MOST PRINTED BIBLES contain maps, and among the maps there is usually a chart of Paul’s journeys. I began to enjoy maps and map reading almost as soon as I could read, and when a schoolteacher gave us an assignment to learn about Paul’s various travels, I took to it like a duck to water. It fitted naturally with the classical studies I was already starting to pursue. I had no idea then that some of the lines I so easily traced were controversial, particularly those relating to North and South Galatia. What interested me was the restless, almost relentless way Paul seemed always to be on the move, crossing mountain ranges, fording rivers, staying in exotic places like Ephesus or Corinth, making good use of the remarkable networks of Roman roads and the almost equally remarkable opportunities for sailing across and around the Mediterranean and the Aegean. I had not at that time visited any of the places where Paul had gone. But a good atlas and a few books with photographs of the main cities and other highlights like mountain passes brought it all to life.
It never occurred to me at that stage to ask what exactly Paul thought he was doing, or why. Why did he go in the first place? Why did he go to those places rather than anywhere else? Why (according to Acts at least) did he usually begin by speaking in a synagogue? If I had thought about it, I would probably have said simply that he believed God wanted him to tell people about Jesus and that one had to start somewhere. (That is no doubt true enough at one level, but quite unsatisfactory.) A little later on someone pointed out to me that Paul tended to concentrate on major population centers, relying on the movement of people and trade in and out of the great cities to help spread the word. That too is fair enough, but it still leaves some of the fundamental questions unaddressed. Here, as we watch him launch the career of a traveling missionary for which he is famous and that provides the context for his equally famous letters, we arrive once more at our basic questions. What made him tick? And why did it work?
His practice of beginning in synagogues—where he usually met anger and hostility once people realized what he was talking about—poses our other main question in a new form too. The puzzle of what happened on the Damascus Road isn’t just a puzzle about one transformative moment in Paul’s early experience. It colors, and in turn is colored by, the thorny issue of the relationship between the message Paul announced and the traditions of Israel—and how those traditions were perceived and lived out in the wider non-Jewish world of ancient Turkey and Greece. Was Paul really a loyal member of God’s ancient people? Was he rebuilding the house or pulling it down about his own ears? This question would quickly become the source of serious tension not only between Paul and local Jewish groups, but between Paul and some of the other Jesus-followers.
At one level the answers are obvious. Paul went on a mission to tell people about Jesus; he believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of the scriptures, that he had been crucified, raised from the dead, and exalted to God’s right hand. Yes, but this fails to address the underlying questions. As I said earlier, I assumed for many years, and many readers will still assume, that the only real point of it all was to get people to “believe” in this Jesus so that they would be “saved” and “go to heaven when they died.” But this was not the concern that drove Paul and Barnabas. I have labored this point elsewhere, but it still needs saying as we watch Paul set off on his complex crisscrossing travels.
The early Christians did not focus much attention on the question of what happened to people immediately after they died. If that question came up, their answer might be that they would be “with the Messiah”1 or, as in Jesus’s remark to the dying brigand, that they might be “with him in paradise.” 2 But they seldom spoke about it at all. They were much more concerned with the “kingdom of God,” which was something that was happening and would ultimately happen completely, “on earth as in heaven.” What mattered was the ultimate restoration of the whole of creation, with God’s people being raised from the dead to take their place in the running of this new world. Whatever happened to people immediately after death was, by comparison, unimportant, a mere interim. And however much it might seem incredible, the early Jesus-followers really did believe that God’s kingdom was not simply a future reality, though obviously it had a strong still-future dimension. God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.
This is closely connected with the idea that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. A glance at Jewish history in this period will reveal that if someone were to claim that the Messiah had arrived, this would not be merely what we would call a “religious” claim. It would mean that the One God was acting at last to fulfill his ancient promises, and the mode of that action would be to set up a new regime, a new authoritative rule. When Rabbi Akiba declared in AD 132 that Simeon ben Kosiba was God’s Messiah, this meant that Simeon was now the ruler of a small Judaean state in rebellion against Rome. (That “kingdom” lasted for three years before the final disaster, but it shows how the logic works.) If someone went about the communities of diaspora Jews declaring that God had at last sent Israel’s Messiah, this would not have seemed at the time to be a message either about “religion” (the Messiah was never supposed to start a new “religion”!) or about “life after death” (devout Jews had long believed that God would take care of them hereafter). Nor would it involve a new philosophy. It would be what we would call “political,” though as always for the Jews of the day this would also be profoundly theological. It would be perceived as the announcement of a new state of affairs, a new community owing allegiance to a new Master, the unveiling, at last, of the covenant faithfulness of the One God. That is exactly what Paul intended.
Paul’s message was, of course, new in another way as well. It was not simply the replacement of one political power with another (Jesus rather than Caesar). Indeed, Paul’s vision of the kingdom both was and wasn’t what people often mean today by “political.” If by “political” you mean the establishment of a rule of law backed up by police and/or military sanctions—as in an ordinary state today—then clearly what Paul was announcing was not that kind of thing at all. If by “political” you mean a system whereby one person or group imposes its will on others across a geographical area, raising taxes and organizing society at large in a particular way, then obviously nothing in Paul’s career points in that direction. But if you use the word “political” to refer to a new state of affairs in which people give their ultimate and wholehearted allegiance to someone other than the ordinary local ruler or someone other than Caesar on the throne in Rome—and if you call “political” the establishment of cells of people loyal to this new ruler, celebrating his rescuing rule and living in new kinds of communities as a result—then what Paul was doing was inescapably “political.” It had to do with the foundation of a new polis, a new city or community, right at the heart of the existing system. Paul’s “missionary” journeys were not simply aimed at telling people about Jesus in order to generate inner personal transformation and a new sense of ultimate hope, though both of these mattered vitally as well. They were aimed at the establishment of a new kind of kingdom on earth as in heaven. A kingdom with Jesus as king. The kingdom—Paul was quite emphatic about this—that Israel’s God had always intended to set up.
