HUMAN CULTURE HAS normally developed at the speed of a glacier. We moderns, accustomed to sudden changes and dramatic revolutions, need to remind ourselves that things have not usually worked this way. Slow and steady has been the rule. Occasional inventions that suddenly transform human life for good or ill—the wheel, the printing press, gunpowder, the Internet—are rare.
That is why the events that unfolded two thousand years ago in southeastern Europe and western Asia are still as startling in retrospect as they were at the time. An energetic and talkative man, not much to look at and from a despised race, went about from city to city talking about the One God and his “son” Jesus, setting up small communities of people who accepted what he said and then writing letters to them, letters whose explosive charge is as fresh today as when they were first dictated. Paul might dispute the suggestion that he himself changed the world; Jesus, he would have said, had already done that. But what he said about Jesus, and about God, the world, and what it meant to be genuinely human, was creative and compelling—and controversial, in his own day and ever after. Nothing would ever be quite the same again.
Consider the remarkable facts. Paul’s letters, in a standard modern translation, occupy fewer than eighty pages. Even taken as a whole, they are shorter than almost any single one of Plato’s dialogues or Aristotle’s treatises. It is a safe bet to say that these letters, page for page, have generated more comment, more sermons and seminars, more monographs and dissertations than any other writings from the ancient world. (The gospels, taken together, are half as long again.) It is as though eight or ten small paintings by an obscure artist were to become more sought after, more studied and copied, more highly valued than all the Rembrandts and Titians and all the Monets and Van Goghs in the world.
This raises a set of questions for any historian or would-be biographer. How did it happen? What did this busy little man have that other people didn’t? What did he think he was doing, and why was he doing it? How did someone with his background and upbringing, which had produced saints and scholars but nobody at all like this, come to be speaking, traveling, and writing in this way? That is the first challenge of the present book: to get inside the mind, the understanding, the ambition (if that’s the right word) of Paul the Apostle, known earlier as Saul of Tarsus. What motivated him, in his heart of hearts?
That question leads immediately to the second one. When Saul encountered the news about Jesus, his mind was not a blank slate. He had been going full tilt in the opposite direction. More than once he reminds his readers that he had been brought up in a school of Jewish thought that adhered strictly to the ancestral traditions. As a young man, Saul of Tarsus had become a leading light in this movement, the aim of whose members was to urge their fellow Jews into more radical obedience to the ancient codes and to discourage them from any deviations by all means possible, up to and including violence. Why did all that change? What exactly happened on the road to Damascus?
This poses a problem for today’s readers that had better be mentioned at once, though we will only be able to address it bit by bit. The term “Damascus Road” has become proverbial, referring to any sudden transformation in personal belief or character, any “conversion,” whether “religious,” “political,” or even aesthetic. One can imagine a critic declaring that, having previously detested the music of David Bowie, he had now had a “Damascus Road” moment and had come to love it. This contemporary proverbial usage gets in the way. It makes it harder for us to understand the original event. So does the language of “conversion” itself. That word today might point to someone being “converted” from secular atheism or agnosticism to some form of Christian belief, or perhaps to someone being “converted” from a “religion” such as Buddhism or Islam to a “religion” called “Christianity”—or, of course, vice versa. Thus, many have assumed that on the road to Damascus Saul of Tarsus was “converted” from something called “Judaism” to something called “Christianity”—and that in his mature thought he was comparing these two “religions,” explaining why the latter was to be preferred. But if we approach matters in that way we will, quite simply, never understand either Saul of Tarsus or Paul the Apostle.
For a start, and as a sign that there are tricky corners to be turned, the word “Judaism” in Paul’s world (Greek Ioudaïsmos) didn’t refer to what we would call “a religion.” For that matter, and again to signal challenges ahead, the word “religion” has itself changed meaning. In Paul’s day, “religion” consisted of God-related activities that, along with politics and community life, held a culture together and bound the members of that culture to its divinities and to one another. In the modern Western world, “religion” tends to mean God-related individual beliefs and practices that are supposedly separable from culture, politics, and community life. For Paul, “religion” was woven in with all of life; for the modern Western world, it is separated from it.
So when, in what is probably his earliest letter, Paul talks about “advancing in Judaism beyond any of his age,”1 the word “Judaism” refers, not to a “religion,” but to an activity: the zealous propagation and defense of the ancestral way of life. From the point of view of Saul of Tarsus, the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth were a prime example of the deviant behavior that had to be eradicated if Israel’s God was to be honored. Saul of Tarsus was therefore “zealous” (his term,2 indicating actual violence, not just strong emotion) in persecuting these people. That is what he meant by Ioudaïsmos. Everything possible had to be done to stamp out a movement that would impede the true purposes of the One God of Israel, whose divine plans Saul and his friends believed were at last on the verge of a glorious fulfillment—until, on the Damascus Road, Saul came to believe that these plans had indeed been gloriously fulfilled, but in a way he had never imagined.
