LUKE DOES NOT spare Paul’s blushes. The apostle to the Gentiles may be the main subject of Acts, at least in its second half, but there is a tale now to be told from which nobody comes out well. Paul will later characterize his vocation as “the ministry of reconciliation.” His whole theme in Galatians and in all the activity that surrounded it had been the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in the single messianic family. But when it came to reconciliation, Paul must always have had a sense of shame and failure. He and Barnabas had a falling-out.
Perhaps it was the long-term result of that shocking moment in Antioch when Peter had separated himself from the non-Jewish believers and “even Barnabas” had been led astray by their “hypocrisy.” They had made up then, it seems. They had gone together to Jerusalem and, side by side, had argued the case for Gentile inclusion. But Paul’s trust in his friend and colleague had received a heavy blow. If things went wrong on another trip, would Barnabas prove utterly reliable? His ability to encourage and help people had been vital in Paul’s own early work. But the real strength of his character—his desire to get alongside people and support them—had led him in the wrong direction in Antioch. Might the same thing happen once more?
The specific flash point concerned Barnabas’s nephew, John Mark (normally reckoned to be the Mark of the Gospel that bears his name). It was natural that Paul would suggest revisiting the churches of southern Anatolia. He felt a close bond with them, and, having written the letter, he was eager to see how things had turned out, to visit them again (as he had said) and be able to use a different tone of voice.1 It was equally natural that Barnabas would want to take Mark, to give him a second chance. And it was utterly predictable that Paul would refuse.
Ostensibly, this was about reliability. Mark had abandoned them on the earlier journey as soon as they landed on the south Turkish mainland. If they were going to have assistance on another trip, it would make sense to have someone they knew would not let them down that way again. But there may be other factors at work. Mark was related not only to Barnabas, but also to Peter. Peter had of course supported Paul’s mission at the Jerusalem Conference; but Mark, a young man with a question mark already over his character, might be inclined to take the same line that Peter had taken in Antioch. Supposing there were still some in Galatia who were claiming the authority of Peter or James in support of a two-table mealtime policy—in support, in other words, of some version of the circumcision agenda? What might Mark do then?
For his part, Barnabas would have found it intolerable that Paul would question his judgment. He had himself stood up for Paul ten years before when others were doubtful. Now he wanted to do the same for Mark. He had most likely spoken privately with the young man and believed that he had learned his lesson.
With the ease of hindsight we can think of many ways in which this could have been resolved amicably. Indeed, the solution that emerged—Barnabas and John Mark going back to Cyprus, Paul and someone else going to Galatia and beyond—was staring them in the face and could have been agreed on with prayer and mutual encouragement. But no. There was what Luke calls a paroxysmos: a blazing, horrible, bitter row. Nobody came out of it well. Goodness knows what the young church in Antioch made of it. We must assume that some of what Paul would later write about avoiding angry and bitter speech had already been part of his regular ethical teaching. But on this occasion all of that went out of the window, leaving not only a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, but also a sorrowful memory.
So Barnabas and Mark sail away, not only to Cyprus, but right out of the narrative of Acts. Mark reappears as one of Paul’s co-workers during his Ephesian imprisonment, and a later mention indicates that he had become a valued colleague at last.2 Paul knows of Barnabas’s continuing work, but they never team up again.3 Paul now chooses a different companion, Silas (or Silvanus), like Paul a Roman citizen, a member of the Jerusalem church, indeed, one of those entrusted with the letter that the Jerusalem leaders had sent to the wider churches. It made good sense. The Antioch church sends them on their way, commending them to God’s grace. They were going to need it.