Humanly speaking, this was of course a fragile project. It was bound to be, since its character was taken from its starting point, the Messiah’s shameful death. As Paul would later insist, the way in which the kingdom was put into effect was always going to be the same: through the suffering of its members, particularly its leaders. Paul’s journeys in Acts are full of troubles, persecutions, beatings, stonings, and the like. But this only highlights what for Paul lay at the core of the whole thing. Why now? If the world was so hostile, why not wait for a better opportunity? Why should this be the moment for the non-Jewish nations to hear the message? Did Paul not have a sense that he was walking a tightrope across the crater of an active volcano?
Part of the answer has to do with the vocation to which Paul was obedient. In Acts 26, admittedly in one of Luke’s carefully crafted scenes, we catch an authentic sense of that vocation. This, according to Luke’s report of Paul’s speech before Herod Agrippa, is what Jesus had said to him on the road to Damascus:
I am going to establish you as a servant, as a witness both of the things you have already seen and of the occasions I will appear to you in the future. I will rescue you from the people, and from the nations to whom I am going to send you so that you can open their eyes to enable them to turn from darkness to light, and from the power of the satan to God—so that they can have forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith in me.3
It would be easy, in the midst of that dense summary, to miss a central point. Like most Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus had long believed that the nations of the world had been enslaved by their own idols. They worshipped nongods, and in Jewish thought, rooted in the scriptures, those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization. This is what Paul means by “the power of the satan”—the word “satan” is the Hebrew term for “accuser,” used popularly and often quite vaguely to refer to the dark power that appears to grip, distort, and ultimately destroy human societies and individuals. And Paul believed that in his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth had overcome the power of darkness. Something happened when Jesus died as a result of which “the satan”—and any dark forces that might be loosely lumped together under such a label—no longer had any actual authority. (Paul explains at various places in his writings how this had been achieved; but what matters for our understanding of his mission is that it had happened, that the dark power had been defeated.) Paul’s mission was not, then, simply about persuading people to believe in Jesus, as though starting from a blank slate. It was about declaring to the non-Jewish nations that the door to their prison stood open and that they were free to leave. They had to turn around, away from the enslaving idols, to worship and serve the living God.
Being free from the consequences of the past means, of course, being forgiven, as Paul emphasizes in this passage in Acts. Forgiveness is not something the non-Jewish world had thought much about. The ancient pagan gods might decide, for whatever reason, either to punish someone or not, as the case might be; but when a god decided not to punish someone, it wasn’t thought of as forgiveness as such. That would imply, apart from anything else, a far more intimate relationship between gods and mortals than was normally imagined. One does not say, when the thunderbolt misses you and strikes the person next to you, that this means you have been “forgiven.” What is happening, it seems, is that the much more Jewish idea of forgiveness, emerging from the idea of Israel’s covenant with the One God and particularly from the notion of covenant renewal after catastrophic disobedience, was already being extended, so that the nations of the world were being included, drawn into the embrace of the creator God. The non-Jewish peoples were being invited to discover not just some blind fate to be cheated if possible and endured if not, but personal forgiveness from a living God. They were being summoned to understand themselves, for the first time, as humans who were personally responsible to a wise Creator. It is as though an orphan, brought up by faceless bureaucrats in a threatening institution, were to meet for the first time the parents she never knew she had.
What emerges from this, as the positive side of the point about the dark forces being overthrown, is the idea of a new humanity, a different model of the human race. If Jesus had defeated the powers of the world in his death, his resurrection meant the launching of a new creation, a whole new world. Those who found themselves caught up in the “good news” that Paul was announcing were drawn into that new world and were themselves, Paul taught, to become small working models of the same thing. As I think of Paul launching this new venture, the image of the tightrope over the volcano doesn’t seem to go far enough. He was inventing, and must have known that he was inventing, a new way of being human. It must have been a bit like the first person to realize that notes sounded in sequence created melody, that notes sounded together created harmony, and that ordering the sequence created rhythm. If we can think of a world without music and then imagine it being invented, offering a hitherto undreamed-of depth and power to space, time, and matter, then we may have a sense of the crazy magnitude of Paul’s vocation.
All this will become much clearer as we proceed, following Paul in his initial journey to Cyprus, up into central southern Turkey, and then back again. We can date this trip roughly to AD 47/48. Two more things must be said by way of introduction to Paul’s journeys and their purpose.
First, if Paul believed and taught that with Jesus and his death and resurrection something had happened, a one-off event through which the world was now irrevocably different, so he also believed that, when he announced the message about Jesus (the “good news,” the “gospel”), a similar one-off event could and would take place in the hearts, minds, and lives of some of his hearers. Paul speaks about this one-off event with the term “power”: the power of the gospel, the power of the spirit in and through the gospel, or the power of “the word of God.” These seem to be different ways of saying the same thing, namely, that when Paul told the story of Jesus some people found that this Jesus became a living presence, not simply a name from the recent past. A transforming, healing, disturbing, and challenging presence. A presence that at one level was the kind of thing that would be associated with a divine power and at another level seemed personal—human, in fact. This then became the focal point of what we said before: people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out. (The fact that skeptics at the time, like skeptics today, could and did give different explanations of what was taking place does not alter the fact that this is what people said was happening to them, that this is what Paul understood to be going on, and that the consequences, whether they were all deluded or speaking a dangerous truth, were long lasting.)
