The discussion of Paul as a Christian has all too often focused exclusively on his conversion or call, without due consideration of the rest of his Christian life.316 Yet when we meet Paul in his letters, even in his earliest letters, he has already been a Christian for at least fifteen years. Paul’s letters do not reflect the musings of a neophyte Christian, but rather the author speaks to us as a mature Christian—a seasoned veteran, so to speak—throughout his letters. This means that even when we are reading remarks about Paul’s conversion, we have the benefit of Paul’s hindsight. Our discussion must begin, then, with the issue of Paul’s conversion, but we must realize from the outset that Paul’s remarks are deliberately selective, highly rhetorical, and lacking in immediacy. Time and reflection have no doubt affected Paul’s perspective.
PAUL’S CONVERSION: SET APART AND CALLED THROUGH GRACE (GAL. 1:15–16)
Our first text of importance is Galatians 1:15–16. In this key passage, Paul refers to God’s having set him apart before he was born, called him through grace, and revealed Jesus to him in order that he could preach the gospel to the Gentiles. This text is part of Paul’s narratio, the narrative of those aspects of his conversion that have direct relevance to his discussions with the Galatians. This is certainly not Paul’s personal testimony in anything like a full form; rather, it is a highly selective and carefully couched presentation on a subject that the Galatians have already heard something about.
The function of these autobiographical remarks is to substantiate a particular claim, not so much about Paul and his Christian origins but about the nature and origins of his gospel and secondarily about his apostleship to preach it. There is another dimension to these remarks, however. Paul is presenting himself as a paradigm of the gospel he preaches to the Galatian Gentiles. As G. Lyons observes, “The formulation of Paul’s autobiographical remarks in terms of ‘formerly-now’ and ‘[hu]man-God’ serves the paradigmatic function of contrasting Paul’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity with the Galatians’ inverted conversion, which is really nothing other than a desertion of ‘the one who called [them] in the grace of Christ’ (1:6) and a surrender of Christian freedom for the slavery of law.”317
Paul offers us two specific denials a few verses earlier: he did not receive his gospel from human beings; nor was he taught it. On the contrary, he says, it came through a “revelation of Jesus Christ.” The issue here is the source and nature of his gospel and the means and timing of its reception—namely, at the beginning of his Christian life. There is debate as to whether we should take the last clause (“revelation of Jesus Christ”) to refer to a revelation of which Christ is the content or a revelation that comes from or through Christ. Clearly enough, in view of the rest of Galatians 1, Paul is not denying that he ever received any information about Jesus from human beings. Still, Galatians 1:16, where Paul says that God revealed his Son in him, suggests that Paul is speaking of a revelation that came from or through his encounter with Christ on the Damascus road. The most reasonable suggestion is that this revelation entailed an indication not just of who Jesus was but also of what the message was that God wanted Paul to convey—the Law-free gospel about redemption through faith in the crucified Christ proclaimed to the Gentiles. Paul admits that this sort of message is not the kind of thing human beings could come up with on their own. It has been revealed to Paul through the making known of the hidden—that is, through apokalupsis, or a “revelation.” The term refers to the making known of a hidden secret about God’s plan for human redemption.
Paul describes his experience in prophetic terms. In particular, in his statement that God set him apart before he was born, we should hear an echo of Jeremiah 1:5—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Isaiah 49:1–6 may also be alluded to here: “The Lord called me before I was born” (v. 1). Paul goes on to say that, having been set apart, he was called by grace. In other words, God has had his hand on Paul since even before the time of his birth and all along has had in mind for him to be God’s spokesman to the Gentile nations. Paul’s current occupation and vocation as apostle to the Gentiles is not a result of careful career planning on his part, then; indeed, it was against the flow of his pre-Christian behavior, especially his persecuting activities. We can see where Paul is going with these remarks: his focus is not on the personal salvific consequences of his encounter with Christ, but rather on that encounter as the basis of his ministry and message. The description is task-centered, not focused on the effects on Paul as a person apart from such activities.
Paul has framed this discussion in a careful manner to fend off criticism that he is guilty of chameleon-like behavior.318 He does not wish to be seen as opportunistic or fickle. Ancients did not much believe in the idea of change or development in a person’s personality, or at least they did not see such change—for instance, a conversion—as a good thing. It was rather the mark of a deviant and unreliable person who was not being true to type. Thus Paul takes pains to present this change in a rhetorically effective manner, making clear that it came about through an action from God.319
But it will not do to see the Damascus road event as simply a prophetic call. Verse 16, as we saw, speaks of a revelation of the Son either to or in Paul—probably the latter, in light of Galatians 2:20 and 4:6. The coupling of the word “revelation” with the phrase “in me” suggests that Paul had an apocalyptic vision of the risen and glorified Christ that changed the character and course of his life and indeed his very identity. It cannot be stressed too strongly that Paul is not talking about his “having made a decision for Christ” or his having voluntarily changed the course of his life. To the contrary, Paul is talking about God’s having made a decision about Paul being his witness to the Gentiles from before the time he was born!
We must compare what Paul says here to 1 Corinthians 9:1, where he speaks of having seen the risen Lord. Paul in all likelihood would have rejected modern distinctions between objective and subjective if asked about the nature of this revelation. It was objective in the sense that it was from God and was not a result of his fantasizing or dreaming or wishing. At the same time, it was subjective in that the revelation came to, and indeed even in, Paul. It was deeply personal and transforming. The purpose of the revelation was to enable Paul to preach Christ among the nations. Thus there was a call that came with the conversion, not later. The verb “preach” is in the present tense, but the verbs “set apart” and “called” are in the aorist, or past, tense.
