PAUL’S LETTERS GIVE us a few tantalizing glimpses of his life, and this is one of the strangest:
When God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, was pleased to unveil his son in me, so that I might announce the good news about him among the nations—immediately I did not confer with flesh and blood. Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me. No, I went away to Arabia, and afterward returned to Damascus.1
As we shall see later, Paul is writing this in his own defense. He has apparently been accused of getting his “gospel” secondhand from the Jerusalem apostles. His opponents are therefore going over his head and appealing to Peter, James, and the rest, like someone objecting to the way a band was playing a cover from an old Beatles song and phoning up Paul McCartney himself to check on how it should really be played. Paul is therefore insisting that his message was his own; he had gotten it from Jesus himself, not from other members of the movement. It had come, he says, “through an unveiling of Jesus the Messiah.”2 “The message” in question was not, after all, a theory, a new bit of teaching, or even details of how someone might be “saved.” “The message” was the news about Jesus himself: he was raised from the dead, he was therefore Israel’s Messiah, he was the Lord of the world. All of that was “given” to Paul on the road to Damascus. Knowing Israel’s scriptures as he did, he didn’t need anybody else to explain what it all meant. Start with the scriptural story, place the crucified and risen Jesus at the climax of the story, and the meaning, though unexpected and shocking, is not in doubt. That is the point he is making.
So why Arabia? The clunky, obvious, straightforward answer is that Paul was eager to tell people about Jesus and that Arabia was where he went on his first “evangelistic mission.” Scholars and preachers have written and spoken about “Paul’s missionary activity in Arabia” as though this interpretation was a done deal. But, as often, the obvious answer is almost certainly wrong. And, again as so often, the clue to what Paul means is found in the scriptures he knew so well.
We recall that the young Saul of Tarsus was, in the technical Jewish sense, “extremely zealous for his ancestral traditions”—a line that comes in Galatians immediately before the passage quoted above. We recall, further, that in the Jewish traditions of Saul’s day there were two outstanding ancient heroes of “zeal”: Phinehas, the young priest who had speared the Israelite man and the Moabite woman, and Elijah, who had tricked and killed the worshippers of the fertility god Baal. Phinehas is important for our understanding of Paul, for reasons to which we will return. Elijah is important for Paul not least because he gives us the clue to the journey to “Arabia.”
The word “Arabia” in the first century covered a wide range of territory. It could refer to the ancient Nabataean kingdom, which stretched from a little to the east of Syria—close to Damascus, in fact—southward through what is now Jordan and beyond to include the Sinai Peninsula. But one of the only other references to it in the New Testament—indeed, in the same letter, Paul’s letter to the Galatians—gives us a far more specific location: Mt. Sinai, in the peninsula to the south of the Holy Land and to the east of Egypt. Mt. Sinai was where God had come down in fire and had given Moses the Torah; it was the place of revelation, the place of law, the place where the covenant between God and Israel, established earlier with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was solemnly ratified. Sinai, the great mountain in Arabia, was, in that sense, the place of beginnings. It was the place to which subsequent generations looked back as the starting point of the long and checkered relationship, the often shaky marriage, between this strange, rescuing, demanding God and his willful, stiff-necked people. Sinai was where Elijah had gone when it all went horribly wrong. Sinai was where Saul of Tarsus went—for the same reason.
The echoes of the Elijah story are small but significant. After his zealous victory over the prophets of Baal, Elijah is confronted by a messenger from Queen Jezebel, herself an enthusiastic backer of the Baal cult. The royal threat is blunt; Elijah’s life is on the line. Zeal turns to panic. He runs away, all the way to Mt. Horeb.3 (Horeb is either another name for Sinai or the name of a mountain close by from which the Israelites set off to Canaan.) There he complains to God that he has been “very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts” (in other words, he has killed the prophets of Baal), but that it hasn’t worked. The people are still rebelling, and he alone is left, the last loyalist. He repeats this complaint a second time after a powerful revelation of wind, earthquake, and fire had been followed by “a sound of sheer silence,” one modern translation of a Hebrew phrase that in the King James Version appears as “a still small voice.”4
When God finally answers, Elijah is told, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus,” where he is to anoint new kings for Syria and Israel and a new prophet, Elisha, to take his own place.5 They will do what needs to be done to remove Baal worship from the land. What’s more, God declares to the puzzled prophet, “I will leave seven thousand in Israel” who will stay loyal.6 (Paul quotes that passage in another letter, likening himself to Elijah as the focal point of a “remnant.”)7
Already those with ears to hear may catch echoes of Paul in Galatians. He has been “exceedingly zealous for the ancestral traditions,” leading him to use violence in trying to stamp out heresy. Paul says that he “went away to Arabia”—just as Elijah did—and “afterward returned to Damascus”—again just like Elijah. So what is this all about? Why did Saul go to Arabia?