The change was bound to be dramatic. Worshipping “the gods”—the great pantheon of Greek and Roman gods with plenty of others added on here and there—permeated every aspect of life in Paul’s world. To pull back from all of that and to worship “the living God” instead was far more than the equivalent of, say, in the modern West giving up gambling and beginning to attend church once a week. It would mean different actions and patterns of life every hour of every day. Perhaps the only way we can imagine such a thing in today’s secular world is to think what it would be like to give up all our usual machines and conveniences: car, cell phone, cooking equipment, central heating, or air-conditioning. You would have to do everything differently, only much more so. The gods were everywhere and involved in everything. In the ancient world, whether you were at home, on the street, or in the public square; attending festivals great and small; or at moments of crisis or joy (weddings, funerals, setting off on a journey)—the gods would be there to be acknowledged, appealed to, pleased, or placated. Once the message of Jesus took hold, all that would have to go. The neighbors would notice. Atheists were socially undesirable.
The most obviously powerful divinity to be given up was Caesar, and this brings us back to the question of geography, of why Paul, with the whole world open before him, went where he did. I have already mentioned the cults of Caesar and Rome. They developed in different ways across the vast Roman Empire, but the point in any case was to solidify the empire itself. People who believe that their ruler is in some sense “son of a god” are less likely to rise in revolt than people who see their rulers merely as ordinary muddled human beings. And when the good news of Jesus called its hearers to turn from “idols,” some of those idols, in towns and cities across Paul’s world, would have been statues of Caesar or members of his family. It begins to look as though Paul’s geographical strategy had a quiet but definite political undertone. Many of the key places on his journeys—Pisidian Antioch, where we will join him presently, but also such places as Ephesus, Philippi, and Corinth—were key centers of Roman rule and of Roman cult in the eastern Mediterranean. And of course he was then heading for Rome itself, and for Spain, a major center of Roman culture and influence. Connecting the dots of Paul’s journeys, actual and planned, is like mapping a royal procession through Caesar’s heartlands.
I do not think, then, that Paul’s choice of these cities was purely pragmatic, that he was picking good centers from which the message might flow outward. Nor was it simply that Paul, himself a Roman citizen by birth, would find it easier to travel within rather than outside of the vast Roman Empire, though that is true as well. I suspect that Paul was deliberately finding ways to make the point: there is one “Lord,” one Kyrios, and it isn’t Caesar. The communities of those loyal to Jesus (pistis again) that grew up as a result of his gospel announcement were marked by a confession of that loyalty that was extremely simple and extremely profound: Kyrios Iēsous Christos, “Jesus Messiah is Lord.” Paul must have known exactly how this would sound. He was well aware how the imperial rhetoric worked, on coins and inscriptions, in statements of civic loyalty. He was, after all, one of the half dozen most intellectually sophisticated first-century persons for whom we have evidence, up there with Seneca, Plutarch, and a select band of others. He was, after all, heir to the Psalms and prophets, which spoke of a coming king to whom the world’s rulers would have to owe allegiance. He and his communities were treading a dangerous line.
But, he would have said, a necessary line. These communities, small at first but growing, were an experiment in a way of being human, of being human together, that had never been tried in the world before. It was like a form of Judaism, particularly in its care for the poor, its strict sexual ethic, and its insistence on a monotheism that excluded the pagan divinities. But it was quite unlike the Jewish way of life in its open welcome to all who found themselves grasped by the good news of Jesus. That in itself was confusing enough for most people. Adding the element of apparent political subversion only made it worse.
If all this sounds like a recipe for social and cultural upheaval, we are on the right track. As the stories in Acts will testify—and as Paul’s letters will emphasize—anyone propagating this kind of subversive message will be the target of scorn, anger, and violence. It wasn’t too long, on his first missionary journey, before Paul would face all three.
* * *
Luke tells the story of Paul’s first journey in Acts 13–14. Like much of Acts, these chapters are page-turners. One thing tumbles out after another, with Paul and Barnabas hurrying from city to city and stirring up excited and/or hostile crowds. Many hear the message; some believe, others are appalled. People are healed, sometimes spectacularly. Local authorities wake up to the fact that something new is going on. These chapters set the scene both for the longer journeys to which this comparatively short trip serves as a prelude and for the fierce controversy into which Paul, Barnabas, and their friends will be plunged not long after they return home.
It seems to have been Barnabas who took the lead as they set off, sailing from Seleucia (Antioch’s closest port) to Cyprus. Barnabas himself came originally from Cyprus, and the island may have appeared a natural place to launch the work they had in mind. Barnabas probably still had family connections there. The short sea voyage would have been familiar to him, as it perhaps was not for Saul; the Jews were not a seafaring people, and in their scriptures the sea is often a dark, hostile force. Barnabas’s nephew John Mark, accompanying them as an assistant and himself quite possibly a first-time sailor, would have had reason to feel comfortable in Cyprus as well, with relatives and a synagogue culture that would remind him of home.
The synagogue was the natural starting point for Paul’s very Jewish message about Israel’s long-awaited Messiah. We may assume that the substantial set piece later in Acts 13, where Paul speaks at length in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, represents Luke’s summary of the kind of thing that Paul (who turns out to be the main speaker in the party) would say in synagogue after synagogue, though as we shall see with varied reactions. We hear nothing, however, of the Jewish reaction on Cyprus, though the fact that Barnabas and John Mark returned to the island later implies that there had been some positive response, producing at least a small community of Jesus-followers. What we do hear about is what happened when the travelers reach Paphos, the capital.
