Constantine’s decision to worship only the god of the Christians may have been a major turning point in the history of the West, but it pales in comparison with a conversion that occurred nearly three centuries earlier. Had the apostle Paul not “seen the light” and become a worshiper of Jesus, the religion of Christianity, open to all people, both Jew and gentile, may never have developed into a worldwide phenomenon of any description whatsoever. It may well have instead remained a sect of Judaism fated to have the historical importance of, say, the Sadducees or the Essenes: highly significant for historians of Jewish antiquity but scarcely the stuff of world-shaping proportions.
It would be difficult indeed to identify two people more different than Constantine and Paul. Whereas Constantine was by far the most powerful, influential, and wealthy figure of the entire empire, Paul was an impoverished and embattled itinerant preacher unknown to most of the world at large. Constantine commanded the most powerful armies of his day and ran an enormous empire; Paul preached principally to lower-class day laborers in his workshop as a simple artisan. The magnificence and splendor of Constantine’s life and surroundings beggar description; Paul’s existence can be nicely summed up in his own words, where he compares himself with other supposed apostles:1
Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one . . . with more numerous labors, more numerous imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. Five times from the Jews I received the forty lashes minus one; three times I was beaten by rods, once I was stoned, three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, in danger from robbers, in danger from those of my own race, in danger from gentiles, in danger in the city, in danger in the wilderness, in danger at sea, in danger from those falsely claiming to be brothers, in labor and toil, in many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in the cold and naked . . . . (2 Corinthians 11:23–27).
We have, then, an exalted emperor and a beleaguered, impoverished craftsman. These are the two most significant converts of Christian history. Without the latter, this history would never have been written.
Unlike for virtually anyone of equal insignificance at the time, for Paul we have rather good sources for his Christian life, including his conversion and his subsequent missionary efforts to convert others. These sources have come down to us in the New Testament. Later believers may have ascribed scriptural status to these books, but historians cannot discount them on these grounds. They are documents produced by people who, at the time, had no idea they were writing the Bible.
A number of these are writings in Paul’s own name. Altogether we have thirteen letters, actual pieces of correspondence, allegedly written by Paul, along with several writings from outside the New Testament. Those that did not make it into the Christian canon are without question inauthentic, penned by later Christians claiming to be Paul in order to induce readers to heed their words. Modern readers would call such works forgeries; ancient readers called them equally denigrating things, if and when they realized they were being duped. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that even some of the letters in the New Testament fit this description. Six of the thirteen canonical Pauline epistles appear to be later productions by authors falsely taking Paul’s name. Even so, that leaves us with seven letters almost certainly from Paul’s own hand, invaluable sources for Paul’s biography.2
One problem with these letters is that Paul is generally not interested in discussing what we ourselves might like to know. He did not write his correspondence principally to enlighten us about his conversion or his experiences in the mission field trying to convert others. As a rule, the letters are instead addressed to problems his converts were later having in their communal and personal lives, problems involving what to believe and how to behave. If a church of his—for example, the church in Thessalonica or in Corinth—was not experiencing a particular difficulty, Paul had no reason to address it. Moreover, in every case the original audience already enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with the story of how Paul—and how they themselves—had converted. For us to deduce that kind of information, we need to dig deeply into Paul’s passing comments.
We are fortunate to have a second source of information as well, a narrative account of the spread of the Christian church over its first thirty years, starting from the days after Jesus’s resurrection. This is the New Testament book known as the Acts of the Apostles, allegedly written by someone who had accompanied Paul on his missionary journeys. What better source could we hope for? This book actually describes Paul’s conversion, on three occasions, and spends the bulk of its narrative describing his post-conversion missionary exploits.
The problem is that this historical narrative, in many, many instances, is not historical enough. Scholars have widely contended that the alleged author, an unnamed companion of Paul, could not have actually written it, in no small measure because both small details and larger narratives of the book are at odds with what Paul says about himself.3 The dominant view of scholarship today is that the author produced his account at least twenty years after Paul had died—a growing number of scholars insists that it was written sixty years later—by an author without firsthand knowledge and a greater desire to tell a compelling narrative than an inclination, and an ability, to preserve solid, accurate, historical information.4 As a result, anyone wanting to know what Paul really did, said, and experienced needs to use the book of Acts cautiously, grateful that it provides us any information at all but wary at every point. Scholars of Paul typically proceed, then, by focusing principally on the seven letters that indisputably came from his pen.
In order to understand Paul’s conversion to faith in Jesus, we need a sense of what he converted from. Unlike Constantine, Paul was raised Jewish, not pagan. Twice in his undisputed letters Paul refers to his prior life. The first occurs in his letter to the churches in the region of Galatia, modern central Turkey. In order to establish his bona fides as an expert on the value and meaning of Jewish faith, Paul stresses that he himself started life as an avid Jew intent on pursuing the requirements of his religion with uncharacteristic zeal. It was this zeal that led him to persecute Jews who were declaring Jesus of Nazareth the messiah:
For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, that I persecuted the church of God violently and was trying to destroy it. And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my peers among my race, being especially zealous for the traditions of our ancestors. (Galatians 1:13–14)
In order to make a similar point in his letter to the Christians of the Macedonian church of Philippi, Paul gives a bit more detail:
[I was] circumcised on the eighth day, from the race of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews, according to the law a Pharisee, according to zeal, a persecutor of the church, according to the righteousness that comes in the law, blameless. (Philippians 3:5–6)
To make sense of Paul’s Christian faith, we obviously need to know a bit about his Jewish origins. Jews made up something like 7 percent of the Roman Empire in Paul’s day; everyone else, of course, was pagan. As is true today, Judaism was extremely diverse, with different Jewish groups both in Palestine and outside—in the so-called diaspora—evidencing a wide range of beliefs and practices.5 Paul was definitely one of the outsiders: even though the book of Acts indicates that he was a highly educated rabbi trained in Jerusalem by the leading teacher of his day (Acts 22:3), Paul himself makes no reference to any pre-Christian Judean sojourn. Moreover, his native language is clearly Greek (the language of his letters), and at a relatively high level. We can assume then that Paul was born and raised outside Palestine, almost certainly in a large urban setting, where he could get an education. The book of Acts indicates that was the city of Tarsus in Cilicia (Acts 22:3), but Paul himself does not say.
Despite their wide diversity, Jews throughout the empire shared certain constants that made them recognizable and distinct from their pagan neighbors.6 Most obviously, Jews were monotheistic, worshiping just their god, the god of Israel alone. This did not require Jews to deny that other gods existed: some thought they did exist but were not to be worshiped; others thought pagan gods were alive simply in the gentile imagination. In either case, they worshiped only their god.