The biblical writers of “histories” only seldom draw explicit moral lessons from the stories they tell. The classic example is Absalom’s rebellion, which follows soon after David’s adultery and the murder of Uriah. The connection is not made explicit, but there is an obvious link between David’s casual attitude toward sexual liaison and human life, on the one hand, and the sexual malpractice and murder that precipitated the rebellion, on the other. And in the book of Ruth, to take a happier example, the narrator does not say, “And this was what God did next.” We are simply told that Ruth and Naomi arrived at Bethlehem at the time of the barley harvest, and we are left to discover that this was the time and the means by which, against all expectation, Ruth would find a husband. One may also recall, in this connection, that wonderful plot-changing line in the middle of the book of Esther: “That night the king could not sleep.”4
Something similar may be going on in Luke’s narration of the journey that Paul and Silas now take, a journey from Antioch all the way to Corinth, probably to be dated from late 49 to early 51. After Timothy joins the party in Lystra, the three then move on, but without a real sense of direction. They try one thing, then another. The only divine guidance they get is negative: not this way, not that way. They go north, it seems, through Phrygia and Galatia, with the spirit forbidding them to go west into the province of Asia (the southwest coastal areas focused on Ephesus). Then they try to go through Mysia into Bithynia, the area up by the Black Sea, but again they are not permitted to go there. Like the children of Israel in the wilderness looking for the pillar of cloud and fire, they are relying on the spirit of Jesus, and the spirit appears to be allowing them to wander this way and that without a clear sense of guidance. It looks as though Paul had been expecting to work his way around some of the main parts of Anatolia, planting more churches as he had done in Galatia. But it wasn’t to be.
It takes two verses for Luke to tell us all this, but the areas the travelers were covering were not small. Granted the roads they seem to have been taking, they journeyed at least three hundred miles after leaving Antioch to the point where they arrived, puzzled and weary, on the far northwestern shore of Mysia. It probably took them several weeks. Early on in the trip, they had visited the churches in South Galatia and had been encouraged by what they found. After that, there seems to be no more activity, either evangelistic or pastoral.
One could say that this was a good time for Paul and Silas to get to know one another better and for them both to act as mentors and guides for Timothy, who had been invited to join them as they passed through Lystra. But one could also say, and perhaps Luke is saying this, that this is what happens when someone makes hasty decisions in a hot temper. If so, this will not be the only cooling-off period of Paul’s ministry. He seems to have learned from these times, but the learning was usually painful.
The bright spot in this otherwise puzzling period was Timothy himself. Timothy was from Lystra, where Paul had healed the crippled man and been mistaken for a Greek god. Paul was by this time in his late thirties or early forties (assuming he was born by AD 10 at the latest). Timothy, most likely in his late teens or early twenties, must have seemed like the son that Paul never had. Certainly a bond of understanding and mutual trust developed between them of the sort that happened with few others.
Timothy was the son of a believing Jewish woman and a Greek father. So, says Luke, Paul circumcised him “because of the Jews in those regions, since they all knew that his father was Greek.”5 Paul’s action here has perplexed many readers. We cast our minds back to the time when Paul and Barnabas, going to Jerusalem with famine relief, took Titus with them. Despite intense pressure from the hard-line Jerusalem activists who wanted to have Titus circumcised, Paul stood firm. Paul stressed this point when writing to the Galatians.6 In his mission in Galatia and then back in Antioch, Paul had stoutly resisted any suggestion that Gentile converts should be circumcised. He had gone to Jerusalem to argue for this principle and had won the day. But now he circumcises Timothy. Why? Is this not inconsistent? What is Paul’s justification?
Here we see the start of the tricky policy that Paul spells out in 1 Corinthians 9. Everything depends on motivation. If someone says that Titus has to be circumcised because otherwise he won’t be able to join the family at the table, Paul will object, saying Titus is a believer and he belongs there. But he wants to take Timothy with him on the next phase of his work, and that will involve going again and again into synagogues. It seems unlikely that synagogue officials would go to the lengths of making a physical check on whether newcomers had been circumcised, but Paul wants to be able to assure any doubters that all the members of the party are in fact officially Jewish.
This is what he means when he says, “I became like a Jew to the Jews, to win Jews. I became like someone under the law to the people who are under the law, even though I’m not myself under the law, so that I could win those under the law.”7 That is in itself an extraordinary statement. How could Paul become “like a Jew”? He was a Jew. The answer must be that, when seeking to work with Jewish communities or individuals, he would behave Jewishly, taking care to observe taboos for the sake of his work, not because he believed God required it of him for his standing as part of the messianic family.
