THANKS TO PAUL, we know more about life in Corinth than we do about life in any other first-century city in Greece. Poets like Martial and Juvenal give us a (no doubt jaundiced) vision of Rome in the first two centuries. Josephus, in a very different register, lets us look on as mid-century Jerusalem descends into chaos. But Paul, as a by-product of his urgent pastoral and theological concerns, shows us Corinth as a lively and lascivious city, with its class distinctions and its law courts; its temples, markets, and brothels; its dinner parties, weddings, and festivals. We watch, in a way we cannot do with any of Paul’s other churches, as a community comes to terms with what it meant to be Messiah people in a world full of challenges and questions. And—in keeping with our purpose in this book in particular—we watch as Paul himself faces new challenges, new opportunities, and not least new heartache. Corinth was famous in any case, but Paul gives it an assured place in any account of ancient city life.
Corinth occupied an enviable civic position. Greece divides geographically in two; its most famous cities were Athens in the northern part and Sparta in the southern. The narrow neck of land that joins the two, carrying traffic and trade between them to this day, is the Isthmus of Corinth, and the city itself sits right there, on the southwest corner of the isthmus and the southeast corner of the western gulf. Attempts were made in antiquity to dig a canal across the four miles of the isthmus to enable ships to avoid the long trip around the Peloponnese by passing directly from the Adriatic to the Aegean (or vice versa) through the Gulf of Corinth on the west side and the Saronic Gulf on the east. Nero himself took a pickax and tried to start such a project in AD 67 (using Jewish prisoners from the early years of the Roman-Jewish war), but like all the other ancient attempts his was unsuccessful. Alternative arrangements were made using a stone carriageway to drag ships overland, though that was laborious and costly. The present canal was finally dug and opened for sea traffic in the late nineteenth century. Even then, and to this day, the canal is too shallow, narrow, and susceptible to rockfalls to accomplish what was really wanted. Most larger ships cannot use it. What you are likely to see there now are smaller tourist boats.
Even without a canal, however, Corinth was bound to thrive. It has several freshwater springs that made the site attractive for dwellings and commerce. In addition to being located right by the main shipping and land routes, it commands a coastal plain that was proverbial in antiquity for its fertility. Corinth was also proverbial for its morals, or rather the lack thereof. It was a classic port city—though actually the ports proper were Lechaeum, two miles to the west, and Cenchreae, six miles to the east—where every type of human behavior might flourish unchecked. (A large temple to Aphrodite, on the summit of the Corinthian acropolis, made its own statement, even though the climb to the top was and is far more demanding than the trek up the much smaller Athenian acropolis.) After a century in which the city lay in ruins, having been sacked by the Romans in 146 BC, it was refounded in 44 BC as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar not long before his assassination. (He was another who tried to have a canal dug. Indeed, people spoke of a curse on the project; Caesar, Nero, and Caligula all died violently after trying to get the scheme going.) Corinth was the capital of the province of Achaea, administered by a proconsul.
Like other colonies, if anything more so, Corinth was excessively proud of its Romanitas, its “Romanness.” The new temple for the imperial cult is still prominent in the Corinthian Forum, deliberately raised just a little higher than the other local temples, of which, of course, there were many, including those to Aphrodite, Poseidon (god of earthquakes as well as of the sea), Apollo, and the healing god Asclepius. The symbolism of raising the imperial shrine higher than the others was, and is, obvious. Even though by the standards of the day Corinth was a large city, to our eyes everything seems close together. When you walk around the city center today, you are reminded again how easy it was for everyone to know everyone else’s business. Except for the very rich, life happened in public. And Paul was not rich.
The original members of the colony were Roman freedmen, ex-slaves on the way up the social scale. They were joined by Roman businessmen with their eye on the profits to be made in such an ideal trading and transport post. Like every other city in the ancient world, Corinth had a huge social imbalance, with few rich, many poor, and at least half the population in any case enslaved. Still, it was a city full of possibility, including the chance of social mobility—in either direction—and hence there was a high probability that people would pay close attention to markers of social standing.
Paul has few such markers. As he trudges into town—we normally assume he traveled on foot, and it would have taken perhaps three or four days from Athens—he does not cut a fine figure. It is now early 51. It is a matter of weeks, perhaps at most a couple of months, since he was badly beaten in Philippi; but since then he has had to leave three cities in a hurry, he is anxious about the Thessalonians after the riots and the threats against Jason, and he may well be short of funds. Having sent Timothy back to Thessalonica, he is alone. “I came to you in weakness,” he would later write to the Corinthian church, “in great fear and trembling.”1 But at this point he makes some new friends who will be among his most important supporters in the days to come.
