WE DON’T WANT to keep you in the dark,” Paul wrote to Corinth, probably in AD 56, “about the suffering we went through in Asia.”1 Our problem is that though Paul wanted the Corinthians to know about what a bad time he had had, he doesn’t say what exactly had happened. We, at least, are still in the dark. Apart from what Paul says in this letter we have only hints and guesses. Luke, wanting no doubt to tone down any serious trouble that his principal subject had faced, gives graphic descriptions of various things that Paul did in Ephesus, the main city in the province of Asia, and of the famous riot in the theater with a vast crowd shouting “Great is Ephesian Artemis!” (as well they might; the Temple of Artemis, on the northeast side of the city, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world).2 But nothing in his account of Paul’s time in Ephesus suggests anything out of line with what we have come to expect, which is that Paul preaches the Messiah in the synagogue, opposition mounts, there are threats and disturbances involving local magistrates, and Paul finally has to leave town.
But 2 Corinthians tells a different story. With this, we probe into a dark place in Paul’s life, and perhaps a dark place in his heart and mind. Some have even suggested that his theological position changed radically as a result of these experiences. I do not think that is the case, but we are now approaching a quite new stage in our investigation about what drove him on and how what he had seen of Jesus on the Damascus Road had left its transforming mark on his life, his heart of hearts, and his outward vocation. We may also be pointing ahead, from this darkness, to the extra question of why on earth Paul’s work turned out to be, in historical and human terms, so ultimately successful.
These questions are already raised by what he says at the start of 2 Corinthians:
The load we had to carry was far too heavy for us; it got to the point where we gave up on life itself. Yes: deep inside ourselves we received the death sentence.3
If somebody came to see me and said something like this, I would recognize the signs of serious depression. This was not just an outward death sentence—the Paul we have come to know could have coped with that reasonably well—but one “deep inside ourselves.” (The “we” in this letter is clearly a way of referring to himself. Though he mentions Timothy as being with him in writing the letter in 1:1, what he says is so personal and intimate that we must take it as a roundabout way of talking about himself while perhaps shrinking from the shocking immediacy of the first-person singular.)
He goes on at once to describe his eventual reaction to this inner death sentence: “This was to stop us relying on ourselves, and to make us rely on the God who raises the dead.”4 He can look back on the darkness now and see it within a larger rhythm of God’s mercy, but at the time he was completely overwhelmed by it. He returns to the theme more than once in the letter, and in chapter 4 what he says is especially revealing:
We are under all kinds of pressure, but we are not crushed completely; we are at a loss, but not at our wits’ end; we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are cast down, but not destroyed.5
Yes, but the point of what he said in the first chapter was that at the time he had felt that he was crushed completely; he did find himself at his wits’ end; he did feel abandoned; he did feel destroyed. It is only with hindsight that he looks back and says, “But I wasn’t, after all.” In his first letter to Corinth Paul uses the image of the boxer; if we were to develop that, the present case looks as though he had received what he thought was a knock-out blow and expected to wake up, if at all, in a hospital; but here he is, still on his feet. How did that happen? Paul being Paul, he interprets this entire sequence of events as part of the meaning of being the Messiah’s man: “We always carry the deadness of Jesus about in the body, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our body.”6
It isn’t only these very revealing passages. When we read 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians in quick succession—especially in Greek, though I think the point still comes through in translation—we are aware at once that something has happened. The style is different. People have run all kinds of tests on Paul’s writing style, including using computer technology to analyze the way the sentences work and so on. That tells its own story—the variation across the complete collection of letters is not that great, despite what some have suggested. But these two letters, written to the same church and within two or three years of one another at most, are strikingly different to the naked eye. The first, dealing with all kinds of problems in the Corinthian church, is cheerful, upbeat, expository, sometimes teasing, and challenging, but always with a flow of thought, a confidence of expression. The second, though it too can tease by the end, feels as if it is being dragged out of Paul through a filter of darkness and pain.
In the second letter, he repeats himself like an old-fashioned gramophone record clicking on the same phrase:
The God of all comfort . . . comforts us in all our trouble, so that we can then comfort people in every kind of trouble, through the comfort with which God comforts us. . . . If we are troubled, it’s for the sake of your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it’s because of your comfort. . . . Just as you’ve shared in our sufferings, so you will also share in our comfort.7
He doubles back on himself, modifying and correcting what he’s just said:
We are not writing anything to you, after all, except what you can read and understand. And I hope you will go on understanding right through to the end, just as you have understood us already—well, partly, at least!8
He adds phrase to phrase like someone picking up heavy bricks one by one and placing them laboriously in a wall:
Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like the many, peddlers of the word of God, but as from sincerity, but as from God, in the presence of God, in the Messiah, we speak.9
Nothing in 1 Corinthians—or in Galatians or the Thessalonian letters, for that matter—sounds and feels like this. We are listening to a man dictating from a heart that, though now lightened in various ways, has been heavier than it knew possible. He sounds exhausted.
By the end of 2 Corinthians, though, he has cheered up. There are signs that the letter is actually being written while he was on the road around northern Greece, on his way from Ephesus to Corinth by the land route, and that he has had good news on the way. But at the start and at several points in the letter, we are made aware that something has happened that has marked his heart, his mind, and his language in the same sort of way that the stoning and the beatings had earlier marked his face and his body. As a translator, I sensed all this when, within a couple of months in the spring of 2002, I moved from the first letter to the second. The second one is much harder Greek, perhaps the hardest in the New Testament and certainly in Paul. It ties itself in knots.
So what had happened? Some have looked back to a hint in the first Corinthian letter where Paul describes himself facing danger every hour and even “dying” every day: “If, in human terms,” he says, “I fought with wild animals at Ephesus, what use is that to me?”10 He is speaking about the future resurrection and stressing that without that hope there would be no point going through what he is going through. But it all still feels quite upbeat, and the “wild animals” are likely, here at least, to be a metaphor for the hostile reception he was, by now, well used to. He is positive about his present work in Ephesus; there are splendid opportunities, he says, as well as serious opposition.11 But it looks as though what he describes as his “boast” of suffering was about to come true in ways, and in depths, he had not expected.
The best guess—it remains a guess, but it’s the best one—is that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus and put on trial for his life. And that made a “perfect storm,” because it followed hard on the heels of a nasty shock from Corinth. The church there had turned against him.
The evidence for an Ephesian imprisonment, not mentioned by Luke, is strong. In the little letter to Philemon, Paul asks Philemon to “get a guest room ready” for him. Philemon lived in Colossae, about 125 miles inland from Ephesus on the river Lycus. Though Paul was still in prison, by the time he wrote this letter he was hoping that, through the prayers of his friends, he would be released. When that happened, he was planning to pay Philemon a visit, not least, we may suppose, to find out what had become of the former runaway slave Onesimus. We will return to that question, but for now that mention of a guest room is vital.
