Am I Not an Apostle?
Saul of Tarsus was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples when he left Jerusalem to find and punish the Hellenists who had fled to Damascus after Stephen’s stoning. Saul was not asked by the high priest to hunt down these followers of Jesus; he went of his own accord. An educated, Greek-speaking, Diaspora Jew and citizen of one of the wealthiest port cities in the Roman Empire, Saul was zealously devoted to the Temple and Torah. “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” he writes of himself in a letter to the Philippians, “as to [knowledge of] the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5–6).
It was while en route to Damascus that the young Pharisee had an ecstatic experience that would change everything for him, and for the faith he would adopt as his own. As he approached the city gates with his traveling companions, he was suddenly struck by a light from heaven flashing all around him. He fell to the ground in a heap. A voice said to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.
The reply broke through the blinding white light, “I am Jesus.”
Struck blind by the vision, Saul made his way to Damascus, where he met a follower of Jesus named Ananias, who laid hands upon him and restored his sight. Immediately, something like scales dropped from Saul’s eyes and he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Right then and there, Saul was baptized into the Jesus movement. He changed his name to Paul and immediately began preaching the risen Jesus, not to his fellow Jews, but to the gentiles who had, up to this point, been more or less ignored by the movement’s chief missionaries.
The story of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus is a bit of propagandistic legend created by the evangelist Luke; Paul himself never recounts the story of being blinded by the sight of Jesus. If the traditions can be believed, Luke was a young devotee of Paul: he is mentioned in two letters, Colossians and Timothy, commonly attributed to Paul but written long after his death. Luke wrote the book of Acts as a kind of eulogy to his former master some thirty to forty years after Paul had died. In fact, Acts is less an account of the apostles than it is a reverential biography of Paul; the apostles disappear from the book early on, serving as little more than the bridge between Jesus and Paul. In Luke’s reimagining, it is Paul—not James, nor Peter, nor John, nor any of the Twelve—who is the true successor to Jesus. The activity of the apostles in Jerusalem serves only as prelude to Paul’s preaching in the Diaspora.
Although Paul does not divulge any details about his conversion, he does repeatedly insist that he has witnessed the risen Jesus for himself, and that this experience has endowed him with the same apostolic authority as the Twelve. “Am I not an apostle?” Paul writes in defense of his credentials, which were frequently challenged by the mother assembly in Jerusalem. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Corinthians 9:1).
Paul may have considered himself an apostle, but it seems that few if any of the other movement leaders agreed. Not even Luke, Paul’s sycophant, whose writings betray a deliberate, if ahistorical, attempt to elevate his mentor’s status in the founding of the church, refers to Paul as an apostle. As far as Luke is concerned, there are only twelve apostles, one for each tribe of Israel, just as Jesus had intended. In recounting the story of how the remaining eleven apostles replaced Judas Iscariot with Matthias after Jesus’s death, Luke notes that the new recruit needed to be someone who “accompanied [the disciples] all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, starting with John’s baptism, right up to the day [Jesus] was taken from us” (Acts 1:21). Such a requirement would clearly have ruled out Paul, who converted to the movement around 37 C.E., nearly a decade after Jesus had died. But that does not deter Paul, who not only demands to be called an apostle—“even if I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you,” he tells his beloved community in Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:2)—he insists he is far superior to all the other apostles.
“Are they Hebrews?” Paul writes of the apostles. “So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one (though it may be foolish to say so), with greater labors, more floggings, more imprisonments, and more often near death” (2 Corinthians 11:22–23). Paul holds particular contempt for the Jerusalem-based triumvirate of James, Peter, and John, whom he derides as the “so-called pillars of the church” (Galatians 2:9). “Whatever they are makes no difference to me,” he writes. “Those leaders contributed nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6). The apostles may have walked and talked with the living Jesus (or, as Paul dismissively calls him, “Jesus-in-the-flesh”). But Paul walks and talks with the divine Jesus: they have, according to Paul, conversations in which Jesus imparts secret instructions intended solely for his ears. The apostles may have been handpicked by Jesus as they toiled away on their fields or brought up their fishing nets. But Jesus chose Paul before he was born: he was, he tells the Galatians, called by Jesus into apostleship while still in his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). In other words, Paul does not consider himself the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the first apostle.