What do we know about conversions from one religion to another in antiquity? First, of course, the word “conversion” is not restricted to shifts between early Christianity and early Judaism.320 In fact, most of the conversionist groups or sects in the first century involved Eastern religions—including, for example, the cult of Isis—in addition to Judaism or Christianity. It must be stressed that the ideological distance Paul traveled from one form of early Judaism to an offshoot of Judaism was considerably less than, say, when a person would convert from the worship of Yahweh to the worship of Baal, or from the worship of the traditional Roman gods to the worship of Isis. In view of the general belief in Paul’s world about people having a static or unchanging character, it is not surprising that there might have been skepticism about Paul’s conversion even among Judean Christians.321
We know something about conversion and initiation by a pagan person into the Judaism of Paul’s day—the sort of conversion with which Paul would have been most familiar. Conversion to Judaism was almost always a gradual process, at the end of which was the rite of passage—namely, circumcision and full conformity to the Law.322 The very existence of God-fearers—Gentile synagogue adherents who were in a sort of limnal state, neither pure pagan nor full convert—supports this conclusion.323 Of a different order is Josephus’s description of his being initiated into various different parties or sects within Judaism (Life 7–12). Initiation and conversion were not one and the same. In the case of the God-fearer, conversion led to initiation. In the case of Josephus, we can hardly speak of conversion at all. In the case of Paul, Acts 9 strongly indicates that conversion preceded initiation into the community through baptism and acceptance on the part of Ananias and the Christians in Damascus.
We must not dismiss the evidence that Jews knew about and even in some cases, however rarely, sought converts to their faith. Matthew 23:15 bears witness to this phenomenon, as does Josephus’s discussion of the royal house of Adiabene (Ant. 20.2.3–4) and perhaps some of the Qumran data. My point is that Saul of Tarsus would have known what a conversion was, and what it meant for his life. It meant he would be viewed as at best a renegade and at worst an apostate crossing the boundaries of Judaism and heading in the wrong direction—indeed, texts such as 2 Corinthians 11:24 (“Five times I received the thirty lashes from the Jews”) suggest that this is how he was viewed by his Jewish peers in the Diaspora synagogues.
There was a strong social dimension to conversion, especially in antiquity. It was not a purely private matter between an individual and the deity. Rather, it was conversion to a deity and into a community.324 However intense Paul’s experience on the Damascus road was, it eventually led him to join the group he calls “the assembly of God.” As Galatians 1:13–16 shows, he saw this assembly as a distinguishable entity from Judaism. Paul found himself part of a new family whose members he called brothers and sisters. Yet if indeed Paul went almost immediately off into Arabia on missionary work, and then was never really integrated into the Jerusalem church afterward, it is easy to see why he would have been viewed as a maverick or a deviant by many Jerusalem Christians—that is, as one not properly integrated into a proper Christian community. This is one of the startling things about Paul: he was seen as strange or even beyond the pale not merely by his fellow Jews but also by various of his fellow Jewish Christians! He was a sectarian person whose sense of identity as a Christian came in large measure from his own conversion experience and his own outreach work and the communities and co-workers those efforts generated, not from some preexistent community he became a longtime member of.
If we were to do a careful sociological analysis of what happened to Saul on the Damascus road, we would have to conclude that he underwent a thorough resocialization. His symbolic universe was not just altered, it was turned upside down. Those formerly thought to be insiders were out, and those thought to be out were found to be in the people of God! It tells us something crucial about Paul’s new worldview that he can see the Jewish rite of passage as not fundamental for marking out those who were truly in the assembly of God. Notice too that Paul focuses clearly on the spiritual experience that changed human lives, and he was willing to sit lightly with the Christian initiation rite.325 Conversion, not initiation, was the truly crucial thing in his mind.
It has become common in some quarters to argue that what happened to Paul on the Damascus road was a prophetic call, not a conversion from Judaism to something else.326 I would suggest that this is right in what it affirms but wrong in what it tries to deny. Even with all the diversity in early Judaism, not Qumranites nor Samaritans nor Sadducees nor Pharisees were prepared to say what Paul in fact says—that the Mosaic covenant, though glorious, has been eclipsed.327 Nor were any of these groups prepared to say that full converts to their party would not have to be circumcised and keep the Law. It is quite impossible to believe that Paul, the former zealous Pharisee, could have ever said, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters” (Gal. 6:15), had there not been a radical change in his worldview and symbolic universe. This change is quite properly called a conversion.
In all likelihood the reason some scholars overlook this fact is because they do not find the traditional language about repentance or forgiveness or being saved in our text. This overlooks the rhetorical function of this material, which is to explain the divine origin of Paul’s gospel. Paul says nothing here about being saved or forgiven or repenting not because he does not believe such a thing has happened to him, just as it did to his Gentile converts (whom he is trying to get to follow his example), but because his remarks are meant to have another rhetorical effect. Paul is also presenting himself as a paradigm of how God’s miraculous grace works and leads to a life of proclamation of the message of grace and living by that grace.
It would appear to be largely true, then, that many key elements of Paul’s gospel, including the idea of salvation offered freely apart from observance of the Mosaic Law, go back to his own conversion experience and the revelation he received on that occasion.328 Paul’s gospel of grace was bound up with his own experience of grace and grounded in the content of God’s revelation of his Son in Paul. After this revelation but clearly before he wrote Galatians or even visited the Galatians, he worked out the implications of this Good News for his beliefs about God, messiah, Law, salvation, and the identity of God’s people.
