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

by Karen Armstrong

Paul had been doing his best to hasten the coming of the Messiah; that was the “good” that he was trying to do. But in an overwhelming moment of truth, he realized that Jesus’s followers were absolutely right and that his persecution of their community had actually impeded the arrival of the Messianic Age.

By showing him the tortured and polluted body of Jesus, standing in glory at his right hand, God had indeed delivered Paul from this deadly conundrum, and Paul would spend the rest of his life working out the implications of an insight that was at once devastating—because it snatched Paul away from everything that had hitherto given meaning to his life—but also profoundly liberating.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke calls it a “vision” (orama), an “ecstasy” (ekstasis), or an “apparition” (optasia), but when he described the encounters of Jesus’s disciples with the risen Christ in his gospel, he did not use any of these words. These earlier sightings, Luke believed, had been objective, physical events. Jesus had walked, talked, and eaten with them just as he did before the crucifixion. Paul’s “vision” experience bore no resemblance to this.

In short, Luke did not regard Paul as a witness to the resurrection in the same way as the Twelve. But for Paul, the most important thing about his experience was that he actually did see the Lord and that Jesus appeared to him in exactly the same way as he had appeared to the Twelve.38

For Paul, an apostle was someone who had seen the risen Christ. “Am I not an apostle?” he would demand. “Have I not seen the Lord?”39

In Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus appeared to his disciples for a limited period of forty days, after which his body ascended to Heaven. So Luke believed that Paul’s vision, which happened years after the ascension, was essentially distinct from the Easter visions of the Twelve.42 But Luke was writing decades after the Damascus experience. When Paul was dictating his letters in the 50s, the stories of Jesus’s physical meetings with the Twelve had not yet become part of the tradition. Paul knew nothing about the forty-day period and had never heard of Jesus’s ascension as a separate occurrence, since in these first years, the resurrection and ascension formed a single event: God had raised Jesus’s body out of the tomb and conveyed it immediately to the heavenly world. Writing in the late 60s, Mark, the first evangelist, still saw the resurrection that way.

After the prophet Ezekiel had been deported to Babylon in 597, he had a vision of Yahweh that made an indelible impression on the Jewish imagination. He had seen the God of Israel, leaving the Holy Land and traveling to join the exiles in a war chariot drawn by four strange beasts. High above their heads, Ezekiel saw something that defied normal categorization. It “looked like a sapphire, it was shaped like a throne and high up on this throne was a being that looked like a man.” This humanlike figure was surrounded by a nimbus of fire and light that “looked like the glory [kavod] of Yahweh.”49

This cluster of images helped Paul and the Twelve to understand the Easter event; it also explains how their perception of what had happened to Jesus was so widely and rapidly accepted by so many Jews at a very early stage in the Jesus movement.

Instead of calling his encounter with Jesus in Damascus a vision, Paul experienced it as an apocalupsis, a “revelation.”53 Like the Latin revelatio, the Greek apocalupsis meant “unveiling.” A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before. At Damascus, it seemed to Paul as though scales had been removed from his eyes and he had an entirely new insight into the nature of God.

But when Paul saw that God had embraced Jesus’s filthy, degraded body and raised it to the highest place in Heaven, he realized that in fact God had an entirely different set of values. In honoring Jesus in this way, God had signaled a change in the way he approached humanity.

When Paul saw the ritually defiled body of Jesus at God’s right hand, he understood exactly why he had received this mission. He had chosen to live in the Holy Land because the gentile world was unclean. Jews tended to regard the non-Jewish nations as impure and morally inferior. But in raising Jesus, God had shown that he did not judge by these earthly standards and that he stood by people who were despised and denigrated by the rules and laws of this world.

Immediately after his Damascus vision, he explained: “Without consulting a single person, without going up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before me, I went off to Arabia.”1 In this letter, Paul was anxious to emphasize his independence of the Twelve and the Jerusalem community. He always insisted that he had been appointed to his mission by Christ himself and had no need of endorsement by the Jerusalem leaders.

But why Arabia rather than the cities of Phoenicia or Palmyra? There were good practical reasons for this choice.

Artisans were often treated with contempt, which, given Paul’s relatively privileged upbringing, must have been especially hard. But by deliberately abandoning this lifestyle and living in solidarity with common laborers, Paul was practicing a daily kenosis or “self-emptying,” similar to Jesus’s when he “emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave.”13

Henceforth Paul would associate Hagar with the Torah, her status as a slave symbolizing the bondage of the Mosaic Law from which, he believed, Christ had liberated him.18

When he looked back on his life as a Pharisaic vigilante, 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.”19 He was, therefore, “a slave to sin,” because he had found it impossible to do what he knew, in his heart, to be right.