The claim of apostleship is an urgent one for Paul, as it was the only way to justify his entirely self-ascribed mission to the gentiles, which the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem appear not to have initially supported. Although there was a great deal of discussion among the apostles over how strictly the new community should adhere to the Law of Moses, with some advocating rigorous compliance and others taking a more moderate stance, there was little argument about whom the community was meant to serve: this was a Jewish movement intended for a Jewish audience. Even the Hellenists reserved their preaching mostly for the Jews. If a handful of gentiles decided to accept Jesus as messiah, so be it, as long as they submitted to circumcision and the law.
Yet, for Paul, there is no room whatsoever for debating the role of the Law of Moses in the new community. Not only does Paul reject the primacy of Jewish law, he refers to it as a “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on a stone tablet” that must be superseded by “a ministry of the Spirit come in glory” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). He calls his fellow believers who continue to practice circumcision—the quintessential mark of the nation of Israel—“dogs and evildoers” who “mutilate the flesh” (Philippians 3:2). These are startling statements for a former Pharisee to make. But for Paul they reflect the truth about Jesus that he feels he alone recognizes, which is that “Christ is the end of the Torah” (Romans 10:4).
Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all, Jesus claimed to have come to fulfill the Law of Moses, not to abolish it. Far from rejecting the law, Jesus continually strove to expand and intensify it. Where the law commands, “thou shall not kill,” Jesus added, “if you are angry with your brother or sister you are liable to [the same] judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Where the law states, “thou shall not commit adultery,” Jesus extended it to include “everyone who looks at a woman with lust” (Matthew 5:28). Jesus may have disagreed with the scribes and scholars over the correct interpretation of the law, particularly when it came to such matters as the prohibition against working on the Sabbath. But he never rejected the law. On the contrary, Jesus warned that “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19).
One would think that Jesus’s admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything “Jesus-in-the-flesh” may or may not have said. In fact, Paul shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus. There is almost no trace of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his letters. With the exception of the crucifixion and the Last Supper, which he transforms from a narrative into a liturgical formula, Paul does not narrate a single event from Jesus’s life. Nor does Paul ever actually quote Jesus’s words (again, with the exception of his rendering of the Eucharistic formula: “This is my body …”). Actually, Paul sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. Compare what Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans—“everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13)—to what Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
Paul’s lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care. He repeatedly boasts that he has not learned about Jesus either from the apostles or from anyone else who may have known him. “But when it pleased God … to reveal his son to me, so that I might preach him to the gentiles, I did not confer with anyone, nor did I go up to Jerusalem [to ask permission of] the apostles before me,” Paul boasts. “Instead, I went directly to Arabia, and then again to Damascus” (Galatians 1:15–17).
Only after three years of preaching a message that Paul insists he received not from any human being (by which he quite obviously means James and the apostles), but directly from Jesus, did he deign to visit the men and women in Jerusalem who had actually known the man Paul professed as Lord (Galatians 1:12).
Why does Paul go to such lengths not only to break free from the authority of the leaders in Jerusalem, but to denigrate and dismiss them as irrelevant or worse? Because Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought, that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly get away with preaching them. What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality. Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’ dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making: Christ.
Although “Christ” is technically the Greek word for “messiah,” that is not how Paul employs the term. He does not endow Christ with any of the connotations attached to the term “messiah” in the Hebrew Scriptures. He never speaks of Jesus as “the anointed of Israel.” Paul may have recognized Jesus as a descendant of King David, but he does not look to the scriptures to argue that Jesus was the Davidic liberator the Jews had been awaiting. He ignores all the messianic prophecies that the gospels would rely on many years later to prove that Jesus was the Jewish messiah (when Paul does look to the Hebrew prophets—for instance, Isaiah’s prophecy about the root of Jesse who will one day serve as “a light to the gentiles” (11:10)—he thinks the prophets are predicting him, not Jesus). Most tellingly, unlike the gospel writers (save for John, of course), Paul does not call Jesus the Christ (Yesus ho Xristos), as though Christ were his title. Rather, Paul calls him “Jesus Christ,” or just “Christ,” as if it were his surname. This is an extremely unusual formulation whose closest parallel is in the way Roman emperors adopted “Caesar” as a cognomen, as in Caesar Augustus.