Other than Ephesus, the only places where we know Paul was in prison are Caesarea12 and Rome. When he was in Caesarea, he had already said farewell to the churches around the Aegean shoreline. When he was in Rome, he was intent on going farther west, to Spain.13 Even if he had changed his plans and decided in Caesarea to revisit Ephesus or had decided in Rome to return to the East one more time, it is not likely that his primary destination would have been a small town up the Lycus valley. So the guest room in Colossae provides the telltale hint that Paul was in prison in Ephesus.
The fact that Luke doesn’t mention this then becomes significant in itself, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that failed to bark in the night. Luke is content to report Paul’s stoning, beatings, and other attacks and legal charges. He tells us about the imprisonment in Caesarea and the house arrest in Rome. Ephesus must have been a darker moment. It was, perhaps, less clear-cut. Elsewhere, one could tell the story of Paul as a loyal apostle and evangelist who was falsely accused and then, when the authorities saw sense, released. This was murkier. And that fits with the mood that Paul reports at the start of 2 Corinthians. It is noticeable as well that 2 Corinthians has several thematic links with Colossians. This would fit with Colossians being written not long before Paul’s release from prison and 2 Corinthians not long afterward.
This also makes sense of Paul’s avoiding Ephesus on his final journey back to the East. Luke explains at that point that he didn’t want to spend much time in the area, since he was eager to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost, and that may well also be true.14 But to sail right by the city where he had spent two or three years appears more than simply a scheduling problem. Paul was never one to shirk a battle, but by this time he may have realized that one had to pick which battles to fight and which ones simply to avoid.
What, after all, do we know about Ephesus? As well as being the home of the magnificent temple of “Ephesian Artemis,” it was in this period the proud host of the imperial cult. Local officials in various towns and cities would vie with one another for the privilege of sporting a new temple to Rome and/or Caesar (and of course for the economic perks that would go with that status). Ephesus was given that honor twice in the first century and once more two centuries later. In addition, Ephesus was famous as the home of all kinds of magic, the dark and powerful arts that were always popular on the edge of mainstream paganism. When Acts describes converted magicians burning their secret books as evidence of the impact of Paul’s teaching,15 this makes sense precisely in Ephesus. But it would also make sense to imagine a backlash. And when the dark forces strike back, they do not play fair.
I therefore agree with the several scholars who have insisted that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, and I suggest that this makes best sense of all the evidence—as well as providing a location from which he wrote not only his letter to Philemon but also the other Prison Letters, including Ephesians itself. That letter, as I shall suggest presently, is a circular written to churches in the area and is therefore couched in more general terms than normal. But it was also in Ephesus that Paul experienced what we might call the “Corinthian crisis.” This had several elements, and though it may now be impossible to ascertain all the details of what had happened, the key points stand out. For our purposes, what really matters is the effect all this had on Paul himself and the way he responded to it. Because these two things are going on at the same time—trouble in Ephesus itself and trouble in relation to Corinth—we will have to move backward and forward between the two in order to understand why Paul felt as if he had received the death sentence.
* * *
When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, probably around AD 53, he had to deal with many problems in the church, and two of these in particular may have been part of the larger crisis that then ensued. He had already written a shorter preliminary letter, which has not survived, urging the believers not to associate with people who flouted the strict Jewish and Christian code of ethics, particularly relating to sex, money, idolatry, and other spheres where inappropriate behavior was rife.16 He followed this up with more specific instructions about the need to expel one particular church member who had been living with his father’s wife. Some in the church, perhaps friends of the person in question, may have thought all this too harsh by far. At the same time, there were divisions in the church; several members declared that they didn’t regard Paul as their real leader. They preferred Peter (Cephas) or Apollos instead. These two problems may have overlapped; if people were cross with the strict line Paul was taking, it might be natural for them to favor an alternative teacher. A second-order problem thus emerges.
We know about Peter (well, a bit). What about Apollos? Apollos was a powerful scripture teacher, originally from Alexandria, who had been in Ephesus just after Paul’s initial visit and had then gone on to Corinth. While Apollos was in Ephesus, it had become clear to the small group of believers that though he knew the basic facts about Jesus, he was thinking of Jesus as the extension and application of John the Baptist, rather than of Jesus as the Messiah whose death and resurrection had accomplished what John could only foresee. At that point, Paul’s friends Priscilla and Aquila had taken Apollos to one side and explained things in more detail, providing one of the moments at which we would love to have been flies on the wall. (There was a strange little sequel: in Ephesus Paul met a small group of followers of John the Baptist, and he explained to them that John’s words had come true in Jesus.)17 For our purposes the point is that Apollos had gone to Corinth after Paul had left and had made a great impression on the church, causing some members to decide that he, rather than Paul, was the kind of teacher they really wanted.
Meanwhile, Cephas himself—Peter, Jesus’s own right-hand man—had also been in Corinth. Some had decided that he was their man. People have often suggested that this may have involved a rerun of the clash in Antioch, as in Galatians 2, and that Peter might have again been trying to insist on a two-tier fellowship and a separation at mealtimes of Jewish and Gentile Jesus-followers. There is no evidence for this, but that doesn’t mean that Paul would have been entirely happy to think of Peter coming in to teach, in his absence, a church Paul had planted and looked after through the first eighteen months of its life.
Paul addresses all this in 1 Corinthians in the general terms of what we call “personality cults.” But underneath that there must have been a deeper sense of personal hurt. He was the one who had told them about Jesus in the first place. He had rejoiced as the spirit worked powerfully among the new believers. He had loved them, prayed with them, worked among them, wept with them. He must have wished that Priscilla and Aquila had still been in Corinth rather than coming with him across to Ephesus; surely they would have put people straight . . .
Anyway, Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, perhaps late in 53, and then made what turned out to be a bad mistake. He crossed the Aegean for a quick visit to Corinth.18 Though he tried to exert a measure of authority over the situation, this was rebuffed. He was made to feel decidedly unwelcome. He found it best to leave in a hurry. It was suggested to him—and unless you have been a pastor yourself, you will not know just how deeply hurtful this would be—that if he ever wanted to come back, he would have to obtain letters of recommendation from someone the Corinthians trusted.
We already know enough about Paul to know how this would have affected him. He had had the rich experience of loving and trusting those with whom he had shared the Messiah faith and of being loved and trusted by them. That was how it had been in northern Greece, as we can tell from the letters he had already written to Thessalonica and from the letter he would later write to Philippi. But southern Greece—the place where the Roman authorities had given the green light for the gospel!—was turning against him. And if this happened at the same time that he was suddenly meeting a darker level of opposition in Ephesus itself, we can begin to understand why, as he later emerged into a battered and chastened new day, he spoke as he did in 2 Corinthians of reaching the point where he was giving up on life itself.