He was treading a fine line, risking the charge of inconsistency at every turn. But, as with the foundational question of belonging to the Messiah’s people, what counted for Paul was the gospel itself. He wanted to be able to continue his practice of worshipping in the synagogue and taking every opportunity to expound Israel’s story (Abraham, Exodus, David, then the unresolved “exile”) with its new and shocking messianic conclusion. And for that purpose Timothy, along with the rest of the party, would have to be a bona fide Jew.
There is one more addition to the party, and again Luke asks us to read between the lines. (There are many different theories to explain this, but the simplest is likely to be the best.) Paul and the others have arrived at Troas, the port on the edge of a mountainous area in the far northwest of modern Turkey. Troas, near the site of ancient Troy, stood on the edge of the Hellespont, the narrow waterway, four miles wide, famous in ancient history for separating the Greeks and the Persians and in modern literary history for Lord Byron’s successful attempt to swim across it on May 3, 1810. Troas had been a strategic city in the time of Alexander, but it had suffered considerably during the Roman civil wars, and its importance had diminished—except insofar as it was the obvious port for anyone wanting to cross over into mainland Greece.
It may be, of course, that Paul and the others had come there because, having been forbidden to go elsewhere, they had already decided that they should probably move into quite different territories. It may even be that Paul had had some thoughts of heading straight for Rome following the Via Egnatia, which they could pick up at Philippi in northern Greece, and then making for the crossing between western Greece and the heel of Italy. But as I read Luke’s description of this whole sequence of events, I think something else was going on. I think Luke knew that when Paul, Silas, and Timothy reached Troas, they were weary, disheartened, and puzzled. And I think that the reason Luke knew this was because this was the point at which he joined the party himself.
This is far and away the simplest explanation for the fact that his narrative suddenly says “we” instead of “they.” Paul had a vision in the night (as so often, one receives guidance when it’s needed rather than when it’s wanted). A man from Macedonia was standing there, pleading, “Come across to Macedonia and help us!” (This itself strengthens my view that Paul had not previously thought of doing this, but had hoped to this point to plant more churches throughout what we now call Turkey.) So, says Luke:
When he saw the vision, at once we set about finding a way to get across to Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the good news to them.8
There are other theories, of course. There always are. But Occam’s razor is still helpful: always go for the hypothesis requiring the fewest extra assumptions. So, although it is perfectly possible that the “we” passages in Acts are, say, part of a source available to a much later author, it is equally possible, and in my judgment more plausible, that “we” here is the author’s signature. Luke turns up among those sending greetings in three Pauline letters (Colossians, Philemon, and 2 Timothy). We cannot be certain, but the signs suggest that the person who joined the party at Troas was the same person who later on wrote the story down.
***
Philippi offered a different sort of challenge from the ones Paul and Barnabas had met on the earlier journey. It had been founded, or strictly speaking enlarged and refounded, out of an earlier settlement, by Philip II, king of Macedon from 382 to 336 BC, the father of Alexander the Great. The area was important in antiquity because of good-quality gold mines, of which Philip made considerable use. But the most significant event in Philippi’s history came in the early stage of the Roman civil wars, when in the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC Mark Antony and the young Octavian Caesar defeated Brutus and Cassius, who had killed Octavian’s adoptive father Julius Caesar two years before. Antony and Octavian then enlarged the city once more, establishing it as a Roman colony to settle veteran soldiers. (As with Pisidian Antioch and the other South Galatian colonies, Rome was anxious not to have old soldiers coming to Italy claiming or simply seizing land as a reward for loyal service.) Philippi is one of the better preserved of Paul’s cities, and one can still see the layout of streets, a fine theater, and the Via Egnatia going by on its way from Rome in the West to Byzantium in the East. It is, in other words, right on one of the major routes for civic and trading purposes. Paul and his companions reached Philippi after a straightforward crossing via the island of Samothrace and the port of Neapolis.