Saul, therefore, poses a double question for the historian in addition to the many questions he poses for students of ancient culture, ancient “religion,” or ancient faith. How did he come to be a world changer? He was, we may suppose, a surprising candidate for such a role. He was a teacher of Jewish traditions, perhaps; a reformer, quite possibly. But not the kind of activist who establishes in city after city little cells of unlikely people, many of them non-Jewish, and fires them with a joyful hope that binds them together. Not the kind of philosopher who teaches people not just new thoughts, but a whole new way of thinking. Not the kind of spiritual master who rethinks prayer itself from the ground up. How did it happen? And, beyond the initial impact, why was Paul’s movement so successful? Why did these little communities founded by a wandering Jew turn into what became “the church”? That’s the first set of questions we are addressing in this book.
The second set gives this a radical twist. How did Saul the persecutor become Paul the Apostle? What sort of transition was that? Was it in any sense a “conversion”? Did Paul “switch religions”? Or can we accept Paul’s own account that, in following the crucified Jesus and announcing that Israel’s God had raised him from the dead, he was actually being loyal to his ancestral traditions, though in a way neither he nor anyone else had anticipated?
These questions doubtless puzzled Paul’s contemporaries. That would have included other followers of Jesus, some of whom regarded him with deep suspicion. It would have included his fellow Jews, some of whom reacted as violently to him as he himself had to the early Jesus movement. It would certainly have included the non-Jewish population in the cities he went to, many of whom thought he was both mad and dangerous (and a Jew to boot, some would have said with a sneer). Wherever he went, people must have wondered who he was, what he thought he was doing, and what sense it made for a hard-line nationalist Jew to become the founder of multiethnic communities.
These questions do not seem to have puzzled Paul himself, though, as we shall see, he had his own times of darkness. He had thought them through and arrived at robust and sharp-edged answers. But they have continued to challenge readers and thinkers ever since, and they confront in particular a modern world that has been confused about many different aspects of human life, including those sometimes labeled by that tricky word “religion.” Paul confronts our world, as he confronted his own, with questions and challenges. This book, a biography of Paul, is an attempt to address the questions. I hope it will also clarify the challenges.
* * *
These were not the questions that first goaded me into reading Paul seriously for myself. No matter. Once you start reading him, he will lead you to all the other questions soon enough. Studying Paul in my teens with like-minded friends (there were many different styles of cultural rebellion in the 1960s, and I’m glad this was one of mine), I tended to focus on basic theological issues. What precisely was “the gospel,” and how did it “work”? What did it mean to be “saved” and indeed to be “justified,” and how might you know that this had happened to you personally? If you were “justified by faith alone,” why should it then matter how you behaved thereafter? Or, if you were truly “born again,” indwelt by the spirit, oughtn’t you now be leading a life of perfect sinlessness? Was there a middle way between these two positions, and if so, how did it make sense? Was faith itself something the individual “did” to gain God’s approval, or was that just smuggling in “good works” by the back door? Did Paul teach “predestination,” and if so, what might that mean? What about the “spiritual gifts”? Just because Paul spoke in tongues, did that mean we should too? Paul was clearly worried, in his letter to the Galatians, that his converts might get circumcised; granted that none of us felt any pressure in that direction, what was the equivalent in our world? Did it mean that Paul was opposed to all “religious rituals,” and if so, what did that say about church life and liturgy and about baptism itself?
These questions swirled around in our eager young minds as we listened to sermons, got involved in church life, and wrestled with the texts. We were reading Paul in the light of fairly typical concerns of some parts of the church in the 1960s and 1970s, but of course what we wanted to know was not what this or that preacher or professor thought, but what Paul himself thought. We believed (in a fairly unreflective manner) in the “authority” of scripture, including Paul’s letters. What we were after, therefore, was what Paul himself was trying to say. We were, in other words, trying to do ancient history, though we didn’t think of it like that and might have resisted the idea if we had. (This was the more ironic in my case, in that Ancient History was part of my undergraduate degree.) Paul’s words, inspired, so we believed, by God, were charged with the grandeur of divine truth, and their meaning was to be sought by prayer and faith rather than by historical inquiry, even though, of course, those words themselves, if one is going to understand them, require careful study precisely of their lexical range in the world of the time.