* * *
It had all started so well. At least, it had started in much the same way as in the cities of his earlier journeys. He had traveled, quite quickly it seems, from Antioch through Cilicia and Galatia and so into Asia. (Did he stop in Tarsus as he went by? Did he visit family? Had he once again been hoping for a change of heart, only to be disappointed? Was that part of the background to his breakdown?) Anyway, he arrived in Ephesus and began as always in the synagogue, this time for three months. A dozen Sabbaths, each ringing with Paul’s scriptural arguments and evidences: Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope, Messiah. Twelve Sabbaths, plenty of time to get into the details of Genesis, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Plenty of time to speak of a Messiah who, Paul says, “loved me and gave himself for me.”
Opposition, however, grew as the disturbing implications of Paul’s way of reading the familiar story dawned upon the puzzled hearers. Resistance hardened. This may have been one of the occasions when, submitting to synagogue discipline, Paul received the official Jewish beating of forty lashes. (Deuteronomy 25:3 specifies forty as the maximum; by Paul’s day, Jewish teachers had reduced this by one in case somebody miscounted, appearing more anxious about technical infringement than about the suffering caused.) He says he had received this five times; this itself indicates his steady commitment to working with the synagogue communities as long as he could, since he could easily have avoided the punishment by merely not turning up.19
Some of the Jewish community in Ephesus had begun to spread rumors about what this “Messiah cult” was doing. From later writings we can guess at the kind of innuendo that went around, sneering comments about what these Jesus-followers were up to behind closed doors, with men and women meeting together and talking a lot about a new kind of “love,” not to mention the disturbing gossip about eating someone’s body and drinking their blood. So Paul realized, as he had done in Corinth, that he could no longer treat the synagogue as his base. It was time to move elsewhere. Perhaps this was the time he refers to in the first letter to Corinth with the metaphor of the arena, suggesting that he had “fought with wild animals at Ephesus.”20 This letter was written while things were going well, with no shadow of the trouble that haunts the second letter. It is very unlikely that he had literally been thrown to wild beasts. He seems to be referring to some great tussle with opponents, though we cannot now tell who they were or what the issue was.
Anyway, he rented a local lecture hall belonging to one Tyrannus, and for two years he divided his time between his tentmaking business and the public exposition and discussion of the faith. Ephesus being Ephesus, another center both of trade routes and culture, this was an excellent way to disseminate the message. People came from far and wide, spent time in the city, and then went on their way. In a culture without print or social media, people simply chatted about anything strange or new that they had come across in their travels. “Yes, I’ve just come from Ephesus; and you’d never believe it, but there’s a strange group there apparently saying . . .”
We can see how this worked in one close-up example. At the start of Colossians Paul thanks God that in Colossae, a small town inland from Ephesus, there is now a community of people who love one another across the deep divisions of ethnic, social, and cultural divisions. “Epaphras,” he says, “gave us the news about your love in the spirit.”21 Epaphras was one of Paul’s fellow workers in Ephesus, and he had been into the inland regions to spread the good news there, returning to Paul to declare that the power of the good news was evident all over the place; the gospel was “producing fruit and growing in all the world.”22 Philemon himself, now one of the leaders in the Colossian church, owed Paul his very life; this presumably means that Philemon had heard and believed Paul’s gospel on a business trip to the metropolis. If the gospel was at work like this in Colossae, there is every reason to suppose that it was also at work in other towns and cities in the region, nearby places like Laodicea and Hierapolis and many others of which we know less.
In Ephesus itself, Paul’s work appeared to be going from strength to strength. In his letters Paul and his hearers seemed to be able to take for granted the fact that sometimes the living God did remarkable things not only in their hearts and minds, but also in their bodies. Remarkable healings, signs of a new creation breaking in to the old world in ways not normally expected, were never the real center of attention and in any case were always mysterious (people still got sick and died, and prayers for healing were not always answered positively). But in Ephesus it seems that Paul’s launching of the church was accompanied by healing powers that went beyond what might have been expected or experienced elsewhere. Luke reports, as a seemingly strange temporary phenomenon, that handkerchiefs and towels that had touched Paul’s skin possessed healing properties.23 Paul’s very name was being spoken of with awe, and some were indeed using it to powerful effect. Some local Jewish exorcists, sons of a high priest, were coupling the names of Jesus and Paul in their efforts to expel demons, until one particular demon-possessed man answered them with the famous line, “I know Jesus, and I am well acquainted with Paul; but who are you?”24 Tales like this, says Luke, spread around the area. Luke himself comments that the name of Jesus was held in great honor, but we cannot imagine that the name of Paul was not also being venerated.
Paul must have loved those days. He was busy in the shop and busy teaching. People crowded into his lectures, brought sick people for healing, and turned to look as he went by. Jesus was Lord, and he was his apostle.
The community at large, it seemed, was being transformed. In a city famous for its different levels of power, a natural magnet for people who knew how to manipulate unseen forces to their advantage, the power of the gospel, of the announcement of Jesus as the true Lord, was having a remarkable effect. In one scene that must have shaken that world to its core, a substantial group of magicians made public confession of what they had been up to and brought their valuable magic books to be burned.25 The dark arts were being smoked out of hiding, almost literally. All those prayers that Paul had prayed, invoking the name and the power of the crucified and risen Lord, were having their effect. Ephesus, even more than Corinth or the cities of northern Greece, was turning into a living example of what the gospel could do, not just in a few individuals here and there, but in an entire community.
But the dark powers do not give up so easily. Something terrible happened that resulted not only in imprisonment, but in crushing despair. Since Luke has foreshortened his account here as elsewhere, we cannot be sure exactly when this took place. The positive, early phase of Paul’s time in Ephesus ends with the burning of the magic books. That is when Paul decides to revisit Greece, going overland through Macedonia and then down to Corinth;26 so he sends Timothy and Erastus on ahead.27 All Luke says then is that Paul “spent a little more time in Asia,” and that may be when everything suddenly went horribly wrong.
On balance, though, I think it more likely that the catastrophe happened after the riot that Luke so graphically describes in Acts 19:23–41. Luke says that Paul was able to leave town “after the hue and cry had died down,”28 but that hue and cry might well have included not only the riot he describes, one of his splendid set pieces, but also the time that he does not describe, the disaster that struck, perhaps in the aftermath of the riot, just when Paul thought he had once again escaped real trouble. If you take on the shadowy powers that stand behind the corruption and wickedness of the world, you can expect the struggle to take unexpected and very nasty turns.