The parallel with Elijah—the verbal echoes are so close, and the reflection on “zeal” so exact, that Paul must have intended them—indicates that he, like Elijah, made a pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai in order to go back to the place where the covenant was ratified. He wanted to go and present himself before the One God, to explain that he had been “exceedingly zealous,” but that his vision, his entire worldview, had been turned on its head. And he received his instructions: “Go back and announce the new king.”
The picture in Acts, it turns out, is oversimplified. (The longest histories ever written leave out far more than they put in, and Luke wants his book to fit onto a single scroll.) In Acts 9:20–28, Paul announces Jesus in the synagogue in Damascus until a plot against his life forces him to leave town and go back to Jerusalem. Somewhere in that story there must be room for a desert pilgrimage, after which Paul “returned again to Damascus.”
But the point is far more significant for a biographer than simply sorting out a potential conflict between two sources. We discover from the Arabia journey something about Paul’s own self-awareness, including at that point a perhaps welcome note of self-doubt in the midst of the zeal—the zeal of the persecutor and then the zeal of the proclaimer. Whether on foot or by donkey, one does not go for several days into a desert just to find a quiet spot to pray. Saul wanted to be clear that the shocking new thing that had been revealed to him really was the fulfillment, the surprising but ultimately satisfying goal, of the ancient purposes of the One God, purposes that had been set out particularly in the law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. He wanted to stay loyal. Saul was starting to come to terms with the possibility that, if the divine purposes had been completed in Jesus, it might mean that a whole new phase of the divine plan, hitherto barely suspected, had now been launched, a phase in which the Torah itself would be seen in a whole new light. And Saul, like Elijah, was told to go back and get on with the job. Elijah was to anoint a couple of new kings and a prophet as well. Saul of Tarsus was to go back and get on with the prophetic task of announcing that Jesus of Nazareth was the true anointed king, the Messiah, the world’s rightful sovereign.
So Saul went back to Damascus, apparently confirmed in his understanding of himself as a prophet fulfilling the ancient role of announcing God’s truth and God’s anointed king to Israel and the nations. If he has not usually been seen this way, that may be because we have not paid sufficient attention to the scriptural echoes he sets up in many places in his writings, but particularly in the very passage we have been studying. When he speaks of God setting him apart from his mother’s womb, he is deliberately echoing the call of Jeremiah.8 When he speaks of God “unveiling” his son in him, he is using the language of Jewish mystics and seers who spoke of that “unveiling” or “revelation” as constituting a divine commissioning.9 When he says that the Jerusalem church later “glorified God because of me,” he is echoing Isaiah, from one of his all-time favorite chapters, and claiming for himself the prophetic role of the “servant.”10 He continues to echo that chapter in Galatians 2 when he speaks of wondering whether he “might be running, or might have run, to no good effect.”11
Paul, in other words, is not only making it clear in Galatians 1–2 that his “gospel” was given to him directly, not acquired secondhand through the Jerusalem leaders. He is also making it clear that his call and commissioning have placed him in the ancient prophetic tradition, whether of Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Elijah himself. His opponents are trying to go over his head in their appeal to Jerusalem, but he is going over everybody else’s head by appealing to Jesus himself and to the scriptures as foreshadowing not only the gospel, but the prophetic ministry that he, Paul, has now received.
This, then, is why he went to Arabia: to hand in his former commission and to acquire a new one. His loyalty to the One God of Israel was as firm as it had always been. Since many Christians, and many Jews too, have assumed otherwise (suggesting, for instance, that Paul the Apostle was a traitor to the Jewish world or that he had never really understood it in the first place), the point is worth stressing before we even approach the main work of Paul’s life.