Paul’s letters existed for us in a kind of holy bubble, unaffected by the rough-and-tumble of everyday first-century life. This enabled us blithely to assume that when Paul said “justification,” he was talking about what theologians in the sixteenth century and preachers in the twentieth had been referring to by that term. It gave us license to suppose that when he called Jesus “son of God,” he meant the “second person of the Trinity.” But once you say you’re looking for original meanings, you will always find surprises. History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves. And ancient history in particular introduces us to some ways of thinking very different from those of the sixteenth or the twentieth century.
I hasten to add that I still see Paul’s letters as part of “holy scripture.” I still think that prayer and faith are vital, nonnegotiable parts of the attempt to understand them, just as I think that learning to play the piano for oneself is an important part of trying to understand Schubert’s impromptus. But sooner or later, as the arguments go on and people try out this or that theory, as they start reading Paul in Greek and ask what this or that Greek term meant in the first century, they discover that the greatest commentators were standing on the shoulders of ancient historians and particularly lexicographers, and they come, by whatever route, to the questions of this book: who Paul really was, what he thought he was doing, why it “worked,” and, within that, what was the nature of the transformation he underwent on the road to Damascus.
* * *
Another obvious barrier stood between my teenage Bible-reading self and a historical reading of Paul. I assumed without question, until at least my thirties, that the whole point of Christianity was for people to “go to heaven when they died.” Hymns, prayers, and sermons (including the first few hundred of my own sermons) all pointed this way. So, it seemed, did Paul: “We are citizens of heaven,” he wrote.3 The language of “salvation” and “glorification,” central to Romans, Paul’s greatest letter, was assumed to mean the same thing: being “saved” or being “glorified” meant “going to heaven,” neither more nor less. We took it for granted that the question of “justification,” widely regarded as Paul’s principal doctrine, was his main answer as to how “salvation” worked in practice; so, for example, “Those he justified, he also glorified”4 meant, “First you get justified, and then you end up in heaven.” Looking back now, I believe that in our diligent searching of the scriptures we were looking for correct biblical answers to medieval questions.
These were not, it turns out, the questions asked by the first Christians. It never occurred to my friends and me that, if we were to scour the first century for people who were hoping that their “souls” would leave the present material world behind and “go to heaven,” we would discover Platonists like Plutarch, not Christians like Paul. It never dawned on us that the “heaven and hell” framework we took for granted was a construct of the High Middle Ages, to which the sixteenth-century Reformers were providing important new twists but which was at best a distortion of the first-century perspective. For Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not “saved souls” being rescued from the world and taken to a distant “heaven,” but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world. (When Paul says, “We are citizens of heaven,” he goes on at once to say that Jesus will come from heaven not to take us back there, but to transform the present world and us with it.) And this hope for “resurrection,” for new bodies within a newly reconstituted creation, doesn’t just mean rethinking the ultimate “destination,” the eventual future hope. It changes everything on the way as well.
Once we get clear about this, we gain a “historical” perspective in three different senses. First, we begin to see that it matters to try to find out what the first-century Paul was actually talking about over against what later theologians and preachers have assumed he was talking about. As I said, history means thinking into other people’s minds. Learning to read Paul involves more than this, but not less.
Second, when we start to appreciate “what Paul was really talking about,” we find that he was himself talking about “history” in the sense of “what happens in the real world,” the world of space, time, and matter. He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of “salvation” was about Israel’s Messiah “inheriting the world,” as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul’s perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new “otherworldly” hope.
Many skeptics in our own day have assumed that Christianity is irrelevant to the “real world.” Many Christians have agreed, supposing that if they are going to insist on the “heavenly” dimension, they have to deny the importance of the “earthly” one. All such split-world theories, however well meaning, miss the point. Though Paul does not quote Jesus’s prayer for God’s kingdom to come “on earth as in heaven,” the whole of his career and thought was built on the assumption that this was always God’s intention and that this new heaven-and-earth historical reality had come to birth in Jesus and was being activated by the spirit.
Third, therefore, as far as Paul was concerned, his own “historical” context and setting mattered. The world he lived in was the world into which the gospel had burst, the world that the gospel was challenging, the world it would transform. His wider setting—the complex mass of countries and cultures, of myths and stories, of empires and artifacts, of philosophies and oracles, of princes and pimps, of hopes and fears—this real world was not an incidental backdrop to a “timeless” message that could in principle have been announced by anyone in any culture. When Luke describes Paul engaging with Stoics, Epicureans, and other thinkers in Athens, he is only making explicit what is implicit throughout Paul’s letters: that, in today’s language, Paul was a contextual theologian. This doesn’t at all mean that we can relativize his ideas (“He said that within his context, but our context is different, so we can push him to one side”). On the contrary. This is where Paul’s loyalty to the hope of Israel comes through so strongly. Paul believed that in Jesus the One God had acted “when the fullness of time arrived.”5 Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.