In addition, Jews everywhere maintained that this one god, the creator of the universe, had chosen the Jews to be his people and given them a “covenant,” a kind of contractual agreement or peace treaty. The covenant had first been extended to the Jewish patriarchs and then handed down to their descendants over the generations. In it God agreed to be distinctively the god of the Jews in exchange for their exclusive devotion, worship, and obedience. The covenant did not require or expect that Jews would go forth to convert others to their community. As we will see, Jews were by and large indifferent to what pagans chose to do with their devotional lives. But they saw themselves as the chosen people with a unique connection, secured by a kind of political or judicial agreement with the God who was over all.
This judicial agreement entailed specific legal requirements, found in the “law of Moses,” located in the sacred Jewish Scriptures. These Scriptures, which later were to become the Christian Old Testament, contained books describing God’s gifting of the law to the great prophet and deliverer Moses, back when God first saved Israel from enslavement and made them his people. The law included the Ten Commandments but many other requirements as well, both for how Jews were to live together and how they were to worship God. Among other things, Jews were commanded to circumcise their infant boys, observe the weekly Sabbath, and follow kosher food laws.
When Paul claims he was a Jew by birth, race, circumcision, and legal zeal, that is what he means. He rigorously followed the prescriptions of the law. He further declares he was a Pharisee. A scholar could write a long book on what that means exactly—many scholars, in fact, have done so7—but for our purposes it is this: Pharisees were particularly conscientious in following God’s requirements. They devised oral interpretations of the law designed to enable the faithful to be certain to do all that God had demanded. Neither the written law nor these oral traditions were seen as a burden on the Jew. They were instead liberating: the Jew had learned from God how to live, and it was a pleasure to do so.
Like many other Jews of the time—including such figures as John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth—Pharisees held to a kind of apocalyptic worldview that had developed toward the very end of the biblical period and down into the first century. This view maintained that the world was not under direct divine control. For unknown reasons, God had ceded control to cosmic powers aligned against him who were responsible for all the pain, misery, and suffering experienced in the present. But God was soon to intervene to destroy these powers of evil and bring in a good kingdom in which his people would live a utopian existence. This kingdom of God would replace the wretched kingdoms of the current age. It would be a place of joy, peace, love, and prosperity, to be enjoyed by the faithful forever. In the meantime, the race of humans was stuck in this miserable cesspool of suffering and could only wait and hope for the day when God would bring a complete reversal of fortune for his chosen ones. The good news was that this day was not far off. It was coming very soon.
Jesus himself delivered some such message.8 Paul, who never knew Jesus—who was, in fact, born and raised in a different country from Jesus, spoke a different language, and ascribed to a different, Pharisaic, form of Judaism—also held such views. These were two very different Jews. To be sure, they had significant points of contact: both were Jewish monotheists who belonged to the covenantal community obliged to obey God’s law; and both were apocalypticists who understood that God was soon to bring about the cataclysmic end of this miserable world to establish his kingdom. But Paul did not hear about Jesus until sometime after his death. What he heard he did not like. Quite the opposite. What he heard stirred up his zeal. As he himself said, when he learned what the followers of Jesus were saying, he became a violent persecutor of the church and sought to destroy it.
On one level it may seem odd that Paul would be so opposed to one with whom, on the surface, he seemed so much to agree. On the other hand, our bitterest feuds are almost always with those closest to us. And religious violence, against those who are, broadly speaking, of the very same religion, is often the worst.
There is not a huge debate among scholars concerning the rough chronology of Paul’s persecution of the church.9 Jesus is almost always thought to have died around 30 CE; it may have been 29 CE or 33 CE, but it was sometime around then. Because of other pieces of relatively datable facts and a variety of specific chronological references in Paul’s letters (“three years later” he did this, “fourteen years later” he did that—see Galatians 1:18; 2:1), it is almost always thought that Paul converted three or possibly four years after Jesus’s death. So let’s say 33 CE. That means Paul was persecuting the Christian church in its first three years of existence.
There is no way to know if his violent activities extended over just a few months or a couple of years. Moreover, we do not know where it was taking place. The book of Acts claims that it was in the region of Jesus’s demise—especially in Jerusalem itself—and up north toward Damascus (Acts 8:1–3; 9:1–2), but there is good reason for doubting it. Paul himself claims that soon after his conversion he was “not known by sight to the churches of Christ in Judea” (Galatians 1:22). That makes it seem unlikely that he had been among them like a fox among the chickens. Moreover, he clearly indicates that he did not convert in Jerusalem but somewhere else, even though he does not say where (in Acts it was “on the road to Damascus”). As a result, we do not know how far the followers of Jesus had spread over the first couple of years or where Paul had heard of them.
It is not hard to guess how Paul had heard of them. The original followers of Jesus—the disciples who came to believe in the resurrection and those they soon convinced—were all Jews, through and through, in every way. They would have spread their religion by communicating with other Jews. That would have involved sharing their “good news” in Jewish contexts. Jews gathered every Sabbath in synagogues throughout the land of Israel, up in Syria and Cilicia, and in all nearby regions. In those settings, Jews who had come to believe in Jesus would be telling others he was the messiah who had died and been raised from the dead, just months or a year or two earlier.
It is important to reflect on why any such message might lead to violent persecutions not simply by Paul but, we must assume, by other Jews of his ilk. We are speaking of a strictly internecine religious persecution at this stage. The civil authorities were not yet concerned; there were no criminal activities involved. It was a persecution driven by religious animosity and almost certainly the animus derived from the nature of the message itself. Something about what the followers of Jesus—for simplicity, let’s call them Christians, even at this early stage—were saying.10
The point of tension is not difficult to identify. It involved the Christians’ central proclamation. The followers of Jesus were claiming he was the messiah. That was a problem for one rather glaring and obvious reason. The messiah could not possibly be a man who was crucified.
To make sense of early Jewish outrage over claims concerning the messiahship of Jesus, we need to cut through many centuries of Christian thinking, mountains of subsequent Christian theological speculation, and masses of Christian “common sense” about how Jesus came as the fulfillment of Scripture. Many Christians today have serious difficulty understanding how Jews in antiquity and throughout history, down till today, have rejected the claim that Jesus was the messiah. In this traditional Christian view it is very simple and clear-cut: the Jewish Scriptures themselves predicted the messiah would be born of a virgin in Bethlehem, that he would be a great healer and teacher, and that he would suffer an excruciating death for the sins of others and then be raised from the dead. All that is in the Jews’ own Bible. Why can’t they see that? Can’t they read?
Not all Christians have thought this way, of course. Those who have done so have been trained to read the Old Testament in certain ways, to see references to a future messiah where Jews themselves have never detected any messianic prophecies.
