Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

Now we must pursue a parallel train of thought. If we simply focus on unity and holiness we may miss the fact that Paul’s communities were essentially outward looking and that the face they turned outward was the face of active care. Medicine in the ancient world was almost entirely reserved for those who could afford it; within a few generations, the Christians were setting up hospitals and caring for all within reach. When a plague struck a town or village and the rich and respectable retreated to their country houses away from the risk of infection, the Christians would stay and nurse the sick, often at the risk of their own lives. Nobody had ever dreamed of living like that before. Paul doesn’t mention this kind of social imperative, but it belongs with the work of healing, which characterized his own ministry, at least from time to time, and it flows directly from the things he says about the life of the community whose members were like shining lights in a dark world.

As we know, the early Christians were technological pioneers when it came to books, abandoning the scroll with its natural limitations and developing instead the codex, the ancestor of the modern bound book.

koinōnia,

no wonder the theologians of the second and third centuries often emphasized, when speaking about the crucifixion of Jesus, their belief that on the cross he won the victory over all the dark powers. That wasn’t just a theological theory about an abstract “atonement.” It was the necessary foundation for the lives of the communities in which they lived and worked. The communities could exist only because the old gods, much as they might try to strike back, really had been overthrown.

But Paul’s vision of a united and holy community, prayerful, rooted in the scriptural story of ancient Israel, facing social and political hostility but insisting on doing good to all people, especially the poor, would always be central.

There is a famous story of how Rabbi Akiba, one of the greatest Jewish teachers of all time, went on praying the Shema, declaring his loyalty to the One God and his determination to stand for his kingdom, as the Roman torturers, catching up with Jewish rebels after the Bar-Kochba revolt in AD 135, ran steel combs through his flesh until he died a horrible and lingering death.22 He continued to pray: “Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might . . .” (“soul” here means “life”). His disciples, standing by like Socrates’s friends as he drank the hemlock, asked him in awe and horror how he could go on praying that prayer even now. His answer, recorded much later but reflecting what we know of the man, is a model of wise, humble Jewish thought. All his life long, he explained, he had been troubled by the words in the prayer “and with all your soul.” He wondered what that meant and if he would ever have the opportunity to fulfill that part of the prayer. Now that he finally had the opportunity, he declared, he was going to seize it. This, then, was what it meant to love the One God with one’s life. Akiba died with the word echad, “one,” on his lips: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Echad. A statement of loyalty. Of loyalty even to the death.