THE VISITOR WHO came to Tarsus looking for Saul was Barnabas. It was Barnabas, we recall, who had vouched for Saul on his first post-Damascus visit to Jerusalem. One of the minor heroes of the book of Acts, the generous-spirited Barnabas was originally from Cyprus, a Jew from the tribe of Levi. His actual name was Joseph, but Luke explains that the Jesus-followers in Jerusalem gave him the nickname Barnabas, which means “son of encouragement.” Some people have the gift of enabling others to flourish. Barnabas was one of those.
So when the Jerusalem leaders received disturbing news about fresh developments in the Jesus community at Antioch and they wanted to send somebody who would understand both the outlook of Greek-speaking communities and the concerns of the Jerusalem church itself, Barnabas was a natural choice. In Antioch a wall had been breached. A crack had appeared in an age-old dam. Should it be mended at once? Or was this a sign that the One God was doing a new thing? To see why all this mattered, and why this question in Antioch shaped the way Saul would see things thereafter—and hence one of the reasons why the movement that came into being through his work became so extraordinarily successful—we need to take another step back. We need to understand the inner dynamic of Jewish life within its wider cultural setting.
The wall in question, the wall that had been breached, was the division between the Jew and the non-Jew. This division, from the Jewish point of view, was greater than any other social or cultural division, more important even than the other two distinctions that ran through the whole ancient world, those between slave and free, on the one hand, and male and female, on the other. As we noted earlier, the question of how high the wall between Jew and non-Jew should be and of what sort of dealings Jews ought to have with those on the other side was controversial then, just as it is today. Different people, and indeed different Jewish community leaders, would draw the line at different places. Business dealings might be fine, business partnerships perhaps not. Friendships might be fine, intermarriage probably not. Lines would be blurred, broken, and then drawn again, sometimes in the same place, sometimes not.
Underneath it all, however, there was always a sense of difference, of “them” and “us.” Social and cultural indicators would be the visible markers. What you ate (and what you didn’t eat), who you ate it with (and who you didn’t eat it with)—those would be the most obvious, but there were others too. Non-Jewish writers of the time sneered at the Jews for their “Sabbath,” claiming Jews just wanted a “lazy day” once a week. The fact that Jews didn’t eat pork, the meat most ordinarily available, looked like a ploy to appear socially superior. Jewish males were circumcised, so if they participated in athletic training in the gymnasium, which normally meant going naked, they might expect ribald comments.
Beneath these social indicators was the more deep-seated non-Jewish suspicion that the Jews were atheists. After all, they didn’t worship the gods. They didn’t turn out for the great festivals, they didn’t come to the parties at the temples, and they didn’t offer animal sacrifices at local shrines. They claimed there was only one true Temple, the one in Jerusalem, but rumors abounded, going back to the time when the Roman general Pompey had marched into the Holy of Holies, that the Jews had no image, no statue of their god. Hence the charge of atheism. And the problem with atheism wasn’t so much theological beliefs. People believed all kinds of strange things, and the authorities let them get on with it. No, the problem was severely practical. The gods mattered for the life and health of the community. If bad things happened, the obvious reason was that the gods were angry, probably because people hadn’t been taking them seriously and offering the required worship. People who didn’t believe in the gods were therefore placing the city, the whole culture, or the whole world at risk.
The Jews had their answers for all this, not that many non-Jews even tried to understand them. Saul of Tarsus would have grown up knowing these debates well, and during his time in Tarsus and after his move to Antioch he must have heard them repeated with wearying familiarity. Our God, the Jews would have said, is the One God who made the whole world. He cannot be represented by a human-made image. We will demonstrate who he is by the way we live. If we join the world around in worshipping the local divinities—let alone in worshipping the Roman emperor (as people were starting to do when Saul was growing up)—we will be making the mistake our ancestors made. (Actually, a significant minority of non-Jews admired the Jews for all this, preferring their clear, clean lines of belief and behavior to the dark muddles of paganism. Many attached themselves to the synagogue communities as “God-fearers.” Some went all the way to full conversion as “proselytes.”) But the Jews were clear about the fact that, if they compromised with the pagan world around them, however “compromise” might have been defined in any particular city or household, they would be giving up their heritage—and their hope.
