St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons)

by Karen Armstrong

One of the most terrible things about crucifixion was that the victim was denied a decent burial, a disgrace that was insupportable in the ancient world in a way that is difficult for modern people to appreciate. The victim was usually left alive to be torn apart by carrion crows.

At Qumran, beside the Dead Sea, Jewish sectarians were so disgusted with this corruption of their most sacred institutions that they had withdrawn from mainstream society, convinced that God would soon destroy the temple and replace it with a purified shrine not made by human hands. So Jesus was not the only person to regard the temple as a “den of thieves,” and his violent demonstration, which probably cost him his life, would have been understood by the authorities as a threat to the political order.

Nazareth was only a few miles from the town of Sepphoris, which the Roman legions had razed to the ground during the uprisings after Herod’s death.

In Israel, ritual immersion had long signified not only a moral purification but also a social commitment to justice. “Your hands are covered with blood,” the prophet Isaiah had told the ruling class of Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE.

The Spirit would be crucial to this early movement; it was not a separate divine being, of course, but a term used by Jews to denote the presence and power of God in human life.

It is almost impossible to construct an accurate picture of the historical Jesus. Paul, writing twenty years after Jesus’s death, is the earliest extant Christian writer, but he tells us next to nothing about Jesus’s earthly life.

In Q, therefore, we have a source that may bring us closer to what Jesus told the troubled people of Galilee.

At the heart of this proto-gospel is the Kingdom of God.20 This was not a fiery apocalypse descending from on high but essentially a revolution in community relations.

Unlike the state of affairs in Herodian Galilee, the benefits of God’s Kingdom were not confined to a privileged elite, because the Kingdom was open to everybody, especially the “destitute” and the “beggar” (ptochos) whom the current regime had failed.22

There was nothing novel in Jesus’s teaching. The ancient laws of Israel had urged exactly this kind of self-help and mutual aid.

All the great spiritual traditions have insisted that what holds us back from enlightenment is selfishness and egotism; they have also said that a practical concern for everybody (not simply those who belong to your own class or those you find congenial) was the test of true spirituality.

One of the first things I discovered was that Paul did not write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. Only seven of them are judged by scholars to be authentic: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans.

The rest—Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, known as the Deutero-Pauline letters—were written in his name after his death,

These posthumous epistles tried to rein Paul in and make his radical teachings more acceptable to the Greco-Roman world. It was these later writers who insisted that women be subservient to their husbands and that slaves must obey their masters.

like Jesus, Paul was a lifelong opponent of the structural injustice of the Roman Empire.

Today Paul would probably have been a fierce critic of the global market we have created in which there is such a huge imbalance of wealth and power.

Like Jesus, he would always insist that in the Kingdom of God, everybody must be allowed to eat at the same table.

In this book, therefore, I rely mainly on Paul’s seven authentic letters.

I have also avoided calling the early communities of the Jesus movement “churches,” because this term inevitably evokes imagery of spires, pews, hymnbooks, and global hierarchical organizations that simply did not exist in Paul’s day. Instead, I prefer to use the Greek ekklesia (later translated “church”), which, like “synagogue” refers to an assembly of people, a community or congregation.

Paul was indeed a mystic; as far as we know he was the first Jewish mystic to record his experiences. Early Jewish mysticism was not a peaceful, yogic activity; a Jewish visionary experienced an ascent through the heavens until he reached God’s throne, bringing back terrifying news about God’s imminent judgment of the world.

They point out that Paul is hesitant, puzzled, and ambiguous about his ascent to the third heaven, but in his letter to the Galatians, he writes quite straightforwardly about his Damascus encounter with Jesus, which seems to have been quite different.

Paul believed that he had been in thrall to what he called “sin.” He would always adamantly deny that the law was identical to sin; no, he insisted, the Torah was “a good thing” but, despite his punctilious observance of the commandments, he had remained “a prisoner under the law of sin which controls my conduct.”

He was, therefore, “a slave to sin,” because he had found it impossible to do what he knew, in his heart, to be right.

Paul may have known that John the Baptist had warned his Jewish hearers not to rely on their physical descent from Abraham,25 and that Jesus had predicted that when the Kingdom was established, gentiles would come from afar to eat at the same table as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Antipas eventually fell from favor in Rome and was exiled to Lugdunum (now Lyons) in the province of Gaul.

Agrippa openly wept, hesitating and stumbling over Moses’s insistence that this king “be one from among your brothers; you are not to give yourself a foreign king who is no brother of yours.”52 How could he, Agrippa, whose family hailed from Idumea, presume to be the king of Israel? “Do not fear,” the crowds shouted, “you are our brother!”

James who had shifted the goal posts and betrayed the baptismal affirmation: “No more Jew or Greek!”76

Paul went on to argue that the Torah had not been revealed for all time but had been only a temporary arrangement.

The German scholar Dieter Georgi, however, has argued that Paul was not simply speaking of the Torah in this letter but was referring to law in general. In the diaspora, the universalizing outlook of some Hellenized Jews had led them, like some of the Greek philosophers, to regard the ancestral laws of various peoples as different reflections of the will of God. So they maintained that Israel was not alone in possessing God’s law; each nation had developed its own version of the eternal law that exists in the mind of God.