Aquila and Priscilla (in Paul’s letters he abbreviates her name as Prisca) were a Jewish couple who came from Pontus, on the Black Sea shore of ancient Turkey. They had, however, been living in Rome until Claudius banished the Jews for rioting. It is hard to pin down exactly what had gone on, or indeed when. The Roman historian Suetonius says that the riots had been instigated by “Chrestus,” which could reflect a garbled account of trouble in the Jewish community in Rome when the gospel of Messiah Jesus (“Christus,” with the middle vowel pronounced long) arrived in town. Suetonius gives no date for the incident, but the convergence of other evidence makes it likely that it happened around AD 49, and that Aquila and Priscilla arrived in Corinth—adding to the many Roman businesspeople already there—not long before Paul did himself. Like him, they were tentmakers. They seem not only to have struck up an instant friendship, but to have become sufficiently close for Paul to lodge in their house, share in their business, and also travel with them to Ephesus. By the time Paul wrote Romans, they were back in Rome again. The way Luke tells the story of their first meeting and going into business together makes the moment seem full of hope and fresh possibility.
As usual, Paul starts his apostolic work (as opposed to his tentmaking work) in the synagogue. We must assume that he rehearses yet again the familiar narrative: Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope. The focus is likewise the same: scripture speaks of a Messiah who dies and rises again, and this Messiah is Jesus. It is to his Corinthian listeners, in the first of the two letters, that he later writes to remind them of the very simple terms of his initial gospel announcement:
The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible; he was buried; he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Bible; he was seen . . .2
He summarizes this even more sharply: “When I came to you . . . ,” he says, “I decided to know nothing in my dealings with you except Jesus the Messiah, especially his crucifixion.”3 That, however, would take a great deal of explaining, and Sabbath by Sabbath Paul gives it all he’s got, arguing and expounding, winning over a good many of the Jews in the synagogue and also several of the God-fearing Greeks. This is how Timothy and Silas find him when they finally catch up with him, Timothy having made the double journey from Thessalonica to Athens and back and now on to Corinth itself.
When Paul later described his initial preaching in Corinth, he reflected on his wider experience of announcing the gospel:
Jews look for signs, you see, and Greeks search for wisdom; but we announce the crucified Messiah, a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, the Messiah—God’s power and God’s wisdom. God’s folly is wiser than humans, you see, and God’s weakness is stronger than humans.4
In other words, every time Paul came into a new town or city and opened his mouth, he knew perfectly well that what he was saying would make no sense. As with Jesus himself, the kind of “signs” that were on offer were not the sort of thing that the Jewish world was wanting or expecting. A crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms.
As for the non-Jewish world—well, the suggestion that a Jew might be the new “Lord” over all other Lords was bad enough, but a crucified man? Everybody knew that was the most shameful and horrible death imaginable. How could such a person then be hailed as Kyrios? And if the answer was (as it would be for Paul) that God had raised this man from the dead, that would merely convince his hearers that he was indeed out of his mind. (A Roman governor would accuse him of that later on, but Paul must have been quite used to people saying it.) Everybody knew resurrection didn’t happen. A nice dream, perhaps—though many would have said they’d prefer to leave the body behind for good, thank you very much. Anyway, there’s no point living in fantasy land.
Paul seems to have accepted this role—saying things that made people think he was mad or blaspheming, but that then appeared to carry a life-changing power of their own. He must have known that some, on the edge of the crowd as it were, might even see him as a magician, someone saying incomprehensible things, with a magic name thrown into the mix, as a result of which—poof!—something dramatic would happen. Someone would be healed. Some well-known local character would be transformed and become a new person. Paul clearly had to resist the temptation to suppose that this power was somehow in his possession or under his control. He was simply a steward, dispensing God’s power and wisdom in the most unlikely fashion. But it tells us a lot about Paul that, in the first Corinthian letter at least, he can speak of this paradoxical vocation in a deliberately sharp-edged and teasing way. The passage is, of course, rhetorically crafted—in order to say that clever rhetoric isn’t where it’s at. Paul must have enjoyed that, not least because he would know that several of the Corinthians would see what he was doing and enjoy it too. But the fact remains that Paul had, to this point, made a career out of telling people things he knew they would find either mad or blasphemous or both. He had grown used to it. This was what he did.
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Timothy’s arrival brought news from Thessalonica, and this resulted at once in the outpouring of relief and affection that we know as 1 Thessalonians. The letter is famous for many reasons, and those who date Galatians much later than I do see it as the first of Paul’s letters, or at least the first to survive. In any case, the tone is completely different from the frantic alarm of Galatians. Nothing has gone wrong in the Thessalonian church; they are holding fast in the face of persecution; and Paul is proud of them, pleased with them, mightily relieved that they have not given in to the pressure of violent opposition. He reminds them of how it all began, with his visit, the sheer power of the gospel itself, which transformed their lives, and the strange combination of suffering and joy that they saw in him and then experienced for themselves. Timothy and Silas (or Silvanus, as he calls him in the letters) have reported that news of the Thessalonians’ newfound faith in the One God and loyalty to Kyrios Iēsous has radiated out into the whole of Greece, into both Macedonia in the north and Achaea in the south.