So when we try to understand Paul, we must do the hard work of understanding his context—or rather, we should say, his contexts, plural. His Jewish world and the multifaceted Greco-Roman world of politics, “religion,” philosophy, and all the rest that affected in a thousand ways the Jewish world that lived within it are much, much more than simply a “frame” within which we can display a Pauline portrait. Actually, as any art gallery director knows, the frame of a portrait isn’t just an optional border. It can make or mar the artist’s intention, facilitating appreciation or distracting the eye and skewing the perspective. But with a historical figure like Paul, the surrounding culture isn’t even a frame. It is part of the portrait itself. Unless we understand its shape and key features, we will not understand what made Paul tick and why his work succeeded, which is our first main question. And unless we understand Paul’s Jewish world in particular, we will not even know how to ask our second question: what it meant for Paul to change from being a zealous persecutor of Jesus’s followers to becoming a zealous Jesus-follower himself.
* * *
The Jewish world in which the young Saul grew up was itself firmly earthed in the soil of wider Greco-Roman culture. As often in ancient history, we know less than we would like to know about the city of Tarsus, Saul’s hometown, but we know enough to get the picture. Tarsus, a noble city in Cilicia, ten miles inland on the river Cydnus in the southeast corner of modern Turkey, was on the major east–west trade routes. (The main landmass we think of today as Turkey was divided into several administrative districts, with “Asia” as the western part, “Asia Minor” as the central and eastern part, “Bithynia” in the north, and so on. I will use the simple, if anachronistic, method of referring to the whole region by its modern name.)
Tarsus could trace its history back two thousand years. World-class generals like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had recognized its strategic importance; the emperor Augustus had given it extra privileges. It was a city of culture and politics, of philosophy and industry. Among those industries was a thriving textile business, producing material made from goats’ hair, used not least to make shelters. This may well have been the basis of the family business, tentmaking, in which Saul had been apprenticed and which he continued to practice. The cosmopolitan world of the eastern Mediterranean, sharing the culture left by Alexander’s empire, flowed this way and that through the city. Tarsus rivaled Athens as a center of philosophy, not least because half the philosophers of Athens had gone there a hundred years earlier when Athens backed the wrong horse in a Mediterranean power play and suffered the wrath of Rome. But if the Romans were ruthless, they were also pragmatists. Once it was clear they were in charge, they were happy to make deals.
One deal in particular was struck with the Jews themselves. Everybody else in Saul’s day, in regions from Spain to Syria, had to worship the goddess Roma and Kyrios Caesar, “Lord Caesar.” Augustus Caesar declared that his late adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was now divine, thus conveniently acquiring for himself the title divi filius, “son of the deified one,” or in Greek simply huios theou, “son of god.” His successors mostly followed suit. The cults of Roma and the emperor spread in different ways and at different speeds across the empire. In the East, Saul’s home territory, they were well established from early on.
But the Jews were relentless. They wouldn’t go along with it. They could and would worship and pray to only one God, the God of their ancestors, whom they believed was the only “god” worthy of the name. The ancient Israelite prayer in Greek, which they all now spoke, made a sharp contrast between “Lords.” Kyrios Caesar? No, they declared, Kyrios ho theos, Kyrios heis estin, “The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”6 There is one Kyrios and only one. So what was to be done? Would the Romans force the Jews to compromise, as some earlier conquering empires had tried to do? Some Jewish leaders proposed to Rome that, instead of praying to Caesar, they would pray to their One God for Rome and its emperor. Would that be enough? Yes, said Caesar, that will do. A special pragmatic privilege. Live and let live. That was the world in which young Saul had grown up.
We don’t know how long his family had lived in Tarsus. Later legends suggest various options, one of which is that his father or grandfather had lived in Palestine but had moved during one of the periodic social and political upheavals, which, in that world, always carried “religious” overtones as well. What we do know about them is that they belonged to the strictest of the Jewish schools. They were Pharisees.
The word “Pharisee” has had bad press over many years. Modern research, operating at the academic and not usually the popular level, has done little to dispel that impression, partly because the research in question has made things far more complicated, as research often does. Most of the sources for understanding the Pharisees of Saul’s day come from a much later period. The rabbis of the third and fourth centuries AD looked back to the Pharisees as their spiritual ancestors and so tended to project onto them their own questions and ways of seeing things. Ironically for those who try to locate Paul within his own Pharisaic context, his writings themselves offer the best evidence for that context in the period prior to the Roman-Jewish war of AD 66–70.