As we try to figure out what exactly happened next, our sources present us with a confused flurry of incidents, ending with Saul paying a brief visit to Jerusalem before going back home to Tarsus. Saul’s time in Damascus, including his trip to Arabia and back, probably took three years, most likely from AD 33 to 36. (Questions of chronology always get complicated, but the main lines are clear.) Thus, though the alarm and anger at his initial proclamation of Jesus may have been real enough, it seems to have taken a little while before this looked like it was turning violent. Only when the threats became severe, with his life in danger not only from the local Jewish population but from a local official as well, did Paul make his famous escape, avoiding the guards on the city gates by being let down the city wall in a basket.
Many years later Paul would use that incident to good rhetorical effect. In his second letter to Corinth, he makes an ironic list of all his “achievements,” and the climax of it all is the time when he had to run away!12 It was the shape of things to come. His career, did he but know it, lay before him in outline in this one incident. Announce Jesus as Messiah, and opposition will arise from Jews, offended at the idea of a crucified Messiah, and from pagan authorities, fearing a breach of the peace. Perhaps too from more perceptive pagans, who might glimpse the (scriptural) point that Israel’s Messiah was not to be a local or tribal chief only. He would be the master of the entire world.
In any case, to Jerusalem Paul then goes, most likely in AD 36 or 37. Writing to the Galatians over a decade later, he explains that he stayed with Peter (whom he calls by his Aramaic name, Cephas) for two weeks, seeing no other Jesus-followers except James, the Lord’s brother, already acknowledged as the central figure in the new movement. The meeting was set up by Barnabas; the Jerusalem leaders were understandably suspicious, but Barnabas assured them that Saul really had seen Jesus on the road, and that in Damascus he really had been boldly announcing Jesus as Messiah. So far, one might think, so good.
But the pattern begins to kick in again. Saul, knowing his scriptures inside out and possessed of a quick mind and a ready tongue, is bound to get into public debate, and public debate is bound to get him into trouble. And trouble, coming just a few years after the stoning of Stephen, is something the Jesus believers can do without. So they escort Paul down to the sea at Caesarea and put him on a boat back home to southern Turkey.
It is hard to know what the Jerusalem community thought would happen next. They were in dangerous, unmapped new territory. Saul of Tarsus, still on fire with having seen the risen Lord, eager to explain from the scriptures what it was all about, apparently careless of the hornets’ nests he was stirring up, was one problem too many. “Let him go back to Tarsus,” they probably thought. “They like good talkers there. And besides, that’s where he came from in the first place . . .”
* * *
There follows a decade or so of silence: roughly 36 to 46 (like most dates in ancient history, including most of the ones in this book, we are dealing in approximations, with a year or so to be allowed either way). Faced with a silent decade at a formative period of someone’s life, a novelist might have a field day; we must be more restrained. But if we send cautious historical and biographical probes into this blank period from either end, we may find at least three themes that need to be explored.
First, and most straightforwardly, we must assume that Saul set to and earned his own living in the family business. As we saw earlier, he was a tentmaker, which involved general skill with leather and fabric of various kinds as well as the specific manufacture of actual tents, awnings, and so on. Jewish teachers did not expect to make a living from their teaching; Saul, as a strange new type of Jewish teacher, would not suppose that going about announcing the crucified Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Lord would earn him a living. His craft was hard physical labor, and his subsequent apostolic letters show that the apostle took a pride in supporting himself by manual work. Saul, by now perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, would be living and working alongside his family and in close contact with the rich mixture of people who passed through the great city of Tarsus.
Importantly for Saul’s later work, tentmaking was a portable trade. As long as he had his working tools, he could set up shop in any town, buying his raw materials locally and offering his regular products for sale. When people in churches today discuss Paul and his letters, they often think only of the man of ideas who dealt with lofty and difficult concepts, implying a world of libraries, seminar rooms, or at least the minister’s study for quiet sermon preparation. We easily forget that the author of these letters spent most of his waking hours with his sleeves rolled up, doing hard physical work in a hot climate, and that perhaps two-thirds of the conversations he had with people about Jesus and the gospel were conducted not in a place of worship or study, not even in a private home, but in a small, cramped workshop. Saul had his feet on the ground, and his hands were hardened with labor. But his head still buzzed with scripture and the news about Jesus. His heart was still zealous, loyal to the One God.