Paul’s summary of the rumors that had gone around the country are telling. They include the way the Thessalonians had welcomed him personally and received his message and the way they readily “turned”—Paul uses the word we would think of as “convert,” “turn around”—from idols “to serve a living and true God.”5 Clearly the heart of it was the Jewish message over against the practices of the pagan world. The results would be visible on the street. People would notice (“You know that family three doors down? They haven’t been to a single festival all month!”). But the reason this ancient Jewish message now had power to change pagan hearts and lives is because of what had happened through Jesus: the power of the idols had been broken. If we ask Paul the question historians always want to ask, taking the long view, as to why this unlikely message achieved such remarkable success, his own answer would undoubtedly include this point.
Through this victory, Jesus had established the new world order, and he would return to complete the work. Paul reminded his hearers that, as part of his message, he had explained that the One God would do what scripture had long promised and indeed what Paul had said to the surprised judges on the Areopagus: this God would sort the whole world out once and for all. On that day, when all human corruption and wickedness would face “anger and fury” and “trouble and distress,”6 those who had turned away from idols would be rescued by Jesus himself.
Paul then ruminates on the deep relationship that had begun in those early days and that continued in the all-too-short time he was with them. It had been time enough, though, for him to be both a pastor and a teacher, a model of the new way of life both in his manual labor to provide for his own needs and in his own personal life:
You are witnesses, and so is God, of our holy, upright and blameless behavior toward you believers. You know how, like a father to his own children, we encouraged each of you, and strengthened you, and made it clear to you that you should behave in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.7
This reminds us, as Paul is writing from Corinth, just what a challenge he faced in city after city. It is hard for any Christian worker today in all but the newest mission fields to imagine this. After two thousand years, most people in most cultures have at least a sketchy idea of what a Christian way of life might be, at least in theory and allowing for cynicism about actual Christian practice. But when Paul arrived in a new town, there was no expectation. Nobody had the slightest idea that there was a new way of life suddenly available, let alone what it might look like. Paul had to model it from scratch. He had done so, and he was naturally overjoyed that it had worked; they were copying him, not least in facing up to suffering. He was overflowing with joy and clearly regarded the Thessalonian church as a pinnacle of his life’s work so far:
When our Lord Jesus is present once more, what is our hope, our joy, the crown of our boasting before him? It’s you! Yes: you are our glory and our joy.8
One wonders what the people in the Corinthian church, among whom Paul was writing this, might have thought of it. Were they coming a poor second in his favors? But perhaps—and this may be an important insight into Paul’s understanding of his own work—the Thessalonian church was particularly special to him precisely because he had been there so briefly. He had not had time to settle down and manage its growth in faith. It had all happened so fast that he really couldn’t claim any credit for it all, even had he wanted to; the gospel did its own powerful work, since it was after all God’s own word at work in people’s hearts.9 So when he looks back, he sees the church in Thessalonica, thriving now in the midst of suffering, as the great sign that the true and living God is indeed at work through the word of the gospel. It is one thing to believe that this happens, as Paul obviously had already believed for a long time by this time. It is another thing, out in strange territory, to discover it so obviously happening despite adverse circumstances. This letter, written in the early days in Corinth, resonates with faith reaffirmed and hope strengthened.
There are three matters about which Paul is eager to say more. Each of these will be important—and more than important—in Corinth, and here we get an early taste of them. It looks as though these are issues that were bound to come up precisely because the early Christian worldview was so radically different from anything people had imagined before.
If we make a list of three topics beginning with “sex” and “money,” we might expect the third to be “power,” but in this case it is the parousia, the “appearing” of Jesus. The first two are obvious, but need to be stressed. Sexual holiness is mandatory, not optional, for followers of Jesus.10 What that means in practice Paul will later spell out in his first letter to Corinth. But already the reason for this rule is made clear. Unbridled, crazy, and inflamed lust is a sign that one does not know God. Sexual holiness isn’t just a “rule,” an arbitrary commandment. It is part of what it means to turn from idols and serve the true and living God. It is part of being a genuine, image-bearing human being. Paul will emphasize the same point again in the later letters Ephesians and Colossians, but it is already crystal clear in this passage, however briefly stated. Clearly Paul often had his work cut out to give pastoral help to people who heard what he said, but found themselves still stuck in long-lasting habits of life. But at the end of the day a clean break had to be made.