PAUL’S LIFE IN THE SPIRIT
As noted earlier, some discussions of Paul as a Christian begin and end with a discussion of his conversion.329 This is unfortunate, as there is much more that can and should be said. I would like to speak briefly about several key aspects of Paul’s Christian life that reflect who he was:
Apart from the seminal work of G. D. Fee, surprisingly few detailed works have been produced in the last two decades in English that meaningfully discuss Paul’s own life in the Spirit.330 This is in part because Paul himself seems reticent to talk about such things, not least because he is not, like many a modern Western individual, bent on revealing his innermost thoughts. Ancients in fact went out of their way not to discuss “unique” experiences that distinguished them from the crowd. Such discussions were seen as antisocial to the collectivist mindset.
Paul’s Life in the Spirit (2 Cor. 12:1–10; 1 Cor. 14)
It is not surprising, then, that when Paul actually does boast about his own experiences (spiritual and otherwise), the boasting is clearly ironic or tongue in cheek. For example, let’s consider 2 Corinthians 12:1–10. This text is set in a context in which Paul has just boasted about his weaknesses and his trials and tribulations (2 Cor. 11), mocking the customary boasting about one’s great deeds. Paul moves on, in the first verses of the passage in question, to speak of his visions and revelations (though when he gets to specifics he does so in the third person—“I know a person in Christ who…was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told”—following the rules of inoffensive self-praise). While Paul is really claiming to have had this sort of experience once in a while, which makes him in various respects like John of Patmos, he is writing to a highly charismatic audience that would be eager to hear about such experiences. Paul knows the emotional impact of such claims on them, and so while he raises their expectations, in the end, as the passage progresses, he just teases and shames them.331
Paul then says that he had a vision that was a source of revelation to him (in other words, he not only saw but also heard and learned), but he coyly adds that he is not permitted to convey the contents of this revelation! It is possible that his opponents, “false apostles” who were bewitching the Corinthians, were claiming such experiences as well, and that he was mainly trying to deflate their boasting.
Paul tells us that this experience happened some fourteen years prior to the writing of this letter (in other words, during the years 40 to 44), which probably places it during Paul’s “hidden” years in Syria and Cilicia.332 Now it is possible that, precisely because Paul was not a modern individualist, the Corinthians would have been shocked to hear Paul recount this story, just as they may have been shocked to hear what Paul says about tongues and prophecy in 1 Corinthians 14. Some commentators have suggested that since Paul mentions an experience of fourteen years prior rather than something more current, such experiences must have been especially rare for him. On the other hand, Paul may mention this one because to him it was especially notable and outstanding. In favor of this last suggestion is the observation that the plural in 2 Corinthians 12:1—“I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord”—suggests that initially Paul thought about relating more than one such vision or revelation.333
In the course of his discussion of this event, Paul says twice that he does not know whether he was in or out of the body when he was “caught up.” The language suggests an overpowering experience that overtook Paul. It was not something Paul deliberately worked his way into through spiritual exercises or ascetical practices. Paul says also that he got as far as the third heaven, which he calls Paradise, a term from the Genesis story about Eden.334 Paul is probably not suggesting that there are any levels above the third heaven, for to say that he didn’t ascend into the highest heaven is to weaken his mock boast. Paul’s point is that he got all the way to the third heaven and that this was no planned trip. Perhaps, unlike the Corinthians, he was not seeking such adventures in the Spirit.
Paul then says he heard unutterable words, but he clarifies this by explaining that he is not permitted (by God? by the Spirit?) to repeat what he heard (v. 4). The Corinthians might well understand this in terms of their knowledge of mystery religions, which often had secrets that were revealed only to special initiates. The point of mentioning the utterance without disclosing the message is to make clear that God thought Paul was a special person. In short, the Corinthians had badly underestimated him. Yet Paul also does not want them to overestimate him just because he’s had an “excess” of revelations (v. 6).335 This impression that Paul was a visionary is clearly confirmed in Acts, and there are various texts in which Paul himself indicates that he both knows and teaches mysteries and has special revelatory knowledge.336
In our 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 text, Paul goes on to say that God gave him a “stake” (a sharp wooden object) or “thorn” in the flesh, lest he too give way to the wrong sort of boasting—a deflation device, in other words. This stake or thorn, likely a physical condition, had the effect of bringing Paul right down to earth. Despite Paul’s repeated prayer, God chose not to remove this stake from Paul’s flesh. While we don’t know for sure what afflicted Paul, what we may have here is a visionary with a vision problem!337 It’s clear from 2 Corinthians 10:10 that Paul’s condition involved something obvious to an outsider, something that led to an evaluation that he was weak or sickly. Furthermore, as 2 Corinthians 12:12 goes on to say, when Paul was with the Corinthians, miracles happened. Apparently they didn’t happen to him, though: he may well have been a healer who himself was not entirely well! Yet it is clear from 2 Corinthians 11:21–24 that Paul did not let this condition or other misfortunes slow him down. The point in any case is that Paul’s weaknesses show that the power and the revelation came from God and not from the apostle. Indeed, God’s power comes to full expression or completion precisely through and in the midst of human weakness. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that this divine power made its home in him. This likely draws on the image of the Shekinah glory descending on the Temple and its Holy of Holies.
It is quite possible that Paul here has patterned his description on the experience of Christ.338 Christ faced a cross, Paul a stake or thorn. Christ prayed three times for the suffering to pass, and so did Paul. Jesus prayed that God’s will not his be done, while Paul received an assurance that God’s grace would be sufficient so he could endure this stake. Both the cross and the stake had to be faced and actually endured. Since Jesus was a suffering messiah, it is no wonder his agent was a suffering apostle. Increasingly, Paul’s autobiography sounds like a version of a “series of unfortunate incidents.”