Paphos, in the southwest of the island, had long since upstaged the earlier capital, the northeastern port of Salamis. The city boasted a long and important history, being particularly famous for its huge shrine of the goddess Aphrodite, commemorating her legendary place of birth. (The temple Paul and Barnabas would have seen there was destroyed in an earthquake in AD 76/77; the one you can see there today is a later replacement.) And Paphos, as the capital, was naturally enough the seat of the Roman governor.
Part of the job description of any Roman governor would have been to keep tabs on anything of special interest, particularly anything socially subversive, that might be going on in his territory. Cyprus was quite small. Word would certainly have reached Sergius Paulus about the three itinerant Jewish teachers and their unexpected message. (Luke comments drily that Sergius Paulus was “an intelligent man,” perhaps contrasting him with certain other Roman officials who appear elsewhere in the story.)4 So he summoned the travelers to hear for himself what was going on. But matters quickly became more complicated. There was another strange Jewish teacher already there, a certain Bar-Jesus, who had a local reputation as a magician. Whether this character was trying to represent “a Jewish point of view” to the governor or whether he was trying to use his magic to impress or to earn a living is not clear. The local Jewish communities themselves might well have seen him as a dangerous maverick; we cannot tell. One way or another, he seemed bent upon opposing and denouncing Barnabas and Saul and their message. And this is the point where we sense something new happening, something emerging within the personal standing and self-awareness of Saul of Tarsus himself.
Up to this point Saul has been, it seems, the junior partner, himself a protégé of Barnabas. But now he steps forward, filled, so it seems, with a new kind of energy (the kind of surge that he and other early Christians attributed to the holy spirit), and denounces Bar-Jesus in fierce and uncompromising terms: he’s a deceitful villain, a son of the devil, who is taking God’s plan and twisting it out of shape. Strong language like that is easy to utter, picking up traditions of invective and hurling them at an opponent. But these words are backed up with action in the form of a curse of temporary blindness. Suddenly the magician finds himself groping around in darkness—the story has an obvious flavor of just retribution, the spellbinder being himself spellbound—and the governor, confronted with a new kind of power, believes what the travelers have been saying. He was, as Luke comments, “astonished at the teaching of the Lord.”5 Why, wonder readers, the “teaching,” not the “power”? Presumably because, though many people could perform strange tricks, the power of the travelers seemed to come not from themselves, but from the one about whom they were “teaching,” the one whose death, resurrection, and enthronement had revealed him as the true Kyrios. With the explanation came the power. And, with this, Saul appears to come of age. He is not now simply a teacher or prophet working within the church as in Antioch. He is out on the front line and finding sudden energy and focus to meet a new kind of challenge.
He emerges not only as the new spokesman, but with a new name. Luke changes gear effortlessly: “Saul, also named Paul.”6 From now on this is how he will be referred to and, in Acts and the letters, how he will refer to himself. Why the change?
“Saul” is obviously a royal name, that of the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin. Saul of Tarsus, conscious of descent from the same tribe, seems to have reflected on the significance of the name, quoting at one point a passage about God’s choice of King Saul and applying it to his own vocation.7 Some have speculated that he deliberately set aside this name, with its highborn overtones, in order to use a Greek word connected to the adjective paulos, “small, little”—a sign, perhaps, of a deliberate humility, “the least of the apostles.” Well, perhaps. Others have supposed that he simply chose a name better known in the wider non-Jewish world, shared even by the governor in the present story. Like most Roman citizens, Saul/Paul would have had more than one name, and it is quite possible that he already possessed the name “Paul” and simply switched within available options. It is worth noting as well, however, that in Aristophanes, known to most schoolboys in the Greek world, the word saulos was an adjective meaning “mincing,” as of a man walking in an exaggeratedly effeminate fashion. One can understand Paul’s not wishing to sport that label in the larger Greek-speaking world. One way or another, “Paul” he would be from now on.
* * *
Our suspicions about John Mark feeling at home in Cyprus are accentuated by what happens next. The travelers sail north from Paphos and arrive on the Pamphylia coastline (south-central Turkey in modern terms). They land at the port of Perga, whereupon John Mark leaves them and returns to Jerusalem. This leaves Paul with a lasting sense of betrayal and suspicion: later on, when Barnabas tries to launch another trip and wants to give Mark a second chance, Paul refuses point-blank to take someone so obviously unreliable. The episode raises other questions too. What precisely did an assistant have to do on such a trip? Look after travel arrangements, accommodations, money? Slip out unnoticed to shop for supplies? Carry extra luggage containing scriptural scrolls? In any case, Paul does not forget, and this will be part of the later rift with Barnabas. The two, though, move on, heading north from Pamphylia on the coast to the inland region of Pisidia, part of the Roman province of Galatia. They arrive at the city known at that time as “New Rome,” Pisidian Antioch.
The reason Pisidian Antioch was thought of as “New Rome” had to do with its recent colonial history. The civil wars that had scarred the Roman world after the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BC had left tens of thousands of military veterans in Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere. Many of them would in any case have been from countries other than Italy in the first place, but all of them, having signed on for active service, would expect to be rewarded. The last thing Rome wanted was such people coming to Italy, let alone to Rome itself; Rome’s population was already swollen, causing unemployment and a regular threat of food shortages. Augustus therefore founded colonies for these ex–service personnel well away from Italy. Pisidian Antioch was the most important such colony in the region, retaining its name (Antioch) from its earlier foundation, though now officially renamed Colonia Caesarea (“Caesar’s Colony,” a telling name in itself) when the province of Galatia, of which it formed the most substantial southern city, was founded in 25 BC.