Throughout history, when Christians have pointed to “predictions of Jesus” in the Old Testament, Jews have denied the passages involve messianic prophecies. Christians have long maintained, for example, that the ancient prophet Isaiah was looking ahead to Jesus when he declared, centuries before the crucifixion: “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace was upon him, and by his wounds we were healed” (Isaiah 53:5–6). In response, Jewish readers have pointed out that Isaiah never indicates he is referring to a messiah figure. On the contrary he speaks of someone who has already suffered, and he does not call that one the messiah. More than that, earlier in his account he explicitly indicates who this “suffering servant of the Lord” is. It is the nation of Israel itself, which has suffered because of the sins of the people (see Isaiah 49:3).
In the days of Paul, among Jews who had expectations of what the messiah would be, there were never expectations that the messiah would suffer for the sins of others and then be raised from the dead. In fact, the expectations were quite the opposite.
We now know from the Dead Sea Scrolls a range of expectations of what the messiah would be like.11 The term “messiah” itself literally means “anointed one” and originally referred to the king of Israel, who was anointed with oil during his coronation ceremony in order to show that God had chosen him to lead his people. In the first century, Jews did not have a king but were ruled by a foreign power, Rome. Many Jews considered this an awful and untenable situation and anticipated that God would soon install a Jewish king to overthrow the enemy and reestablish a sovereign state in Israel. This would be God’s powerful and exalted anointed one, the messiah.
Other Jews maintained that the future savior of the Jews would be more cosmic in character, a kind of heavenly figure who would come on the clouds of heaven to judge the evil kingdoms of this earth and to establish, in their place, God’s own kingdom instead. That kingdom would then be ruled by that cosmic judge or by someone he appointed as God’s emissary.
Others thought the future ruler of the coming kingdom of God would be a mighty priest empowered by God to interpret the law correctly and forcefully as he guided the people of Israel in the ways of God apart from the oppressive policies of an alien force.
Despite their differences, all these expectations of the coming messiah had one thing in common: he was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow the enemies of Israel with a show of force and rule the people of God with a powerful presence as a sovereign state in the Promised Land.
And who was Jesus? He was a crucified criminal. He appeared in public as an insignificant and relatively unknown apocalyptic preacher from a rural part of the northern hinterlands. At the end of his life he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with a handful of followers. While there, he ended up on the wrong side of the law and was unceremoniously tried, convicted, and tortured to death on criminal charges. That was the messiah? That was just the opposite of the messiah.
There are good reasons for thinking that during his lifetime, some of Jesus’s followers thought maybe he would be the messiah. Those hopes were forcefully and convincingly dashed by his execution, since the messiah was not to be executed. But some of these followers came to think that after his death a great miracle had occurred and God had brought Jesus back to life and exalted him up to heaven. This belief reconfirmed the earlier expectation: Jesus was the one favored of God. He was the anointed one. He was the messiah.12
This reconfirmation of a hope that had been previously dashed compelled these early followers of Jesus to make sense of it all through the ultimate source of religious truth, their sacred scriptural traditions. They found passages that spoke of someone—a righteous person or the nation of Israel as a whole—suffering who was then vindicated by God. These included passages such as Isaiah 53, quoted earlier. The followers of Jesus claimed such passages actually referred to the future messiah. They were predictions of Jesus.
This was for them “good news.” Jesus was the messiah, but not one anybody had expected. By raising Jesus from the dead, God showed that his death had brought about a much greater salvation than anyone had anticipated. Jesus did not come to save God’s people from their oppression by a foreign power; he came to save them for eternal life. This is what the earliest Christians proclaimed.
For the zealous Pharisee Paul, it was utter nonsense—even worse: it was a horrific and dangerous blasphemy against the Scriptures and God himself. This scandalous preaching had to be stopped.
We don’t know exactly how Paul tried to stop it, since regrettably he never describes his persecuting activities. The book of Acts indicates he ravaged the gatherings of Christians and dragged people off to prison (8:3). That’s inherently implausible: we don’t know of anything like Jewish prisons and we can assume that Roman authorities were not inclined to provide cell space for Jewish sectarians who happened to be proclaiming a rather strange message.
Years later Paul does indicate, in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that on five occasions after his conversion he himself had received the “forty lashes minus one” (2 Corinthians 11:24). That is a reference to a punishment meted out in a synagogue when Jewish leaders found a congregant guilty of blasphemy and sentenced him to be flogged within an inch of his life: forty lashes were considered too severe, so the supreme penalty was thirty-nine. If Paul experienced this penalty—and we have no reason to doubt it—it would mean he was caught out in a Jewish context of worship. Possibly we can infer that he himself meted out this punishment on others before he had converted. If so, this would make sense of his claim that when he “persecuted the church,” he did so “violently” (Galatians 1:13).
It is precisely Paul’s original, vicious opposition to the Christian message that makes his conversion to the Christian faith so astounding and momentous. His was not a casual recognition that maybe he had been a bit too quick off the mark, or that perhaps he should have given it more thought. It was a life-transforming reversal, blinding in its intensity. The faith he had tried to destroy snared him and reversed everything he had ever thought—not about his Jewish faith and trust in the Jewish god, but about the person Christians were calling the messiah. Whatever caused this complete reversal, it was not simply life-transforming for Paul himself. It changed the course of human history.
It is impossible to know exactly what led up to Paul’s conversion or what happened at the time. We do have a narrative description in the book of Acts, and it is this description that provides the popular images of Paul being struck by a blinding light on the road to Damascus, falling to the ground, and hearing the voice of Jesus asking, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me” (Acts 9:1–19). The account of Acts 9 is retold by Paul himself on two occasions in the narrative (22:3–16 and 26:9–18). The historical problems it presents have long intrigued and perplexed scholars. For one thing, the three accounts present numerous contradictory details. In one version Paul’s companions do not hear the voice but they see the light; in another they hear the voice but do not see anyone. In one version they all fall to the ground from the epiphanic blast; in another they remain standing. In one version Paul is told to go on to Damascus, where a disciple of Jesus will provide him with his marching orders; in another he is not told to go but is given his instructions by Jesus. Clearly we are dealing with narratives molded for literary reasons, not with disinterested historical reports.
The other problem is that most of the details in Acts, contradictory or not, are absent from Paul’s own terse description of the event: he makes no references to being on the road to Damascus, being blinded by the light, falling to the ground, or hearing Jesus’s voice. I have already indicated the probable reason he provides no detail in his letters: his recipients had surely heard full descriptions of the moment from him earlier. As outsiders we have been largely left in the dark.
The closest thing to a description comes in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. After he refers to his former zeal for the ways of Pharisaic Judaism and his consequent persecution of the Christian church, he says the following:
But when God, who had set me apart from the womb of my mother and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his son to me, so that I might preach him among the gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. But I went off to Arabia and again, then, returned to Damascus. (Galatians 1:15–17)
This description seems to suggest that the “revelation” Paul received occurred in Damascus itself and not on the road there. That’s because he indicates that after his sojourn to Arabia—by which he does not mean the deserts of Saudi Arabia but the kingdom of the Nabataeans—he “returned” to Damascus. Despite its maddening brevity, the description does contradict at least one detail in the narrative of Acts 9: here Paul states that he did not consult with anyone about his experience right away. In Acts, that is the first thing he does, as he goes on Jesus’s instruction to speak with a disciple named Ananias.