Money was part of Christian discipleship from the start. Paul had agreed with the “pillars” in Jerusalem that he would go on “remembering the poor”; that was one of the signs of the new community that would carry forward as an identifying mark for centuries to come. For Paul this was simply the outworking of “love,” agapē. That was never simply about feelings, but about mutual support, first of all within the family of Jesus-followers 11 and then, as far as ability allowed, to the larger world (note the repeated emphasis on “good works” in the wider community in the letter to Titus). It is noticeable that here and then particularly in the second letter to Thessalonica, Paul is already dealing with the second-order problems that arise in any community known to make generosity a way of life: there must be no freeloading, no sponging. Jesus-followers must “behave in a way which outsiders will respect, and so that none . . . may be in financial difficulties.”12 Sex and money are important, but they are not to be worshipped. Sexual purity and financial generosity were to be built into the Christian DNA from the start.
An altogether more complicated issue concerns the parousia, or “royal presence” or “manifestation,” of Jesus. Clearly it was always part of Paul’s message that the kingdom, on earth as in heaven, had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection, but it needed to be completed, and that would happen at Jesus’s return. But what language could he use to get this point across to people in different cultures, with different worldviews and metaphysical assumptions? Paul was heir to the long Jewish tradition of richly metaphorical language to speak of the ways in which the life and power of God’s realm (“heaven”) would impinge on the life and reality of the human sphere (“earth”). His hearers may not have been so familiar with it, just as many people today find this language alien or incomprehensible (or, perhaps worse, assume they do understand it when clearly they do not). And Paul was not just writing about a theoretical question. There was a pressing pastoral need.
The presenting problem in Thessalonica was Paul’s teaching that Jesus, who had already defeated death, would return to complete the job. At least some of his hearers had gained the impression that none of them, having come to faith, would die before that time. So now that some of them had indeed died, they wondered if the whole thing was a mistake.
This draws out of Paul something he obviously hadn’t said when he was with them, though it builds on things that he had believed long before. His ways of expressing things develops over time, no doubt partly as he discovers which lines of exposition his hearers can grasp easily and which ones they tend to misunderstand. But at the heart of it he is teaching non-Jews to think Jewishly and teaching both non-Jews and Jews to think in the Jewish way as radically modified by Jesus. This is a difficult double task. It involves nothing short of that hardest conversion of all, the conversion of the imagination. But that is what is required if people are to understand where they are and who they are as the family of God.
As I said when discussing the Epicureans and Stoics, the ancient non-Jewish world did not have much of an “eschatology,” a sense of time going somewhere, a sense of history having an ultimate purpose that would eventually be realized. The Stoic idea of a once-in-a-millennium conflagration is not the same thing, since that is part of a cycle. The only other serious “eschatology” in Paul’s world was, tellingly, the one offered by the new imperial ideology, which had revived a much older idea about a sequence of “ages,” starting with gold and working down to base metals. (A variation on this is found in the sequence of four metals in the statue dreamed of by Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2.) Now at last, sang the Augustan court poets, the golden age has returned! The imperial propaganda machine, featuring some of the greatest poets and architects of the day, relentlessly put out the word that with Augustus Caesar history had reached a surprising but joyful new day.
That was, no doubt, an exciting message for those who could glimpse, as many could not, the possibility that they might benefit from the rule of Rome. It was certainly a new idea for many who had lived in a world largely without hope except on the lowest personal levels. But for Paul all this was simply a parody of the truth. The real “golden age”—not that he called it that—had begun when the Messiah had defeated death and been raised from the dead. So—back to the Thessalonians’ question—what should one think about believers who had died before the Lord’s return?
It is significant that Paul is writing about this while in Corinth, because it is in the two letters to Corinth later on that he gives the fullest account of these important matters. But here in 1 Thessalonians he makes a start. Speaking pastorally, Paul distinguishes between two different types of grief.13 He tells the Thessalonians that they do not have the hopeless kind of grief, the bleak, dark horror of loss with no mitigating circumstances or beliefs, but rather a hopeful grief, which, although there is still the tearing, wrenching sense of loss, has within it the strong and clear hope of reunion. Paul doesn’t say exactly when the reunion will occur, because that’s not where he wants the focus to be. The point is that all will in the end be together “with the Lord.”
To make this point he uses three quite different images. First, he recalls Moses coming down the mountain accompanied by the sound of a trumpet, suggesting that Jesus will appear in like manner coming down from heaven. We should not make the mistake of supposing that Paul thought “heaven” was literally “up there,” a place within our space-time continuum. Ancient Jews were quite capable of using the language of a “three-decker universe” without supposing it was to be taken literally. Heaven (we might say) is a different dimension of reality, not a location within our dimension. Second, he recalls the image from Daniel 7 of “one like a son of man coming with the clouds” from earth to heaven, vindicated at last after suffering, exalted to the place of sovereign rule and kingdom. Even so, he says, those who belong to the Lord will be exalted like that, vindicated, sharing the Lord’s throne. Third, he recalls what happens when an emperor or grand official pays a state visit to a city or province. The leading citizens, seeing him coming, go out to meet him in the open country in order then to escort him royally into the city. Like that, those “who are alive,” he says, will “meet the Lord in the air.” How else can he describe the coming together of heaven and earth? The point is not that people will be snatched away from earth and end up in “heaven.” As we see frequently in his letters, that is never Paul’s view. The point is that heaven and earth will come together14 and those who belong to the Messiah will be part of it.