Paul’s evidence must no doubt be taken with a pinch of salt because of his newfound faith in Jesus; some later Jews have questioned whether he had ever been a Pharisee at all. But the other great first-century source on Pharisees, the Jewish historian Josephus, requires equal caution. Yes, he says quite a lot about Pharisaic movements in the period, but everything he says is colored by his own stance. Having been a general at the start of the war, he had gone over to the Romans and had claimed moreover that Israel’s One God had done the same thing, an alarmingly clear case of making God in one’s own image. So all the evidence requires careful handling. Despite this, however, I think it is clear that Saul and his family were indeed Pharisees. They lived with a fierce, joyful strictness in obedience to the ancestral traditions. They did their best to urge other Jews to do the same.
This was never going to be easy in a city like Tarsus. Even in Jerusalem, with a mostly Jewish population and with the Temple itself, the building where heaven and earth came together, right there in its recently restored beauty there were cultural pressures of all sorts that could draw devout Jews into compromise. How much more had this kind of challenge existed in the Diaspora, the “dispersion” of Jews around the rest of the known world, a process that had been going on for centuries. Cultural pressures and different responses to them were the stock in trade of Jewish life as families and individuals faced questions such as what to eat, whom to eat with, whom to do business with, whom to marry, what attitude to take toward local officials, local taxes, local customs and rituals, and so on. The decisions individual Jews made on all of these questions would mark them out in the eyes of some as too compromised and in the eyes of others as too strict. (Our words “liberal” and “conservative” carry too many anachronistic assumptions to be of much help at this point.)
There was seldom if ever in the ancient world a simple divide, with Jews on one side and non-Jews on the other. We should envisage, rather, a complex subculture in which Jews as a whole saw themselves as broadly different from their non-Jewish neighbors. Within that, entire subgroups of Jews saw themselves as different from other subgroups. The parties and sects we know from Palestinian Jewish life of the time (Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and a nascent militantly “zealous” faction) may not have existed exactly as we describe them, not least because the Sadducees were a small Jerusalem-based aristocracy, but intra-Jewish political and social divisions would have persisted. We who today are familiar not only with the complexities of Middle Eastern culture and politics but also with the Western challenge of multicultural living (a bland homogeneity or a dangerous mix of particular identities?) can imagine something of what a city like Tarsus must have been like.
We can’t be sure how many Jews lived in Tarsus in Saul’s day. There were, quite possibly, a few thousand at least in a city of roughly a hundred thousand. But we can get a clear sense of how things were for the young Saul.
If there are parallels between today’s complex societies and that of a city like ancient Tarsus, there is one radical difference, at least when seen from the modern Western perspective. In the ancient world there was virtually no such thing as private life. A tiny number of the aristocracy or the very rich were able to afford a measure of privacy. But for the great majority, life was lived publicly and visibly. The streets were mostly narrow, the houses and tenements were mostly cramped, there was noise and smell everywhere, and everybody knew everybody else’s business. We can assume that many of the Jews in Tarsus would have lived close to one another, partly for safety ( Jews, absenting themselves from official public “religion” including the celebrations of the imperial cult, were regularly seen as subversive, even though they tried in other respects to be good citizens) and partly for ease of obtaining kosher food. The questions of where one stood on the spectrum between strict adherence to the ancestral code, the Torah, and “compromise” were not theoretical. They were about what one did and what one didn’t do in full view of the neighbors. And about how the neighbors might react.
All this obviously involved the workplace as well. We know from Paul’s mature life and writings that he engaged in manual work. “Tentmaking” probably included the crafting of other goods made of leather or animal hair in addition to the core product of tents themselves. (We may think of tents as camping gear for leisure use, but in Paul’s world then, as in parts of the world today, many people moved from place to place for seasonal work, and even people who stayed put would depend on canvas awnings and shelters to enable them to work under the hot sun.) This probably means two things.
First, Saul was probably apprenticed to his father in this family business. We don’t know whether the father was himself a Torah scholar, though it seems likely that Saul’s deep familiarity with Israel’s scriptures and traditions, however much they were nurtured in his subsequent Jerusalem education, had begun at home. But being a Torah student or teacher was not a salaried profession. Rabbis in Saul’s day, and for centuries afterward, earned their living by other means.
Second, the market for tents and similar products would be wide. One might guess that likely purchasers would include regiments of soldiers, but travel was a way of life for many other people as well in the busy world of the early Roman Empire. It seems improbable that a Jewish tentmaker in a city like Tarsus would be selling only to other Jews. We can safely assume, then, that Saul grew up in a cheerfully strict observant Jewish home, on the one hand, and in a polyglot, multicultural, multiethnic working environment on the other. Strict adherence to ancestral tradition did not mean living a sheltered life, unaware of how the rest of the world worked, spoke, behaved, and reasoned.