The author of the New Testament letter attributed to James, Jesus’s brother, gives us a glimpse of what could happen when a community attracted the attention of a rich patron. He imagines a rich man and a poor man arriving at the Lord’s Supper at the same time. The well-dressed man is escorted immediately to a prime seat while the poor man is told to “stand over there, or sit on the floor by my footstool.” The author is appalled: Had not God chosen the poor to possess the Kingdom? Yet here the poor were relegated to the margins, while their rich patrons and oppressors were held in honor.

His converts were no longer enmeshed in a self-indulgent quest for personal fulfillment but were becoming ever more aware that they formed a global community. The collection would demonstrate their commitment to working side by side, as equals, with “the poor” of Jerusalem for the coming of the Kingdom.87

John Dominic Crossan has suggested that the disciples may never have known what really happened to Jesus after his arrest and their flight to safety in Galilee.

It is most unlikely that a special nighttime meeting of the Sanhedrin would have been convened during a major festival to decide the fate of an obscure prophet from Nazareth, as the gospels claimed. Nor is it likely that Pilate, who was eventually recalled to Rome because of his reckless cruelty, would have made such valiant efforts to save him.

“I doubt very much if Jewish police and Roman soldiery needed to go too far up the chain of command in handling a Galilean peasant like Jesus,” Crossan concludes. “It is hard for us, I repeat, to bring our imagination down low enough to see the casual brutality with which he was probably taken and executed.”103

The fact that there are such variant views of his death indicate that once he was taken into Roman custody, he simply vanished, dispatched like Jesus with “casual brutality.”

There is no more anguished discussion about the admission of gentiles into the assembly, and instead of the focus on an individual ekklesia, as in Paul’s authentic letters, we find an emphasis on the movement as a whole.

Because of Paul’s disappearance, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Parousia was not going to come as quickly as everybody had thought. Where Paul had urged his disciples to hold aloof from the pagan world because “the world as we know it is passing away,” it was now becoming apparent that Jesus’s followers faced the prospect of a long-term period of coexistence with mainstream society.

They both use Paul’s image of the body of Christ—but with one important difference. Paul had subverted imperial theology, which had seen Caesar as the head of the body politick. Instead, he had developed a more pluralistic ideal of an interdependent community, in which the “inferior” parts of the body received greater honor than the head.

When tackling the problems raised by the Corinthian “spirituals,” Paul had been adamant that the Kingdom had not yet come. But these authors insisted that Christ’s followers were already living the redeemed life.

Paul’s utopian egalitarianism had been replaced by a more hierarchical vision, in which wives must obey their husbands, children their fathers, and slaves must “give entire obedience to your earthly masters.”

The baptismal cry—“Neither male nor female”—has been subsumed into the hierarchical body of Christ:

He had made very little impression on the second-century theologians known as the Apostolic Fathers. Ignatius of Antioch refers to him only six times and it is clear that his understanding is at best superficial; Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, admits that neither he nor anybody else could understand the wisdom of the blessed and glorious Paul.

The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr never mentions Paul, and Theophilus, second bishop of Antioch, refers to Paul’s remarks in Romans about obedience to the state but never mentions him by name.

Ironically, the early Christian thinkers who put Paul on the map would later be condemned for heresy. Marcion, a well-educated, wealthy man who became a shipbuilder in Sinope, an important port on the Black Sea, believed that Paul had been the only apostle who had been true to Jesus’s teachings. His reform movement spread so rapidly ...

But Marcion did understand Paul’s egalitarianism and his concern for the poor and disenfranchised. His was the first church to follow Paul in promoting the ministry of women; in his communities, women were permitted to heal and teach and were ordained as bishops and presbyters; he also shared Paul’s understanding of the link between freedom and salvation.

They use many words and expressions that are entirely absent from Paul’s authentic letters. They never mention the Parousia, nor do they speak of living “in Christ”; for them the Greek pistis does not mean “loyalty” but “the Christian faith”;14 and they never call Jesus “son of God.” They are called the “pastoral” letters because they give instructions to Christian leaders, who were by this time organized into a hierarchy that we do not find in Paul’s letters, consisting of bishops, presbyters, and deacons.

There are signs of an anti-Marcion polemic in the Pastorals.15 They make Paul urge Timothy to “turn a deaf ear to empty and irreligious chatter, and the antitheses which some falsely call gnosis,”16 clearly a slighting reference to Marcion’s famous treatise Antitheses. The same letter condemns those who “forbid marriage, and insist on abstinence from foods which God created to be enjoyed with thanksgiving by believers.”17 They clearly disapproved of Marcion’s women in ministry;

Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, based on a reading of Paul in a Latin translation, was quite alien to Paul’s thought, as was Luther’s signature dogma of justification by faith.

His passionate identification with the poor is unheeded by those Christians who preach the Prosperity Gospel.

Above all, we need to take seriously Paul’s insight that no virtue was valid unless it was imbued with a love that was not a luxurious emotion in the heart but must be expressed daily and practically in self-emptying concern for others.