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

by Karen Armstrong

The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul’s Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never really interested him in the first place. Far more important to Paul was Jesus’s death and resurrection, the cosmic events that had transformed history and changed the fate of all peoples, regardless of their beliefs or ethnicity. If they imitated Jesus’s kenosis in their daily behavior, he promised his disciples, they would experience a spiritual resurrection that brought with it a new freedom.5 The Messiah, he told the Galatians, had given “himself for our sins, to rescue us out of this present wicked age as our God and Father willed.”6

Paul the Pharisee was also a visionary, but his Damascus apocalupsis differed from the traditional eschatology in two important respects. First, Paul was convinced that in the death of Jesus, God had already intervened decisively in history and that the general resurrection had begun when God had raised Jesus from the tomb. Second, Paul believed that God’s final deliverance would include the whole of humanity, not Israel alone, so that the ancient promise to Abraham that in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed would be fulfilled.

In his letters, he was not writing for Everyman and never intended to make a general ruling applicable to everybody, but was always addressing a specific problem in a particular congregation.