One of the big differences between Philippi and the earlier cities of Paul’s mission was that there was no synagogue. That became significant when the locals identified Paul as a Jew; it looks as though the city knew just enough about Jews to be prejudiced against them. (How often must Paul have been stung by this. He had grown up familiar with the normal Gentile sneers against his people, and now he heard them again.) There was, however, a proseuchē, a “place of prayer” where a small number of Jews and “God-fearers” (non-Jews who wanted to join in synagogue worship) would meet regularly. This is where, after a few days settling in, Paul and the others made a start.
Their first convert was a businesswoman from Thyatira, Lydia by name, described as “a seller of purple.” Her occupation, and actually her name as well, fit with her place of origin, Thyatira, a city in Asia Minor, in the district of Lydia. There a technique had been developed to procure the prestigious purple dye from the root of the madder plant, a much cheaper way of producing the dye than extracting it from shellfish, as was done elsewhere. The implication is that Lydia was a woman of independent means: she was the head of a household, perhaps indicating that she had been widowed or divorced. Her story of response to the gospel appears the most straightforward of any in Acts: “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.”9 She was baptized with all her household and insisted on inviting the whole party, Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Luke, to come and stay at her home.
The announcement of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Lord seems to have caused no difficulty in the small Jewish meeting place. But trouble of a different sort was not far away, taking a form that Paul would meet at least once more. On the way to and from the proseuchē, the group encountered a girl who had what we might describe as “second sight,” but what Luke refers to as “a spirit of divination.” She was a slave girl who by telling oracles (“fortunes,” we might call them) made a good living for her owners. Unfortunately both for the owners and for Paul, something about his party and its message attracted her attention. As in some of the scenes in the Gospels in which spirit-possessed people shouted out Jesus’s secret identity, so this girl announced to all and sundry in a loud voice: “These men are servants of God Most High! They are declaring to you the way of salvation!”10
The phrase “God Most High” would ring bells with people. Many in the ancient world, fed up with the complex muddle of pagan gods and goddesses, came to believe in a single ultimate power, a “most high” divinity. The phrase “the way of salvation,” though, is a bit of a tease. “Salvation” was something the Roman Empire claimed to offer its citizens (rescue from civil war, social unrest, and so on), but the phrase could also refer, in some philosophies, to the “rescue” of souls from the wicked world of space, time, and matter. The early Christians, of course, had a robust view of “salvation” that was neither of the above. There is a sense here, as in some other passages, of someone saying more than she knew.
One might think that there was little harm in this poor girl shouting after the group day after day, but it was not the kind of attention Paul and his friends wanted. Eventually, as with the magician in Cyprus, Paul turned to the girl and, in the name of Jesus, commanded the spirit to leave her, which it did then and there. One can imagine the looks passing between Silas, Timothy, and Luke. Was this another case of Paul blowing his short fuse and getting himself and everyone else into trouble? So it seemed.
It didn’t take the girl’s owners long to realize that their line of business was finished. She wasn’t going to be giving any more oracles or telling any more fortunes; they wouldn’t be making any more money from her special ability. (This is one of many occasions in Acts where we wish we knew what happened next. One would like to think that perhaps Lydia rescued the girl and adopted her, because her other options would not have been good, but we have no information.) But instead of complaining that Paul had taken away their livelihood, the girl’s owners jumped straight to a charge that was, in our terms, both “civil” and “religious,” though with the emphasis on the first. They grabbed hold of Paul and Silas (why them; did Timothy and Luke melt into the crowd at that point?), dragged them into the public square, and presented them to the magistrates. “These men,” they said, “are throwing our city into an uproar! They are Jews, and they are teaching customs which it’s illegal for us Romans to accept or practice!”11
We may hope that Paul, despite his plight, was alive to the irony. The anger and violence he had faced in Galatia and the opposition to his missionary strategy in Jerusalem and Antioch had been instigated by Jewish groups, furious that he seemed to be disloyal to the ancestral traditions. Now he was accused of being a Jew teaching people to be disloyal to Rome!—a charge that might resonate uncomfortably in a world where it was known that the Jewish people had rebelled against Rome before and might well do so again.