Then what exactly happened at this moment of conversion? All Paul says is that God was “pleased to reveal his son to me.”13 But what does that mean? That Paul was given a sudden revelatory insight into the true meaning of Jesus? That he experienced an actual revelation—an appearance of Christ?
It probably means both. In other places, Paul is perfectly clear: he had a vision of Jesus after his resurrection. He says so explicitly in 1 Corinthians 15:8. Just as Peter, James, the twelve apostles, and others saw Jesus raised from the dead, so too did Paul. In 1 Corinthians 9:1, he suggests that this is why he was an apostle: he had seen the risen Lord. The significance of the event for Paul was not simply that he witnessed something amazing one day. The vision completely revolutionized his thinking and turned him from being a violent persecutor of the Christian faith to being its most forceful and successful advocate. That was because Paul—whether on the spot or after reflecting on it for days, weeks, or months—came to see what it must mean. It must mean that God’s entire way of dealing with the human race had changed. And Paul needed to tell people.
We obviously don’t know what Paul actually saw. How can we possibly know? What he fervently claimed was that he saw Jesus himself, alive again. Believers would say that was because Jesus actually appeared to him. Unbelievers would say he imagined it. Either way, it is crystal clear that he believed he did see Jesus and that this radically changed his thinking.
It is easiest to understand Paul’s subsequent missionary activities and evangelistic message by realizing how an appearance of the living Jesus would force him from “fact” to “implications.” For him the “fact” was that Jesus was alive again, as he knew from having seen him. From there Paul started reasoning backward. This backward reasoning must have proceeded through a number of steps ending in a remarkable place: Paul came to believe that he himself had been chosen and commissioned by God to fulfill the predictions of Jewish Scripture. Divinely inspired prophecies delivered centuries earlier were looking forward to his day, his labors, and him personally. Paul cannot be faulted for thinking small.
Here is how the thought process appears to have worked.14 Paul started with the “fact” that Jesus was alive again. Since Paul also knew that Jesus had died by crucifixion, his reappearance meant that he had experienced a resurrection. God performed a miracle by raising Jesus from the dead. If God raised Jesus from the dead, that would mean that Jesus really was the one who stood under God’s special favor, the one chosen by God. But if he was in God’s special favor, why would God let him be executed? Would God require him to be tortured to death? Is this what God does to the one he favors? What does he do to his enemies?
The matter was even more complicated for Paul, because Jesus did not die just any death or even just any excruciating death. He was killed on a wooden cross. That was a particular problem, because Paul knew full well that Scripture itself pronounces God’s curse on anyone who dies on a tree, as Paul himself indicates in Galatians 3:13; quoting Deuteronomy 21:23: “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” If Jesus was the one blessed by God, how could he be the one cursed by God? Paul drew what for him was the natural conclusion: Jesus must not have died for anything he himself had done wrong, since God favored him. He was not being cursed for his own deeds. He must have been cursed for the deeds of others.
As a good citizen of the ancient world, and a good Jew in particular, Paul was perfectly familiar with the theology of sacrificial death. Living beings, including four-footed animals, are chosen to be sacrificed for a variety of reasons: to honor God, to appease God’s anger, or to cover over the sins of others. They are not killed because they themselves have done anything to deserve death. Jesus, then, must have been a sacrifice, one who suffered not because of his own misdoings but because of the misdoings of other people. Why was that necessary? As Paul continued to think backward, he concluded Jesus’s death must not have been an accident or a gross miscarriage of justice. His death must have appeased God’s anger toward others or covered over their sins. If that was the case, then his death must have been part of God’s own plan for dealing with the human race. People needed a sacrifice for their sins, and Jesus provided it. God then honored Jesus’s act of sacrifice by raising him from the dead.
Then came a further and all-important thought. If the salvation of God came by the death and resurrection of Jesus, this must be how God had planned all along to save his chosen people. That must mean that salvation could not come in any other way—for example, by the zealous adherence to the prescriptions of the Jewish law. If salvation could come by belonging to the covenantal community of the chosen people, or by keeping the Law of Moses, there would be no reason for God’s messiah to have suffered an excruciating death. Following the law thus must have no bearing on how a person stands in a right relationship with God.
That in turn had inordinately significant implications. If the law had no bearing on a person’s standing before God, then being a Jew could not be required for those who wanted to belong to God’s people and enjoy his gracious act of salvation. The only requirement was trusting in the sacrificial atonement provided by Christ. That in turn meant that the message of salvation was not for Jews alone—although it certainly was for them, since it was through the Jewish messiah sent to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the plans of the Jewish god as set forth, Paul came to realize, in the Jewish Scriptures. But the message was not only for Jews. It was for all people, Jew and gentile. And it came to gentiles apart from observing the Jewish law.
Thus, to be members of God’s covenantal people, it was not necessary for gentiles to become Jews. They did not need to be circumcised, observe the Sabbath, keep kosher, or follow any of the other prescriptions of the law. They needed only to believe in the death and resurrection of the messiah Jesus. This was an earth-shattering realization for Paul. Prior to this, the followers of Jesus—the first Christians—were of course Jews who understood that he was the messiah who had died and been raised from the dead. But they knew this as the act of the Jewish god given to his people, the Jews. Certainly gentiles could find this salvation as well. But first they had to be Jewish. Not for Paul. Jew or gentile, it did not matter. What mattered was faith in Christ.
Once Paul came to realize this, he was blinded yet again by a further insight. Throughout the prophets of Scripture can be found predictions that at the end of time God would bring outsiders into the fold of the people of God as gentiles flock to the good news that comes forth from his chosen ones, the message delivered through his Jewish people. The prophet Isaiah had said:
In days to come, the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the world of the LORD from Jerusalem. (Isaiah 2:2–3)
The prophecy of Isaiah was coming true in Paul’s own day. Or consider the words of the prophet Zechariah:
Many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem . . . . In those days ten people from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” (Zechariah 8:22–23)
God had predicted that gentiles would come to the salvation that transpired in Jerusalem. Where had Jesus been killed? Jerusalem. How was the message to go forth? It would be preached by Jews, or a Jew, to outsiders. Paul may well have thought specifically of famous words about God’s special servant, spoken by the Lord himself, again in the book of Isaiah:
I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness. I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness . . . .
I will give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. (Isaiah 42:6–7; 49:6)
Who is this one who was “called in righteousness” to preach God’s salvation as a “light to the nations”? Remember how Paul describes his conversion experience in Galatians 1: God “called me through his grace” and “in order that I might preach him among the gentiles” (Galatians 1:15–16). Paul was the one God had called to take his message of salvation afield. Paul’s calling to preach was anticipated in the Jewish Scriptures. Paul himself was the fulfillment of prophecy. He was the one God had chosen to bring salvation to the world, through his proclamation of Jesus’s death and resurrection.
A number of scholars over the years have suggested that, rather than speaking of Paul’s “conversion,” we should instead speak of his “call.” Part of the logic behind this suggestion is that it is misguided to think Paul left one religion, Judaism, in order to adopt another, Christianity. It is widely acknowledged among Pauline scholars today that this is absolutely right. As Paul’s recent biographer, J. Albert Harrill, has expressed it, “Paul thus did not change from Judaism to ‘Christianity’ in the sense of a faith apart from the religion of Israel.”15 In other words, Paul did not see himself as switching religions. He came to realize that Christ was the fulfillment of Judaism, of everything that God had planned and revealed within the sacred Jewish Scriptures. God had not abandoned the Jews or vacated the Jewish religion; Christ himself had not opposed the Jewish faith or proposed to start something new. Christ stood in absolute continuity with all that went before. But, for Paul, without Christ the Jewish faith was incomplete and imperfect. Christ was the goal to which that faith had long striven, and now he had arrived. And Paul was his prophet.
Even while granting that Paul saw himself principally as one who was “called,” we should not jettison too quickly the term “conversion” for what he experienced. True, in his own eyes he did not stop being a Jew or think he was preaching a message at odds with Judaism. But he did “turn around”—the literal meaning of “conversion”—making a radical change in his understanding of that religion and, even more obviously, in his understanding of Christ, rejecting his earlier view of Jesus as condemned by God and coming to see him as God’s messiah. And so possibly it is best to consider his experience as both a call and a conversion.
Whatever terms we use, it was a cataclysmic change, astounding in its heightened self-understanding. God had commissioned Paul to take this gospel message to the gentiles. For Paul, this was not merely an interesting career choice. It was the completion of God’s plan for the human race. Paul’s mission had been predicted by the prophets of old, in anticipation of the coming kingdom of God. Paul was to bring the history of the world to its preordained climax.
The received wisdom that Paul engaged in “three missionary journeys” derives from the accounts in the book of Acts. The final two-thirds of the book (chapters 13 to 28) are principally devoted to these journeys and the arrest and trials of Paul that came in their wake. In his own writings, Paul never mentions a specific number of missionary endeavors, but at one point he does intimate a missionary strategy. In what was probably the last of his surviving letters—and the only one addressed to a church that by his own admission he did not found, the letter to the Romans—he looks back on the missionary work already done: “I have completed my preaching of the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem to Illyricum” (Romans 15:19).
Here Paul is sketching an arc of missionary proclamation from the capital of Judea to the northwestern Balkans. As it turns out, nowhere in his letters does Paul indicate that he spent time in Jerusalem trying to convert anyone; on the contrary, he makes it quite clear that he understood himself to be the missionary to the gentiles, leaving the Jewish mission to the disciple Peter and others (Galatians 2:7–9). We also have no record of him taking his mission to Illyricum. We do, however, have clear and certain evidence that he established churches in areas between these two points.16
It cannot be stressed enough that Paul’s mission was entirely to cities, at least so far as we know.17 That only makes sense: Paul clearly wanted to reach as many people as possible. Unlike Jesus, who preached in hamlets, villages, and remote areas of rural Galilee, Paul focused on urban centers, where populations were the most dense. His letters mention Christian communities in such places as Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Colossae, Laodicea, Ephesus, and the region of Galatia.
Among other things, this means he was traveling a lot. One scholar has pointed out that, in the book of Acts alone, Paul’s journeys cover some ten thousand miles.18 That is not implausible. The Roman road system was extensive and well maintained and it was a time of virtual peace on the interior of the empire. Ancient ships could cover a hundred miles a day; ordinary travelers on foot probably fifteen or twenty. On the whole, international travel was more popular and feasible in the Roman Empire than at any time in previous history, and more than in all the centuries to follow until the Industrial Revolution.
It is difficult to discern a pattern in Paul’s travels, but his general principle appears clear. Either alone or, more commonly, with Christian companions, he would come to a new city, make converts, start a worshiping community, and instruct the new members in the basics of the faith. When he judged the church could survive and thrive on its own, he would then move on to the next place. He thus established churches in major urban settings one after the other—principally provincial capitals and Roman colonies—by converting gentiles to believe in the god of the Jews and in Christ as his son who died for the sins of the world and was raised from the dead.
Clearly Paul seems to have understood himself to be “planting” churches, as he himself states in his letter to the Christians in Corinth (1 Corinthians 3:6). Once planted, the church would grow by accumulating new members. After Paul journeyed onward he continued to be invested in the communal lives of the churches he left behind. That is demonstrated by the letters themselves as he responds to problems that have arisen in one community or another over what to believe and how to behave. He was not one to stay too long in one location. He had a gospel to preach and he needed to take it where it had not yet been proclaimed. As he writes: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call upon one in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe if they have not heard? And how can they hear without one who preaches?” (Romans 10:13–15) He was the preacher, the one who brought the word of faith.
The ultimate goal of his mission was, in his words, that “the full number of gentiles” would come into the faith (Romans 11:25). Paul saw himself as the one responsible for making it happen. We do not know his master strategy, given his inability to be everywhere at once. Possibly he planned to preach in one region and then the next—not in every city and town in the region, but in major urban centers—anticipating that the churches he planted would not just grow but would also fertilize the areas around them, leading to new growths and more expansion. Were that to work, the entire region, and eventually every entire region, would be filled with believers in Jesus.
When Paul wrote his letter to the Romans from the Greek city of Corinth, he indicated that he no longer had “any room for work in these regions” (Romans 15:23). He evidently meant in the entire eastern Mediterranean, since he then mentioned his plan to use Rome as a stopping point before moving on to preach in Spain. It appears that Rome was to be a base of operations from which to evangelize the western empire. Spain was as far west as he could go. Some scholars have plausibly argued that this was his ultimate objective. Recall that Isaiah had predicted the good news of God’s salvation would be taken to “the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6, quoted by Paul in Acts 13:47). Was Spain the end of the earth? Paul may have well thought so, believing that, once he established the church there, the last days would be near when “the full number of the gentiles” had come in and “all Israel” would “be saved” (Romans 11:25–26). If so, this is heady stuff. In the words of one Pauline scholar, Paul himself had become “the central figure in the story of salvation.”19
It is difficult to know for certain how Paul conducted his mission on the ground. He was moving to cities that, so far as we can tell, he had never visited before, and trying to convert strangers to the faith. He apparently succeeded a good deal. But how did he do it?