The next point to make about Paul’s life in the Spirit is that he did indeed perform miracles, though once again he does not boast of such things but mentions them only in passing. For example, we can mention the reference to miracles in 2 Corinthians 12:12—“signs and wonders and mighty works,” which in this case surely refers to miracles of healing of various sorts. We may also point to Romans 15:18–19, which closely associates the performance of powerful works with the power of the Spirit working through Paul. This impression of Paul as a miracle worker is simply confirmed by various texts in Acts.339
We now come to the reference in 1 Corinthians 14 to the fact that Paul both prophesied and spoke in tongues. The former is simply implied, but the latter is specifically stated. Indeed, in an attempt to deflate the overly charismatic and chaotic Corinthians, Paul says, “I thank God I speak in tongues more than all of you” (14:18)—not, mind you, more than any of the Corinthians, but more than all of them! Nevertheless, it is quite clear that Paul affirms the gifts of prophecy and of tongues (glossolalia), both in his own life and in the lives of other Christians.340
Tongues passages such as 1 Corinthians 14:2 (which notes that glossolalia speakers speak only to God) and 14:14 (which refers to glossolalia as prayer of the spirit but not of the mind) strongly suggest that Paul sees glossolalia as an angelic prayer language (see 1 Cor. 13:1), something prompted by the Spirit in the believer and uttered to God. In Galatians 4:6 Paul says it is the Spirit who cries “Abba, Father.” This is of course an intelligible utterance or prayer. In Romans 8:26, on the other hand, Paul says that the Spirit “groans” for us. Here, it seems, Paul is referring to glossolalia, where the Spirit helps the believer at a loss for words and intercedes through the believer with “inarticulate groanings or speech.”341
This kind of utterance does have meaning, though it is not immediately intelligible to the human speaker. God knows the mind of the Spirit, however, and knows what the Spirit is saying through the believer. The Spirit intercedes for the saints according to God’s will. In other words, while the human person may not know exactly how to conform his or her prayer to God’s will, the Spirit indeed does, and will do so for the believer so that he or she may pray effectively.342 For our purposes, what is important about this material is that Paul is speaking from experience here, including his own. The first-person plurals (“when we cry…with our spirit…the Spirit helps us…for we do not know how to pray…”) must be taken quite seriously here.
Paul was not only a spirited man, as any reading of his more polemical letters will attest, but also a man of the Spirit. It is important that we not downplay this factor, and it is equally important that we not anachronistically contrast it with the notion of Paul being a profound and rational thinker. We are talking about a person who manifests both life in the Spirit and life of the mind, and in fact we see a marriage of the two. No doubt Paul might have said that the only people really in their right minds are those who are filled with and inspired by the Spirit to think God’s thoughts after God has revealed those thoughts.
When we assess this data as a whole, it becomes clear that despite Paul’s reticence to talk directly about such matters when he himself was the focus of the discussion, he was in fact much more like his Corinthian converts than many modern commentators would like to think. Paul was not being facetious in 1 Corinthians 1:4–7 when he thanked God for the Corinthians’ spiritual gifts. Paul was indeed a man of the Spirit, a “charismatic” individual in more than just the secular sense of that term. His Christian life was punctuated and enriched with notable spiritual and ecstatic experiences.
Paul’s Eschatology (Phil. 2:12–13; Phil. 3:10–13)
This is not to say that Paul was not also familiar with the notion of progressive sanctification in the Christian life, nor is it to say that Paul saw himself as already spiritually complete or totally perfect in this lifetime. In this regard the book of Philippians has several texts that are helpful.
We turn first to Philippians 2:12–13, which reads in part, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is the one working in your midst, and the willing and the doing are according to his pleasure.” The first point of note about this text is that “your” is in the plural. This is an exhortation for Christians to collectively work out the salvation they share with fear and trembling. Paul is not exhorting each individual to pursue his or her own private salvation in this matter. This is especially unlikely in that earlier in Philippians 2 Paul talks about being self-forgetful and not regarding one’s own interests.343 Paul speaks of working out the shared eschatological gift of salvation within and by the community of faith as a community. It’s not a human accomplishment, however: not only salvation comes from God, but also the energy and the will to do this working out of salvation. God’s ongoing work in the body of Christ, which also includes individual Christians as part of that body, is indeed a part of progressive sanctification.
Lest we think that Paul is speaking only about his converts in this matter, we must examine Philippians 3:10–13, where Paul speaks of “knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing in common of his sufferings, sharing the very likeness of his death, if somehow I might obtain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained or am already complete [or perfect], but I press on.” We see here that salvation for Paul has several tenses. He speaks of having been saved, being saved, and going on to be saved.344 In his own life, Paul makes clear that he does not yet fully know Christ, nor has he fully experienced the power of his resurrection. In the passage above, resurrection is not a present spiritual experience but a future condition, a being raised from the dead. It is only at that latter juncture that Paul expects to be complete or perfect as a Christian person. He has not yet obtained the goal of perfection, which amounts to full Christ-likeness in the resurrection body as in the spirit. Progressive sanctification and dynamic spiritual experiences can take us only so far in this life. We must still deal with the fact that outwardly we are wasting away while inwardly we are being renewed day by day (2 Cor. 4:16–17). However “charismatic” we may be, we must still live by and move on faith and look forward to the day of resurrection, when completion finally comes.
For Paul, life apart from a body is not seen as a full human life. Thus salvation is not seen as complete without the resurrection of the body.345 This means that we must take seriously Paul’s qualifying wording in Philippians 3:11, which reads, “…if somehow I might reach/obtain the resurrection from the dead.” Paul’s own view, then, is that even those who have preached Christ could in the end be disqualified if they do not remain in Christ and obey him to the end.346 Even apostles must live by faith and are not eternally secure until they are securely in eternity or have obtained the resurrection. Until such time, one must work out one’s salvation with fear and trembling.