Of course, the motive for the charge was clear, even though the underlying sequence of thought was bewildering. Paul’s exorcism of the girl (an initially “religious” problem) quickly translated into loss of income (an economic problem), and this was turned, vengefully, into the accusation that Paul and Silas were Jews (an ethnic problem) who were teaching customs that it would be illegal for Romans to practice (a political problem). The last of these is a genuine puzzle, since it isn’t clear that any Roman law prohibited Romans from adopting Jewish practices; many did so with impunity. The only sense that can be made of it—always supposing that Luke himself thought it made sense, which perhaps he didn’t—might be that the gospel message about Jesus, which demanded that people stop worshipping “idols” and turn to the living God, could be seen as a Jewish message urging people to abandon the imperial or state cults.
With that, the accusers might just have had a point. It is clear from the charge, however distorted, that some kind of gossip about the group had already been going around Philippi, as one would expect. These strangers really were teaching a Jewish message, a message about Israel’s God doing something dramatic, installing Israel’s Messiah as the world’s true Lord. So, though the accusers’ argument and conclusions were flawed at every turn, there was more than a grain of truth in what they ended up saying.
Without waiting for any formal process—an omission that would come back to haunt them—the magistrates had Paul and Silas stripped, beaten with rods, and thrown into prison. (Again, we wonder why only Paul and Silas were picked out. Timothy and Luke must have appeared to be of lesser importance or have managed to hide in Lydia’s house or elsewhere.) So far as we know, this was Paul’s first taste of prison. It would not be his last.
In Paul’s world, unlike ours, prison was not a “sentence” in itself. It was where magistrates put people while they decided what to do with them. No provision was made for the prisoners’ welfare. They had to rely on friends or family to bring them food and other necessities. Sanitation would be minimal; rodents and other vermin would be normal. The company would not be one’s first choice of friends. A few days in such a hole might well make one hope for almost any punishment, a heavy fine, or banishment at least, if only one could get out of the horrid place.
Paul and Silas did not have long to wait. What follows reads like a sequence from a movie or a somewhat overwritten thriller. The two men were praying and singing hymns at midnight. After their ordeal and with their feet in the stocks, there was not much chance of sleep, though one wonders what the other prisoners thought of being kept awake in this strange manner. That, however, was the least of their worries, since they suddenly felt the whole building shaking. Northern Greece is an earthquake zone, and suddenly the whole prison shook. This was bad news for the jailer. He was responsible for keeping the prisoners under lock and key; with doors bursting open and chains being loosened, the poor man feared the worst. He did what many a junior Roman official would think of doing in the circumstances: he drew his sword and was about to take his own life rather than face the torture and possible death he might expect for failing his duty.
Paul had other ideas. “Don’t harm yourself!” he yelled. “We’re all still here!”12 The jailor called for lights and rushed into the prison. It seems that his panic was not only because of the penalty he might face for letting prisoners escape, but because he knew, as the whole town would, that Paul and Silas were there on some kind of a religious charge, and he would have been aware of traditions in which angry gods used earthquakes to make their displeasure known. That explains not only his panic but also his trembling question: “Gentlemen,” he said, “will you please tell me how I can get out of this mess?”13
The traditional translation of his question, “What must I do to be saved?” makes it sound more like a plea from a seventeenth-century Puritan anxious about how to go to heaven. But the language of “salvation” worked at several levels in the ancient world. The slave girl whom Paul had exorcised had been shouting out that the travelers were announcing “the way of salvation.” The Roman Empire offered “salvation” to its subjects, meaning rescue from war, social upheaval, and destitution. Later in Acts, when Luke is describing the shipwreck, he speaks of the whole company being “saved” in the very concrete sense of being rescued from drowning. So it is natural to take the jailer’s panic-stricken question at the most obvious level: he wants the nightmare to end and to avoid any trouble. But then there is the deeper level, at which believing in Jesus would at once give the jailer and his household membership in the family that was already celebrating Jesus’s victory over sin and death. And there is the ultimate level: Luke and Paul both believed that one day God would rescue the whole creation from its “slavery to decay,” bringing it and all Jesus’s people into the full and final new creation.