For Paul sin was a demonic power before which we were virtually helpless. Today we might link his concept of “sin” with the instinctual reptilian drives that neurologists have located in the deepest part of our b...

But if Hagar represented his former self, her husband, Abraham, symbolized the way forward. According to Jewish tradition, Abraham had once traveled along the spice route, making a ritualized circuit of the land that God had promised his descendants.21 Now as he traveled in Arabia, Paul found himself walking in Abraham’s footsteps. Long before the Torah had been revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, God had declared Abraham to be a just man because of his trust (pistis) in God.22 Before Abraham had been circumcised, God had promised that all the nations of the world would find blessing in him.23 As he thought about his mission to the gentile world, Paul would naturally have seen Abraham as a pivotal figure. Abraham had not been born a Jew, yet he became the ancestor of the Jewish people and so he was in some sense both Jew and gentile.

As the only intellectual in the movement, he would have been able to express his ideas forcefully and may have exerted a considerable influence on Peter, who would come to accept some of his views.29

Perhaps this was another sign that the Kingdom was at hand, for the prophets had predicted that in the Last Days, gentile peoples from all over the world would finally acknowledge the God of Israel.

Luke tells us that Antioch was the place where the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.”37 It is possible that during the riots that broke out after Caligula’s death, the imperial officials in Antioch began to call those Jews who venerated the Messiah crucified by Pilate Christianoi, in order to distinguish them from the Herodianoi, the Jews who believed that Herod Agrippa, the new pro-Roman Jewish king in Judea, would restore the fortunes of Israel.

In Antioch, if not in Jerusalem, they were both regarded as full apostles on a par with the Twelve—Barnabas because he had been involved in the movement from the very beginning and may even have known Jesus, and Paul because of the Damascus commission.40

In this experimental community of Jews and gentiles, the baptismal cry that greeted each new member as he emerged from the water had a special significance: “No more Jew or Greek, slave or freeman, male or female!”41

But while the horizons of the Antioch community were broadening, the Jerusalem congregation, governed by the Twelve, was increasingly preoccupied with events in the Land of Israel, where another Messiah had appeared.51

But to the followers of Jesus, Agrippa was a false Messiah, and Agrippa launched an attack on their leaders. First he beheaded James, the brother of John, who seems in the very early days to have been second in command to Peter.54 Then, Luke says, when Agrippa saw that the Jerusalem elite approved of James’s execution, he had Peter arrested.55 Agrippa seemed anxious to gauge Jewish reactions, his chief concern being to retain the loyalty of the priestly aristocracy that had long seen Jesus and his movement as an irritant.56 But Peter, Luke says, was miraculously delivered from prison and fled the city.57 He would reappear in Jerusalem later but could no longer govern the community there, and after this incident, we hear no more of the Twelve, who may also have been forced into exile.

For years now, Paul had lived and worked with gentiles and was adamant that the transformative experience of living “in Christ” had nothing to do with the ritual laws of the Torah. He would never reject the Torah; he still saw the ethical commandments as a valuable moral guide for humanity. But he believed that the Messiah’s death and resurrection had changed everything and that the Torah had been superseded.

Luke tells us that Paul and Barnabas had heated discussions with these Judean visitors, and eventually the Antioch leaders commissioned them to lead a delegation to Jerusalem to seek the Pillars’ advice. They arrived in the city late in 48 or early in 49 CE.64 We have two accounts of this meeting. Luke, who may have misunderstood some of the issues, makes it sound as if the Antiochenes were seeking the apostles’ approval. But Paul, our only eyewitness, insists in his letter to the Galatians that this was a meeting between equals, a joint struggle to find a reasonable solution to a problem that could divide the movement.

Titus’s presence would bring matters to a head, and, as he expected, the “intruders” seem to have demanded that Titus be circumcised on the spot. But so compelling was Paul’s argument and so authentic was Titus’s spirituality that the Pillars ruled against his forcible circumcision and, Paul insists emphatically, they “did not impose anything further on me.” On the contrary: “They saw that I had been entrusted to take the gospel to the gentiles as surely as Peter had been entrusted to take it to the Jews; for the same God who was at work in Peter’s mission to the Jews was also at work in mine to the gentiles.”68 Paul, Barnabas, and the Pillars all shook hands, formally sealing an agreement that had two clauses. First was the acceptance of both Peter’s mission to the Jews and Paul’s to the gentiles as equally valid—and “nothing further” was demanded in the way of circumcision or ritual observance.69 The second clause asked that the diaspora communities “should keep in mind the poor,” which, Paul says, was “the very thing that I have always made it my business to do.”