The one “literal” statement in this text is the central and important one—the Messiah’s people who have already died will rise first.15 Those who have died while believing in Jesus are safe in his presence, and they will be raised when he appears. Then all these other things will happen too. Each time Paul returns to this topic, he says it a little differently. But once we grasp how the imagery works, the underlying sense is always the same.
A different image, though, challenges the Thessalonians with another echo of imperial propaganda. The Lord will come like a midnight robber, just when people are saying “peace and security.”16 Who in that world was claiming to offer “peace and security”? The Roman Empire, of course; it proclaimed, on coins and other symbols, that with the rise of the empire the whole world was now “safe.” It was a lie, of course, a classic piece of political propaganda, comparable to the lies exposed by the prophet Jeremiah.17 The sequence of awful emperors—Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero—was bad enough, but then there came “the year of the four emperors” (AD 69), when the whole Roman world seemed to go into prolonged convulsions once more. No “peace and security” there. Paul’s answer to the Roman boast is once more to teach the converts to think Christianly about time itself:
You are not in darkness. That day won’t surprise you like a robber. You are all children of light, children of the day! We don’t belong to the night, or to darkness. . . . We daytime people should be self-controlled. . . . The Messiah . . . died for us, so that whether we stay awake or go to sleep we should live together with him.18
Followers of Jesus, then, must get used to living with a form of theological jet lag. The world all around is still in darkness, but they have set their clocks for a different time zone. It is already daytime on their worldview clock, and they must live as daytime people. This is one of the greatest challenges Paul faced: how to teach people who had never thought eschatologically that time is going somewhere and they must learn how to reset their watches; how to teach Jews who had thought the ultimate kingdom was going to come all at once that the kingdom had already broken in to world history with Jesus, but that it was not yet consummated and wouldn’t be until his return and the renewal of all things.
This is a more familiar challenge to us in the modern West, though it isn’t always thought of in this way. From time to time politicians and philosophers proclaim that the world entered a great new day with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This, they say, is a new saeculum, a different “age” of world history, and the world must learn to live in the light of it. But, they often complain, things aren’t working out as well as they should. Not everyone has woken up to the brave new world we thought was arriving. This is a particular problem for those who saw the French and American Revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s or the Russian Revolution of 1917 as ushering in some kind of new time. What happens then? How do you live between the supposed arrival of the new day and its actual implementation? That is a good question, and it only arises, we may suppose, because the ideals of revolutionary Europe, not least those associated with Karl Marx, were themselves echoes or even parodies of Jewish and Christian eschatology.
That is a story for another time. But we note that Paul, writing to Thessalonica while living in Corinth, would have been very much aware that one of his prime tasks was to teach his churches to think of God’s coming kingdom in this two-stage way. Knowing what time it was would be crucial for how they would then live. In fact, though the question of the Lord’s “royal appearing” (parousia) might seem to be quite unrelated to the earlier questions of sex and money, they are all of a piece. If you are already living in the new world, there are new ways of behaving.
The question of when Jesus would return and what that event would look like is the main focus of the second letter to Thessalonica, probably written from Corinth not long after the first one. Since Paul in effect includes Silas (Silvanus) and Timothy as coauthors, the probability is that it dates from later on in this first visit to Corinth, perhaps sometime in 51. Suffering and judgment dominate, the present suffering of the church and the coming judgment in which God will sort everything out at last.
It has been fashionable in modern times to imagine that the early Christians saw the coming judgment as the literal “end of the world,” the collapse and destruction of the planet and perhaps the entire cosmos as we know it. This letter, though full of lurid imagery, makes it clear that that cannot be right. Paul warns the Thessalonians not to be unsettled by anyone saying or writing in a letter that purports to be by Paul “that the day of the Lord has already arrived.” The “day of the Lord,” in other words—the new, Jesus-focused version of the ancient Israelite hope for “the day of the Lord”—will not mean the end of the present space-time order. One would not expect to be informed of such a thing through the Roman postal system. As so often in Jewish writing of roughly this period, what sounds to us like “end-of-the-world” language is used to denote and refer to things that we might call major world events, the sudden rise and fall of ruling powers and the like, and to invest those events with their inner, God-related significance.
Classic examples are found in books like Isaiah, where the language of the sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven is deployed to denote the fall of Babylon and to invest that event with its “cosmic” significance, which is that the powers of the heavens are shaken!19 Or take the case of Jeremiah, who in his early days had prophesied that the world would return to chaos. Since the Temple in Jerusalem was regarded as the focal point of creation, of heaven and earth coming together, this was the appropriate language to use when speaking prophetically of a time when the Temple would be destroyed.20 Jeremiah spent many years worrying about whether he was after all a false prophet, not because the world had not come to an end, but because the Temple had not fallen.