Paul’s ethical enjoinders have purpose and meaning not least because there is an eschatological tension in the life of the believer between already being saved and not yet being saved to the uttermost. One not only may but must work out one’s salvation in conjunction with the body of Christ with awe and respect for what is happening and must happen in Christ’s body. Grace-induced, grace-empowered obedience on the part of the Christian does indeed have something to do with the final outcome. Paul calls his converts to, and models for them, the role of athletic spiritual discipline and moral effort as one presses forward toward the goal of final salvation, of fully knowing Christ, of obtaining the resurrection from the dead. Even with all of the straining, of course, resurrection still comes as a gift from God, not something achieved by the believer, though there is a sense in which Paul can speak of a heavenly prize for faithfulness to the end.347 The discussion of spiritual gifts and experiences and process in the life of the apostle and Christians in general is incomplete unless one also speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. The Spirit not merely gives experiences or gifts but also shapes character.
Paul’s Concern for Concord in the Body of Christ (Gal. 5:22–26)
It is a striking fact that many of the undisputed Pauline letters in the end prove to be exhortations to concord and unity within the body of Christ. We see this sort of deliberative argument in 1 Corinthians, in Philippians, and even in Galatians. As a part of this overall strategy to produce harmony between Paul and his converts and within the congregations, the apostle is attempting to model and commend the fruit of the Spirit.
Galatians 5:22–26 is part of a larger discussion in which verses 22–23 (“but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”) stand in direct contrast to what has just been said about the deeds of the flesh—deeds prompted by sinful inclinations and leanings. Many of the main virtues that Paul lists as fruit are not included in ancient virtue lists, and some of them, such as humility, would not have been seen as virtues by most ancient pagans.348 Those ancient lists of traits or habits that were seen as desirable for contributing members of Greco-Roman society look in many ways different from Paul’s list. Only some Jewish lists also comment on love, for example, as Paul does.349 To be more specific, the first six virtues Paul lists are found elsewhere in the New Testament, mainly in the Pauline letters,350 while the last three are what might be called characteristic Greek virtues. It is quite tempting, in fact, to see Paul’s sketch of fruit (as has sometimes been suggested for a part of 1 Corinthians 13), as a sketch of Christ’s own character and characteristic teaching on the subject.351 What a list like this actually shows is that Paul, while drawing on the best of the pagan virtues, is largely trying to create a distinctive Christian ethos for the community of his converts. What then does Paul say about the fruit?
First, he speaks of fruit singular, not fruit plural. This suggests the unity and unifying nature of virtuous qualities, as opposed to the division and discord that the works of the flesh produce. The singular also suggests that all these qualities should be manifest in any Christian’s life, including that of the apostle. The term “fruit” also suggests that we are not talking about natural virtues or personal attainments but rather about character traits wrought in the life of the believer by the work of the Spirit. To be sure, the believer must work out these qualities in his or her social interactions, but the Spirit is the source of the qualities originally.
Love is of course the signature Christian quality to which Paul refers here, as in 1 Corinthians 13. In Romans 5:5 (“because the love of God is poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit”) he makes abundantly clear that he is not talking about natural human feelings, but rather about love poured into the hearts of believers by the Spirit. The noun agape, which Paul uses for this sort of love, is not really found in classical Greek writings, nor for that matter in Josephus, yet it dominates the New Testament discussion of personal relationships. Paul sees love as the means and the goal affecting all else: he talks about faith working through love, about serving each other through love, and about loving neighbor as self (Gal. 5:6–14). The similarity between Galatians 5:13–14 (“The whole Law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’”) and Galatians 6:2 (“Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the Law of Christ”) should not be overlooked. The Law of Christ has to do with that which Christ taught and modeled—namely, love and self-sacrificial acts. There is no law against the fruit of the Spirit; indeed, it reflects the higher law of Christ.
It is quite impossible to read Paul’s letters and not be impressed with the way he modeled the various forms of spiritual fruit, especially love. The evidence of loving service for the gospel and for his converts at great personal cost is writ large in these documents.352 Paul set the example of Christlike loving service and then bid his converts, “Imitate me, as I Christ.”353 To our own culture, the appeal “Imitate me” will seem hubristic, but it would be a mistake to read Paul this way.354 In the first place, one of the major pedagogical tools of ancient teachers was to use modeling, especially for beginning or immature learners. Quintilian, the great Roman teacher of rhetoric, stressed the importance of modeling and indicated how he used it successfully.355 This tool requires a society where there is considerable respect for authority, for one’s elders, for those in the know. In the second place, Paul appeals for imitation only to the extent and in the way that he models Christ, the great paradigm. Were Paul an individualist, this appeal could be seen as hubris. However, Paul sees himself as one who is in Christ, as one who is but a servant or messenger of Christ, as one who is embedded in the body of Christ, as one who is what he is by the grace of God (which is to say, because of what someone else has done to and for and in him).
When Paul speaks of imitating Christ, he makes clear that his own pattern for identity and sense of identity come from another—namely, Christ. Paul is modeling himself on the narrative pattern of Christ’s whole career of self-sacrificial giving, as the so-called Christ hymn in Philippians 2:5–11 shows. There he calls his converts to have the “same mind” as Christ, but it is clear that he has already heeded that exhortation in his own life.356 He is not interested in manifesting his own distinctive mind or imposing it on others. He wishes to embody and model the mind of Christ. This focus on Christ refutes the accusation, sometimes made, that Paul has a messiah complex: to the contrary, he clearly sees a distinction between himself and the One he seeks to imitate.357
What does imitation of Christ mean for Paul? At times it means being conformed to the pattern of Christ’s death in the events of his life while trying to serve Christ. At other times it means consciously trying to act and live humbly, deliberately stepping down the ladder of social status so that he might relate to and help all, even slaves. Imitation of Christ, then, is for Paul both something that happens in his life and a choice, both a being conformed to Christ’s image and a choosing to conform to it. Imitation involves both the indicative and the imperative of the Christian life, and imitation does not fully become image until the believer is made fully Christlike at the resurrection.