Pisidian Antioch was the home of a good many first-century senators and other high-ranking Romans, including the Sergius Paulus whom Paul and Barnabas had met in Paphos. As is the way with colonies, the city did its best to imitate Rome in its architecture as well as its style of government, its public holidays, and its entire ethos. By the middle of the first century AD, when Paul and Barnabas arrived, the city center was dominated by a vast complex of buildings focused on the imperial cult. This featured the temple itself along with several other buildings and a massive triumphal arch celebrating the victory of Augustus over the Pisidians. Other typical Roman buildings, including an aqueduct and a theater, are still visible there today. What’s more, this was one of the places where one could see, displayed at great length on public buildings, the remarkable autobiographical work Res Gestae, “Matters Accomplished,” which Augustus had inscribed in Latin and Greek in several locations including the Galatian capital Ancyra, farther north. Rome was not noted for subtle political statements. The entire city of Antioch made the very obvious point about who was in charge and about the “religious” implications of the new imperial reality. Caesar and Rome were the central focus of worship, a worship that would bind together the city and the region and give it security by linking it so obviously to its ultimate patron.
All this is part of the backdrop to the long address that Luke ascribes to Paul in the synagogue at Antioch.8 Luke, as I have suggested, presumably intended this to be seen as typical of what Paul would have said in one synagogue after another. Earlier scholarship used to cast doubt on whether such speeches were really compatible with what we know of Paul from his letters. This speech in particular, focusing so strongly on Jesus as the true descendant of King David, came under that kind of suspicion when scholars tried to maintain that Paul gave little thought to Jesus’s Davidic messiahship. Since, however, there are good reasons for reversing that verdict, we are free to explore the speech not only in its obvious Jewish context but within the larger framework of “New Rome.” What did it mean to proclaim the King of the Jews in such a context? What did it mean for Paul to be doing that?
Paul must have felt that he’d been preparing for this kind of moment all his life. He was going to tell the story of ancient Israel in a way that everybody would recognize, but with a conclusion nobody had seen coming. He would focus on God’s original choice of King David and on the promise that God would eventually send a new David. So he moves rapidly from Abraham to the Exodus, to the settlement of the land, and then to Samuel, Saul, and David himself. He then jumps to the story of Jesus, carefully highlighting the fulfillment of the Davidic promises as witnessed by Jesus’s resurrection—for which purpose he quotes key texts from the Psalms and the prophets.9 He is covering all the bases: the story of the Torah (the first division of the Hebrew Bible) is backed up with the Prophets and the Writings (the second and third). And the climax is that the long hope of Israel has been fulfilled. The law of Moses had ended in a puzzle. Deuteronomy had warned about Israel’s long-term covenant unfaithfulness and its results. But now there was a way through. Moses could only take them so far, but now God had broken through that barrier. “Forgiveness of sins” had arrived in space and time, a new reality to open a new world. But, as with Moses, would the present generation listen? Paul’s speech ends with another prophetic warning: something new is happening, and they might just be looking the wrong way and miss out on it entirely.
This was, of course, dramatic and revolutionary. Paul had sat through many synagogue addresses in his youth, and he must have known that people simply didn’t say this kind of thing. He wasn’t giving them a new kind of moral exhortation. He certainly wasn’t offering a new “religion” as such. He was not telling them (to forestall the obvious misunderstanding about which I have spoken already) “how to go to heaven.” He was announcing the fulfillment of the long-range divine plan. The Mosaic covenant could only take them so far. The story that began with Abraham and pointed ahead to the coming Davidic king would, so to speak, break through the Moses barrier and arrive at a new world order entirely. No Jew who had been brought up on the Psalms (not least Psalm 2, which Paul quotes here and which other Jews of his day had studied intensively) could miss the point. If the new David had arrived, he would upstage everything and everyone else—including the New Rome and its great emperor over the sea. This was both exciting and dangerous. Small wonder that many of the synagogue members, both Jews and proselytes, followed Paul and Barnabas after the close of the synagogue meeting. Either this message was a complete hoax, a blasphemous nonsense, or, if it was true, it meant the opening up of a whole new world.
Small wonder too that the next Sabbath a huge crowd gathered to hear what Paul was saying. But this time the local community had had a chance to think through what it all might mean, and the signs were not good. Paul might be clever at expounding scriptures, but nobody had ever heard of a crucified Messiah, and nobody had imagined that if Israel’s God finally did what he had promised, some of the Jewish people themselves might miss out on it, as Paul (in line with scripture itself) had warned. Underneath this again there is a dark note. If, according to Paul, this new world of forgiveness had opened up to embrace all alike, non-Jew as well as Jew, what would become of the settled but still fragile place of the Jewish communities in the Roman world? Everything was going to change.
The result, as with the young Saul of Tarsus himself, was zeal—zeal for Israel’s God, zeal for the Torah, zeal against anything that might appear to be overthrowing the ancestral order. Some of the local Jews, we may suppose, glimpsed that what Paul had been saying might just be true. Most could only see the threat to their way of life, the drastic redrawing of the shape their hopes had always taken. They denounced Paul and Barnabas as false teachers leading Israel astray. Paul’s response was to quote the prophets once more, this time his regular text, Isaiah 49: “I have set you for a light to the nations, so that you can be salvation-bringers to the end of the earth.”10 The Jewish reaction itself confirmed his scripture-fueled sense that, when Israel’s God did for Israel what he had promised, then the nations as a whole would come into the promised blessing.