This is how such language was used across many centuries in the Israelite and Jewish culture, which had always believed in the close link of “heaven” and “earth” and found it natural to use the language of “natural disasters” to bring out the significance of what we might call major sociopolitical upheavals. Actually, we do the very same thing, speaking of a political “earthquake” or of an election producing a “landslide.” Our own metaphors seem so natural that we forget they are metaphors. Other people’s metaphors, alien to our way of speaking, are often misinterpreted as though they are not metaphors at all. No doubt Paul faced the same kind of problem, moving as he did within a complex and confusing range of cultures.
So what was he really saying to the Thessalonians when warning them about the coming “day”? The best way of taking his strange, allusive language is to see it as the natural extension of what he says back in 1 Thessalonians 5. There, we recall, he had warned about those who say “peace and security,” but who would face sudden ruin. This can only be a coded reference to the imperial propaganda put out by Rome, which, claiming to have gained control over the whole world, offered its citizens an assurance of safety far beyond its power to deliver. Paul already knew—the whole Jewish world already knew—what that might look like in reality. Paul was writing this letter while Claudius was emperor, but everybody knew what his predecessor, Gaius Caligula, had tried to do.
He had nearly achieved it. Becoming emperor in his middle twenties, Caligula had become increasingly erratic and megalomaniacal, insisting on divine honors in Rome itself, something his predecessors Augustus and Tiberius had been careful never to do. One thing stood in his way: the permission given to the Jews to worship their own God in their own way. He planned to do to Jerusalem what Antiochus Epiphanes had done two centuries earlier, only more so; he would convert the Jerusalem Temple into a great shrine focused on a giant statue of himself. He would be the divine image in the holy place.
Like his grand plans for the Corinthian canal, this didn’t happen. Caligula was assassinated in January AD 41. His name was removed from public records, and his statues were destroyed. But for many Jews who knew their scriptures, not least the prophecies of Daniel, there was a sense that the great evil, the vast, chaotic, and horrible “mystery of lawlessness,” had been thwarted once, but would return. Something was holding it back, “restraining” it, for a time.21 What did that mean? Some have thought Paul meant that Claudius, a very different kind of emperor, was following a different kind of policy, but that when he departed another Caligula might arise. Others have supposed Paul was referring to the power of the gospel itself, that the work of announcing Jesus as Lord was establishing a bridgehead into the power structures of the world, so that when the great evil returned it could be properly defeated. Paul’s purpose, in any case, was not to encourage the Thessalonians’ tendency toward lurid apocalyptic speculation, but to assure them that, despite fears and rumors, God was in charge. Jesus was indeed the coming world ruler, and they, as his people, were secure.22
He had one more message for them, again reminding us that the church was from the first a community of mutual support. Here, within twenty years of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, was a “family” already running into the problem of people taking advantage of generosity, of agapē! Paul’s instruction here is brisk: those who won’t work shouldn’t eat.23 This no doubt made the point at the time, but for us the important thing is perhaps what Paul and the Thessalonians were all taking for granted: that the followers of Jesus were to live as “family,” with all that this entailed in mutual support. Paul stressed the responsibilities of the individual: “Do your own work in peace” (as Paul himself had done, deliberately setting the example), “and eat your own bread.”24 The modern Western church has taken individualism to an extreme, and there are great strengths in focusing on the challenge to every single church member, both to believe and to work. But for Paul this did not undermine, but rather gave appropriate balance to, the more foundational reality, that those who belonged to the Messiah were “brothers and sisters.”
* * *
As we think back to the experience of the Galatian cities and then of Thessalonica and Beroea, we might imagine that Paul’s work in the Corinthian synagogue would result in riots, in the stirring up of local hostility from whatever quarter, and in his being run out of town. For whatever reason this didn’t happen, and indeed things took a much more hopeful turn all around. He did meet the predictable opposition, but by that time Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, had himself become a believer, which must have caused quite a stir both in the Jewish community itself and more widely in Corinth as a whole. When eventually it was no longer possible for Paul to work in the synagogue, one of the converts from among the God-fearers offered an alternative meeting place—his own house, right across the street. Once more, if Paul had been a shrinking violet he might have sought a less confrontational position. But that was never his style.
Around this time too Paul had a vision of Jesus himself encouraging him. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Speak on, and don’t be silent, because I am with you, and nobody will be able to lay a finger on you to harm you. There are many of my people in this city.”25 Visions like this, in the modern world as well as the ancient, are not normally luxuries. Paul needed assurance that he was in for a longer haul than in most of his previous cities.