Paul’s Christ is not even human, though he has taken on the likeness of one (Philippians 2:7). He is a cosmic being who existed before time. He is the first of God’s creations, through whom the rest of creation was formed (1 Corinthians 8:6). He is God’s begotten son, God’s physical progeny (Romans 8:3). He is the new Adam, born not of dust but of heaven. Yet while the first Adam became a living being, “the Last Adam,” as Paul calls Christ, has become “a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45–47). Christ is, in short, a comprehensively new being. But he is not unique. He is merely the first of his kind: “the first-born among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). All those who believe in Christ, as Paul does—those who accept Paul’s teachings about him—can become one with him in a mystical union (1 Corinthians 6:17). Through their belief, their bodies will be transformed into the glorious body of Christ (Philippians 3:20–21). They will join him in spirit and share in his likeness, which, as Paul reminds his followers, is the likeness of God (Romans 8:29). Hence, as “heirs of God and fellow heirs of Christ,” believers can also become divine beings (Romans 8:17). They can become like Christ in his death (Philippians 3:10)—that is, divine and eternal—tasked with the responsibility of judging alongside him the whole of humanity, as well as the angels in heaven (1 Corinthians 6:2–3).
Paul’s portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright bizarre to Jesus’s Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean into a divine, preexistent, literal son of God whose death and resurrection launch a new genus of eternal beings responsible for judging the world has no basis in any writings about Jesus that are even remotely contemporary with Paul’s (a firm indication that Paul’s Christ was likely his own creation). Nothing like what Paul envisions exists in the Q source material, which was compiled around the same time that Paul was writing his letters. Paul’s Christ is certainly not the Son of Man who appears in Mark’s gospel, written just a few years after Paul’s death. Nowhere in the gospels of Matthew and Luke—composed between 90 and 100 C.E.—is Jesus ever considered the literal son of God. Both gospels employ the term “Son of God” exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title, not a description. It is only in the last of the canonized gospels, the gospel of John, written sometime between 100 and 120 C.E., that Paul’s vision of Jesus as Christ—the eternal logos, the only begotten son of God—can be found. Of course, by then, nearly half a century after the destruction of Jerusalem, Christianity was already a thoroughly Romanized religion, and Paul’s Christ had long obliterated any last trace of the Jewish messiah in Jesus. During the decade of the fifties, however, when Paul is writing his letters, his conception of Jesus as Christ would have been shocking and plainly heretical, which is why, around 57 C.E., James and the apostles demand that Paul come to Jerusalem to answer for his deviant teachings.
This would not be Paul’s first appearance before the movement’s leaders. As he mentions in his letter to the Galatians, he initially met the apostles on a visit to the holy city three years after his conversion, around 40 C.E., when he came face-to-face with Peter and James. The two leaders were apparently thrilled that “the one who had been persecuting us is now proclaiming the message of faith he once tried to destroy” (Galatians 1:23). They glorified God because of Paul and sent him on his way to preach the message of Jesus in the regions of Syria and Cilicia, giving him as his companion and keeper a Jewish convert and close confidant of James named Barnabas.
Paul’s second trip to Jerusalem took place about a decade later, sometime around 50 C.E., and was far less cordial than the first. He had been summoned to appear before a meeting of the Apostolic Council to defend his self-designated role as missionary to the gentiles (Paul insists he was not summoned to Jerusalem but went of his own accord because Jesus told him to). With his companion Barnabas and an uncircumcised Greek convert named Titus by his side, Paul stood before James, Peter, John, and the elders of the Jerusalem assembly to strongly defend the message he had been proclaiming to the gentiles.
Luke, writing about this meeting some forty or fifty years later, paints a picture of perfect harmony between Paul and the council’s members, with Peter himself standing up for Paul and taking his side. According to Luke, James, in his capacity as leader of the Jerusalem assembly and head of the Apostolic Council, blessed Paul’s teachings, decreeing that thenceforth gentiles would be welcomed into the community without having to follow the Law of Moses, so long as they “abstain from things polluted by idols, from prostitution, from [eating] things that have been strangled, and from blood” (Acts 15:1–21). Luke’s description of the meeting is an obvious ploy to legitimate Paul’s ministry by stamping it with the approval of none other than “the brother of the Lord.” However, Paul’s own account of the Apostolic Council, written in a letter to the Galatians not long after it had taken place, paints a completely different picture of what happened in Jerusalem.