How much any of this flashed across Paul’s mind at such a bizarre moment it is hard to say, though with his quick wit and his overall sense of an integrated cosmic divine plan he would in principle have been able to glimpse it. What he says works at all these levels: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be rescued—you and your household.”14 The jailer is only too glad to bring Paul and Silas into his house and let them explain what this actually means. He fetches water and washes their wounds; they reciprocate by baptizing him and his household, perhaps with the same water. The near tragedy turns into a celebration as the whole family shares a meal. What happened to the other prisoners we have no idea.
There follows another of those moments when Paul’s companions must have thought he was pushing his luck. At first light, the magistrates sent word to the prison that Paul and Silas were to be released and should leave town. Paul objected, producing a trump card that must have sent shock waves through the locality. “We are Roman citizens!” he says. “They didn’t put us on trial, they beat us in public, they threw us into prison, and now they are sending us away secretly? No way! Let them come themselves and take us out.”15 He is on safe ground. Roman citizens were entitled to full legal rights. Public beating and imprisonment without trial was normal practice for noncitizens, but in the case of citizens this would have been enough to turn the tables and get the magistrates themselves into serious trouble, should Paul have chosen to follow it up. (Roman officials would know this well, ever since Cicero’s prosecution of Verres in 70 BC; Verres’s crowning fault was the crucifixion of a Roman citizen.)
Another irony: the original charge was that he was teaching customs it wasn’t lawful for Romans to adopt, but by the end Paul is accusing the magistrates themselves of illegal behavior against Romans. It is, of course, a wonderfully confusing situation, but that is the kind of thing to expect when a new world is breaking in on the old one. It ends with a public apology and with the magistrates, clearly at a loss to know what to do next, imploring Paul and Silas to go away. They take their time about complying, first visiting Lydia’s house and conversing with the group of believers there.
When they go, it is not clear whether Timothy and Luke go too (though Timothy has at least caught up with Paul by the time the apostle is in Beroea). But Luke, in the next scene, no longer writes “we.”
* * *
Philippi was an important city in its own right, but Thessalonica, Paul’s next port of call, was even more so. It was on a main crossroads, and its role as a port at the head of the Thermaic Gulf to the west of the Chalcidice Peninsula guaranteed it prosperity. It was the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia, and the Roman general Pompey had used it as his base in the civil war. It was not, in Paul’s day, an official Roman colony. That would come two centuries later. But it was clearly a major center of Roman influence.
Thessalonica, unlike Philippi, had a Jewish population of sufficient numbers to sustain a synagogue. Luke’s summary of what Paul said on the three Sabbaths he spoke there conforms both to the earlier summaries, particularly Paul’s address in Pisidian Antioch (Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope), and to Paul’s own repeated statements in his letters. The message can be summed up in two basic points: first, the scriptures point to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah; second, Jesus was and is that Messiah. The message was accepted by some of the Jews, several of the God-fearing Greeks, and quite a number of the leading women. It also appears from Paul’s first letter to Thessalonica, written not long after this initial visit, that many in the young church there had been polytheistic pagans and had “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”16 Clearly this was a significant group of both Jews and Gentiles.
One member in particular, Jason, gave hospitality to Paul and Silas and then faced the brunt of the anger that was aroused when, as in Galatia, some of the synagogue community decided that enough was enough. A mob was stirred up, bent on violence, but the traveling missionaries could not be found. What matters here, though, is the political nature of the charges that were thrown around as all this was going on:
“These are the people who are turning the world upside down!” they yelled. “Now they’ve come here! Jason has had them in his house! They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar—and they’re saying that there is another king, Jesus!”17
Once again the charges are complicated. A Jewish objection to the apostles’ message (we Jews are not convinced that Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah) is easily translated into a charge of sedition against Rome (if there really is a Jewish Messiah, then according to scripture such a person will rule the whole world). Another king, indeed! Mixed in with that there may be a hint of the problem we identified as one key element in the Galatian situation: if non-Jews were abandoning idols and coming to worship the God of Israel, but without formally becoming Jews in the process, then they were indeed disobeying Caesar’s decrees. Only genuine Jews had that permission.