* * *
Before we plunge into the darkness of what happened to Paul in Ephesus, we must return to Corinth. I strongly suspect that the sudden deterioration of relations with that church was one of the factors that sapped Paul’s confidence and laid him open to attack.
He had not been away that long, but things had clearly developed in his absence. He had had various visitors from Corinth. “Chloe’s people” had brought him news. That phrase, “Chloe’s people,” could mean Chloe herself and her actual family. But the implication is that Chloe, like Lydia in Philippi and (later on) Phoebe in Cenchreae, was an independent and probably wealthy businesswoman whose associates or slaves, also we presume Jesus-followers, would have been coming to Ephesus anyway and would then have made contact with Paul. Anyway, “Chloe’s people” brought news of a quarrelsome church in which different groups were siding with different preachers (Paul, Apollos, Cephas) and a final group (or is this Paul’s sarcastic response?) said, “I’m with the Messiah!” What was going on?
Some nineteenth-century scholars, eager to project the cultural “either/or” of modern European philosophy back onto the early church, tried to glimpse in this a major ideological cleavage between a supposed “Jewish Christianity” focused on the law (with analogies therefore to the Galatian “agitators”) and a supposedly Pauline “Gentile Christianity,” which had broken with Jewish law. Some think Peter himself was the leader of the first party. This is not only simplistic, unsubstantiated, and counterintuitive (Paul himself insists in various places that he is a “Jewish Christian”!); it is anachronistic.
The issue seems to be quite different. It has to do with style. Paul’s rebuttal of the party spirit in Corinth has very little to do with Jewish law and everything to do with “the wisdom of the world.” Hence his emphatic statement about the foolishness of God. The Corinthians, it seems, were wanting leaders whose speaking abilities would command social respect. They found Paul disappointing. But, as he explains, there are different kinds of wisdom: the wisdom of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, the true, hidden wisdom that comes from God.
Here and throughout the letter Paul is teaching the Corinthians, as he had surely been teaching them in person earlier, to think eschatologically, that is, to imagine a world quite unlike the world of ordinary Greco-Roman paganism, a world in which the One God was living and active and had started up something quite new, something that would be complete on the coming day. That something involved the creation of the new Temple; the church, which the Corinthians were pulling apart in their search for the ideal clever teacher, was the new Temple, the place where the living God had come to dwell by the spirit.29 No first-century Jew could use imagery like that as a mere “illustration” of a different kind of truth. Paul’s vision of the church picked up the ancient Jewish hope of an ultimate Temple and put forth a new creation for which the Jerusalem Temple and the wilderness Tabernacle were advance signposts. This is it, says Paul. And if they belonged to it—if they belonged to the Messiah—then they should be above these petty squabbles:
Everything belongs to you, whether it’s Paul or Apollos or Cephas, whether it’s the world or life or death, whether it’s the present or the future—everything belongs to you! And you belong to the Messiah; and the Messiah belongs to God.30
And if they all belong to the Messiah—the crucified Messiah, as Paul never lets them forget—then they should expect the world’s standards to be stood on their heads. In particular (a point Paul will develop in the second letter) apostles are precisely not supposed to be people of great standing in the wider community. They are like bedraggled prisoners at the end of a triumphal procession, on their way to a shameful death. That is part of the point, but it is also the source of the power.31 This whole opening section of the letter is about power, a theme that obviously concerned Paul both as he was thinking about Corinth and as he was dealing with various sorts of power in Ephesus. The foolish gospel of the crucified Messiah is God’s power; God’s weakness is stronger than human strength; their faith, as evoked by Paul’s preaching, did not rest on human wisdom but on God’s power; and now, dramatically and with a somewhat shocking threat, “the kingdom of God isn’t about talk—it’s about power,” the “power” in question being the power Paul thinks he may have to use in confronting those who are “puffed up” with their own sense of worth and importance.32 (The charge that the Corinthians are “puffed up” is a major theme of the whole letter. This has nothing to do with Jewish law and everything to do with ordinary human pride and folly.)
So Paul comes to specific issues. Here is the man guilty of incest—and many in the church are supporting him because it shows how “free” they are as Messiah people! Paul reminds them of the earlier letter (the one that has not survived). Church discipline is vital. They are Passover people, and no moral “leaven” must be allowed in the house.33 So too with lawsuits in the church. They are the Messiah’s people, and as such they are destined to assist in the final cosmic judgment, so they ought to be able to settle local in-house disputes without using the secular courts. And, as he wrote to the Galatians, this is all about the ultimate inheritance. God’s kingdom, already established in the Messiah, will be complete at last, with the glorious worldwide inheritance promised to the Messiah and his people.34 But the whole point of the kingdom is that God is putting all things right, restoring the human race to its proper role and dignity, and those who persist in styles of life that corrupt and destroy that genuine humanity cannot inherit it. This isn’t an arbitrary bit of legalism. It is analytical truth.
With some fundamental issues about sexual morality briefly laid out, Paul turns to marriage itself in chapter 7. Here too the requirement is to think eschatologically. God is remaking the world from top to bottom, and everything looks different as a result.
His next topic is a very different, and very difficult, issue: meat that had been offered in sacrifice in pagan temples. In a city like Corinth, that meant almost all meat available for purchase, since temples functioned effectively as a combination of butcher’s shop and restaurant. A sacrificial animal was brought in and offered in worship to this or that deity, and then the family enjoyed the meal. What was left would be sold on the open market. Some large Jewish communities in towns like Corinth would have their own kosher butchers, but in many cases Jews simply avoided meat altogether, not simply because of the rules about blood, but because they avoided pagan worship and everything that went with it.
This is where the letter from the Jerusalem leaders in Acts 15 might have come into its own. Paul has reemphasized what that letter said about sexual morality. There is no leeway there, no principle of “tolerance” for different opinions. But what we see in 1 Corinthians 8–10, discussing idol temples and meat that had been sacrificed there, is a sophisticated and delicate discussion of the pastoral challenges involved in dealing with two different opinions, which he calls the “strong” and the “weak.” These are Paul’s technical terms. Those with “strong” consciences are those who, like him, know that idols don’t exist, so that meat offered to them is merely meat. The “weak” are those who, after a lifetime of actually worshipping idols and imagining themselves to be participating in the life of the god by eating sacrificial meat, cannot now touch the meat without feeling themselves being dragged back into the murky world of idolatry and all that went with it.
This question draws out of Paul a fundamental theological principle and a remarkable statement of how he understood his own vocation. Both need to be at the heart of any ultimate assessment of who he thought he was, of what made him the man he was.