The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last. On a good day, many Jews would think of the One God bringing peace and justice to the whole world. On a bad day, some might think of the One God finally giving the Gentiles what they deserved, rescuing and vindicating his ancient people Israel in the process. So what would Jewish people, particularly in a diaspora community like Antioch or Tarsus, think of the suggestion that the One God had done what he promised by sending a crucified Messiah? What would this mean for Jewish identity? Was this good news simply for Jewish people, or might it be for everyone?
Syrian Antioch, even more than Tarsus, was exactly the kind of place where this question would come quickly to the fore. (We call it Syrian Antioch to distinguish it from other cities with the same name, such as Pisidian Antioch in southern Turkey, where Paul would later preach. They all go back to their founding by Antiochus Epiphanes in the early second century BC, just as the many ancient cities called Alexandria look back to Alexander the Great in the late fourth century.) This Antioch stood on the river Orontes, about 250 miles north of Jerusalem, in the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. It was a major crossroads and trading center not far from the coast, poised between east and west, north and south, much like Venice in the high Middle Ages.
It boasted a busy, bustling mixture of cultures, ethnic groups, and religious traditions, including a substantial Jewish population. The Roman general Pompey had made Antioch the capital of the new province of Syria, and Julius Caesar had raised it to the level of an autonomous city. With a population of around a quarter of a million, it was widely regarded in antiquity as the third or fourth city of the East, after Alexandria and Seleucia and later Constantinople. It was a classic melting pot. Every kind of social and cultural group was represented. It isn’t difficult to imagine the crowded streets, the markets selling exotic fruit as well as local produce, the traders and travelers, foreigners with strange costumes and donkeys needing food and water, the temples on every corner. It wasn’t surprising that some of the early Jesus-followers found their way there. Everybody else had, after all.
Nor was it surprising that, once there, the Jesus-followers were eager to share the news of Jesus with non-Jews as well as Jews. They believed that God’s Messiah had launched God’s kingdom and that the new energy they discovered in announcing this message was the work of God’s own spirit, poured out in a new way, ready to embrace the wider world. If the scriptures had seen the coming king as Lord of the whole world, how could membership in this kingdom be for Jews only?
Some of the believers who had come to Antioch from Cyprus and Cyrene saw no reason for any such limitation. They went about telling the non-Jews too about Jesus. A large number of such people believed the message, abandoned their pagan ways, and switched allegiance to Jesus as Lord. One can imagine the reaction to this in the Jewish community; many Jews would naturally have supposed that these Gentiles would then have to go all the way and become full Jews. If they were sharing in the ancient promises, ought they not to share in the ancient culture as well? What sort of a common life ought this new community to develop? These were the questions that buzzed around Paul’s head, like large worried bees, for much of his public career.
These were, in fact, massive and fateful questions for the entire new movement. Antioch was where they came to a head. Barnabas and Saul were at the center of them. Their friendship, which went from firm to fluctuating to tragic, helped to shape Saul’s mind and teaching.
It all began, then, when the Jerusalem leaders sent Barnabas to Antioch to see what was going on. Good-hearted Barnabas was not the sort to jump instinctively to a negative reaction, to reach for familiar prejudices just because something new was happening. He could see in the transformed lives and transparent faith of the Gentile believers that this was indeed the work of divine grace, reaching out in generous love to people of every background and origin. Barnabas shared Paul’s view that with the death and resurrection of Jesus the barriers to Gentile inclusion had gone. Now, the evidence of changed lives, of a new dynamic in worship, and above all of love (remembering that for the early Christians “love” meant a shared family life with obligations of mutual support) told its own story, and Barnabas was not going to deny it. He recognized the work of God when he saw it, and he was glad.
Others from Jerusalem, faced with the same evidence, might have reached a different conclusion. We will meet them soon enough, urging the Jesus believers in Antioch to restrict themselves to their own ethnic groups, at least for mealtimes and perhaps even for the Lord’s meal, the “breaking of bread.” Many Jews would have assumed that Gentiles still carried a contagious pollution from their culture of idolatry and immorality. But that wasn’t how Barnabas saw it. As far as he was concerned, what mattered was the believing allegiance of these Gentiles; they were staying loyal to the Lord from the bottom of their hearts. This new community was not, then, defined by genealogy. It was defined by the Lord himself, and what counted as the sure sign of belonging to this Lord was “loyalty,” “faithfulness.”