WHAT WE’VE LEARNED AND WHAT THAT KNOWLEDGE TELLS US ABOUT JESUS
The trinity of Paul’s identity involves his Jewishness, his Roman citizenship, and his Christianity. In other words, a variety of influences went into making Paul who he was. He had a foot in more than one sector of the ancient world both by choice and by accident of birth, and thus he cannot be understood on the basis of any one of these three crucial factors. Some combination of them is required to make sense of the apostle to the Gentiles—and even then there is much that goes unexplained, not least because Paul’s letters are not like the Confessions of St. Augustine. They only occasionally include biographical remarks, and those remarks are never there for their own sake. In part this is because Paul, like most ancient persons, did not go around talking about his unique inner self. Rather, he spoke of who he was in relationship to the Jewish and Christian communities of which he had been or was a part, and he spoke of whose he was as a follower and servant and imitator of Jesus Christ.
It would appear that, of Paul’s trinity of factors, the least influential was his Roman citizenship and identity. The matter is barely hinted at in his extant letters. Certainly more important is Paul’s Jewish background, much of which he carried with him, though in transformed and transfigured shape, into his Christian life. Yet when Paul himself compares his illustrious Jewish past with his Christian present, he is quite clear that he places all of his former life in the loss column in comparison with the surpassing value of knowing Christ and being in Christ.
The balance of the evidence suggests that Paul was a sectarian person. He had broken away from the community that mothered him and was now helping to found a new community that, though related in various ways to its forebear Judaism, was distinct. He derived his self-understanding from that new community and from its foundation, Jesus. His identity and life work were given him by another—God in Christ; in fact, God had an identity and a calling in mind for him before he was born.
We should then not be surprised, as some commentators are, that we “do not learn anything [in his letters] about his origin from Tarsus and his family, his twofold Roman and Tarsian citizenship, his Jewish (and his official tripartite Roman) name, the great significance of Antioch, and indeed of Syria and Cilicia generally over many years,…his biography, his mission in the interior of Asia Minor, the foundation and fate of the community of Rome, and the reasons for the acute danger to his life.”358 This is not because Paul was shy or because he just wanted to leave the past behind; it is largely because he was an ancient, not a modern, person. There is an irony in our lack of personal information about Paul, because few people have ever had a closer link between theology and biography, between belief and life, between experience and exhortation than Paul did. Paul not only taught about Christ; he lived a cruciform life. Paul not merely talked about the Spirit; he was a man of the Spirit.
If Rudolf Bultmann was right that Paul’s essential exhortation to his converts was “Become what you already are,” it is fair to say that Paul was busy hearing and heeding this same exhortation.359 He was prepared to both live in and walk by the Spirit. He was prepared to both imitate and model Christ. We have no evidence from his letters that he ever had what we would call an identity crisis. No, he was very sure of who he was and ought to be in Christ.
We can no longer treat Paul as a late Western individual. In fact, Paul was not an “individual” in the modern sense at all. He believed, and it was largely true, that his identity was established by whose he was, not who he was; by who he was related to, not how he stood out from the crowd. In this he reflected the collectivist mentality of first-century culture. Yet he was viewed by those who opposed his ministry as not merely a sectarian person, but as a deviant person, an outcast, an “abortion” of an apostle, as he calls himself in 1 Corinthians 15:8.
As a sectarian person, Paul helped lead a group of people, including some Jews and many Gentiles, to define themselves as the people of God and take over for themselves the terminology and concepts that previously had been applied almost exclusively to non-Christian Jews. This social agenda, plus Paul’s strident, zealous mode of pursuing this agenda, produced strong and even at times violent reactions to him and his ministry. Apparently one either loved or hated him. Controverted and controversial, he would have won no popularity contests. He was no advocate of the status quo in a world that expended considerable energy on maintaining it.
Yet when Paul set about his mission to change the world, his choice of weapon was rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion, first in his oral proclamations and then in his letters, which served as surrogates for his presence in the communities he had started. The leaven of the gospel was, apart from the initial acts of evangelism, inserted into the lump of society indirectly, by working for social change within the communities he had founded. The discourse we find from Paul in his letters is community-based and community-directed. Like most of the prophets of the Old Testament, he directed words of praise and censure, of prediction and confirmation, to those who were already a part of God’s people.
Paul was no ordinary wordsmith, no backwoods preacher, despite his rhetoric about proclaiming to the Corinthians nothing but Christ and him crucified. Paul partook fully of the rhetorically saturated oral culture and used the great love of rhetoric to his advantage in numerous ways, yet without compromising the integrity of his gospel. It is a measure of his success as a rhetor that he was able to sell socially disconcerting notions about servanthood, self-sacrifice, equality of personhood, love of enemies, grace rather than reciprocity, and a crucified Lord using the formal conventions of his day. Indeed, nothing short of grace itself could have convinced the Greco-Roman world about these sorts of values. To moderns, Paul’s boasting seems a bit off-putting, but to ancients accustomed to boasting, the only striking thing would have been what he chose to boast about—a crucified savior, power in weakness, reversal of roles between the haves and have-nots, and the like.
It would be wrong to underestimate the social level of Paul. His education was considerable, his Roman citizenship important, and his deliberate agenda of stepping down the social ladder impressive. He was a clear parable of grace to the less fortunate of society. We must not be misled by his choice to occasionally make or mend tents. While Paul was not among the tiny minority of the Greco-Roman aristocracy, he was among the relatively elite echelon of society that came just below the patricians—and not just because of his education. What a paradox he was: a Roman citizen with considerable status, but also a Jew who continued to affirm various aspects of his Jewish heritage (which made him part of a minority that was despised by many Greeks and Romans) and a follower of Christ (which made him part of an even smaller and less well known—and perhaps less well liked—minority).