Reasoning, in fact, is one thing the mature Paul was particularly good at, even if the density of his arguments can still challenge his readers. Everything we know about him encourages us to think of the young Saul of Tarsus as an unusually gifted child. He read biblical Hebrew fluently. He spoke the Aramaic of the Middle East (the mother tongue of Jesus and quite possibly Saul’s mother tongue as well) in addition to the ubiquitous Greek, which he spoke and wrote at great speed. He probably had at least some Latin.
This multilingual ability doesn’t mark him out in and of itself. Many children in many countries are functionally multilingual. In the longer perspective of history, in fact, it is those who know only one language who are the odd ones out. But the mature Paul has something else of which fewer people, even in his world, could boast. He gives every impression of having swallowed the Bible whole. He moves with polished ease between Genesis and the Psalms, between Deuteronomy and Isaiah. He knows how the story works, its heights and depths, its twists and turns. He can make complex allusions with a flick of the pen and produce puns and other wordplays across the languages. The radical new angle of vision provided by the gospel of Jesus is a new angle on texts he already knows inside out. He has pretty certainly read other Jewish books of the time, books like the Wisdom of Solomon, quite possibly some of the philosophy of his near contemporary Philo. They too knew their Bibles extremely well. Saul matches them stride for stride and, arguably, outruns them.
What is more, whether Saul has read the non-Jewish philosophers of his day or the great traditions that go back to Plato and Aristotle, he knows the ideas. He has heard them on the street, discussed them with his friends. He knows the technical terms, the philosophical schemes that probe the mysteries of the universe and the inner workings of human beings, and the theories that hold the gods and the world at arm’s length like the Epicureans or that draw them into a single whole, to pan, “the all,” like the Stoics. It’s unlikely that he has read Cicero, whose book On the Nature of the Gods, from roughly a century before his own mature work, discussed all the options then available to an educated Roman (this does not, of course, include a Jewish worldview). But if someone in the tentmaker’s shop were to start expounding Cicero’s ideas, Saul would know what the conversation was about. He would be able to engage such a person on his own terms. He is thus completely at home in the worlds of both Jewish story and non-Jewish philosophy. We may suspect that he, like some of his contemporaries, somewhat relishes the challenge of bringing them together.
Reading some of his letters, in fact, one might almost think that he had been a childhood friend of someone like the philosopher Epictetus, a down-to-earth thinker determined to get philosophy out of the classroom and into the street. He uses well-known rhetorical ploys. When he tells the Corinthians that human wisdom is useless, he sometimes sounds like a Cynic; when he talks about virtue, a casual listener might, for a moment, mistake him for a Stoic. When he writes about the difference between the “inner human” and the “outer human,” many to this day have supposed him to be some kind of Platonist—though what he says about resurrection and the renewal of creation then becomes a problem. The mature Paul would not have been afraid of giving impressions such as these. He believes, and says explicitly here and there, that the new wisdom unveiled in Israel’s Messiah can take on the world and incorporate its finest insights into a different, larger frame. The “good news” of the Messiah opens up for him the vision of a whole new creation in which everything “true, attractive, and pleasing”7 will find a home.
But the messianic “good news” meant what it meant, first and foremost, within the Jewish world of the first century. Whole books could be written about every aspect of this, not least as it relates to the young Saul of Tarsus, but we must be brief. Saul grew up within a world of story and symbol: a single story, awaiting its divinely ordered fulfillment, and a set of symbols that brought that story into focus and enabled Jews to inhabit it. If we are going to understand him, to see who he really was, we have to grasp this and to realize that for him it wasn’t just a set of ideas. It was as basic to his whole existence as the great musical story from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms is to a classically trained musician today. Only more so.
The story was the story of Israel as a whole, Israel as the children of Abraham, Israel as God’s chosen people, chosen from the world but equally chosen for the world; Israel as the light to the Gentiles, the people through whom all nations would be blessed; Israel as the Passover people, the rescued-from-slavery people, the people with whom the One God had entered into covenant, a marriage bond in which separation might occur but could only ever be temporary. There are signs all across the Jewish writings of the period (roughly the last two centuries before Paul’s day and the first two centuries afterward) that a great many Jews from widely different backgrounds saw their Bible not primarily as a compendium of rules and dogmas, but as a single great story rooted in Genesis and Exodus, in Abraham and Moses. Saul’s Bible was not primarily a set of glittering fragments, snapshots of detached wisdom. It was a narrative rooted in creation and covenant and stretching forward into the dark unknown.