This naturally delighted the non-Jews who had heard his message: they were free to belong to God’s ancient people! But this in turn stiffened the Jewish reaction, and that then produced an altogether more serious turn of events. We have no idea whether Paul had made contact with the leading citizens of Antioch, though if, as some have suggested, he had come with a letter of recommendation from Sergius Paulus in Cyprus, that is altogether possible. But the aristocrats of Antioch would have been alarmed, as Romans were always alarmed, by any suggestion of strange new subversive teachings that might upset the delicate social and cultural status quo.
Paul’s message seemed to point to uncharted territory, to a new kind of “Jewish” community claiming continuity with Abraham, David, and the prophets, but now including any non-Jews who professed allegiance to the newly heralded “Messiah,” Jesus, and at the same time threatening (as Paul and Barnabas seem to have threatened) that any Jews who refused to see Jesus as their promised Messiah would themselves be missing out on this new fulfillment. Since Julius Caesar had given the Jewish people the privilege, unique among all groups in the empire, of not being required to worship the Roman gods, it is quite possible that both groups (leading Jews and leading citizens of Antioch) would have seen at once the threat of real civic upheaval. Supposing large numbers of non-Jews started trying to claim the same privilege?
The visit to New Rome thus ends with the start of Paul’s new life: that of a suffering apostle, a visible symbol of the crucified Lord he was proclaiming. Opposition turned to violence sufficient to cause Paul and Barnabas to leave town in a hurry, symbolically shaking the dust off their feet as they did so.11 They left behind them, however, the beginnings of a new community, “filled with joy and with the holy spirit.”12 There was a sense of springtime. Something new had begun, even if the heralds of spring, like migrating birds pausing on their journey, had had to move on quickly.
The next three cities follow in quick succession, and Luke selects one incident in Lystra for particular treatment. If you traveled east from Antioch and followed the main road (the Via Sebaste) across the mountains southeast from Antioch, you would be heading ultimately for Syria via Paul’s home city of Tarsus. The first territory you would enter would be Lycaonia, and the first city you would meet there is Iconium, followed closely by Lystra, and then, a little farther, by Derbe.
This area had been part of the Roman province of Asia in the second century BC. It then became part of the new province of Cilicia in roughly 80 BC. Then, following dynastic changes among local client kings, it became part of the new province of Galatia in 25 BC. Both Iconium and Lystra were Roman colonies, used by Augustus to settle veterans in 26 BC. They never had the same importance or vast public buildings as Antioch. But their significance as centers of Roman culture and the Roman cult cannot be underestimated.
We watch, then, as Paul follows the pattern that has already emerged. His message and mission remain firmly anchored in the traditions and hopes of Israel, and he naturally begins with the synagogue, presumably employing some version of the narrative we saw him displaying in Antioch (Abraham, the Exodus, David . . . and Jesus). He receives an enthusiastic reception from some hearers and predictably implacable hostility from others. But there are two other features that emerge in these three cities and also in the letter Paul wrote to these churches not long afterward.
First, Paul’s message of a new age dawning, of new creation suddenly leaping into life, is dramatically symbolized by a burst of healing activity. When Paul writes to these churches later on, he refers to the powerful signs that had been performed and it seems were still being performed in their midst.13 We should be careful, by the way, about the modern word “miracle” in this connection. People often think of “miracles” as the “invasion” of the natural order by a force from outside. That wasn’t how the early Christians saw it. For them, dramatic and otherwise inexplicable healings were seen as evidence of new creation, of the Creator himself at work in a fresh way. This is especially clear in the incident in Lystra to which we shall return presently.
The second feature of this part of the trip is suffering. The community leaders in Iconium, Jews and Gentiles alike, try to attack Paul and Barnabas and even to stone them.14 Paul himself is stoned and left for dead in Lystra.15 As they go back through the region after their initial foray, the message they give is stark: God’s kingdom is indeed breaking in, but belonging to that new age, that new divine rule, will mean undergoing suffering. The “present age” and the “age to come” are grinding against one another, like upper and lower millstones, as God’s new world is brought to birth. Those who find themselves seized by the message of Jesus will be caught in the middle and will thereby provide in themselves further evidence of the message, the news that the crucified Messiah is now the Lord of the whole world.
The paradoxes of Paul’s apostleship are thus laid bare right from the start of his traveling career. There is a sense in which all the writing that would later flow from his pen becomes a complicated set of footnotes to the reality he was already discovering and modeling. When Paul writes to the churches in Galatia and refers to his first visit to them, he mentions that it was “through bodily weakness that I announced the gospel to you in the first place.”16 Some have speculated that he was seriously ill at the time. Those who invoked epilepsy or serious migraines as “explanations” for the Damascus Road incident have naturally invoked them here too. As another alternative, some have suggested that when he goes on to say that the Galatians welcomed him so warmly that, had it been possible, they would have torn out their eyes and given them to him, this is an indication that he suffered from some kind of sickness of the eyes.17 That, I think, is a case (and not the only one) of modern readers failing to spot a well-known first-century metaphor.