Yes, a paradox to be sure. On the one hand Paul was a prophet, which gave him considerable status in the Greco-Roman world, but on the other hand he chose to work with his hands, which would not have endeared him to the elite. On the one hand Paul advocated submitting to the governing authorities, but on the other hand he set about to deconstruct many of the major social values of Greco-Roman culture that the authorities spent no little time and money to support. On the one hand Paul seemed to support the patriarchal status quo, with its harsher aspects mitigated by love, but on the other hand he tried to give women more options by advocating singleness, give slaves more hope and sense of self-worth by advocating their personhood in Christ, give children a chance to avoid abuse, and finally rein in the power and authority of the head of the family by tying him to following the model of servanthood and love of Christ. It is not surprising in these circumstances that people today have a hard time deciding which anachronistic pigeonhole—chauvinist or feminist—to place Paul in. But this square peg will fit in neither of those modern round holes.
While recent discussions of Paul’s thought-world and his theology have made some progress in looking at Paul as part of his old-world context, we’ve seen precious little progress in the debate about Paul’s view of the Law. The key to understanding Paul’s view is where he places the Law in the timetable of the story of God’s people in relationship to where he sees God’s people now, as a result of Christ’s coming. That word “story” is crucial: the search for the heart of Paul’s theology has to recognize that in an oral culture dominated by defining narratives, we need to be looking for the climax to a story, not the center of a body of thought. There is no static body of thought in Paul’s theology. Rather it is the result of his thinking and theologizing into the various situations of his converts. It is not those situations that dictate what Paul says, of course; they are only the occasions for this or that particular articulation of his gospel and narrative thought-world. What we have in Paul’s letters is theologizing on the basis of a symbolic universe and the stories within that universe—particularly the story of Christ, which is the gospel. To speak of Paul’s theology is to speak of a modern creation, a modern putting together of the pieces of Paul’s theologizing. To a certain extent this process is artificial, and it certainly involves various debatable interpretive judgments. Yet it is reasonable to conclude that the task is necessary if we are to have a full-orbed picture of Paul.
Paul’s ethics are likewise grounded in his theologizing and his narrative thought-world. Again the story of Christ plays a crucial role, providing the paradigm for Christian living. Paul the exegete draws on the substance of Old Testament stories and commandments to address his converts, but he reconfigures these stories in light of Christ and in light of the eschatological situation he sees Christians living in, caught between already and not yet, between flesh and Spirit. The Paul who emerges from our explorations appears to have been remarkably flexible in an inflexible world. It is very odd language for an early Jew to speak of being a Jew to the Jew and a Gentile to the Gentile in his manner of living in order by all means to win some. This is not to say that Paul does not have fixed and unalterable commitments to the gospel and its theological and ethical ramifications, but it is to say that the way Paul theologizes and thinks ethically out of these commitments is remarkably adaptable to his audience’s situation. His message is at one and the same time both coherent (with his thought-world) and contingent in its expression and application. The old distinction between eternal principles and culturally relative practices is in some ways still helpful, but only if one recognizes that the middle term between these two is the theologizing and ethicizing that Paul does in order to relate the former to the latter. In all this one must keep steadily in mind that Paul was a pastor, not an armchair theorist. He did not intend for his letters to become fodder for systematicians or fertile fields for doctoral theses; and yet both things have happened, and not without profit.
The definitive biography of the man is yet to be written and may never be written. But were the apostle to have written one himself, I am sure he would have stressed the cruciform and Christocentric pattern of his life. He stood in the shadow of the Galilean and not infrequently reflected the character of the one he served. No higher compliment can be paid to a Christian than to say he lived out of and strove to emulate the story of Christ. It is no wonder so many have loved this passionate and paradoxical man and have striven to imitate him. We become what we admire.
I suspect that the historical Paul, were he to visit us today, would still be a social outcast and deviant, still be seen as a fanatic, even in many conservative religious circles. Prophetic figures tend to be heroes only long after they are dead, when their actual ground-shaking presence and power are no longer directly felt. Yet it is true to say that if Paul had not been the person he was, the Christian movement might not have become the Gentile-dominated entity it has been for almost the whole of the last two thousand years. There might never have been a Lutheran reformation or a Wesleyan revival or a Geneva awakening. If the measure of the stature of a person is the degree of impact that he and his life’s work have on subsequent generations, then the historical Paul is clearly the most important figure in Christian history and the history of the West—after Jesus, of course. It thus behooves us to continue to search for ever clearer portraits of the man.
It is ironic that the last of the inner circle to become a follower of Jesus was the one who was to have the largest impact on the shape of the Christianity that came after him. It also ironic that this last one was in fact to provide the chronologically earliest and most ample contributions to the New Testament. Is this large contribution due to the fact that Paul and his co-workers won the day when it came to defining what the faith would be like? Yes, there is some truth to this view. Rome was the center of the empire, and Paul went there; and we see his large impact already in 1 Clement, and then in the letters of Ignatius, and then in many other writings.
The members of the inner circle that stayed at home or near home in the eastern end of the Roman Empire were not likely to have, and in fact did not have, the largest impact on the future character of Christian faith. One wonders what Jesus would have thought about all of this. Perhaps he would have said to Paul, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” or perhaps he would have reminded his Jerusalem brothers and sisters about the Old Testament promise that many would come from the east and the west and sit down at table with Father Abraham at the messianic banquet. But surely if they were to come, somebody would have to go out and give them an engraved and grace-filled invitation. That person was Paul in the first century. Perhaps the last really do become first.