The second thing we can be sure of is that he prayed, he studied, and he figured out all sorts of things. Faced with his letters (written a decade and more later), dense as they are with concentrated argument, we cannot imagine that when he wrote them he was breaking entirely new ground. He could no doubt improvise on the spot, but in his mature thought he gives every evidence of long pondering. Saul spent a silent decade deepening the well of scriptural reflection from which he would thereafter draw the water he needed.
During this period he had one particular experience from which, in retrospect, he learned one particular lesson. Writing to Corinth in AD 56, he seems to be mocking the Corinthians’ desire for spectacular “spiritual” events. “All right,” he says, “if I must, I must. Someone I know in the Messiah . . .”—he won’t even say it’s himself, though this becomes clear. “This ‘Someone’ was snatched up to the third heaven.” (Since heaven was often subdivided into seven, this itself might have seemed a bit of a letdown.) “I don’t know,” he says, “whether this was a bodily experience or one of those out-of-body things; only God knows that. And this ‘Someone’ heard . . . but actually I’m not allowed to tell you what was heard. Oh, and the most important thing about it all was that I was given ‘a thorn in my flesh,’ a satanic messenger, to stop me from getting too exalted with it all.” The underlying point in the letter is clear: “You shouldn’t be asking this kind of question and trying to rank me with other people and their ‘experiences.’ If you do, I will only say that yes, these things have happened, but that the real point was that I had to learn humility, to understand that ‘when I’m weak, then I am strong.’”13
The underlying point for our understanding of Paul is that he continued the practices of prayer and meditation within which, I have suggested, his Damascus Road vision took place and that sometimes these led to almost equally spectacular results. Perhaps this may have happened to comfort and reassure him at a moment when things were particularly difficult back home in Tarsus. Perhaps the “thorn in the flesh” was the continuing resistance to the gospel on the part of people he loved dearly, though speculation has been rife as to whether it was a bodily ailment, a recurring temptation, or even the recurring nightmare of the stoning of Stephen, in which he himself is standing by giving his grim approval. The point leads to an ironic climax. He prayed three times about this, he says to the Corinthians, asking that it be removed. The Corinthians are no doubt expecting him to log this as a great “answer to prayer” of which they could be proud. Instead, he reveals that the answer was No.
This is the only window we have on the silent years at Tarsus, and Paul seems to have been determined that they would remain more or less silent. “Yes, something happened, but that’s not the point.” But here too we can see his mind at work: praying, puzzling things out, pondering.
We can infer quite a bit about his pondering. From everything we know of Saul of Tarsus, on the one hand, and Paul the Apostle, on the other, we cannot imagine that in this early period he ever stopped thinking things through, soaking that reflection in Jewish-style prayer, focusing it on Israel’s scriptures, and, like many other devout diaspora Jews, engaging with the culture all around him. He searched the ancient scriptures for all he was worth and argued about them in the synagogue and at the workbench with his friends and family. He thought his way backward from the “new fact,” as he saw it, of a crucified and risen Messiah, back into the world of Israel’s scriptures and traditions, back into the long, dark, and often twisted narrative of Israel that had been groping its way forward to that point without glimpsing its true goal. He reread Genesis. He reread Exodus. He reread the whole Torah, and the prophets, especially Isaiah, and he went on praying the Psalms. With hindsight (and, he would have insisted, with a fresh wisdom that came with the spirit), he saw Jesus all over the place—not arbitrarily, not in fanciful allegory (the only time he says he’s using allegory, he is probably teasing those for whom that was a method of first resort), but as the infinite point where the parallel lines of Israel’s long narrative would eventually meet.
These parallel lines are central to his mature thinking and foundational for what would later become Christian theology. First, there was Israel’s own story. According to the prophets, Israel’s story (from Abraham all the way through to exile and beyond) would narrow down to a remnant, but would also focus on a coming king, so that the king himself would be Israel personified. But second, there was God’s story—the story of what the One God had done, was doing, and had promised to do. (The idea of God having a story, making plans, and putting them into operation seems to be part of what Jews and early Christians meant by speaking of this God as being “alive.”) And this story too would likewise narrow down to one point. Israel’s God would return, visibly and powerfully, to rescue his people from their ultimate enemies and to set up a kingdom that could not be shaken. “All God’s promises,” Paul would later write, “find their yes in him.”14
Saul came to see that these two stories, Israel’s story and God’s story, had, shockingly, merged together. I think this conviction must date to the silent decade in Tarsus, if not earlier. Both narratives were fulfilled in Jesus. Jesus was Israel personified; but he was also Israel’s God in person. The great biblical stories of creation and new creation, Exodus and new Exodus, Temple and new Temple all came rushing together at the same point. This was not a new religion. This was a new world—and it was the new world that the One God had always promised, the new world for which Israel had prayed night and day. If you had asked Saul of Tarsus, before the meeting on the road to Damascus, where Israel’s story and God’s story came together, the two natural answers would have been Temple (the place at the heart of the promised land where God had promised to live) and Torah (the word of God spoken into, and determinative of, Israel’s national life). The Temple indicated that Israel’s God desired to live in the midst of his people; the Torah, that he would address his people with his life-transforming word. Saul now came to see that both these answers pointed beyond themselves to Jesus and of course to the spirit.