Paul may, then, have been asking for trouble by holding meetings across the street from the synagogue. But, once more, he not only got away with it, but, as with his public apology in Philippi, he came out even better. After over a year of his teaching and pastoring in Corinth, the remaining synagogue members—the Jews who had not, like Crispus, decided to follow Jesus—made a concerted attack on the apostle. We recall the ironies of the two earlier charges, which must have resonated with Paul’s own sense of a new and paradoxical identity. In Philippi, he had been accused of teaching Jewish customs that would be illegal for Romans; in Thessalonica, he was accused by the Jewish community of teachings contrary to Caesar’s decrees. Here things were less specific but still, in a proud Roman colony, potentially threatening. He was accused of “teaching people to worship God in illegal ways.”26
The tribunal to which he was taken was that of Gallio, the brother of the famous philosopher Seneca. Gallio had been appointed by Claudius to be proconsul of the province of Achaea; an inscription from Delphi dates this fairly exactly, indicating that Gallio finished his term of office in AD 52. The normal term of office was a single year, though some stayed longer; the probability is that Gallio had arrived in late 51. Paul’s eighteen months in Corinth probably lasted from sometime early in 51 to sometime late in 52.
What might his Jewish opponents have meant by “worshipping God in illegal ways”? We cannot be sure, but an interesting and revealing answer suggests itself. The Jewish communities had official permission to worship their own God. From what we know of Paul’s prayers, he regularly used Jewish-style formulations but included Jesus in them. The best-known example, which I think was very important to Paul, is the prayer he quotes in the first letter to Corinth incorporating Jesus into the central monotheistic prayer, the Shema: “For us there is one God, the father, . . . and one Lord, Jesus the Messiah.”27 This was bound to be offensive to Jews who did not see Jesus either as Israel’s Messiah or as the embodiment of Israel’s God. It ought, therefore, so the accusers suggested, to be regarded by the Roman authorities as “illegal,” going beyond what had been authorized. Rome had, so to speak, given permission for a lodger to bring a piano into an apartment; Paul was bringing in a small orchestra.
It is possible, though less likely, that they might also have hinted that to call Jesus Kyrios or “son of God” and to regard him as the true king of Israel was potentially seditious against Rome itself; that is, Paul’s small orchestra included a trumpet summoning the troops for battle. And the accusers would have had a point. If Paul was adapting the permitted liturgies in a new form, claiming that this was the fulfillment of the Jewish way of life and the hope of Israel, this might well be going beyond what Rome thought it had sanctioned in permitting Jewish worship. And calling Jesus by titles that Caesar had made his own was throwing caution to the winds.
This proposal is confirmed, I think, by Gallio’s response. Gallio was not interested in the Jewish charges. He stopped the case before Paul could say anything; perhaps he had heard about his loquacity and was not prepared to sit through a lengthy exposition of Jewish and Christian teaching. There was to be no repeat of the Areopagus discourse. Gallio declared that the charges had nothing to do with actual illegal or vicious conduct. They were matters internal to the Jewish community, “a dispute,” he says, “about words, names, and laws within your own customs.”28 As far as Gallio was concerned, if Paul wanted to adapt Jewish styles of prayer by adding this or that name or title, that was up to him. Gallio refused to be a judge of such things. They would have to sort it out themselves.
This was a momentous event in the history of the church, and one wonders if even Paul had seen it coming. What it meant was that, unlike the authorities in the other territories he had visited, the official Roman governor of southern Greece (“Achaea”) had declared that being a Jesus-follower was to be seen as a variation of the Jewish way of life. At a stroke, this drew the sting that had been part of the pain in Galatia. It meant (among other things) that when non-Jewish Jesus-followers absented themselves from the civic cult—which, we note once more, could hardly remain hidden in a proud Roman city—they would be able to claim the same exemption as their Jewish neighbors.
The other major difference between what happened in Corinth and what had happened in Paul’s earlier legal and quasi-legal conflicts is that the mob—always a volatile element in a crowded city—saw which way the wind was blowing and took out its frustrations not on Paul and his friends, but on Sosthenes, the new synagogue ruler. Gallio, who could easily have sent in officers to stop the beating, did nothing.29
* * *
Shortly after that, Paul left Corinth, though we have no idea why. He seems to have wanted to get to Jerusalem, perhaps for a particular festival. Perhaps for that reason he had taken a vow, preparing himself in a traditional way for a special act of worship. Acts states, with a suddenness that has taken some interpreters by surprise and made them wonder whether the real Paul would ever have behaved like this, that while Paul was at the eastern port of Cenchreae awaiting his departure by sea, he had his hair cut off because of this vow. The odd thing about this, at one level anyway, is that one might expect the haircut to be scheduled for the end of a special time (during which the hair had grown freely) rather than at the start; unless, of course, the vow was going to take some time, in which case (and remembering that in 1 Cor. 11 Paul disapproved of men with long hair) it might make sense to have it cut at the start of the period of purification, so that even with a long subsequent period of growth it would not get too long.