I think it far more likely that the poor physical condition to which Paul refers is the result of the violence to which he had been subjected. In the ancient world, just as today, the physical appearance of public figures carries considerable weight in how they are assessed. Someone turning up in a city shortly after being stoned or beaten up would hardly cut an imposing figure. The Galatians, however, had welcomed Paul as if he were an angel from heaven or even the Messiah himself.18 As Paul would later explain, the bodily marks of identification that mattered to him were not the signs of circumcision, but “the marks of Jesus”—in other words, the signs of the suffering he had undergone. When, later on, he faces suffering at other levels as well—including what looks like a nervous breakdown—he will, through gritted teeth, explain that this too is part of what it means to be an apostle.19
Another theme that resonates throughout Paul’s public career first emerges here in Lystra. He would have been well aware, from his early days, of the non-Jewish religious culture of ancient Anatolia: many gods, many “lords,” many tales of divine goings-on, traceable all the way back in the classical world to Homer, but then diversifying into local legends and folktales. One such, reported by the Roman poet Ovid, tells of the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes wandering unrecognized in the region. Later inscriptions from the area indicate that these two divinities were subsequently celebrated there.20 So it isn’t surprising that, when Paul dramatically heals a man who had been crippled from birth, the locals assume that the old stories have come true: Zeus and Hermes have appeared at last. (Luke, in an interesting bit of local color, tells us that the crowds are shouting out their welcome in the local Lycaonian language.) Since Hermes is the “messenger of the gods,” and since Paul seems to be doing all the talking, they assume that Paul is Hermes. That, by process of elimination, means that Barnabas must be Zeus. Before the apostles know what is happening, the local cult swings into action. The priest of Zeus brings out a procession to meet them. He has oxen and garlands, all the paraphernalia for a great sacrifice. There is no doubt music and dancing. They find themselves in the middle of a classic pagan celebration.
At this point all the deep-seated instincts and theology of two lifelong devout Jews come into play. This is exactly the kind of idolatry against which the Jewish world had always reacted. Early Jewish tales of the call of Abraham himself stress his background in polytheism and how he had given it all up to follow the call of the One God. The law of Moses warns repeatedly against any kind of compromise with pagan worship. Paul, steeped in the Torah from boyhood, would never forget the threat posed by Balaam when he sent in the Moabite women to tempt the Israelite men to commit idolatry, the moment when Phinehas burned with the “zeal,” the moment when Elijah faced the Baal worshippers. Later challenges reinforced the point. The deepest revulsion of the Jewish monotheist was reserved for this kind of thing and all that went with it. Jews from that day to this have accused Paul of compromising with paganism. But this scene makes it abundantly clear that, if Paul ever appears to be sailing close to the wind (he would say that this was a false conclusion, but many have drawn it), this was not because he was becoming some kind of pagan by the back door. He was as fierce and zealous a monotheist as anyone else. He reacts to finding himself in the middle of a pagan celebration like a man in a pit of snakes. This is not a good place for him to be.
Nor was this simply a knee-jerk reaction to “other people’s religious practices.” Throughout his mature work we see evidence that Paul had a well-thought-out critique of the world of pagan philosophy and religion, rooted in his belief in the One God as the creator of the world. Paganism, he believed, was simply a parody, people worshipping forces within the natural world without realizing that they owed their very existence and such charm and power as they possessed to the creator who had made them in the first place—and that to worship these forces was the quick route to slavery and dehumanization. Completely consistent with his slogan of “turning from idols to serve a living and true God,” Paul insists not only on that challenge but on the underlying narrative: that for a long time this God has allowed the nations to go their own way, but now something new has burst onto the scene.
Paul and Barnabas rush into the crowd and, disrupting the careful liturgical procession and interrupting the music, they do their best to explain that this is precisely what their message is not about. They, Paul and Barnabas, are not gods but ordinary humans, and the whole point of their visit is to tell everybody to turn away from such foolishness. The “gods” the local people are invoking are lifeless idols, but they, the apostles, are bringing them news of a God who is alive. He is the Creator; he is the one who supplies humans with all they need. And something has happened to make this message urgent: this living God, having for a long time allowed the nations to go their own way, has now done something to unveil his power and his purpose. That’s why it is time to turn away from all this playacting and experience the power and love of the God who puts all the gods to shame.
When we set this incident alongside the opening synagogue sermon in Acts 13, we see clearly how the inner logic of Paul’s mission actually works. On the one hand, he is declaring to the Jewish community, and thereafter to all and sundry, that the long-awaited fulfillment of Israel’s hope has arrived. The story that began with Abraham—the story, that is, of how the One God was addressing the deep problems of the whole human race and hence of creation itself—had reached its goal. Israel’s God had defeated the forces of darkness that had held the nations captive and, in a majestic second Exodus, had brought Jesus through death to resurrection and had thereby declared him to be David’s true son, Israel’s Messiah, and the world’s true Lord.
But, on the other hand, if all this is true, then this does not mean that the Jews are wrong and the pagans are right. On the contrary, the powers that have gripped the pagan world and the fake “gods” that these “powers” have used to deceive the nations have been overthrown. Zeus, Hermes, and the rest have been shown up as shams. They simply do not exist. Any “power” that they have comes not from their own quasi-divinity, but from the fact that humans, worshipping them, have given to the malevolent forces that use their name as a cloak the authority that God always intended humans themselves to exercise. That is why, as we have seen, if these “powers” are overthrown and if the long-awaited new creation has begun under the rule of the Davidic king, then the nations of the world are to be invited to join the people who worship the One God, just as the Jewish people themselves are invited to welcome their Messiah and to discover, as Paul insisted in Antioch, that the puzzling ending to Moses’s own words to Israel in Deuteronomy 27–32 has been dealt with. The story that could get no farther because of Israel’s ongoing rebellion and hard-heartedness has arrived at its new destination. That which couldn’t be dealt with under Moses has now been dealt with once and for all.21
The transition is swift. One minute the Lycaonians are ready to worship Paul; the next minute they are ready to stone him. If this seems extreme—but then who are we to judge a totally different culture?—it may be explained more easily than we might imagine, and not only on the principle of the fickleness of crowds (like those who shouted “Hosanna” on Palm Sunday and then “Crucify!” a few days later). Rather, Paul had accomplished an extraordinary feat of healing. That could not be denied. But if he was not to be identified with one of the Greek pantheon, then who was he? Some kind of magician?