In this new world (this too became axiomatic for Paul’s mature thought and thematic for his public career) it mattered that Israel’s God was indeed the One God of the whole world. A tight-knit orthodox Jewish community in the midst of a bustling, philosophically minded pagan city must have been a fascinating place to start thinking all this through. At first glance, Israel’s scriptures might seem to demand that Israel stay separate from the nations, the goyim. The pagans, like the Moabite women sent to seduce the Israelites in the desert, would lead them astray. They should stay separate. But look again, and you will see, not least in the Psalms, not least in the royal predictions of Psalms and prophets alike, that when Israel’s true king arrives, he will be the king not only of Israel, but also of the whole world. Saul, in Tarsus, must have reflected on what it would mean for Psalm 2 to come true, where the One God says to the true king:
You are my son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron,
And dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.15
This psalm echoes the promises to Abraham, promises about an “inheritance” and a “possession” that would consist of the land of Canaan. But the promises have been globalized. They now extend to the whole world. They say, in effect, that the promises of the “holy land” were a foretaste, a signpost, to a larger reality. The God of Abraham was the Creator, who called Abraham—and then, much later, David—so that through their long story, replete as it was with disasters and false starts, he would bring his restorative purposes to bear on the whole world.
That, indeed, seems to be the message of another psalm:
God is king over the nations;
God sits on his holy throne.
The princes of the peoples gather
as the people of the God of Abraham.
For the shields of the earth belong to God;
he is highly exalted.16
Put those psalms together with others such as Psalm 72 (“May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth”17), dip them in the prophetic scriptures like Isaiah 11 (the “shoot from the stump of Jesse,” that is, David, will inaugurate the new creation of justice and peace), and you have a composite picture of the hope of Israel: hope for a new world, not just a rescued or renewed people, and hope for a coming king through whose rule it would come about. Put all that into the praying mind of Saul of Tarsus, who is sensing a new energy transforming and redirecting his earlier “zeal,” and what do you get? One could not sing those and the other psalms in a Jewish community in a city like Tarsus without wondering what it might mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus was the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken. How would that work out? What would it look like in practice?
Not far behind that, what did it mean that the promises to Abraham had been universalized? What would a worldwide Abrahamic family consist of? How, so to speak, might it work? These are the questions that underlie much of Paul’s mature writing. We cannot imagine that he was not puzzling them out through the long, silent years in Tarsus.
We glimpse, then, Saul at the workbench; Saul praying and thinking; and, third, Saul listening to the ideas all around him, in the philosophical and political as well as religious cultures of cosmopolitan Tarsus. He would be taking it all in, not simply as further evidence of pagan folly (though there would be plenty of that), but as signs that the One God, the creator of all, was at work in the world and in human lives, even if those lives and that wider world were twisted and flawed through the worship of other gods. Tarsus, as we have said, was full of talk, philosophical talk, speculation, logic, wise and not so wise advice about life, death, the gods, virtue, the way to an untroubled existence. Philosophy wasn’t just for a small wealthy class, though there were schools where one could study Plato, Aristotle, and the various writers who had developed the great systems that flowed from their writings. The questions that drove philosophical inquiry were everybody’s questions. What made a city “just” or a human “wise” or “virtuous”? What constituted a good argument or an effective speech? What was the world made of and how did it happen? What was the purpose of life, and how could you know? These questions and the various standard answers were just as likely to be voiced at the barber’s or in the tavern as in a schoolroom with teachers and serious-minded students.