More than any other single figure, Paul was the change agent who steered a Jewish sect in the direction of becoming a world religion. There was no time for looking back in longing, for the eschatological age had already dawned, time was a-wasting, and Jesus had promised to return. New occasions (especially eschatological occasions) call for new duties, new mission strategies, and new flexibilities, but also for consolidating the gains already obtained.
Whether we look to the early letters of Paul or the late letters of the Beloved Disciple, all along the way we see boundary lines being drawn and firmed up—Christological, ethical, and practical community boundary lines. Paul and the rest of the inner circle believed in joining hands so that the circle would be unbroken in generations to come. Though that circle was inclusive, it was also exclusive: had there been Gnostic or Marcionite Christians in the first century, they would have been treated like the false teachers described in 2 Corinthians, the pastoral epistles, Jude, the Johannine epistles, and Matthew’s gospel. And in due course those false teachers would have found themselves on the outside looking in.
The establishment of boundaries is not a cause for regret. A Jewish eschatological Christ-centered religion that was open to Jew and Gentile alike, to the well-educated and the illiterate alike, to men and women alike, to the young and the old alike, could not afford to be without some clear ideological boundaries, some clear sense of what they were and were not—especially since their identity was not to be defined by geography, gender, generation, social class, age, or wealth of possessions or knowledge. It was not to be defined by the things that usually determined what religion one was a part of in that world. There were, after all, not that many highly evangelistic, successfully conversionistic religions in antiquity. If with the apostle to the Gentiles one is going to say, “If anyone is in Christ, he or she is a whole new creation,” one had best be prepared to say clearly what that does and does not entail.
And what it did not entail at the end of the day was simply being a part or sect of extant Judaism, nor did it involve becoming a part of the general pagan religious world that worshipped many gods and recognized emperors as gods who walked upon the earth. Instead—in some ways reluctantly, in some ways eagerly, in some ways intentionally, in some ways quite by accident—a new Christ-centered religion became fully formed in the first century by devout monotheistic Christians not waiting for later church councils to tell them what they did or ought to believe and embrace.
Later attempts to reinvent the Christian wheel in the second through fourth centuries were seen for what they were—Johnny-come-lately efforts that did not stand in continuity with the original form of the faith and could not trace their lineage back to the inner circle of Jesus, though they would desperately try to do so through vehicles like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary.
These later offshoots, then, should not be seen as “lost Christianities” that we should rediscover, if by rediscover one means endorse or embrace as a legitimate form of early Christianity. We certainly need to know about them, however, in order to know what early Christianity was not like. These aberrations should be seen exactly the way the church fathers and mothers of the second through fourth centuries saw them—as “heresies,” the promulgation of “other” ideas not in continuity with the eyewitness and apostolic faith given in the first century. After all, those later Christians who lived in the second through fourth centuries and interacted with the living advocates of mutations of the Christian faith knew far better than we do today the real character of those offshoots and whether they comported with the Jesus movement and its earliest source documents. In our final chapter we will pursue these matters further.
Here it is sufficient to stress that Paul, the change agent, was right when he said already in his earliest letter, Galatians, that there is no other gospel than the one originally proclaimed by the inner circle of Jesus. There seems not to have been any major Christological dispute among members of that circle. We don’t see Paul facing off with Peter about Jesus: they dispute, yes—but about table manners and table fellowship! We don’t see James butting heads with Paul about Jesus or even about grace or the need for obedience; they differ on whether Jewish Christians should be required to keep the Mosaic Law. The differences within the inner circle are primarily ecclesiological and praxis-centered; they’re not about Christology, which is the defining element that made Christianity distinct from early Judaism and paganism.
Why this basic concord on matters Christological within the inner circle? Surely it is because they all had seen the risen Lord, had all worshipped him together, had written hymns and prayers and confessions about him, and had taken that central message down the roads of the empire to share the Good News with others. It was the resurrection of Jesus that made the Galilean the risen Lord; and it was the appearances of that same Jesus that made his followers the founders of a new community of faith, the authors of most of its original source documents, and the evangelists of its great message.
To look through the eyes of Paul at the historical Jesus is an interesting exercise. What we learn about the man Paul is prepared to call the Son of David on the one hand (Rom. 1:3–4) and the Son of God (or even God) on the other hand (Rom. 9:5; Phil. 2:5–11) is remarkable. But I would stress again that we have no evidence that Paul was ever taken to task by his fellow members of the inner circle for his Christological reflections. That issue is not what he argues with Peter or James or the others about. This is remarkable for what it tells us about both the inner circle itself and what those fellow Jesus-followers thought about Paul’s views in light of what they actually knew about the historical Jesus. As we saw in our earlier discussion of Joanna/Junia, Paul says that she was in Christ before him, shared jail time with him, and was notable amongst the apostles. Perhaps he learned much about Jesus from his time with her. But we have no hint that she ever corrected, contradicted, or disputed Paul’s presentation of Jesus the Christ. If the leadership of earliest Christianity was really as diverse as some modern scholars have suggested, these sorts of silences make no sense at all.
The final important clue about Jesus that we glean through the study of Paul comes through Paul’s imitation of Christ. Just as Paul was not an individualist in the modern sense, neither was Jesus. Ancient persons were not preoccupied with their own inner psyche or sense of identity, which helps explain why Jesus was not more forthcoming about how he viewed himself. But we see Jesus through Paul. When Paul speaks of imitating Jesus, he is referring to a reasonably clear line of demarcation in regard to the behavior traits of Jesus—something both he and his converts knew about. Jesus the man of the Spirit, the visionary, the miracle worker, the man of peace, the purveyor of wisdom, the prophet, the eschatological teacher—all these roles find an analogue in the behavior of Paul. You do indeed become the person whom you admire. In our last chapter I will say more about all this, and we will see if that inner circle actually joined hands in the end.