The other odd thing, at a deeper level, is that interpreters of Paul for many years have come to him with the assumptions of modern European Protestantism, in which the idea of doing something so “Catholic”—or so Jewish!—as taking a purificatory vow that might require a special haircut was unthinkable. But these are simply modern prejudices. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith has nothing to say about the rightness or wrongness of particular devotional practices. Since Paul obviously still saw himself as a loyal Jew, worshipping the God of his ancestors albeit in the new dispensation launched by Israel’s Messiah, there was no earthly (or heavenly!) reason why he should not engage in particular practices. The truly odd thing, however, is that Luke, after mentioning this out of the blue, says nothing more about it, though it connects at long range with the other purificatory rituals that Paul undergoes on his final arrival in Jerusalem in Acts 21:22–26.
So Paul sails away, with Priscilla and Aquila accompanying him (nothing is said about Silas or Timothy), and crosses the Aegean to Ephesus, where Priscilla and Aquila stay on. Paul makes a brief visit to the synagogue there (we know the script by now: Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, hope, Messiah), but he is eager to get on his way. He sails to Caesarea, from there travels up to Jerusalem, and then returns to Syrian Antioch. The trip is probably to be dated in late 52, and the final leg of it, traveling north from Jerusalem to Antioch, in early 53.
While he was traveling—on the sea, on the roads—he prayed. We know this. When he tells people that they should “never stop praying,” this can hardly be something that applies to everybody else but not to himself.30 But how do you go on praying all the time? Is it simply ceaseless chatter, a stream-of-consciousness monologue (or indeed dialogue) with the God who through the spirit was as present as breath itself? This may have been part of it, but reading back from the letters Paul wrote over the next three or four years I think we can be much more precise and focused. At several points in his letters he seems to be adapting Jewish prayers and liturgies to include Jesus in recognition of the new life that had erupted into the ancient tradition. We know from many passages in the letters that he prayed the Psalms, focusing them on Jesus; Jesus was the promised king, the ultimate sufferer, the truly human one who would now be crowned with glory and honor. We can guess, from the easy way he weaves it into his argument, that the astonishing adaptation of the Shema prayer had already been Paul’s daily, perhaps thrice-daily, way of invoking Jesus, of expressing his loyalty to him and his kingdom: For us there is one God . . . and one Lord . . .31
So too the “benedictions” in Jewish liturgy (“Blessed be the God who . . . ”) had become part of his celebration of the way in which the One God had fulfilled his purposes in Jesus. They were Exodus prayers, kingdom prayers, messianic prayers, Jesus prayers. Paul’s experience of articulating the crazy, nonsensical message about Jesus and watching as it grasped and gripped and changed people’s lives had given him concrete reasons to pray like this, to invoke the name and power of Jesus, to seek his protection, his guidance, his encouragement, his hope, to know his presence as the focus of what in Paul’s earlier life he had experienced as the covenant love of the One God.
It is easy as we follow the outward course of Paul’s life to forget that the inward course was just as important. But unless we step to one side from his relentless journeyings and imagine him praying like this, praying as he and his friends break bread in Jesus’s name; praying as he waits for the next ship, for the turn of the tide, for the right weather to sail; praying for sick friends and for newly founded little churches; praying as he makes his way toward what may be a wonderful reunion with old friends or an awkward confrontation with old enemies—unless we build this into the very heart of our picture of this extraordinary, energetic, bold, and yet vulnerable man, we will not understand him at all. In particular, we will not understand what happened next.
At every stage of this journey, from his extraordinarily successful missionary venture around the Aegean back to Jerusalem and Antioch, we would like to know what happened. Where did he stay? Who did he meet? What was said, how was he received, what scriptures did they study together, was there fresh agreement or new tension? Did he get back together with Barnabas? Did he meet John Mark, and if so, what did they say to one another? Did he report back to James and the others in Jerusalem about the practical difficulties of organizing and maintaining communities of faith across cultural boundaries—and, in particular, about the ways in which the letter written by the Jerusalem church at the conference a few years before both was and wasn’t helpful in real-life situations? Had James written his own letter (“the Letter of James”) by this time, and did they discuss justification, faith, works, and the significance of Abraham? Was it on this visit that, realizing both the hardship faced by the Jerusalem church and the sense that the Jesus-followers there had only the sketchiest idea of who their far-flung brothers and sisters actually were, Paul conceived the plan for a large-scale collection to bring real relief to Jerusalem and to function as a sign of unity across the miles and the cultures?
We are not told. Paul himself never mentions this trip. Luke describes it in a single verse: “Then he went up to Jerusalem, greeted the church, and went back to Antioch.”32 Our sources give us the sense of a lull before the storm.