The default mode in Tarsus, and many other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world, would have been some kind of Stoicism, with its all-embracing vision of a united and divine world order in which humans partake through their inner rationality, or logos. The famous alternative, Epicureanism, was a minority, elite option that saw the gods, if they existed at all, as themselves a distant, happy elite who took no interest in human affairs and certainly didn’t try to intervene in the world. The puzzled uncertainties of the “Academy,” the successors to Plato (“We can’t be sure whether the gods exist, but we’d better keep the civil religion going just in case”) were giving way, in some newer teaching, to a vision of an upstairs/downstairs world such as the picture sketched by the biographer and philosopher Plutarch in the generation after Paul. For Plutarch, the aim of the game was eventually to leave the wicked realm of space, time, and matter and find the way to a “heaven” from which pure souls have been temporarily exiled and to which they would return in everlasting bliss. (If that sounds like much modern Western Christianity, that is our problem. It certainly wasn’t what Paul believed.)
And all that was just the rough outline. There were many more themes and variations on themes, an endless round of discussions in the tentmaker’s cramped little shop, on the street, over meals with friends, at home. It was, we may suspect, fascinating and frustrating by turns. Like many other Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus, thinking as a Jew while taking on board the theories of the wider world, would reflect on the similarity and dissimilarity between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of Israel.
For Saul, with the vision of Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah close to his heart, there would be no question of retreat from the world. If the Stoics had a big integrated vision of a united world, so did he. If the Roman Empire was hoping to create a single society in which everyone would give allegiance to a single Lord, so was he. Paul believed that this had already been accomplished through Israel’s Messiah. If the Platonists were speaking of possible commerce between “heaven” and “earth,” so was he—though his vision was of heaven coming to earth, not of souls escaping earth and going to heaven. As a Jew, he believed that the whole created order was the work of the One God; as a “Messiah man,” he believed that the crucified and risen Jesus had dealt with the evil that corrupts the world and the human race and that he had begun the long-awaited project of new creation, of which the communities of baptized and believing Jesus-followers were the pilot project.
When he writes, later, that he has learned to “take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah,”18 it seems highly likely that this was a conviction to which he had come in the silent decade in Tarsus. So too when he tells the church in Philippi to consider carefully “whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy,”19 he is recognizing that human society, even in the radically flawed non-Jewish world, could and did aspire to live wisely and well. All this is part of Saul’s monotheism, renewed and deepened by his belief in Jesus. Saul knew that the world needed redeeming. He also knew that it remained God’s world.
Saul then, I propose, spent the silent years in Tarsus laboring, studying, and praying, putting together in his mind a larger picture of the One God and his truth that would take on the world and outflank it. If Jesus was the fulfillment of the ancient scriptural stories, that conclusion was inevitable. But all the while he must have been uncomfortably aware that this still thoroughly Jewish vision of the One God and his world, reshaped around the crucified and risen Messiah, was, to put it mildly, not shared by all his fellow Jews. Saul must already have come up against the social, cultural, exegetical, and theological tension that would stay with him throughout his career. What sense could it make that Israel’s Messiah would come to his own and that his own would not receive him?
We have no idea whether there was already a Jesus community in Tarsus, whether Saul was part of such a thing, or whether he met regularly with a handful of others to break bread in the name of Jesus. It is hard to imagine Saul as a solitary Jesus believer through all those years, but history offers no clues one way or another. But we certainly cannot imagine him staying silent. And to speak of the crucified and risen Jesus would inevitably be controversial. It wasn’t just that a crucified Messiah was bound to be seen by many Jews as blasphemous nonsense. It wasn’t simply that the idea of the One God becoming human was a shock to the Jewish system (though some strands of Jewish thinking at the time may perhaps have explored such a possibility). It was, just as much, that the implications of all this for the ancestral way of life were either not clear or all too disturbingly clear. Paul’s own question, what it would look like if the One God created a new single family of “brothers and sisters” in the Messiah, had potentially revolutionary answers. And traditional societies do not welcome revolution.
For Saul, this question cannot have been merely theoretical. Here we probe, with caution, into one of the most sensitive parts of the silent decade in Tarsus. He had gone back to his family. All we know of Saul indicates that he would have wasted no time in telling them that he had met the risen Jesus, that the scriptures proved him to be God’s Messiah, that the One God had unveiled his age-old secret plan in and through him, and that by the power of his spirit this Jesus was at work in human hearts and lives, doing a new thing and creating a new community. How would his family have reacted?