We should not think that Paul staged “tent revivals” like a traveling American evangelist in the nineteenth or twentieth century. There is no reference to any such undertaking in his letters or even in Acts. The public speeches in Acts are almost always occasioned by a random and fortuitous event, such as a public miracle. They are not organized in advance.
It is theoretically possible that Paul acted on a more ad hoc basis, entering a public space and preaching, as it were, from a soapbox. But that too seems unlikely, both because the success rate would surely be inordinately low and because neither Acts nor Paul himself says anything of the sort.
More plausibly, it has been suggested that Paul would attend the local synagogue during services on Sabbath and use the occasion as a visitor in town to proclaim his good news about Jesus the messiah. After making some converts, according to this scenario, Paul would then use the synagogue as a kind of base of operations to begin reaching pagans in the community.
A strategy like this makes a good deal of sense. For someone new in town, the obvious first place to go would be where one could make contacts with people from similar backgrounds. And for a Jew who had just arrived, no better place would exist than one of the local synagogues. Moreover, as we saw at the outset of this chapter, Paul had been punished in synagogues, evidently flogged within an inch of his life on five separate occasions. Paul was no stranger to hostile Jewish environments, presumably in cities he was attempting to evangelize.
On the other hand, it cannot be overemphasized that Paul sees himself as a missionary not to Jews but to gentiles. In addition, it would have been very difficult to use a synagogue as a base of operations if everyone there, including the leaders who wielded the power and the whip, hated you and wanted to beat some good sense into you. Also, contrary to what one might think, there is little indeed to suggest that the communities of believers that Paul addressed comprised both Jews and gentiles. When he refers to his converts’ former religious lives, it is to their worship of pagan gods. As he reminds the Corinthians: “You know that when you were pagans you were led astray by idols that could not speak” (1 Corinthians 12:2). So too when he recalls to the Thessalonians that they used to worship “dead idols” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). The entire letter to the Galatians is predicated on the fact that the readers are gentile Christians being told by false teachers to begin practicing the ways of Judaism. These are all churches filled with pagan converts. So where did Paul meet them?
Modern scholarship has landed on a solution that is both sensible and supported by Paul’s own words.20 In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul recalls preaching while engaged in manual labor: “For you remember, brothers and sisters our labor and toil; during night and day we labored so as not to burden you, preaching to you the gospel of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:9). When he refers to his toil here, it is not to his toil of preaching: it was toil that kept him from having to be supported financially by others. He was working both a day and a night job. So too in his letter to the Corinthians, Paul stresses that he and his missionary companions engaged in a life of “labor, working with our own hands” (1 Corinthians 4:12). Later he reminds them how he and his companion Barnabas had “to work for a living” (9:6).
And so the question is, how are we to imagine the relationship between Paul’s daily work and his missionary activity? New Testament scholar Ronald Hock has argued the most persuasive case: Paul was preaching on the job.21
Support for this view comes from the book of Acts, which indicates that Paul was a professional “tentmaker” (Acts 18:3). Some scholars have thought this word can have broader applicability, referring to some kind of leather-goods work. (Tents were made from animal skins, but so obviously were lots of other things.) There is no certainty on the matter. But it does appear that Paul was a craftsman of some kind. If so, we can have a good idea of how he proceeded from one town to the next establishing churches. If he was a leather- worker Paul would have had a mobile profession. He would have taken his knives, awls, and other tools of the trade with him from one place to the next. When coming to a new town, he would meet up with others in his line of work. Commonly the professions were centered in one part of the city or another. He would choose an apt spot, rent out a space for his workshop, probably secure an apartment in a floor above for living quarters (this was common in city dwellings: a multilevel building of this sort was called an insula), and open up for business.
It is in some such context that he would have “preached night and day” to the Thessalonians. People would come into his shop for business and he would talk to them about religion. Businesses as a rule were far more casual in that way than today. People could spend a long time in conversation. Paul, by his own account, was at it at all hours. Obviously he would not be able to convert someone the first time they met, on the spot. He was urging pagan people to give up every religious tradition and cultic practice they had ever known. That took time. But he had time. He had to work—he was at it before dawn to after dusk—and while working with his hands he was preaching the gospel.
One can imagine that he was rarely successful. But it would not take a lot of success to make a big difference. For one thing, it was a common feature of ancient life for the head of a household—the senior adult male—to make the family’s decisions when it came to religion. Convert the head of the household, and you converted the entire family. Modern Christians might say that the wife and children of a convert should not really be counted as converts because it was not their choice. Even so, new religious traditions and forms of worship would be introduced into the household and everyone in it would participate. In many or even most situations, over a period of months or years, other members of the family would surely come over mentally and emotionally as well. Thus one convert could translate into numerous others.
One other factor to consider is the high population density of ancient cities. The modern city of Antakya in southeastern Turkey has just over two hundred thousand inhabitants and by most modern standards is crowded. In Paul’s day it was called Antioch and it had twice that population. But you could walk around its circumference in an afternoon. The average population density in Roman cities was about two hundred persons per acre, matched today in only the densest inner cities. There was little space and even less privacy. One result was that news could spread very quickly indeed. And rumor. And gossip.22
If someone adopted a completely new set of religious traditions—abandoning the traditions and worship that everyone else followed more or less without question—any such conversion would no doubt spark comment, curiosity, and interest. Maybe enough interest to see what it was all about. More people would start showing up in Paul’s workshop. He would not convert the majority of them by any stretch of the imagination. But he would convert some. Heads of the household would then convert their families. The church would be planted and start to grow.
Soon Paul would be satisfied that the planting season was finished, and he would head off to the next city to start all over again. This would go on for years, possibly for three decades. We will never know how many churches Paul started, but he is explicitly associated with about a dozen in his writings. Possibly there were many more.
We are still left with the question of what Paul would say to potential converts that would prove at all convincing. As we will see more fully in the next chapter, these people were pagans who worshiped numerous divine beings by local customs that had been handed down over the centuries and that everyone simply took for granted. Temples to pagan gods would be found everywhere throughout a major city, and in the temple would be idols—statues of the gods—that represented a kind of physical representation of the divinity itself. Outside the temple would be an altar on which to perform occasional sacrifices to the god—or, rather, to watch someone else do so. People could frequent as many temples of as many gods as they wanted. They would also worship their own family gods. And participate in worship of the emperor and of any of the gods that the Roman state itself promoted. In any city at any time there was a rich, fertile, and extraordinarily textured set of cultic traditions. Paul’s mission was to convert people from these pagan traditions to be believers in Jesus. What did he say and how did he convince anyone?
In his surviving letters, Paul never explicates the message he had delivered to his potential converts. Obviously there was no reason for him to do so: he was writing about other matters precisely to the people he had converted, who knew full well what he had said at the time, presumably over and over again. But he does on occasion make an allusive reference back to his preaching, and as scant as these recollections are, they provide an intriguing insight into what Paul said and the rhetorical strategy he used. We find the first such reference in the earliest of Paul’s surviving writings, the letter of 1 Thessalonians.