The theological principle is a robust creational monotheism. Idols have no real existence, and as the great prayer the Shema declares, God is one. Paul knows perfectly well that in Corinth and everywhere else there are “many gods, many lords,” but his new version of the Shema upstages them all. This, as we saw, might be the prayer to which the Jewish community in Corinth had objected in their petition to Gallio; if not, it may well have been another one like it. This prayer dwells in his heart and on his lips day by day, and now as at some other times when he wants to talk about the One God, he prefers to do so by invoking and praying to this God, declaring his loyalty to his kingdom:
For us there is one God, the father,
From whom are all things, and we live to him and for him;
And one Lord, Jesus the Messiah,
Through whom are all things, and we live through him.35
This translation is a bit wooden, but longer paraphrases do not bring out the remarkable way in which Paul has adapted the Shema (“Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one”) by making “Lord” refer to Jesus and “God” refer to “the father.” This prayer contains, in compressed form, a wealth of theology, but Paul’s point in quoting it here is to emphasize the practical outworking of creational monotheism. The One God made all things, so nothing is to be rejected if received with gratitude. He returns to the same point at the end of the long discussion where this time he quotes Psalm 24:1: “The earth and its fullness belong to the LORD.”36 This is not mere pragmatics (“It will be difficult to get people to stop eating idol meat”). It is rooted in the most basic Jewish theological assertion: there is one God, creator of all.
Of course, emphasizing that point does rather undermine the normal Jewish codes in which several varieties of meat are off limits even if they have never seen the inside of a pagan temple. That is part of the paradox of Paul’s position, a paradox that, we may suppose, the Jerusalem church never fully understood (and that certainly did not square with the letter they had sent out after the Jerusalem Conference). The central section of his argument here, in chapter 9, focuses on the fact that as an apostle he enjoys “freedom”—freedom to be married, to be paid for his work, and so on—but stresses that he has chosen, for the sake of the gospel, not to make use of these freedoms. In particular, and quite shocking to some in its implications:
I am indeed free from everyone; but I have enslaved myself to everyone, so that I can win all the more. I became like a Jew to the Jews, to win Jews. I became like someone under the law to the people who are under the law, even though I’m not myself under the law, so that I could win those under the law. To the lawless I became like someone lawless (even though I’m not lawless before God, but under the Messiah’s law), so that I could win the lawless. I became weak to the weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that in all ways I might save some. I do it all because of the gospel, so that I can be a partner in its benefits.37
Paul was not as fixated on the idea of “identity” as we are in our contemporary culture. But, if the question had been asked, this passage offers a sharp answer. “I became like a Jew.” “Why, Paul,” we want to say, “you are a Jew.” “Not in that sense,” he replies. “I am not ‘under the law.’” If he were, he could never have quoted Psalm 24:1 as meaning that all foods are now acceptable. He has a different identity, the messianic identity. He is “under the Messiah’s law”; he is “in the Messiah.” The Messiah’s people, as he says in a climactic passage in Galatians, have died; they have left behind the old identities and have come into a new identity, the messianic identity.38 That is part of why the gospel is “a scandal to Jews,” but of course it nonetheless makes sense only within a deeply Jewish, and now messianic, view of the world. And, charged with his specific responsibility, Paul is able, without compromising that messianic identity, to live alongside people of all sorts, sharing their customs while he is with them.
This must mean—this can only mean—that when Paul goes to a dinner with Jewish friends (or when he invites them to share his own meal), they will eat kosher food, and he will do the same. But it must mean—it can only mean—that when Paul goes to dinner with non-Jewish friends, he will eat whatever they put in front of him.39 What would then make the difference is “conscience”—not Paul’s, but that of anyone else who might be offended, who might be led back into idolatry.
This must have been a much harder path to tread than that sketched in the apostolic letter issued after the Jerusalem Conference. There, simple abstinence from all relevant foods was enjoined. But Paul has seen that this is not only unnecessary; it violates the foundational principles of Jewish belief itself. His own pragmatic solution must have seemed not just paradoxical, but perverse to some. Think, for instance, of a Jewish family in Corinth who had shared a meal with Paul and watched him keep all the Jewish customs, only to find out that the same week he had dined with a Gentile family and eaten what they were eating. One might imagine a certain surprise in the other direction too, though the Gentile family would most likely just shrug their shoulders and see no harm in it. But, once again, what Paul is doing in writing this letter is teaching the Corinthians to think as Messiah people; he is building on the foundation of Israel’s scriptures, interpreting them afresh in the light of the crucified and risen Messiah himself.
So the letter moves toward its powerful conclusion. Chapter 11 deals with problems at the family meal, the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist. Chapter 12 addresses the question of unity in the fellowship and the way in which the spirit gives to each member of “the Messiah’s body” different gifts to be used for the benefit of all. Chapter 14 applies this to the corporate worship of the church. And chapter 13, nested in between 12 and 14 like the soft middle movement of a powerful symphony, is Paul’s exquisite poem about love, agapē. Here too he is not just teaching them “ethics”; he is teaching them to think eschatologically:
We know, you see, in part;
We prophesy in part; but, with perfection,
The partial is abolished. As a child
I spoke, and thought, and reasoned like a child;
When I grew up, I threw off childish ways.
For at the moment all that we can see
Are puzzling reflections in a mirror;
Then, face to face. I know in part, for now;
But then I’ll know completely, through and through,
Even as I’m completely known. So, now,
Faith, hope and love remain, these three; and, of them
Love is the greatest.40
Love is not just a duty. Paul’s point is that love is the believer’s destiny. It is the reality that belongs to God’s future, glimpsed in the present like a puzzling reflection, but waiting there in full reality for the face-to-face future. And the point is that this future has come forward into the present time in the events involving Jesus and in the power of the spirit. That is why love matters for Paul—more even than “faith,” which many have seen as his central theme. Love is the present virtue in which believers anticipate, and practice, the life of the ultimate age to come.
That is why the final theological chapter in the letter, chapter 15, dealing with the resurrection of the body, comes where it does. It is not a detached discussion tacked onto the end of the letter dealing with a distinct topic unrelated to what has gone before. It is the center of everything. “If the Messiah wasn’t raised,” he declares, “your faith is pointless, and you are still in your sins.”41 Unless this is at the heart of who they are, he says (here is his own regular anxiety, now framed as a challenge to the Corinthians), their faith is in vain, “for nothing.” But it isn’t: the resurrection of Jesus means that a new world has opened up, so that, “in the Lord . . . the work you’re doing will not be worthless.”42 The resurrection is the ultimate answer to the nagging question of whether one’s life and work have been “in vain.”