They might conceivably have wanted to cut him some slack. Many young men or women leave home for a while and come back with new and disturbing ideas. Often they settle down eventually, and their elders smile indulgently at their youthful enthusiasm. But it seems more likely, assuming that young Saul learned his traditional “zeal” at home, that there would have been a fierce reaction. Saul would not have held back; he would not have toned down his message. There would have been no stopping him. Either Jesus was the Messiah, or he wasn’t. And, if he was, then there could be no “take it or leave it.” One could not shrug one’s shoulders and walk away. If Israel’s Messiah has come, then Israel must regroup around him, whatever it takes. Every would-be messianic movement in Israel’s history carried that challenge. We imagine arguments, misunderstandings, accusations of disloyalty to the ancestral traditions—even though Saul would be at pains to insist that what had happened in Jesus and what was happening through the spirit was what the ancient scriptures had been talking about all along. (“Maybe so,” his father might have replied with a weary sigh, “but Moses never said you could be part of Israel without being circumcised . . .”)
Among other strong points that emerge again and again in his mature writing and that must have been hammered out on the anvil of these constant arguments, we find Paul’s vision of what Jesus had achieved in his death and resurrection. Every time he refers to these earth-shattering events in his later writings, he draws out different drafts from that deep well of earlier reflection. At the heart of it, rooted in the Passover theme, which Saul had known from boyhood and which Jesus himself had made thematic for his own life and death, we find the idea of victory. Something had happened in Jesus’s death and resurrection as a result of which the world was a different place. It didn’t look different outwardly. Saul, returning to the Tarsus of his boyhood, would have seen the same sights, the same idols and temples, the same standard pagan behavior. But what Saul believed about Jesus meant that the underlying center of spiritual gravity had shifted.
The world he had known was full of dark powers. Or, to be more precise, the created order was good, as Genesis had said, but humans had worshipped nongods, pseudogods, “forces” within the natural order, and had thereby handed over to those shadowy beings a power not rightfully theirs. The “forces” had usurped the proper human authority over the world. Evidence was all around. Tarsus, like every ancient non-Jewish city, was full of shrines, full of strange worship, full of human lives misshapen by dehumanizing practices. And Paul believed that on the cross Jesus of Nazareth had defeated the ultimate force of evil. The resurrection proved it. If he had overcome death, it could only be because he had overcome the forces that lead to death, the corrosive power of idolatry and human wickedness.
This is a dark theme to which we shall return. We mention it here partly because Paul must have thought through these questions in this early period and also partly because it is at the root of his understanding of what with hindsight we call his Gentile mission. Here’s how it works.
Paul believed that, through Jesus and his death, the One God had overcome the powers that had held the world in their grip. And that meant that all humans, not just Jews, could be set free to worship the One God. The Jesus-shaped message of liberation included forgiveness for all past misdeeds, and this message of forgiveness meant that there could be no barriers between Jewish Messiah people and non-Jewish Messiah people. To erect such barriers would mean denying that Jesus had won the messianic victory. Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil. This translated directly into one of the great themes of his mature thought and particularly his pastoral efforts: the unity of all Messiah people across ethnic boundary lines. And this is one of the things that Saul’s own family must have found impossible to swallow.
Here, I believe, we have the root of the ongoing grief in the heart of the mature Paul as he looks at “his flesh-and-blood relatives.”20 The people over whom he is agonizing (with “great sorrow and endless pain in my heart”) are not a generalized mass of “unbelieving Jews.” Paul knows their names. He sees their faces and their sorrowful head-shaking. His mother. His father. He hears their voices in his inner ear, praying the Shema as they had taught him to pray it, unable to comprehend that their super-bright, utterly devout son—brother—nephew—had turned away to such horrible heresy. And yet they loved him all the same, since Saul always wore his heart on his sleeve, and they knew when he was in distress as well. Love and grief are very close, especially in warm, passionate hearts. Saul shrank from neither. He wrote constantly of love—divine love, human love, “the Messiah’s love.” And he constantly suffered the grief that went with it.
When we speak of love, and perhaps also grief, there is another silence hidden within the larger silence of the Tarsus years. Everyone who reads Paul asks this question sooner or later. Was there a girl? Had he been betrothed or even married?
