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

by Karen Armstrong

Paul introduced the Thessalonians to a new “lord” (kyrios), “son of God” (theou huios), and “savior” (soter). Other redeemer gods were popular in the city, notably Cabirus, a blacksmith murdered by his brothers who would one day return to help the poor and needy. But the aristocracy had co-opted Cabirus into their own rituals, and Paul could present Jesus as a more authentic savior.

From his letters we learn that he spent some time alone in Athens, sending Timothy back to Thessalonica to see how the community was faring. Luke’s account of Paul’s visit has become famous. He describes Paul preaching before the Council of the Areopagus like a Greek philosopher, arguing from the evidence of natural reason for the existence of a God, praised by Greek poets as “not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move, in him we exist.”49 Paul had little time for Greek wisdom, however, and it is more likely that Luke was describing what he himself would have said had he had the good luck to speak in Athens, even though by this time its golden age was long past. There is no historical evidence that Paul made any converts or founded a community there.

In Corinth, he became even more aware of the structural violence of the Roman patronage system, in which the local ruling class dominated all lines of communication with Rome and controlled the scarce resources of wealth, power, and prestige.

Like the imperial cult, the patronage system bound the Roman Empire together. A patron would collect clients to boost his own status with his peers; he would promise to help these dependents, but his power lay in his ability to refuse or delay such assistance, keeping his clients dependent and in suspense.

These Roman patrons expressed their loyalty (pistis) to the provinces by helping their “friends” there; in return, these “friends” were rewarded for their pistis to Rome.

Yet again, it was the poor who accepted the gospel. God, Paul told the Corinthians, had “chosen things without rank or standing in the world, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order.”54 By executing the Messiah, the powers that be had condemned themselves to destruction. The Messiah was now enthroned at the right hand of God, preparing to depose “every sovereignty, authority, and power.”55 In Corinth, the cross was central to Paul’s message. When he had raised Jesus, the disgraced criminal, from the dead, God had displayed his pistis to the despised of this world. Where the emperor cult deified power and wealth, the cross had revealed an entirely new set of divine values.

Paul stayed in Corinth for eighteen months, but toward the end of his visit, in the spring of 52 CE, there was disturbing news from Thessalonica. Apparently the community there had suffered some kind of persecution, but Paul had been overjoyed to hear Timothy’s glowing report of their fidelity and perseverance under trial.

When he described the dramatic arrival of the Christ, instead of drawing on the conventional imagery of Jewish apocalypse, he used terminology that was quite new to the Jesus movement, presenting Jesus’s return as an official visit of an emperor or king to a provincial city.

The word parousia (“presence”), which referred to the ceremonial “arrival” of the visiting emperor, recurs throughout the letter.60 As soon as the officials heard that the emperor was actually approaching the city, the trumpet would sound and a delegation of local dignitaries would pour through the city gates and surge toward him for the ritualized apantesis (“meeting”).

In the summer of 52 CE, Paul finally left Corinth and sailed to Ephesus.

He was accompanied by Aquila and Prisca, who settled in the city; Ephesus would become his home for two and a half years. There he was joined by Titus, his old friend from Antioch, who took the gospel to the surrounding districts. Briefly present also in Ephesus was an eloquent and charismatic Alexandrian Jew called Apollos, who would cause Paul a great deal of trouble.

Had they not declared after their baptism that the old distinctions of race, class, and gender were irrelevant in the community of the Christ that they had created?

The incident reminds us that at this early phase, Paul’s was only one voice among many others. His ideas would later become normative in Christianity, so we tend to see his firm stand against circumcision and observance of Jewish ritual law as unavoidable.

In fact, Paul’s uncompromising stance on this issue was not typical. As a Pharisee, Paul had believed that once a person had been circumcised, he had to observe the entire Torah, including the mass of orally transmitted legal traditions of Israel that would later be codified in the Mishnah.

As far as we know, no other Jewish missionaries in the Jesus movement took Paul’s hard line.

Paul’s opponents in Galatia believed that Jesus’s heroic death and resurrection had inspired a spiritual renewal movement within Israel; they advocated continuity with the past. But Paul believed that with the cross something entirely new had come into the world.

But by raising him to the highest place in Heaven, God had vindicated Jesus, cleared him of all guilt, and in the process declared Roman law null and void and the Torah’s categories of purity and impurity no longer valid.

Unlike his opponents, Paul stressed discontinuity, but in doing so he violated some of the most fundamental values of his time.