In fondly recalling the time he had spent with the Christians of Thessalonica (in northern Greece), Paul has occasion to remember how they, as former pagans, came to join with him in his Christian faith, how they “turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God, and to await his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, the one who saves us from the wrath that is coming” (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10). The comment is terse but illuminating.
To convert to the Christian faith through Paul’s gospel was both more and less complicated than converting to Judaism. It was more complicated because it involved not simply coming to believe that the Jewish god was the only one who deserved to be worshiped, but also to believe that Jesus was his son, who had been raised from the dead for salvation. Even in its briefest form, this is a two-step conversion—faith in God and faith in Jesus—not one step. At the same time, these two steps were somewhat less complicated than converting to Judaism, since the convert was not then expected to join the Jewish people by adopting Jewish customs and following Jewish laws, including, most notably, circumcision, Sabbath observance, keeping Jewish festivals, and following kosher food laws.
The first, and undoubtedly most difficult, step in converting pagans to Christianity was to convince them to turn away from the gods they had worshiped from infancy—gods that not just their immediate families but also all their friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, and, in fact, with the exception of Jews, everyone in their entire world worshiped. This would obviously be an enormous step. One would have to give up all the daily and periodic festivals, processions, sacrifices, prayers, beliefs, and practices attendant to all the traditional religions they had ever known. How did Paul manage to convince anyone to do it?
He shows how he did it in this concise recollection of 1 Thessalonians. He convinced the pagans that their idols—the statues of their gods—were “dead” and that they should instead worship the “living” God. For Paul, there was only God who was alive and active in the world. The others were completely dead and useless, inert and able to do nothing. It appears that when Paul preached to these pagans he employed the standard kind of attack on pagan gods that had been used by Jews for centuries. One of our earliest examples of this kind of attack, which shows both its rhetorical strategy and force, is in the Hebrew Bible, in a passage that Paul, with his rigorous training in Judaism, must have known intimately. It is found in the book of Isaiah, where the prophet mocks the gods of the pagans. He points out that a person who makes a god-statue, an idol, fashions it out of wood or iron, not realizing that this is all it is: wood or iron. It is not a god. It has no power. It can do nothing. It is human designed and human made. In his mockery the prophet points out that after the woodworker cuts down a tree for the material he needs to fashion his god:
Then [the wood] can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says “Save me, for you are my god.” . . . A deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?” (Isaiah 44:15–17, 20)
This kind of polemic would have seemed common sense to most Jews. Many pagans, it has to be admitted, would have found it either ridiculous or irrelevant, for a very simple reason. Pagans—at least, the reflective ones among them—did not consider their cult statues to be gods. They considered them to be representations of gods—visual aids, as it were—to help one focus on the reality of the god. Or, in a somewhat more sophisticated vein, they thought the cult statue was a focal point of divine energy, the place through which the god could manifest its power. But the item itself was not a god. It was an image or a conduit for a god.
Many pagans, on the other hand, may not have thought at this level of abstraction and may simply have taken the intellectual shortcut assumed by Jewish polemicists, thinking that idols really were gods. People like that would certainly be susceptible to the kind of critique leveled by Isaiah, by Jewish polemicists after his day, and by people like Paul, who in a different moment wanted to convince them that their own gods were lifeless, powerless, ineffectual—in short, dead.
Paul almost certainly preached some version of this message. And he proclaimed, by contrast, the glories of the living God, the one who created the heavens and the earth, the one who saved his people Israel from their slavery in Egypt at the Exodus, the one who did miracles through his prophets and who continued to do miracles among the living in Paul’s own day. But Paul also had to persuade his listeners to believe in Christ. His message was not simply about the living God but also about the living Jesus.
In fact, Paul’s message about the living Jesus may have itself been the medium through which he preached about the living God. The notion that God is living presupposes that God is active, not just in heaven but also on earth. A living God is a God who is involved in this world. He is a God who acts in ways that appear miraculous to mere mortals. In fact, his actions are miracles. Paul preached God’s miracles as demonstrations of power available to all who believed. And he focused on one miracle in particular, as he himself indicates in the recollection I have quoted of his preaching to the Thessalonians. He preached that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
Paul’s message to these converts began with a historical fact: Jesus was a Jewish prophet who was crucified by the Romans. There would be nothing incredible about that. Romans were crucifying people all the time. What makes this one instance stand out is what happened afterward. God raised Jesus from the dead. This is the heart and soul of Paul’s proclamation. It is one that he could speak with enormous conviction, the kind of conviction that could win converts. Paul knew that God raised Jesus from the dead because he himself had seen Jesus alive afterward.
Paul could swear to it. He did swear to it. Moreover, he was a reasonable, intelligent, clear-thinking human being. We can assume that he seemed completely honest and ingenuous. He would have been straightforward and emphatic. With his own eyes he had seen the crucified Jesus alive again. This must have been convincing to people—at least some people.
Paul’s potential converts must have wondered why God would allow his son to die, especially a death by crucifixion, the most torturous, horrific, and feared form of execution in Roman antiquity. So Paul’s next step was to explain what the death of Jesus meant. We know how Paul explained Jesus’s death because of another recollection of his missionary preaching in a different letter, this one not to the Thessalonians but to the church of Corinth, farther south along the eastern coast of Greece. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is much longer and involved than the one to the Thessalonians. In it he deals with a large number of problems that the Corinthian church was experiencing. Near the end Paul has occasion to recall what he had preached to them—they too had been pagans—when first he converted them, a message that Paul indicates he had “received”:
For I delivered over to you among the most important things what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve . . . . And last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Corinthians 15:3–5, 8)
This was the core of Paul’s missionary message, as he himself says. Christ’s death was not a miscarriage of justice or a tragic accident of history: it was all part of God’s plan of salvation that had earlier been set forth in the Jewish Scriptures. Jesus died “for our sins.” In this message Paul stressed there could be no doubt about Jesus’s death, because after he died he was buried. But Jesus did not stay dead. God raised him from the dead, again in fulfillment of the Scriptures. Once more there could be no doubt, because he then appeared on several occasions to his disciples. Last of all he appeared to Paul. Paul saw him. He really was raised. If he was raised, God must have raised him. If God raised him, his death must have been by divine design. It was a death God planned and willed, because it was a death for the sake of the sins of others. It is the death and resurrection of Jesus that put a person in a right standing before the one and only God, a living God, who has done miracles in this world that he created.
But Paul’s message did not end there. Recall from the passage in 1 Thessalonians that Paul reminded the Thessalonian Christians not only about what happened in their past—how they turned from their dead idols to the living God—but also about what was about to happen in their future. They turned to God and they now “await his Son from heaven . . . Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath that is coming” (1 Thessalonians 1:10).