Paul claims that he was ambushed at the Apostolic Council by a group of “false believers” (those still accepting the primacy of the Temple and Torah) who had been secretly spying on him and his ministry. Although Paul reveals little detail about the meeting, he cannot mask his rage at the treatment he says he received at the hands of “the supposedly acknowledged leaders” of the church: James, Peter, and John. Paul says he “refused to submit to them, not even for a minute,” as neither they, nor their opinion of his ministry, made any difference to him whatsoever (Galatians 2:1–10).
Whatever took place during the Apostolic Council, it appears that the meeting concluded with a promise by James, the leader of the Jerusalem assembly, not to compel Paul’s gentile followers to be circumcised. Yet what happened soon afterward indicates that he and James were far from reconciled: almost immediately after Paul left Jerusalem, James began sending his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in Galatia, Corinth, Philippi, and most other places where Paul had built a following, in order to correct Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus.
Paul was incensed by these delegations, which he viewed, correctly, as a threat to his authority. Almost all of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament were written after the Apostolic Council and are addressed to congregations that had been visited by these representatives from Jerusalem (Paul’s first letter, to the Thessalonians, was written between 48 and 50 C.E.; his last letter, to the Romans, was written around 56 C.E.). That is why these letters devote so much space to defending Paul’s status as an apostle, touting his direct connection to Jesus, and railing against the leaders in Jerusalem who, “disguising themselves as apostles of Christ,” are, in Paul’s view, actually servants of Satan who have bewitched Paul’s followers (Corinthians 11:13–15).
Nevertheless, James’s delegations seem to have had an impact, for Paul repeatedly lambastes his congregations for abandoning him: “I am amazed at how quickly you have deserted the one who called you” (Galatians 1:6). He implores his followers not to listen to these delegations, or to anyone else for that matter, but only to him: “If anyone else preaches a gospel contrary to the gospel you received [from me], let him be damned” (Galatians 1:9). Even if that gospel comes “from an angel in heaven,” Paul writes, his congregations should ignore it (Galatians 1:8). Instead, they should obey Paul and only Paul: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
Feeling bitter and no longer tethered to the authority of James and the apostles in Jerusalem (“Whatever they are makes no difference to me”), Paul spent the next few years freely expounding his doctrine of Jesus as Christ. Whether James and the apostles in Jerusalem were fully aware of Paul’s activities during this period is debatable. After all, Paul was writing his letters in Greek, a language neither James nor the apostles could read. Moreover, Barnabas, James’s sole link to Paul, had abandoned him soon after the Apostolic Council for reasons that are unclear (though it bears mentioning that Barnabas was a Levite and as such would probably have been a strict observer of Jewish law). Regardless, by the year 57 C.E., the rumors about Paul’s teachings could no longer be ignored. And so, once again, he is summoned to Jerusalem to answer for himself.
This time, James confronts Paul directly, telling him that it has come to their attention that Paul has been teaching believers “to forsake Moses” and “not circumcise their children or observe the customs [of the law]” (Acts 21:21). Paul does not respond to the accusation, though this is exactly what he has been teaching. He has even gone so far as to say that those who let themselves be circumcised will have “cut themselves off from Christ” (Galatians 5:2–4).
To clear up matters once and for all, James forces Paul to take part with four other men in a strict purification ritual in the Temple—the same Temple that Paul believes has been replaced by the blood of Jesus—so that “all will know there is nothing to the rumors said about you, and that you observe and guard the law” (Acts 21:24). Paul obeys; he seems to have no choice in the matter. But as he is completing the ritual, a group of devout Jews recognize him.
“Men of Israel!” they shout. “Help! This is the man who has been teaching everyone everywhere against our people, our law, and this place” (Acts 21:27–28). All at once, a mob descends upon Paul. They seize him and drag him out of the Temple. Just as they are about to beat him to death, a group of Roman soldiers suddenly appears. The soldiers break up the mob and take Paul into custody, not because of the disturbance at the Temple, but because they mistake him for someone else.
“Are you not the Egyptian who some days ago led a revolt in the wilderness of four thousand Sicarii?” a military tribune asks Paul (Acts 21:38).