With this, we uncover the roots of Paul’s entire public career. The chapter on resurrection is not simply the underlying reasoning behind the whole letter. It is basic to everything Paul believed. It is the reason he became an apostle in the first place. The Messiah’s resurrection has constituted him as the world’s true Lord, as already the world’s rightful ruler, and “He has to go on ruling, you see, until ‘he has put all his enemies under his feet.’”43 Victory has already been won over the dark powers of sin and death that have crippled the world and, with it, the humans who were supposed to be God’s image-bearers in the world. This victory will at last be completed when death itself is destroyed. For Paul, learning to be a Messiah person—learning to live within the great biblical story now culminating in Jesus and the spirit—was all about having the mind and heart, the imagination and understanding transformed, so that it made sense to live in this already/not-yet world.
This was not the easiest place to live, but it was certainly one of the most exhilarating. The Messiah has already been raised; all the Messiah’s people will be raised at his “royal arrival.”44 Christian living, loving, praying, celebrating, suffering, and not least the apostolic ministries that have nothing to do with social prestige or clever rhetoric—all this makes the sense it makes within this eschatological framework. That is the main thing Paul wants to tell the Corinthians. Sitting there in Ephesus, watching the gospel go to work in homes and shops, confronting the powers of the world and seeing magicians burn their books, Paul can sound confident. This is the future, and it works. What they do in the present, within God’s new world, is not in vain.
The closing greetings give notice of a new project (though Paul indicates that he has already broached the subject to the churches in Galatia, presumably on the journey described briefly in Acts 18:23). He had realized just how poor the Jerusalem church had become, and he had imagined to himself what an impact it would have if the churches of which Jerusalem had been so suspicious—those communities that were allowing Gentiles into full membership without circumcision—were to band together and send real and lasting financial help. This would take some organizing. But Paul clearly saw it as a sign and means of the unity of the Messiah’s people, which, with every passing day, had become more important to him. So he made his plans. He intended to travel through northern Greece and then to spend a good period of time with the Corinthians. It all made sense.
Until it all fell apart.
We do not know exactly when it was that Paul made the extra visit described in 2 Corinthians 2:1 (“I settled it in my mind,” he says there, “that I wouldn’t make you another sad visit”). He stayed in Ephesus for around two and a half years, probably from 53 to 56, and this visit would have been early on in that time, after the writing of 1 Corinthians itself. Nor do we know what precisely happened on that occasion. He had in any case changed his mind, at some point, from the plans he had sketched in 1 Corinthians 16:5–7, where he had been intending to go from Ephesus to northern Greece and then down to Corinth before moving on once more. Then, later, he had had a different idea; he would sail across to Corinth from Ephesus and then go north to Macedonia, before returning from Macedonia to Corinth again and having them send him on his way to Jerusalem.45 But when he got to Corinth something happened. We do not know what.
Some have speculated that one or more members or leaders in the church opposed Paul to his face, perhaps with insults and mockery. Others have suggested that there were financial irregularities in connection with the early stages of the projected collection, and that when Paul confronted the offenders, they denied it all. There may well have been other problems as well, perhaps moral failures or lapses in the church that Paul tried to put right and was rebuffed. (The references to an offender who has “caused sadness” in 2 Corinthians 2:7–8 might refer to the incestuous man of 1 Corinthians 5, but the two pictures do not quite fit, and there is every reason to suppose that this was not the only case of immorality or other inappropriate behavior in the church.) Some in Corinth seem to have declared that he was unreliable, making different plans every other day like a fool who can’t make his mind up.46
Paul, finding that his normal exercise of power seemed to have deserted him, was shocked and dismayed. Why could he not simply confront the problem and the problem people, as he had done with the magician in Paphos or the slave girl in Philippi? What had happened to the power, the power of which he had boasted in 1 Corinthians 4? He abandoned his plan to go on to Macedonia. He went back to Ephesus with his tail between his legs. We imagine him on the return voyage across the Aegean, pacing the deck, staring at the islands, asking himself, asking God, asking the Lord whom he loved, where it had all gone wrong. What had happened to the power? What was the point of having his name up in lights in Ephesus if his own people in Corinth were turning against him?
Returning to Ephesus was not going to be easy either. Paul was now in a very different frame of mind, dazed and upset by the way his beloved Corinthians had treated him. He wrote them a “painful letter,” which, like the first letter referred to in 1 Corinthians 5, we do not possess. He gave it to Titus, sent him off, and awaited developments.
This is not a good place for a pastor to be. I was once lecturing in the United States—on 2 Corinthians, as it happens—when I received word that members of the community for which I was responsible were in deep disarray over a moral issue that had arisen in my absence. Even in a world with telephones (this was before the days of e-mail), one cannot even begin to put things right. You simply have to pray and agonize, and pray some more, and be patient in the hope that the spirit will be at work. Anyone who ever supposed that Paul sailed through his apostolic work carrying all before him in a blaze of glory can never have studied 2 Corinthians.
* * *
It was at this point that the enemy struck, and struck hard. I explained earlier why I am convinced that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus. Some suggest that this occurred at least twice. We know enough about the sort of things that happened to Paul from one place to another to guess what may have landed him in jail. In Philippi it was an exorcism that ruined a business whose owners said that Paul was teaching Jewish customs illegal for Romans, in other words, a spiritual battle with economic consequences framed as a religious problem with political implications. In Thessalonica he was accused of turning the world upside down by saying that there was “another king.” In one place after another, Jewish horror at the message of a crucified Messiah—and, we may suppose, at the teaching that this Messiah was now welcoming non-Jews without circumcision—led to opposition, which was sometimes augmented by local hostility from non-Jews who may have had no special sympathy for the Jewish people, but who saw Paul as a social and cultural threat. Sometimes, in other words, opposition was aroused because pagans saw him as a dangerous kind of Jew; sometimes it was because Jews saw him as flirting dangerously with paganism. The irony, surely not wasted on Paul, did not make it any easier for him when facing violence.
Now, in Ephesus, matters came to a head. The pattern would seem familiar. Though, as we saw, the city boasted fine new premises for the imperial cult, the long-standing local devotion to the goddess Artemis was famous throughout the known world, focused not least on a splendid statue of the goddess that, some claimed, had been sent from heaven, a gift from Zeus himself. This statue was on display in the massive Temple of Artemis, where the all-female cult of the goddess wielded considerable power in the city and beyond. Artemis was a fertility goddess whose many-breasted silver statues were themselves famous. (They still are; the last time I was in Ephesus the local tourist shops were full of them.)
But what the modern tourist sees as a souvenir, the ancient citizen saw as an object of worship. When people placed one of these silver statues in their home, in its own little shrine, they were assured that the goddess was there with them, blessing their family and their fields, their business and their livestock. They prayed to her, greeted her when they went in and out, placed fresh flowers in front of her, and perhaps lit a candle or two. She looked after them. So the local silversmiths’ guild had the same problem with Paul as the slave-owners did in Philippi, only much more so. There, Paul had simply exorcised one slave girl. Here, he was denouncing the great goddess herself, telling people “that gods made with hands are not gods after all.”47 If even the magicians were burning their books, then it wasn’t surprising that the local trade in silver Artemis shrines was in a slump as well.