The second coming of Jesus was absolutely central to Paul’s preaching. It was not simply an afterthought. It was in fact a natural corollary to the declaration that Jesus had been raised. If he had been raised, where was he? Why wasn’t he anywhere to be seen? Paul maintained that Jesus was no longer present because he had been taken up to heaven and given a position of divine glory. But he would not reside there forever. God’s act of salvation was much, much larger than simply saving a few souls here and there. God’s plan was to redeem the entire world.
It is crucial to remember that even before his conversion Paul was a thoroughgoing apocalypticist. He did not abandon his apocalyptic thinking when he came to follow Jesus; his apocalypticism was instead brought into his new faith and formed his framework for understanding it. This world was controlled by evil forces. That was why there was so much pain and misery here. But God was ultimately sovereign and was about to reestablish his control over the world. He was soon to enter into judgment and overthrow the forces of evil—along with everyone who sided with them—in order to bring about his good kingdom here on earth. The utopia to come was to be preceded by a cataclysmic act of destruction. God’s wrath was about to strike. God would send a cosmic judge of the earth to destroy his enemies and set up his kingdom. And, for Paul, that cosmic judge was Jesus. It was Jesus whom the Thessalonians were to “await from heaven,” because he was the one who would “save us from the wrath that is coming.”
Paul’s message, in a nutshell, was a Jewish apocalyptic proclamation with a seriously Christian twist. God was saving this world. He had destroyed the power of sin by the death of Jesus; he had destroyed the power of death by the resurrection of Jesus; and he would destroy the power of evil by the return of Jesus. It was all going according to plan. Paul knew for a fact that it was because with his own eyes he had seen that Jesus had been raised from the dead. He also knew that Jesus was soon to return. This time he would not come meekly.
It is not hard to see how Paul might convert at least some pagans with this message, given his confidence and self-assurance as one who had personally seen the resurrected Jesus. But was there anything else that made his message particularly persuasive? Here we have to rely on scant but tantalizing allusions that no doubt resonated clearly with the audience of Paul’s letters, who knew full well what he was talking about, but whose meaning can only be surmised by those of us living two millennia later. In a later chapter we will see that Christian sources of the first four centuries consistently report one and virtually only one thing that convinced people to convert to the faith. They saw, or more often heard about, miracles that authenticated the Christian message. Miracles led to faith.
Let me be clear that I am not saying that Christian missionaries were actually performing the miraculous works ascribed to them in our sources: healing the sick, speaking with demons and driving them out, raising the dead, leveling pagan places of worship with a word, giving dogs human voices, and bringing smoked tuna back to life. (We will see these miracles later.) I do not think there is any way, given the nature of the historical discipline and the tools in the historian’s chest, for a historian ever to claim that any of these things “probably” happened. Believers may think they did; nonbelievers will think they did not; and historians cannot arbitrate in that dispute (although theologians may want to give it a go). What historians can say—clearly, emphatically, and with a clear conscience—is that throughout history people have thought miracles happened. Most often they have thought this not because they saw miracles but because they heard about them.
Paul’s converts heard about miracles. In fact, he suggests they saw him personally do miracles—or thought they saw him do them, which for our purpose comes to the same thing. Again, the references are allusive at best. But they do seem to point in that direction. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he indicates he had preached the gospel throughout the eastern Mediterranean from Jerusalem to Illyricum, he claims he converted people not only “by word” but also by “deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:18–19). It is hard to imagine what “signs, wonders, and Spirit-power” would be if not miracles.
So too, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul admits his speaking abilities were rather feeble but his words were backed up by incredible acts: “I was with you in weakness and fear and great trembling, and my word and preaching was not in persuasive words of wisdom but also in a show of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:3– 4). Again “Spirit” and “power” as a supplement to his preaching. Then, more emphatically, in his second letter to the Corinthians, while reminding his readers of his apostolic ministry among them, Paul states that “the signs of an apostles were performed among you in all patience: signs, and wonders, and miracles” (2 Corinthians 12:12). What was Paul actually doing in these peoples’ presence? We have no reliable record and no real clue. Whatever it was, it must have been stupendous. And it proved convincing. He was, after all, converting people and establishing churches, in city after city.
I am all too aware of the problem of hyperbole, but I nonetheless stick to my claim: Paul was not simply the most significant convert of the first few years of Christianity, or of the first century, or of the early church. He was the most significant Christian convert of all time. One can argue that, without Paul, Christian history as we know it would not have happened.
It is not that Paul himself started Christianity. Christians were already around before his time. Otherwise he would not have had anyone to persecute. Moreover, contrary to what people often say, it is not that Paul invented the idea that Jesus’s death and resurrection brought salvation. That is what the earliest Christians were proclaiming before Paul had ever heard of them. Instead, Paul is so significant because he came to believe—whether in a flash, as claimed in the New Testament, or over a period of time, as calmer reflection might suggest—that the death and resurrection of Jesus brought a salvation that was not tied to explicit Jewish identity; that the salvation of Christ was efficacious for gentiles as well as Jews; that pagans who came to believe in Christ did not first have to convert to Judaism and begin to follow the prescriptions of Jewish law and custom. Salvation had indeed come to the Jews, but it had gone forth to the gentiles. God was in the process of saving the entire world. Gentiles could remain gentiles—and presumably Jews could remain Jews.
What is more, Paul believed God had called him, and him in particular, to make this gospel, this “good news,” known to the world at large. The prophets of old had predicted someone would come to bring light to the gentiles, enlightenment to the pagans. Paul was that one. He had a message and a mission, and it was not a small-time affair merely involving a leatherworker talking to customers in his shop. It was that, but it was also massively bigger. It was a fulfillment of the promises God had made through his prophets centuries earlier. Paul’s mission would bring God’s entire plan of salvation to completion. Once Paul had reached “the ends of the earth,” the gentiles would have heard the message and the climax of history could arrive. Jesus would come from heaven, the forces of evil would be destroyed, and God’s utopian kingdom would arrive. Paul’s mission was of cosmic proportions.
The end, of course, did not come. But the Christian message continued to thrive after Paul’s day. It does not appear to have thrived in Jewish circles. Nearly all the early Christians we know about—including those addressed in our earliest writings, those of the New Testament—came from pagan stock.23 For reasons I have set forth in this chapter, most Jews simply could not accept the claim that Jesus, a lower-class itinerant preacher who was crucified for crimes against the state, was in fact God’s messiah. Pagans proved more receptive to the message—not just in Paul’s day, but in the decades and centuries to come.
Later we will consider how the message was preached after Paul and why it succeeded. First we need to gain an even clearer idea of what it was pagan converts were converting from. That will require us to explore more fully the world of Roman paganism, the world from which most Christians came and that they then confronted.