It seems Paul’s arrival in Jerusalem in 57 C.E. could not have come at a more chaotic time. One year earlier, the Sicarii had begun their reign of terror by slaying the high priest Jonathan. They were now wantonly murdering members of the priestly aristocracy, burning down their homes, kidnapping their families, and sowing fear in the hearts of the Jews. The messianic fervor in Jerusalem was at a boil. One by one, claimants to the mantle of the messiah had arisen to liberate the Jews from the yoke of Roman occupation. Theudas the wonder worker had already been cut down by Rome for his messianic aspirations. The rebellious sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, had been crucified. The bandit chief Eleazar son of Dinaeus, who had been ravaging the countryside, slaughtering Samaritans in the name of the God of Israel, had been captured and beheaded by the Roman prefect Felix. And then the Egyptian had suddenly appeared on the Mount of Olives, vowing to bring the walls of Jerusalem tumbling down at his command.
For James and the apostles in Jerusalem, the turmoil could mean only one thing: the end was near; Jesus was about to return. The Kingdom of God they had assumed Jesus would build while he was alive would now finally be established—all the more reason to ensure that those espousing deviant teachings in Jesus’s name were brought back into the fold.
In that light, Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem may have been unexpected, but considering the apocalyptic expectations in Jerusalem, it was neither ill timed nor unwelcomed. If Jesus were about to return, it would be no bad thing to have Paul waiting for him in a prison cell, where, at the very least, he and his perverse views could be contained until Jesus could judge them himself. But because the arresting soldiers assumed Paul was the Egyptian, they sent him at once to be judged by the Roman governor, Felix, who happened at the time to be in the coastal town of Caesarea dealing with a conflict that had erupted between the city’s Jews and its Syrian and Greek inhabitants. Although Felix ultimately cleared Paul of the Egyptian’s crimes, he nevertheless threw him in a Caesarean prison, where he languished until Festus replaced Felix as governor and promptly transferred Paul to Rome at his behest.
Festus allowed Paul to go to Rome because Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen. Paul was born in Tarsus, a city whose inhabitants had been granted Roman citizenship by Mark Antony a century earlier. As a citizen, Paul had the right to demand a Roman trial, and Festus, who would serve as governor for an extremely brief and tumultuous period in Jerusalem, seemed happy to grant him one, if for no other reason than to simply be rid of him.
There may have been a more urgent reason for Paul to want to go to Rome. After the embarrassing spectacle at the Temple, in which he was forced to renounce everything he had been preaching for years, Paul wanted to get as far as he could from Jerusalem and the ever-tightening noose of control placed around his neck by James and the apostles. Besides, Rome seemed the perfect place for Paul. This was the Imperial City, the seat of the Roman Empire. Surely the Hellenistic Jews who had chosen to make Caesar’s home their own would be receptive to Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus Christ. Rome already had a small but growing contingent of Christians who lived alongside a fairly sizable Jewish population. A decade before Paul’s arrival, conflicts between the two communities had led the emperor Claudius to expel both groups from the city. By the time Paul arrived some time in the early sixties, however, both populations were once again flourishing. The city seemed ripe for Paul’s message.
Although Paul was officially under house arrest in Rome, it appears he was able to continue his preaching without much interference from the authorities. Yet by all accounts, Paul had little success in converting Rome’s Jews to his side. The Jewish population was not just unreceptive to his unique interpretation of the messiah, they were openly hostile to it. Even the gentile converts did not appear overly welcoming toward Paul. That may be because Paul was not the only “apostle” preaching Jesus in the imperial city. Peter, the first of the Twelve, was also in Rome.
Peter had come to Rome a few years before Paul and likely at James’s command to help establish an enduring community of Greek-speaking Jewish believers in the heart of the Roman Empire, a community that would be under the influence of the Jerusalem assembly and taught in accordance with the Jerusalem doctrine: in short, an anti-Pauline community. It is difficult to know just how successful Peter had become in his task before Paul arrived. But according to Acts, the Hellenists in Rome reacted so negatively to Paul’s preaching that he decided to cut himself off once and for all from his fellow Jews “who listen but never understand … who look but never perceive.” Paul vowed from that moment on to preach to none but the gentiles, “for they will listen” (Acts 28:26–29).
No record exists of these final years in the lives of Peter and Paul, the two men who would become the most important figures of Christianity. Strangely, Luke ends his account of Paul’s life with his arrival in Rome and he does not mention that Peter was in the city, too. Stranger still, Luke does not bother to record the most significant aspect of the two men’s years together in the Imperial City. For in the year 66 C.E., the same year that Jerusalem erupted in revolt, the emperor Nero, reacting to a sudden surge of Christian persecution in Rome, seized Peter and Paul and executed them both for espousing what he assumed was the same faith.
He was wrong.