Here we run into the kind of problem that meets all serious readers of Paul. One obvious Greek term for “loyalty” is one of Paul’s favorite words, pistis, regularly translated “faith,” but often carrying the overtones of “faithfulness,” “reliability,” and, yes, “loyalty.” The word pistis could mean “faith” in the sense of “belief”—what was believed as well as the fact of believing, or indeed the act of believing, which already seems quite enough meaning for one small word. But pistis could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief, in this case that Jesus was now “Lord,” the world’s rightful sovereign. Hence the term means “loyalty” or “allegiance.” This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.
For Paul, the word meant all of that but also much more. For him, this “believing allegiance” was neither simply a “religious” stance nor a “political” one. It was altogether larger, in a way that our language, like Paul’s, has difficulty expressing clearly. For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not. That was already the position that Barnabas was taking. He saw a single community living a common life. Saying that he recognized this as the result of divine grace is not simply the kind of pious fantasy some might imagine, since in the ancient Near East the idea of a single community across the traditional boundaries of culture, gender, and ethnic and social groupings was unheard of. Unthinkable, in fact. But there it was. A new kind of “family” had come into existence. Its focus of identity was Jesus; its manner of life was shaped by Jesus; its characteristic mark was believing allegiance to Jesus. Barnabas saw it, and he was glad.
To say that this new project, this new community, was going to present a challenge is a gross understatement. The vibrant and excited group of Jesus-followers in Antioch was doing something radically countercultural. Nobody else in the ancient world was trying to live in a house where the old walls were being taken down. Nobody else was experimenting with a whole new way of being human. Barnabas must have realized this and must have seen that, in order even to begin to sustain such a thing, granted the enormous pressures that we might call sociocultural but that resonated also with philosophy, politics, religion, and theology, one would have to help people to think through what it all really meant. And that would mean teaching.
It would mean, in fact, the launching of a project (though they couldn’t have foreseen this at the time) that with long hindsight we might call “Christian theology.” If a community like the one in Antioch was to keep its balance as a group of Jesus-followers in that world of clashing cultures, its members would need to grasp two things. On the one hand, they would have to put down roots firmly into the Jewish traditions, into the scriptures. On the other hand, they would have to think through what precisely it meant that Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of those same scriptures, had been crucified and raised from the dead. Only by going deeply into the scriptural story of Israel and the events concerning Jesus, reflecting from many different angles on its full significance, could such a community keep its identity, its integrity, and its nerve. Who did Barnabas know who had that kind of knowledge and the eager energy and the way with words that would communicate it? There was one obvious candidate.
It was a decade or so since Saul had gone to Tarsus, after his brief time in Damascus and then Jerusalem. We cannot tell whether anyone in Jerusalem or Antioch had seen or heard of him during that time. But Barnabas hadn’t forgotten him. He had a strong sense that Saul was the man for the job. This was the beginning of a partnership that would launch the first recorded official “mission” of the new movement—and that would also, within a few years, reflect the inner tensions within that movement still awaiting resolution. Barnabas and Saul would sing from the same sheet . . . until someone tried to add a new verse to the song.
So Saul came to Antioch. Once again he was leaving home; this time, we assume, with the mixed feelings he would later describe as “great sorrow and endless pain.”1 He worked with Barnabas and the local Antioch leaders for a whole year, teaching and guiding the new and growing community. They did their best to shape the new believers and their common life in accordance with scriptural roots and the “good news” events concerning Jesus. Much as we might like to be a fly on the wall in those early days, all we can be sure of is that the ways of reading scripture and interpreting the Jesus events that we find already fully grown in Paul’s mature letters were taking shape, not just in his head and his heart, but in the life of the community. Paul, the greatest theoretician of the new movement, was never merely a theoretician. Pretty much every idea he later articulated had been road-tested in the narrow, crowded streets of Antioch.