Here, just as in Thessalonica or Athens, the primary impact of Paul’s message was not “how to be saved,” though that was part of it, nor even “the Messiah died for your sins,” though that remained central. The announcement of a Messiah itself only made sense within the larger picture of the One God; it was an essentially Jewish message confronting a world full of fake gods with the news of a living one.
The silversmiths, led by one Demetrius, stirred up civic pride: “Who does this fellow think he is, coming here to tell us that our great goddess doesn’t exist?” A theological proclamation had produced economic challenges, which were then interpreted as civic insults. The silversmiths started to chant their slogan and soon the whole city took it up: “Great is Ephesian Artemis! Great is Ephesian Artemis!”48 A riot had begun. The crowd rushed into the vast amphitheater, whose magnificent acoustics would amplify the chant. Imagine a huge football crowd, angry at a wrongly awarded penalty, setting up a rhythmic shout that became louder and louder. This is one of Luke’s great set-piece scenes; it would go well in a movie, though we still await the director who will do justice to Paul. It might have been fun if you were one of the crowd, shouting in unison with fifty thousand others, with gestures to match. It wouldn’t have been much fun if you were the person it was all aimed at.
The person it was all aimed at, Paul himself, was eager to go in and speak to the people (of course!). A surge of adrenaline, after the sad and worrying visit to Corinth, might do him a powerful lot of good. But some of the local magistrates, friendly to Paul, sent word that he shouldn’t risk going to the theater, and in any case his friends refused to let him. (Did they tie him up, as the sailors did with Odysseus? Did they lock him in his own shop? How did he cope with his frustration—he, the speaker, the one who had lectured the graybeards in Athens, the one who had told the magistrates in Philippi what they could do with their get-out-of-jail-free card?) The crowd did manage to grab hold of two of Paul’s friends, the Macedonians Gaius and Aristarchus. They must have thought their last hour had come. Trampling by the mob would perhaps be the kindest fate they might expect.
Then comes the revealing moment that brings the whole problem into sharp focus. The theological challenge, the economic problem, and the wounded civic pride rush together and show, in a flash, the ugly face of ethnic prejudice: “It’s the Jews!” A Jewish group pushes forward a representative, one Alexander; perhaps he is hoping to explain to the crowd that the local Jewish community has nothing to do with this heretic Paul and his friends. If that is the intention, it backfires. The mob realizes that he is a Jew. The whisper goes around. Then the volume of the chant increases once more, going on for two straight hours: “Great is Ephesian Artemis!” It isn’t difficult to imagine that being chanted, even in English, but when we put it back into Greek we can envisage a rhythm being set up: Megalē hē Artemis Ephesiōn! Megalē hē Artemis Ephesiōn! Emphasize every other syllable, starting on the first, and imagine tens of thousands chanting it together, punching the air in time.
We imagine Paul, restrained by his friends, listening to the chant. He would be praying, of course. If you are the sort of person who sings hymns in prison at midnight, you are certainly the sort of person who goes on praying when there’s a deafening riot happening down the road, especially when it’s all your fault. As his surge of excitement ebbs away, he is more drained than before. Has it all been for nothing? Is the message of the One God and his son going to remain forever a small, specialized option for a subgroup of the Jewish people, the followers of Messiah Jesus? Suppose he had managed to give his friends the slip and get into the theater after all to address the huge crowd. Would he have been able to pull it off? Would he have found words? Would the spirit have given him power? Would he have been able to speak freshly and clearly about Jesus, the true Lord? It hadn’t happened during his recent visit to Corinth. Suppose it didn’t happen here? Suppose it never happened again? And always the nagging question: Has it all been in vain?
Luke does his best to play the whole thing down. Most of the crowd, he says, had no idea why they had all come together in the first place. In any case, the local magistrate, perhaps surprisingly, managed to calm things down. Perhaps after two hours the crowds were ready for a break. As with the other magistrates and local officials who feature in Luke’s account, this one basically says what the writer wants his readers to know, that despite the noisy riot, Paul and his companions had not in fact broken any laws. If they had, people could bring charges against them in the normal way. Luke must have known that it wasn’t as easy as that. The perfect storm of economic disruption, religious challenge, civic pride, and ethnic prejudice could hardly be contained by Roman provincial legislation.
I suspect that Luke highlights the riot, which he can interpret as a lot of fuss about nothing, partly because it would be well known and people might ask about it (“Didn’t I hear that he caused a riot in Ephesus, of all places?”) and partly because it would distract attention from what happened next. This is where the biographer enters a dark tunnel, the tunnel between the cheerful Paul of 1 Corinthians and the crushed, battered Paul of 2 Corinthians; the tunnel between the Paul who believes that Jesus will come back during his lifetime and the Paul who now expects to die in advance of that glorious moment; the black night when, ahead of any actual judicial decision, Paul heard, deep within himself, the sentence of death. We have no idea what precisely occurred. But he got to the point where he despaired of life itself.
So what happened? There were some parallels with the problem in Philippi. But there it had been easy enough; after a night in the cells, he pointed out that he was a Roman citizen and had been beaten and imprisoned without a charge or a trial. Things may have been more complicated this time, and perhaps he decided that to play the “citizen” card again might be unwise. Depending on the charge, it might not have been enough to get him off. So he allowed the tide of hostility to do its worst.
It looks, in short, as though someone managed to succeed where Demetrius the silversmith had failed. Or perhaps Demetrius and his colleagues took the hint from the town clerk and manufactured a charge against Paul, suggesting that he was in fact guilty of blasphemy against Artemis or her great shrine. (Perhaps Paul, hearing tales of a statue falling from heaven, had poured scorn on such ideas.) Paul’s robust monotheism had led him to sail close to the wind in Athens. Maybe this time he had taken his hand off the tiller at the crucial moment as the wind shifted.
And perhaps some people to whom he looked for support let him down. The hints in the letter to Philippi (written most likely toward the end of this imprisonment) suggest that it wasn’t just pagan hostility that landed Paul where he was. Local people he had considered friends turned out in reality to be enemies, or at least rivals. One way or another, Paul found himself in prison, on a charge that might very easily have meant death. Like Samson shorn of his hair, he was suddenly powerless. The riot was just the noisy prelude. The dark powers had other ways of striking back at someone who dared to encroach on their territory with the essentially Jewish message of the One God redefined around the shocking message of the crucified and risen Messiah.