One person’s miracle is another person’s magic, and someone performing powerful deeds without proper sanction may be a dangerous deceiver. Jesus himself had been accused of being in league with the devil. Deuteronomy had warned Israel about that kind of thing, and a puzzled pagan crowd would be ready for a similar explanation. Perhaps Paul was bewitching them, dazzling them with magic tricks in order to prey on them. Such a person would be better off out of the way altogether, and the mixture of zealous Jews and angry local pagans leaves Paul for dead under a hail of stones. “Once I was stoned” he says later.22 Once would have finished off most people, but for whatever reason Paul lives to tell the tale, perhaps by being knocked unconscious early on and so being left for dead.
Equally, one such incident would have convinced many people that they were on a fool’s errand and ought to find less risky ways of getting their message across. But Paul’s resolve is only stiffened. His friends come around and take him into the city. He explains that this kind of suffering is precisely the sign of two worlds clashing; they are on the cusp of the new world, and if this is what it costs, this is what it costs. So he will go on.
One more visit, this time to Derbe, a little farther down the same road. Had they gone much farther along the Via Sebaste, Paul and Barnabas would have gone up the steep pass through the Cilician Gates in the Taurus Mountains and would then have dropped down to Paul’s native city of Tarsus. There may have been reasons for not doing that. Instead, they turn back to revisit the cities where they have launched these little new-creation communities, these surprised groups of people who have found themselves caught up in a movement at once so utterly Jewish and so very unlike (and therefore so threatening to) anything that local Jewish communities had thought of before. As we would expect, they encourage these little groups; they urge them to “remain in the faith,” which we could equally well translate as “stay loyal,” loyal, in other words, to the Faithful One, to the true King Jesus. They remind them, with Paul’s battered body as the obvious evidence, that the ultimate “kingdom of God,” the sovereign rule of the One God on earth as in heaven, will come about “through considerable suffering.”23 Suffering, it appears, is not simply something through which the faithful people must pass to get to their destination. It is in itself the way in which the dark powers that have ruled the world will exhaust themselves, the way in which the one-off victory won by the Messiah on the cross will be implemented in the world.
All this Paul and Barnabas now have etched into their conscious and subconscious minds. They have seen the power of God unveiled as they have told the story of Israel reaching its climax in Jesus. They have witnessed “signs and wonders” of various kinds. They have suffered and have discovered that this too is a means of the power by which God’s new age is coming to birth. And they have seen, in particular, that many non-Jews, hearing the message, have responded with delight, believed, and stayed loyal to Jesus as the crucified and risen Lord. What they had witnessed earlier in Syrian Antioch—the creation of a new community in which Jews and Gentiles were able to live together because all that had previously separated them had been dealt with on the cross—had come true in city after city.
Every element of this contributes to our initial answer to our first question about Paul’s deepest motivations. Every element of it contributes to a deeper understanding of our second question, as to the significance of what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. There is no suggestion that Paul had embraced a “religion” different from the one he had previously pursued. There is no suggestion that up to that point he had supposed that in order to get to “heaven,” one had to please Israel’s God by performing good moral works, and that he was now offering an easier way (“You just have to believe!”). Both of these suggestions—widely popular in Western thought over the last few centuries—are simply anachronistic. This is not how Jews or pagans of the time were thinking, and it certainly isn’t how Paul’s mind worked.
For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences. And if that had now happened, if the Messiah’s death had dealt with the “powers” that had held Jew and Gentile alike captive and his resurrection had launched a new world order “on earth as in heaven,” then the non-Jewish nations were not only free to turn from their now powerless idols to serve the living and true God, but their “uncleanness”—the idolatry and immorality that were always cited as the reason Jews should not fraternize with them—had itself been dealt with. The radical meaning of the Messiah’s cross was the reason, on both counts, that there now had to be a single family consisting of all the Messiah’s people. And perhaps this helps, eventually, with the other question that hovers over all study of Paul: Why did this extraordinary movement, launched by this energetic and subversive man, spread in the way it did?
All these questions need as their central point the recognition that this was neither a new “religion” nor a new system of otherworldly salvation. At the heart of Paul’s message, teaching, and life was—to use a technical phrase—radical messianic eschatology. Eschatology: God’s long-awaited new day has arrived. Messianic: Jesus is the true son of David, announced as such in his resurrection, bringing to completion the purposes announced to Abraham and extended in the Psalms to embrace the world. Radical: nothing in Paul’s or Barnabas’s background had prepared them for this new state of affairs. The fact that they now believed it was what the One God had always planned did not reduce their own sense of awe and astonishment. They knew firsthand that such a program would meet stiff resistance and even violence. What they could not have foreseen, as they traveled back through the southern part of the province of Galatia and then sailed home to (Syrian) Antioch, was that the new reality they had witnessed would become a focus of sharp controversy even among Jesus’s followers, let alone that the two of them, Paul and Barnabas, would find themselves on opposite sides as that controversy boiled over.