Luke claims that it was in Antioch, in this period, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christianoi, “Messiah people.”2 That claim has been challenged by those who rightly point out that our word “Christian” implies an organized movement separate from the Jewish world and that there is no evidence of such a thing for at least a generation or so. The only other places in the New Testament where the word is used are on the lips of Herod Agrippa, who teases Paul for “trying to make him a Christian,” and in an early letter where Peter refers to people “suffering as Christians.”3 Both of these look as if the word was a nickname used by outsiders, quite likely in contempt (“Messiah freaks!”), rather than a word the Jesus-followers used for themselves. But that, anyway, isn’t the point. In the Antioch of the 40s you might mistake the word Christos for a personal name. The Jesus-followers, the Messiah people, were, so to say, getting a name for themselves, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t have acquired a literal name at the same time. The most natural choice would have been Christianoi, Messiah people, a word that, like the community itself, like Saul of Tarsus himself, had deep Jewish roots but a strange new reach and power.
That odd sense of a new kind of life, as in all the very early Jesus communities, was heavily dependent (they would have said) on the powerful presence and guidance of the holy spirit. Whatever account we want to give of this phenomenon today, we cannot begin to understand Saul, Barnabas, and their colleagues without recognizing that as they prayed, sang, studied scripture, organized their community life, and (not least) went about talking to both Jews and non-Jews about Jesus, they were conscious of an energy and a sense of direction unlike anything they had known before. They had no hesitation in ascribing that energy and leading to the divine spirit, which had been promised in the scriptures and then again, only a few years before, by Jesus’s own forerunner, John the Baptist. These early Jesus-followers were not naive “enthusiasts.” Already within the first decades it became necessary to challenge some claims about the work of the spirit and to warn against the likelihood of deceit, and indeed of self-deceit. But we cannot understand the things that now happened unless we allow that Saul and the others really did believe they were being led and energized by the personal presence of the One God.
It was out of such leading that Barnabas and Saul found themselves being commissioned for their first joint project. One of the spirit-led “prophets” in Antioch, a man named Agabus, warned the community that there was a famine coming over the whole Mediterranean world. (Various pieces of evidence point to the occurrence of this in AD 46.) The reaction to this news tells us a lot about the way the community instinctively thought. We might have imagined that a warning like this would have resulted in knee-jerk inward-looking anxiety. Should they stockpile food? Should they do what Joseph did in Egypt, storing grain in the good years to last through the bad? The Jesus-followers in Antioch resolved at once not to do that. Instead, they would look out for those community members worse off than themselves. And that meant Jerusalem. Jerusalem was where Jesus’s first followers had sold their lands and pooled their resources and where now, after a decade or two of hostility from the authorities and probably their own wider communities, they were struggling to stay alive.
The Antioch-based Jesus-followers knew what they had to do. They had never supposed themselves to be independent of the Jerusalem Jesus-followers. Those of us who are used to multinational organizations, including “churches,” may need to consider just how unusual the next step was at the time. Just as Antioch was the first place where we see a genuine effort at a new kind of transethnic community life, so in this action Antioch was the first place to demonstrate that the followers of Jesus thought of themselves as a translocal community with mutual responsibilities. The only possible parallels are the network of synagogue communities (but they were not transethnic) and the Roman army and civil service (but they all, though incorporating non-Romans, bore the stamp of Caesar). What might it mean, farther on down the track, to belong to a new kind of worldwide community? That too was to prove a huge question, to which Saul of Tarsus would make a characteristically innovative response. And this, once more, points ahead to the remarkable long-term results of Saul’s project.
So Barnabas and Saul were sent from Antioch to Jerusalem with a gift of money for the Jerusalem believers. The date was probably AD 46 or 47. Despite other traditional ways of putting the historical jigsaw together, I assume that this is the same visit that Saul, writing later as Paul, describes in Galatians 2:1–10. It makes sense. He went to Jerusalem, he says, “by revelation,” presumably referring to the prophetic warning of Agabus. His own account of the visit ends with the Jerusalem leaders urging him to go on “remembering the poor.”4 That admonition certainly applies more widely. Right from the start, the Jesus-followers believed they had a special obligation toward “the poor” in general. But it was also focused on the Jerusalem community in particular.