Does this mean, then, that Paul and the others really were “turning the world upside down”? Broadly speaking, yes it does. Exactly in line with Jesus’s own announcement of God’s kingdom, which took normal political values and power structures and stood them on their heads, Paul and his friends were announcing and modeling in their own lives a different way of being human, a different kind of community, and all because there was a very different kind of “king.” Of course, one would not expect a mob to understand the finer points of the early Christian message. But Luke, summarizing the accusation, seems content to allow the muddled pagan crowd to say more than they know. In any case, Jason and his friends are bound over to keep the peace, while Paul and Silas are smuggled out of town by night and sent on to Beroea, fifty miles or so to the west, but off the main route. They leave in a hurry, with a sense that the little body of believers is under threat.
The first letter Paul wrote back to this community, most likely in late 50 or early 51, makes it clear that in the relatively short time he had been with them they had established a close and loving bond. “We were gentle among you,” he writes,
like a nurse taking care of her own children. We were so devoted to you that we gladly intended to share with you not only the gospel of God but our own lives, because you became so dear to us.18
He was snatched away from them, he says, “in person though not in heart,” because he “longed eagerly, with a great desire,” to see them “face to face.”19 So strong was this feeling that when Paul reached Athens soon afterward, he sent Timothy back to Thessalonica to see how things were going, and he returned with good news, which Paul reports to the Thessalonians: “You always have good memories of us, and . . . are longing to see us, just as we are to see you.”20
These short references, an intimate exchange very soon after Paul’s initial visit, tell us a great deal about Paul’s way of life, his style of teaching and pastoral engagement—and also perhaps about his own personal needs. The split with Barnabas, the long and apparently aimless journey through central Anatolia with all its nagging uncertainties, the sense of arriving in a new culture, the shock of public beating and imprisonment—all this would have left him vulnerable at quite a deep level. In that context, to sense the genuine, unaffected love and support of people he had only just met, to discover through the work of the gospel a deep bond for which the language of “family” was the only appropriate description—all this must have given him comfort and strength.
As he had worried in early days about working in vain, so he wonders, by himself in Athens, whether all he had done in Thessalonica was wasted effort.21 Once more, the fact that he expresses this anxiety in terms of Isaiah’s “servant” theme doesn’t mean that the anxiety was any the less real. Paul looks back on his time in northern Greece with, no doubt, some shocking memories, but with an overarching sense that he now belongs with those communities and they with him. This, however, needs reinforcing with news. Antioch, his original base, is far away. What he is discovering is not exactly a new home—he would never spend very long in northern Greece—but a place where he has left part of his heart. A place from which he might derive either real encouragement or devastating disappointment.
So Paul, Silas, and Timothy head south rather than west. I rather think that this meant a change of plan. I suggested earlier that Paul had not originally intended to cross over the Aegean Sea into Greece. But once he was there, sensing a positive response to the gospel of Kyrios Iēsous in these very Roman cities and finding himself on the Via Egnatia, it must have been tempting to continue all the way to the port of Dyrrhachium on the Adriatic coast, to cross over to Italy, and to make straight for Rome. But the violence of the opposition in Thessalonica and the fact that he had to leave town in hurried secrecy would have made it difficult to proceed openly along the great east–west highway. Instead, the party set a different course, slightly south of west, and soon arrived in Beroea.
The stay in Beroea is short, perhaps shorter than the few weeks in Thessalonica. The city is at this time a major center of the imperial cult as well as the headquarters of the Macedonian “confederation.” As in Thessalonica, there is a synagogue, but the Jewish community here takes a quite different approach. They are prepared to listen carefully and in a generous spirit to what Paul is saying and to work through the scriptures he was expounding to see if what he said fitted the texts. We imagine them sitting down with him, sharing hospitality, and looking carefully at the story of Abraham, at the drama of the Exodus, at the anointing of David, at the Psalms and the prophets who pointed forward through the darkness of exile to the possibility of a new dawn. That shared study sounds like a promising start. Many of the Jews become believers, as do some of the Gentiles, notably some of the well-born women. They are, perhaps, among those who would find the synagogue culture to be a welcome change from the surrounding pagan world. The clear, strong ethic and the simple, almost stark, belief in the One God contrasted sharply with the ordinary life of the Roman world. Paul insists, writing later to Corinth, that among the believers “not many were nobly born.”22 But “not many” does not mean “not any.” The small groups of Jesus-followers were mixed socially as well as in gender and ethnic origin.