As we have seen, prisons in the Roman world were not normally used as a place of punishment, but only as a remand center to keep people who were coming up to trial—though, since that might well take some time, it would have had the effect of punishment in advance of sentence. No effort was made to look after prisoners. If they wanted food, friends would have to bring it. Later, by the time we find him writing letters, Paul clearly had some friends attending to his needs—and at least one friend who was thrown into prison with him—but it is quite possible that for some time after his arrest his friends may not even have known where he was or may have been too frightened, granted what had happened, to be associated with him.
It doesn’t take too long with little food and water for the spirits to sink. Paul and Silas had sung hymns in the jail at Philippi, precipitating the earthquake and their sudden change of fortune. I presume that Paul prayed and perhaps sang in the jail in Ephesus. Some of the ancient psalms fit his situation exactly. Some of the early Christian poems, not least those celebrating Jesus as Lord, would have been in his head and his heart as well. But when, after a few days and then a few weeks, nothing much seemed to have happened, it would have been easy for him to get to the point we noticed in 2 Corinthians 4, where in retrospect it seemed as though he was crushed, abandoned, destroyed, and at his wits’ end. No earthquake came to his rescue. He may well have been subject to regular beatings. He may have been cold, perhaps ill. All this is of course speculation, but we have to give some sort of account for what he says as he looks back to this dark moment as well as the other evidence that locates at least some of the Prison Letters in just this period.
When he mentions, in greeting Prisca and Aquila, who have now moved back to Rome, that they “put their lives on the line” for him, we have no means of knowing what the emergency was or how they risked their lives on his behalf.49 The chances are that it was something to do with the terrible plight into which Paul had now fallen. Perhaps they were the ones who eventually plucked up courage, said their prayers, and went to the magistrates to testify that their star prisoner was being held on a fraudulent charge. That might have been enough to get them arrested as accomplices, but perhaps they did it anyway.
How long this shocking period lasted we do not know. As we saw, Paul was in Ephesus most likely from middle to late 53 till early or middle 56, apart from the short and highly unsatisfactory visit to Corinth. At some point after that visit he had sent Titus to Corinth with the “painful letter,” but we cannot be sure when that was done and hence how long there might have been between that moment and his eventual release and subsequent travels. There is easily enough time in that schedule to fit in all the activities described in Acts, including the riot plus at least one significant spell in jail. In any case, as we try to assess Paul’s mental and emotional state, we might reflect that it would have taken only a few weeks of prison, where he was subjected to various kinds of mental and physical torture, including having no idea how long he would be there, to get him into the condition he describes in 2 Corinthians 1.
For reasons that will become clear, I think Paul interpreted his imprisonment as the revenge of the powers into whose world he had been making inroads. He was used to confronting synagogue authorities; he knew how to deal with Roman magistrates. He knew Jewish law and Roman law just as well as they did. He was easily able to turn a phrase and win a rhetorical point and perhaps a legal one too. But in this case he had sensed that something else was going on. The forces ranged against him were not simply human. He had stirred up a hornets’ nest with his powerful ministry in Ephesus. Think of all those magic books going up in smoke. Just as Jesus warned his followers not to fear those who could merely kill the body, but rather to fear the dark power that could wreak a more terrible destruction,50 so Paul was learning that human authorities, though important in themselves, might sometimes be acting merely as a front for other powers that would attack through them. And, though he had taught, preached, and celebrated the fact that in his death Jesus had defeated all the dark powers and that in his resurrection he had launched God’s new creation, that dogged belief, seen from the cold and smelly depths of a prison, with no light at night, flies and vermin for company, and little food in his stomach, must have been tested to the uttermost and beyond. Hence the despair.
Looking back with hindsight after his release, he explained to the Corinthians that this was to make him trust in the God who raises the dead.51 Not, of course, that he had not believed and trusted this God before, but now it was put on the line in a whole new way. So how did he get back to that point of trust? Did he just go on gritting his teeth and saying, “I must trust the God who raises the dead” until it happened? I doubt it. That kind of so-called positive thinking was not Paul’s style. I think something more specific was at work.
We noticed, as Paul was on his way back to Jerusalem and then Antioch after his early time in Corinth, that his praying was rooted in the Jewish traditions of prayer but now focused on Jesus. We saw this as he breathtakingly adapted one of the main Jewish daily prayers, the Shema, so that it now expressed loyalty to the “father” and the “Lord” together.52 So if Paul had these prayers forming and taking shape in his mind and if, as we know, he had an enviable gift for vivid and fluent language, we might not be surprised if his prayers from the depths of despair began to develop from biblical roots into Jesus-shaped expressions, and from Jesus-shaped expressions into more formal and shaped invocations and celebrations that, recalling the ancient biblical celebrations of God’s sovereignty and victory, now placed the sovereign lordship of Jesus himself at the center.
I think that, like a plant in harsh winter, Paul in prison was forced to put his roots down even deeper than he had yet gone into the biblical tradition, and deeper again, still within that tradition, into the meaning of Jesus and his death. The roots slowly found moisture. From the depth of that dark soil, way below previous consciousness, he drew hope and new possibilities. The fruit of that labor remains to this day near the heart of Christian belief.
I think, in other words, not only that the four Prison Letters were all written from Ephesus, but that the writing of them grew directly out of the struggle Paul had experienced. Their vision of Jesus the Messiah, sovereign over all the powers of the world, was Paul’s hard-won affirmation of the truth he had believed all along but had never before had to explore in such unpromising circumstances. And I think that as he pondered, prayed, and heard in his mind’s ear phrases and biblical echoes turning into poetry, he began to long once more to share this vision with those around him. And with that longing and that prayer he found he was, at an even deeper level than he had known before, trusting in the God who raises the dead. The poems of Philippians 2 and Colossians 1 and the sustained liturgical drama of the first three chapters of Ephesians all bear witness to this celebration—not of Paul’s faith or stamina, but of the victory of God and the lordship of Jesus. As he says in 2 Corinthians 4, right after a passage that belongs very closely with the poem in Colossians 1, “We have this treasure in earthenware pots, so that the extraordinary quality of the power may belong to God, not to us.”53 That, I think, was what was going on while Paul was in prison.
Some have suggested that this whole experience was in effect a “second conversion,” in which Paul finally learned the humility that had previously eluded him. I do not subscribe to this view. Things are more complicated, and indeed more interesting, than that. But I do think that his long-held practice of Jesus-focused prayer, taking the ancient scriptural poems and patterns and finding Jesus at their heart, was crucial in helping him to find his way out of despair and back into hope. Christology and therapy go well together, even if, like Jacob, an apostle may limp, in style and perhaps also in body, after the dark night spent wrestling with the angel.