We cannot tell and must not rush to fill the silence. Yet when Paul writes about marriage he says that he would be happy “to see everyone be in the same situation as myself.”21 He amplifies this, assuming his audience knows his story and thus leaving it tantalizingly unclear for later readers: “To unmarried people, and to widows, I have this to say: it’s perfectly all right for you to remain like me.”22 Why did he put it like this?
He was writing at a time when remaining unmarried—particularly for women—was next to scandalous. Who could tell what an unattached person might get into? The dominant cultural assumption was that an unmarried adult, particularly a woman, was a social and moral disaster waiting to happen. But Paul, as we shall see, was challenging the dominant culture with the news of new creation, a new creation with different values. On the one hand, he insists (against any form of dualism that would regard the human body and its pleasures as shameful) that married sexual relations were a good gift from the Creator, to be celebrated. On the other hand, he insists that singleness, celibacy, was also a gift that pointed beyond the present world (with its need to propagate the species) to a new world altogether. And in the middle of it all Paul holds himself up as an example: “the same situation as myself.” What was that situation?
Clearly Paul was unmarried during the time covered by his letters. Most of the traveling early Christian teachers were married, and their wives accompanied them on their journeys, but Paul was different (so also, apparently, was Barnabas).23 That leaves us with four options. Either he had never married at all, despite the fact that most orthodox Jews would have been expected to marry, usually quite young. Or he had been married, presumably during the silent decade in Tarsus, but his wife had died early, as many did, and he had chosen not to marry again. Or maybe his wife had decided to break off the marriage when she realized he really meant all this dangerous new teaching about a crucified Messiah. (“In a case like that,” he writes, “a brother or sister is not bound.”)24 Or perhaps—and if I had to guess, this is the one I would choose—he had been betrothed early on, probably to the daughter of family friends. He had come back to Tarsus eager to see her again, but also wondering how it would now work out and praying for her to come to know Jesus as he had. But she or her parents had broken off the engagement when they found out that lively young Saul had returned with his head and heart full of horrible nonsense about the crucified Nazarene. Did Saul “get over her,” as we say? Who can tell?
He had plenty of female friends and colleagues later on, as we can see from the greetings in his letters, especially Romans. He seems to have treated them as equals in the work of the gospel, just as he insisted in a famous passage that gender distinctions were irrelevant when it came to membership in the Messiah’s family.25 But he had decided that, for him, marriage was now out of the question, not because he was a super spiritual man who had risen above that kind of shabby second-rate lifestyle (as some later Christians would try to pretend) or because he did not possess normal human desires, but because it was incompatible with his particular vocation. He gives the impression, as we read between the lines of 1 Corinthians, that he had gained mastery over his natural desires, while recognizing that such a discipline required constant vigilance.26
Why go into this imponderable question? It is important before we launch into Paul’s public career, which we are nearly ready to do, to challenge the perennial idea that Paul was a misogynist. He did not imagine that women and men were identical in all respects. Nobody in the ancient world, and not many in today’s world, would think that. But he saw women as fellow members on an equal footing within the people of God, and also, it seems, within the public ministry of that people. He could be friends with women and work alongside them without patronizing them, trying to seduce them, or exploiting them.
For Saul back home in Tarsus, then, the deepest heartbreak was not the loss of an actual or potential spouse, though that may have been there too. What grieved him most was the loss, in a much deeper sense, of many who were very close to him, who had known him from boyhood and still loved him dearly. If he was not a misogynist, neither was he the kind of Jew who (in the odd caricature) hated other Jews because they reminded him of himself. When Paul the Apostle thinks of “unbelieving Jews,” they are not, for him, a “theological” category. They are real human beings. One does not suffer ceaseless heartache over a faceless abstraction or a projected fantasy.
The decade or so in Tarsus was clearly formative for Saul. How much he then guessed at his future vocation we cannot begin to imagine. But somewhere in the middle 40s of the first century—still only fifteen years or so after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and when Saul was probably somewhere in his thirties—he received a visit that would take his life in a whole new direction. What motivated him was, at one level, the same as it had always been: utter devotion to the One God and “zeal” to work for his glory in the world. But by the end of the Tarsus decade Saul had worked out in considerable detail what it meant that the One God had revealed himself in and as the crucified and risen Jesus. That meant a new dimension to his devotion, a new shape for his “zeal,” a new depth to “loyalty.” And that new dimension, shape, and depth would produce a string of hastily written documents whose compact, explosive charge would change the world.