The good beginning in Beroea did not last. Word got back to Thessalonica that the troublemakers had moved down the road, and those Jews who had opposed Paul in Thessalonica came after him and whipped up a crowd to make trouble once more. So Paul had to move on again, though this time it seems he was the sole target of the crowd’s anger, while Silas and Timothy were able to stay behind. It would have been possible to travel south to Athens by public roads. But the group from Beroea accompanying Paul seems to have chosen to take him by sea. He arrived at Athens and, saying farewell to his escorts, urged them to tell Silas and Timothy to join him as soon as they can.
We have followed Luke’s account of Paul’s arrival in Europe and the short stays in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beroea. These are confirmed from Paul’s own letters. Yet Luke’s version can easily give us a false impression. By highlighting the swift events of arrival, gospel announcement, opposition and persecution, and departure, Luke has written a page-turner, but as we read it we have to remind ourselves that these things did not, in fact, happen in quick bursts of twenty-four hours. The hints are that Paul was in Philippi for several weeks at least. His letter to the church there, written a few years later, is so full of love that we cannot imagine his stay to have been as short as a quick reading of Acts might suggest. By the same token, we discover from that letter that when Paul was in prison (in Ephesus, as I shall later explain) the Philippian church sent him money—and Paul comments that they had done that as soon as he had left them, supporting his work in Thessalonica as well. Paul was clear that he was not preaching the gospel in order to earn money. But those whose lives had been changed by his preaching and teaching seem spontaneously to have wanted to support him, and the Philippians were preeminent in this. Such a desire is hardly raised by a visit of a few days.
It is worth laboring this point, because when people in our own day wonder what made Paul the man he was and ultimately why his project succeeded, it has been fashionable to suggest that he was a difficult, awkward, cross-grained customer who always disagreed with everyone about everything. There is no doubt that he could come across like that, especially when he could see straight through the fudge and muddle of what someone else was saying, whether a senior apostle like Peter or a local magistrate like those in Philippi. But—and it is perhaps important to stress this before we see him move on to southern Greece, where relations were not always so easy—all the signs are that in the northern Greek churches Paul quickly established a deep and lasting bond of mutual love and trust.
He would say, of course, that this came about because of the gospel. The power of the spirit, through the message and the strange personal presence of Jesus, transformed not only the individual hearts, minds, and lives of those who received it, but also the relationships between speakers and hearers. “Sharing not only the gospel of God but our own lives”23—that line tells its own story.
Yes, it is of course Paul himself who is saying this. But it is hard to believe that Paul could write that to a group he had been with only a few weeks earlier unless he knew that they would know it was true. When we wonder what most strongly motivated Paul, we must put near the center the fact that at a deeply human level he was sustained and nourished by what he came to call koinōnia.
As we saw earlier, the normal translation of koinōnia is “fellowship,” but that coin has worn smooth with long use. It can mean “business partnership” too; that is part of it, but again it doesn’t get to the heart. And the heart is what matters. When our words run out, we need images: the look of delight when a dear friend pays an unexpected visit, the glance of understanding between musicians as together they say something utterly beautiful, the long squeeze of a hand by a hospital bed, the contentment and gratitude that accompany shared worship and prayer—all this and more. The other Greek word for which Paul would reach is of course agapē, “love,” but once again our English term is so overused that we can easily fail to recognize it as it walks nearby, like a short-sighted lover failing to recognize the beloved; what we so often miss is that it means the world, and more than the world. “The son of God loved me,” Paul had written to the Galatians, “and gave himself for me.” What we see as Paul makes his way around the cities of northern Greece is what that love looks like when it translates into the personal and pastoral ministry of the suffering and celebrating apostle.