.
And if so, did the Gentiles have to undergo formal conversion to Judaism before
being considered Christians? Was Jesus of Nazareth to be only for orthodox Jews
or was he a saviour of the entire world?
Central to these early debates was Saul, a Pharisee (the most
militantly observant of the Mosaic Law, the most passionately concerned to see
God’s will done, and ardent defenders of Jewish
political independence), a Jew of the Diaspora, from Tarsus, in Cilicia, and a
Roman citizen. He had studied Judaism diligently in Jerusalem and began his
career as a prosecutor of the young Jewish radical sect, acting on behalf of
the Temple authorities who opposed the mission to the gentiles and to the Greek
Jews of the Diaspora (see note on St. Stephen).
One of the most famous stories in the New Testament is the account
of Saul’s conversion (in Acts of the Apostles three times: 9:1-19; 22:5-16;
26:12-18). And from this point on Saul, or as he soon renamed himself, Paul,
became the most tireless, dominating, and passionate champion of a very
particular vision of the new religious sect, criss-crossing the Mediterranean
and Asia Minor in a constant attempt to encourage the missionary work, resolve
disputes, and, most important of all, insist upon his particular vision of how
the various doctrinal differences must be resolved, of what the meaning of
Jesus Christ’s ministry really was for true Christians. There are relatively
few examples in our history of a single person exercising so tirelessly such a
decisive influence in the formative stages of a revolutionary change.
Inevitably, proselytizing doctrines of salvation through Christ
without proper regard for traditional law and ritual brought Paul into direct
and repeated conflict with the more orthodox religious leaders in Jerusalem,
who were understandably far less keen to set aside traditional practices and
the Law and who had no desire to lose the historical particularism
of the past and present (such a vitally important feature of Old Testament
faith).
From the first days of the growing Christian movement, quarrels
between the two tendencies had existed. Paul became the central figure in the
often fierce disputes on this issue. Sometime around 50 BC, for example, Paul
traveled to Jerusalem to argue his position with Peter and other Jewish
Christian leaders. The result was a victory in principle for Paul (the fact
that Jews outside Palestine were often wealthy enough to send significant
financial contributions to Jewish Christians in Palestine was, no doubt, an
important factor in these arguments). This first council of the church endorsed
the mission to the gentiles and removed adherence to the Law as a requirement for
Gentile converts. However, as numerous passages in the Acts of the Apostles
make clear, the quarrels did not therefore disappear, and hostility to Paul’s
mission intensified with its very success.
Indeed, it seems clear that for all his tireless energy, Paul was
in some vital respects not succeeding, for those wishing to curtail his vision
of what the new religion should be grew in power and in the mid 50’s AD
summoned him to Jerusalem where he was treated so roughly that he appealed to
the Roman authorities for protection. They took him into custody and began
arrangements for his trial. Paul appealed to Rome, eventually arrived there,
and was finally executed during the Neronian
persecution.
If someone had judged Paul’s efforts at the time of his death, one
might very well have concluded that his mission had failed. The central powers
in the Jerusalem Church were increasingly hostile to those urging a resolution
of the growing differences between the Christian community and traditional
Jewish religion by relaxing the requirements of Judaic religious traditions,
and there was every indication that they might succeed in establishing their
orthodoxy on the movement, against the tireless efforts of the newly martyred
Paul.
But then one of those great accidents of history occurred, the
effects of which no one could have foreseen, just as no one can tell what might
have happened if a very particular decision had not been made. In 70 AD the
Roman Emperor Vespasian, whose son was leading the Roman legions in Judea in an
attempt to put down the constant eruptions of Jewish nationalism, decided to
have done once and for all with the troublesome Jewish religious nationalists,
a constant thorn in the imperial flesh. So Titus destroyed the Temple, outlawed
Temple worship, diverted the religious taxes to the imperial treasury, placed
Judea even more firmly under Roman control, and most important of all from the
point of view of the development of Christian history, in the process
demolished the organized structure of orthodox Jewish religion, the Sadducees
and Pharisees. Thus, two of the most powerful and best organized and most
popular opponents of Paul’s vision of the new religion disappeared overnight
and forever.
In the confused climate which followed, the faithful Christians
discovered in Paul and in the work of his followers the basis for a new
doctrine, according to which they could discuss and sometimes resolve the many
and increasingly complex doctrinal issues which inevitably arose from the
considerable ambiguity and confusion concerning the precise meaning of Christ’s
ministry. Paul’s vision of Christ did not rest on a particular historical
vision for the Jews, and so it was not threatened by the destruction of the
historical reality of a Jewish state—in fact, that event made his vision all
the more persuasive. Thus, Paul’s pioneering work, which at the time of his
death appeared to have been largely in vain, later became the solidest basis
for the rapidly growing new faith, now quite divorced from Judaism—and in the
centuries which followed his death, as the Christians had to grapple with all
the competing visions of Gnosticism, Donatism, free
will, predestination, reformation, anti-Semitism, and a host of other issues
right up to the present day, the letters of Paul have remained key places on
which various adherents have taken their stand and from which Christians,
particularly the most passionately revolutionary believers, have drawn
inspiration. This is a key point for which there is obviously no time now. But
it is significant that whenever one enters a fiercely contested doctrinal
dispute in the history of Christianity, whether in the works of heretics like Marcion, saints like Augustine, or revolutionary figures
like Luther, at the very centre of the arguments, as likely as not, one finds
the dominating figure of Saint Paul.