Ever since the time of the Maccabees, Jewish groups that believed that they were the true Israelites—the hidden, oppressed, and persecuted remnant of the End Time—had called themselves “the poor” (evionim in Hebrew).72 The Qumran sectarians and the Jesus community in Jerusalem both styled themselves in this way. The word “poor,” therefore, was synonymous with “righteous” or “just”; and James the Zaddik, praying constantly for the sinners of Israel, epitomized the deeply Jewish piety of the evionim who lived in the heart of the Holy City.

In the presence of the entire community, Paul angrily denounced Peter’s defection. In admitting gentiles to the Lord’s Supper, he, Paul, was not doing anything new, he protested. It was “the truth of the gospel” and this had been affirmed recently in Jerusalem. It had been the essence of Jesus’s message that nobody be excluded from the messianic banquet. It was James who had shifted the goal posts and betrayed the baptismal affirmation: “No more Jew or Greek!”76

Yes, the renewal of Israel to which James was committed was important, but James had forgotten God’s other charge: “It is not enough for you to restore the cities of Jacob and bring back the survivors of Israel; I will make you the light of the nations so that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth.”79

Bruised and saddened, feeling perhaps that his mission was in ruins, Paul broke with Barnabas, and together with Silas, one of the prophets in the Antioch community, he set out on a mission to “the ends of the earth.” He was now convinced that he alone was true to the gospel, but his Jewish colleagues may understandably have felt betrayed, because he seemed to be turning his back on the agreement made so affirmatively in Jerusalem.

We have no idea how Paul instructed his pagan audiences. In his letters, he simply addressed the issues of a particular community, so we have only tantalizing glimpses of his oral preaching. But the epistles suggest that his audience did not always fully understand his message.

Paul was now speaking to people with entirely different cultural presuppositions and expectations, yet he was nevertheless brilliantly able to adapt the core teachings of the gospel to the traditions and preoccupations of his listeners, and, as he did so, the figure of Jesus gradually altered, taking on a new dimension in each region.

The more deeply he entered the gentile world, the more Paul’s Christos parted company with the historical Jesus, which had never real...

Paul had experienced his Damascus vision as a liberation from the bondage of the destructive and divisive power of “sin.” And freedom seems to have been the theme of his message to the Galatians, who in one sense could not have been more different from the Galilean Jews who had listened to Jesus’s teaching.

What on earth could these savage Celts have in common with Jesus and his Jewish followers? Yet Paul soon realized that like the Judeans and Galileans, the Galatians had been conquered by Rome relatively recently and were still struggling with imperial rule.

Paul’s vision of Christ was rooted in the Jewish apocalyptic tradition that had developed in Israel after the Maccabean wars.

Most important, they enabled these visionaries to cultivate a conviction that one day they would be free as they meditated intensely on the destruction of their oppressive rulers and the deliverance of Israel.

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.

Most striking was his use of euangelion, the “good news” or “gospel” that God had announced to the world when he had vindicated Jesus and named him as the Messiah.11

Paul’s euangelion made the crucified savior a symbol of a fast-approaching liberation from this “present wicked age.”

At the time of Paul’s visit, Roman culture was beginning to penetrate the rural areas of Asia Minor. Like colonized people everywhere, the peasants of Galatia would have experienced the sinking loss of identity that comes with enforced acculturation.

To make the Kingdom a reality, this could not remain an emotional exhilaration but had to be incarnated soberly and practically in daily life. The Galatians had to liberate themselves from habits of servility and ethnic prejudice by creating an alternative community characterized by equality. This community was what Paul meant by life “in Christ.” He would call his congregations ekklesiai (“assemblies”), regarding them as an implicit challenge to the official ekklesiai of local aristocrats that ruled the population of each province as Rome’s representatives.

Jesus had tried to make God’s Kingdom a reality by establishing mutually supportive communities that had made themselves mentally, spiritually, and, to an extent, economically independent of Roman imperium; so too Paul urged the Galatians to create a legal system that united people rather than dividing them into classes and gave equal value to everybody without exception. “The whole law is summed up in a single commandment: love your neighbor as yourself,” he urged them.19

In Philippi, Paul encountered a particularly intense form of the deification of the Roman emperor.

The followers of Jesus were not the only ones to proclaim the “good news” that a new age was dawning. “A great new cycle of centuries begins!” the poet Virgil exclaimed. “Justice returns to earth, the golden age returns.”

When Augustus had become the sole ruler of the empire, he had called for a return to traditional Roman values, especially pietas, duty to family and country.

Paul’s converts in Philippi, of course, came from the poorer classes of society and did not have the same rights as Roman citizens. But Paul told them to declare de facto independence of the imperial system. Philippi might be a Roman colony, but their ekklesia was a “colony of heaven.”

In Paul’s congregations there seem to have been roughly as many male as female leaders, since “in Christ” gender equality, as well as class and ethnic equity, was mandatory.