It had become very dark indeed in the centuries leading up to Saul’s day. Whether people read Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, whether they followed the line of thought through the books of Kings and Chronicles, or whether they simply read the Five Books of Moses, the “Torah” proper, from Genesis through to Deuteronomy, the message was the same. Israel was called to be different, summoned to worship the One God, but Israel had failed drastically and had been exiled to Babylon as a result. A covenantal separation had therefore taken place. Prophet after prophet said so. The One God had abandoned the Jerusalem Temple to its fate at the hands of foreigners.
Wherever you look in Israel’s scriptures, the story is the same. Any Jew from the Babylonian exile onward who read the first three chapters of Genesis would see at a glance the quintessential Jewish story: humans were placed in a garden; they disobeyed instructions and were thrown out. And any Jew who read the last ten chapters of Deuteronomy would see it spelled out graphically: worship the One God and do what he says, and the promised garden is yours; worship other gods, and you face exile. A great many Jews around the time of Paul—we have the evidence in book after book of the postbiblical Jewish writings—read those texts in that way too; they believed that the exile—in its theological and political meaning—was not yet over. Deuteronomy speaks of a great coming restoration.8 Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel all echo this theme: the words of comfort in Isaiah 40–55, the promise of covenant renewal in Jeremiah 31, the assurance of cleansing and restoration in Ezekiel 36–37. Yes, some Jews (by no means all) had returned from Babylon. Yes, the Temple had been rebuilt. But this was not, it could not be, the restoration promised by the prophets and by Deuteronomy itself.
Through those long years of puzzlement, the complaint of the (“postexilic”) books of Ezra and Nehemiah sounded out: “We are in our own land again, but we are slaves! Foreigners are ruling over us.”9 And slaves, of course, need an Exodus. A new Exodus. The new Exodus promised by Isaiah. This was the hope: that the story at the heart of the Five Books—slavery, rescue, divine presence, promised land—would spring to life once more as the answer both to the problem of covenantal rebellion in Deuteronomy 27–32 and to the parallel, and deeper, problem of human rebellion in Genesis 1–3. The former would be the key to the latter: when the covenant God did what he was going to do for Israel, then somehow—who knew how?—the effects would resonate around the whole world.
At the center of this longing for rescue, for the new Exodus, stands one text in particular that loomed large in the minds of eager, hopeful Jews like Saul of Tarsus. Daniel 9, picking up from Deuteronomy’s promise of restoration, announces precisely that idea of an extended exile: the “seventy years” that Jeremiah said Israel would stay in exile have been stretched out to seventy times seven, almost half a millennium of waiting until the One God would restore his people at last, by finally dealing with the “sins” that had caused the exile in the first place. The scheme of “seventy sevens” resonated with the scriptural promises of the jubilee—this would be the time when the ultimate debts would be forgiven.10 Devout Jews in the first century labored to work out when the 490 years would be up, often linking their interpretations of Daniel to the relevant passages in Deuteronomy. This was the long hope of Israel, the forward-looking narrative cherished by many who, like Saul of Tarsus, were soaked in the scriptures and eager for the long-delayed divine deliverance. And many of them believed that the time was drawing near. They knew enough chronology to do a rough calculation. And if the time was near, strict obedience to the Torah was all the more necessary.
The Torah loomed all the larger if one lived, as did the young Saul, outside the promised land and hence away from the Temple. The Torah, in fact, functioned as a movable Temple for the many Jews who were scattered around the wider world. But the Temple remained central, geographically and symbolically. It was the place where heaven and earth met, thus forming the signpost to the ultimate promise, the renewal and unity of heaven and earth, the new creation in which the One God would be personally present forever. We don’t know how often Saul traveled to the homeland with his parents for the great festivals. Luke describes Jesus, aged twelve, being taken from Nazareth to Jerusalem for Passover, and we know that tens of thousands of Jews gathered from all over, both for that festival and for others such as Pentecost, the feast of the giving of the Torah. It is thus quite probable that the young Saul acquired at an early age the sense that all roads, spiritually as well as geographically, led to the mountain where David had established his capital, the hill at the heart of Judaea where Solomon, David’s son, the archetypal wise man, had built the first Temple. The Temple was like a cultural and theological magnet, drawing together not only heaven and earth, but the great scriptural stories and promises.