It is clear that one of the great assets of Christianity following
Paul has always been its ability to draw on apparently contradictory traditions
in order to forge a coherent body of doctrine which is not only intellectually
challenging but also emotionally satisfying and accessible to all, to combine,
that is, the passionate and often simple faith of the radical Jewish sects with
the philosophical sophistication of the Greeks, with no limiting vision of
exclusive membership. Moreover, Christianity for centuries displayed an
astonishing energy in and talent for organization. The very complexity of Paul’s
character, origins, and life is as apt a symbol as any of this phenomenon: a
Jew well versed in the passionate faith of a traditional religion and
fearlessly candid about his beliefs, an international traveler who could
converse easily in different languages with people from all walks of life and
live happily in any Christian community, an intellectual who had a ready
command of Greek and Latin, and a Roman citizen with a very strong sense of the
importance of attending to details, communicating with all believers, and
settling disputes in the most efficacious ways to promote international cooperation.
These qualities, as much as anything, have earned him the title Nietzsche gave
him: “the first Christian.”
If these are some of the great assets of Christianity, there have
been darker issues, too, particularly the treatment of women, pagans, heretics,
and, above all, the Jewish people. While it is clearly not fair to lay the
blame for this wretched tradition all at Paul’s feet, there is equally no doubt
that many of the most horrible desires to persecute, to promote anti-feminism
and anti-Semitism, and to apply what later came to be called Political
Augustinianism, the forceful dealing with many minorities as cruelly as the
Church deemed necessary, such desires have often found in Paul a sympathetic
and influential justification for an extraordinarily narrow, passionate, and
destructive religious impulse, in which an obsession with the sins of the
physical world or the alleged evils of the Jewish people have encouraged men to
persecute and to slaughter others in the name of the Lord.
Paul’s theological legacy has been as ambiguous as it has been
powerful. There is, for example, a central argument about how one should
interpret his message, about where the chief emphasis should fall. In the last
century, the central achievement of Paul was almost universally seen as the de-Judaizing of Christianity, a victory against the Christian
faction led by Peter, who wanted to turn the gospel into new law. Thus, in a
sense, Paul was seen as the moving spirit behind the Christian spirit for
reform and Protestantism, just as Peter was seen as the leading spirit behind
Roman Catholicism (which traces its origin to Peter as the first Pope)
Recent scholars have changed the emphasis. Many now maintain that
the central message of Paul, and especially of the Epistle to the Romans,
is contextual. It is to be found in his discussions of the appropriate
relationship between Jews and Gentiles and not in the notion of justification
or predestination. Many interpreters thus now maintain that Paul is far less
important theologically than historically. They see the climax of Romans,
for example, in the Chapters 10 and 11, his reflections on the relation between
church and synagogue, the church and the Jewish people, not “Christianity and “Judaism”
or “Gospel” and “Law” (Pelikan).
Estimates of Paul’s character have varied greatly, no more so than
in our own century. For some people, like Bernard Shaw, Paul was extremely
pernicious, satisfying his own inner needs by corrupting the healthy and vital
ministry of Jesus into something much more sinister and historically damaging:
He is more Jewish than the Jews, more Roman than the Romans, proud both ways, full of startling confessions and self-revelations . . . but always hopelessly in the toils of Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power over Jesus. . . . It was by introducing this bondage and terror of his into the Christian doctrine that he adapted it to the Church and State systems which Jesus transcended, and made it practicable by destroying the specifically Jesuist side of it. He would have been quite in his place in any modern Protestant State; and he, not Jesus, is the true head and founder of our Reformed Church, as Peter is of the Roman Church. The followers of Paul and Peter made Christendom, whilst the Nazarenes were wiped out. (“The Monstrous Imposition Upon Jesus, 1913, From “Preface on the Prospects of Christianity, to Androcles and the Lion).
To others, by contrast, Paul has always remained the greatest of
all the Christian fathers, in whose debt the Western tradition forever stands:
What missionary is there, what preacher, what man entrusted with the cure of soul, who can be compared with him, whether in the greatness of the task which he accomplished, or in the holy energy with which he carried it out? He worked with the most living of all messages, and kindled a fire; he cared for his people like a father and strove for the souls of others with all the forces of his own; at the same time he discharged the duties of the teacher, the schoolmaster, the organiser. When he sealed his work by his death, the Roman empire from Antioch as far as Rome, nay, as far as Spain, was planted with Christian communities. . . . They had little “illumination,” but they had acquired the faith in the living God and in a life eternal; they knew that the value of the human soul is infinite, and that its value is determined by relation to the invisible; they led a life of purity and brotherly fellowship, or at least strove after such a life. Bound together into a new people in Jesus Christ, their head, they were filled with the high consciousness that Jews and Greeks, Greeks and barbarians, would through them become one, and that the last and highest stage in the history of humanity had then been reached. (Adolf Von Harnack, “The Founder of Christian Civilization,” 1900).