When Paul himself describes the visit, however, he takes the financial purpose almost for granted and focuses on what else had happened while he was there. He had now been working in Antioch for a year, in addition to whatever public work he may or may not have done in Tarsus. During that time he had been energetically speaking about Jesus to non-Jews as well as Jews and encouraging the community, Jew and non-Jew alike, to live as a single family. What would the Jerusalem leaders think of this brave new experiment? And if they didn’t like the look of it, what would that mean? Had Paul been wasting his time?
This possibility seems to have haunted him at various stages of his work; he worried that he might have been wasting his time, running the race “to no good effect.”5 This is an allusion to Isaiah 49; in v. 4 of that chapter, the “servant,” the one tasked with bringing God’s light to the nations, wonders if perhaps he has “labored in vain” or “spent his strength for nothing and vanity.” The fact that Paul expresses this particular anxiety in this scriptural language means, of course, that he knows in theory what the answer ought to be. But he says it anyway, here in reference to the trip to Jerusalem, then again in his anxiety over the Thessalonians while waiting in Athens, and again in writing from Ephesus to the Philippians.6 He keeps on coming back to it, like the tip of the tongue finding its way to a sore tooth. Perhaps it’s all been for nothing? But then, following the prophetic train of thought, he might reason that because the “servant” voiced the sentiment, perhaps the feeling was part of the task. But still he couldn’t help wondering . . .
This fits as well with the remarkable moment in the first letter to Corinth when Paul reveals one of the sources of his self-discipline. One of the best-known things about Paul’s thought is his view that when a person has come to faith in Jesus as the risen Lord, that event is itself a sign of the spirit’s work through the gospel, and that, if the spirit has begun that “good work” of which that faith is the first fruit, you can trust that the spirit will finish the job. That is what he says in Philippians 1:6, and it coheres with his larger teaching elsewhere, particularly in Romans 5–8. But Paul knows that this does not occur when disciples sit back, relax, and allow the spirit to do it all, with no human effort involved. On the contrary. Think of athletics, he says; those who go into training have to exercise great self-discipline. This applies to him too:
I don’t run in an aimless fashion! I don’t box like someone punching the air! No: I give my body rough treatment, and make it my slave, in case, after announcing the message to others, I myself should end up being disqualified.7
Has he, then, been “running in vain”? He lives with the nagging question. At one level, he knows the answer perfectly well. The truth about Jesus, the power of God at work in the gospel announcement, the presence of the spirit, the witness of scripture—all these point in the same direction. But at another level, Paul has to go on asking the question. And he has to go on making his body a disciplined, obedient slave.
This to-and-fro between natural anxiety and scripturally sourced encouragement is made more complex by the human dynamics of the visit to Jerusalem, raising as they do an issue with which Paul would struggle in the years to come. “Here is the money. Now, by the way, are you happy with our present policy?” Paul would have been the first to say that just because you give generously to others does not mean you are compelling them to agree with your policies or practices. But underneath that question there lies a deeper one. This gift of money, he would be implying, demonstrates that they are part of one family, one partnership, one koinōnia. That Greek word is often translated “fellowship,” but in Paul’s world it also meant, among other things, a business partnership, which would often overlap with family ties. Paul would be asking them, at least by implication, to realize that this koinōnia is what it is because in Jesus the One God has done a new thing. He would be asking them to recognize that through Jesus the One God has created a new sort of family, a community that leaps across the walls our traditions have so carefully maintained, as it has now spanned the miles between Antioch and Jerusalem.
This question, posed implicitly when Barnabas and Saul went to Jerusalem, had one particular focal point. They had not gone alone. They had taken with them a young man, a non-Jew who had become an eager and much-loved follower of Jesus, a member of the fellowship in Antioch. His name was Titus. Did Barnabas and Saul realize that Titus was likely to become a test case? Did they realize they might be putting him in a difficult position?