The Temple was therefore also the focal point of Israel’s hope. The One God, so the prophets had said, abandoned his house in Jerusalem because of the people’s idolatry and sin. But successive prophets (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, Malachi) had promised that he would return one day. That list is significant, since the last two prophets named, Zechariah and Malachi, were writing after some of the exiles had returned from Babylon, after they had rebuilt the Temple and restarted the regular round of sacrificial worship. We will never understand how someone like the young Saul of Tarsus thought—never mind how he prayed!—until we grasp the strange fact that, though the Temple still held powerful memories of divine presence (as does Jerusalem’s Western Wall to this day for the millions of Jews and indeed non-Jews who go there to pray, though they do not think that the One God actually resides there now), there was a strong sense that the promise of ultimate divine return had not yet been fulfilled.
If this seems strange, as it does to some, consider this. Two of the greatest scenes in Israel’s scriptures are moments when the divine glory filled the wilderness Tabernacle and then the Jerusalem Temple with a radiant presence and power.11 Isaiah had promised that this would happen once more, indicating that this would be the moment when Jerusalem would be redeemed at last and Israel’s God would establish his kingdom in visible power and glory.12 At no point do any later Jewish writers say that this or anything like it has actually happened. The closest you might come is the glorious double scene in Sirach 24 and 50, written around 200 BC. In the first, the figure of “Wisdom” comes from heaven to dwell in the Temple; in the second, the high priest himself appears to be an almost visible manifestation of Israel’s God. But this rather obvious piece of propaganda for the aristocratic high-priesthood of the time cut little ice after the various crises that then followed. No, the point was that it hadn’t happened yet. The God of Israel had said he would return, but had not yet done so.
Saul of Tarsus was brought up to believe that it would happen, perhaps very soon. Israel’s God would indeed return in glory to establish his kingdom in visible global power. He was also taught that there were things Jews could be doing in the meantime to keep this promise and hope on track. It was vital for Jews to keep the Torah with rigorous attention to detail and to defend the Torah, and the Temple itself, against possible attacks and threats. Failure on these points would hold back the promise, would get in the way of the fulfillment of the great story. That is why Saul of Tarsus persecuted Jesus’s early followers. And that is why, when Paul the Apostle returned to Jerusalem for the last time, there were riots.
All this, to pick up an earlier point, is many a mile from what we today mean by “religion.” That is why I often put that word in quotation marks, to signal the danger of imagining that Saul of Tarsus, either as a young man or as a mature apostle, was “teaching a religion” in some modern sense. Today, “religion” for most Westerners designates a detached area of life, a kind of private hobby for those who like that sort of thing, separated by definition (and in some countries by law) from politics and public life, from science and technology. In Paul’s day, “religion” meant almost exactly the opposite. The Latin word religio has to do with “binding” things together. Worship, prayer, sacrifice, and other public rituals were designed to hold the unseen inhabitants of a city (the gods and perhaps the ancestors) together with the visible ones, the living humans, thus providing a vital framework for ordinary life, for business, marriage, travel, and home life. (A distinction was made between religio, official and authorized observance, and superstitio, unauthorized and perhaps subversive practice.)
The Jewish equivalent of this was clear. For Saul of Tarsus, the place where the invisible world (“heaven”) and the visible world (“earth”) were joined together was the Temple. If you couldn’t get to the Temple, you could and should study and practice the Torah, and it would have the same effect. Temple and Torah, the two great symbols of Jewish life, pointed to the story in which devout Jews like Saul and his family believed themselves to be living: the great story of Israel and the world, which, they hoped, was at last reaching the point where God would reveal his glory in a fresh way. The One God would come back at last to set up his kingdom, to make the whole world one vast glory-filled Temple, and to enable all people—or at least his chosen people—to keep the Torah perfectly. Any who prayed or sang the Psalms regularly would find themselves thinking this, hoping this, praying this, day after day, month after month.
Surrounded by the bustling pagan city of Tarsus, the young Saul knew perfectly well what all this meant for a loyal Jew. It meant keeping oneself pure from idolatry and immorality. There were pagan temples and shrines on every corner, and Saul would have a fair idea of what went on there. Loyalty meant keeping the Jewish community pure from those things as well. At every stage of Israel’s history, after all, the people of the One God had been tempted to compromise. The pressure was on to go with the wider world and to forget the covenant. Saul was brought up to resist this pressure. And that meant “zeal.”
Which brings us at last to the biographical starting point that the later Paul mentions in his letters. “Zealous?” he says, “I persecuted the church!”13 “I advanced in Ioudaïsmos beyond many of my own age and people,” he says, “I was extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions”14 Where did this “zeal” come from? What did it mean in practice? If this is what made the young Saul tick, what was the mechanism that kept that ticking clock running on time? And what did it mean, as he himself puts it in his first letter, to exchange this kind of “zeal” for a very different kind?15 Addressing those questions brings us to the real starting point of this book.