That, anyway, is how it turned out. The main leaders in Jerusalem, according to Paul, were happy with the line Antioch had been taking. Non-Jewish believers were full members of the family. But some other Jesus-followers in Jerusalem were not content. They realized that Titus was a Greek, a non-Jew. He had not been circumcised; he was not therefore a “proselyte,” a non-Jew who had fully converted (there were debates at the time as to whether even circumcision made someone a real Jew, but for most it would have been sufficient). They realized that Barnabas and Saul were insisting that Titus be treated on equal terms as a full member of the family, including sharing in the common meals. This group was horrified. “This is precisely the kind of pollution,” they said, “that the One God wants us to avoid! Fraternizing with pagans is what landed our ancestors in trouble! If the One God who has raised Jesus is going to fulfill his promises and establish his kingdom on earth as in heaven, setting us free from all enemies and earthly ills, he certainly won’t be doing so if we compromise on purity! Either we stay with two tables, one for Jewish Jesus-followers and one for Gentiles, or Titus will have to be circumcised. He will have to become a full Jew if you want him to be recognized as a full member of the Jesus family.”
Barnabas and Saul stood firm. The problem was not so much the embarrassment and physical pain that circumcision would cause Titus. It was a point of theological principle. It was, so Paul declared later, a matter of “freedom”—a loaded word, a Passover word, the slogan for so much that Jews such as Saul had hoped and prayed for. But now, with the new “Passover” of Jesus’s death and resurrection, a new sort of “freedom” had been born. The freedom for all, Jew and Gentile alike, to share membership in the new world, the new family, the new messianic and spirit-led life. And if that was the new “freedom,” then anything that challenged it was a form of slavery. These people want to enslave us, Saul concluded. They want to reverse the Passover moment, to take us back to Egypt. Titus was spared.
The three central Jerusalem leaders, James (the brother of Jesus), Peter, and John, were content. Their view carried weight; they were known as the “pillars.” For us, that might be a dead metaphor. For them, in Jerusalem with the Temple still standing, it was making a polemical claim. The early Jesus-followers, it seems, already understood themselves as an alternative Temple with these three as its “pillars”: a new heaven-and-earth society, living and worshipping right alongside the old Temple, making the latter redundant. What Stephen had said was coming true.
That makes it all the more remarkable that James, Peter, and John were able to agree with Barnabas and Saul. Temple meant purity; and purity (for a loyal Jew) would normally have meant extreme care over contact with non-Jews. What Barnabas and Saul had glimpsed, and what (according to Acts) Peter himself had already glimpsed in the house of the non-Jew Cornelius, was a new kind of purity coming to birth. A new freedom. A new Temple. A new kind of purity. No wonder confusion abounded, especially among those who were the most eager for God’s coming act of deliverance. No wonder some loyal Jews resented Barnabas and Saul for pushing the point so insensitively—and no wonder that the two friends held their ground.
How much Saul had argued his case from scripture at this point we cannot tell. But the “pillars” shook hands with him on it. They struck a deal whose apparently simple terms (as quoted by Paul in Galatians) become more complicated the more we think about them. James, Peter, and John would work with Jewish people, while Saul and his friends would work with non-Jewish people. Put like that, it sounds easy, but it doesn’t fit the facts. It may be that the original intention was more geographical than ethnic: the “pillars” would restrict their proclamation of the Messiah to the ancient territory of Israel, while Saul would roam the world. But this hardly fits with Peter’s later journeys, whether to Corinth or ultimately to Rome. Equally, an ethnic division, with Saul carefully avoiding any work with Jewish people in the Diaspora, makes no sense either, granted that in Acts he almost always begins in the synagogues, that in 1 Corinthians he speaks of becoming “like a Jew to the Jews, to win Jews,”8 and that in the decisive opening statement of Romans he says that the gospel is “to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek.”9
It looks as though the agreement Paul reports in Galatians 2 was a temporary arrangement, a way of mollifying the Jerusalem hard-liners, trying to reassure them that Jewish followers of Jesus, at least, would not have to compromise their own purity, would be able to carry on without straining their consciences. The whole episode, with its swirling theological, personal, and inevitably also political currents, alerts us to the overlapping complexities and challenges that the young movement was facing. Granted Saul’s unrivaled knowledge of the scriptures, we may assume that it alerted him too to the need to understand and to articulate powerfully just what it meant that those scriptures had been fulfilled in the crucified Messiah.
Barnabas and Saul returned to Antioch, their mission complete. We assume that Titus went back with them. They had another young colleague in tow as well, John Mark, a youthful relative of Barnabas and also of Peter. If the two friends were pleased with the way things had gone, that was entirely natural. They had worked well as a team. That would stand them in good stead in the surprising new challenge they would now face.