3. The Theologian

The leaders of the mother church gave him “a hearty welcome” (57?); but privately they admonished him:

You see, brother, how many thousand believers there are among the Jews, all of them zealous upholders of the Law. They have been told that you teach all Jews who live among the heathen to turn away from Moses, that you tell them not to circumcize their children, nor to observe the old customs. . . . They will be sure to hear that you have come. So do what we tell you. We have four men here who are under a vow. Join them, undergo the rites of purification with them, and pay their expenses. . . . Then everybody will understand that there is no truth in the stories told about you, but that you yourself observe the Law.⁴¹

Paul took the advice in good spirit, and went through the rites of purification. But when some Jews saw him in the Temple they raised an outcry against him as “the man who teaches everybody everywhere against our people and the Law.” A mob seized him, dragged him from the Temple, and “were trying to kill him” when a squad of Roman soldiers rescued him by arrest. Paul turned to speak to the crowd, and affirmed both his Judaism and his Christianity. They shouted for his death. The Roman officer ordered him to be flogged, but desisted when he learned of Paul’s Roman citizenship. The next day he brought the prisoner before the Sanhedrin. Paul addressed it, proclaimed himself a Pharisee, and won some support; but his excited opponents again sought to do him violence, and the officer withdrew him into the barracks. That night a nephew of Paul came to warn him that forty Jews had vowed not to eat or drink until they had killed him. The officer, fearing a disturbance that would compromise him, sent Paul in the night to the procurator Felix at Caesarea.

Five days later the high priest and some elders came up from Jerusalem, and accused Paul of being “a pest and a disturber of the peace among Jews all over the world.” Paul admitted that he was preaching a new religion, but added: “I believe everything that is taught in the Law.” Felix dismissed the accusers; nevertheless, he kept Paul under house arrest—accessible to friends—for two years (58-60?), hoping, perhaps, for a substantial bribe.

When Festus succeeded Felix he suggested that Paul should stand trial before him at Jerusalem. Fearing that hostile environment, Paul exercised his rights as a Roman citzen, and demanded trial before the emperor. King Agrippa, passing through Caesarea, gave him another hearing, and judged him “mad with great learning,” but otherwise innocent; “he might be let go,” said Agrippa, “if he had not appealed to the emperor.” Paul was put on a trading vessel, which sailed so leisurely that it encountered a winter storm before it could reach Italy. Through fourteen days of tempest, we are told, he gave crew and passengers an encouraging example of a man superior to death and confident of rescue. The ship broke to pieces on Malta’s rocks, but all on board swam safely to shore. Three months later Paul arrived in Rome (61?).

The Roman authorities treated him leniently, awaiting his accusers from Palestine, and Nero’s leisure to hear the case. He was allowed to live in a house of his choosing, with a soldier to guard him; he could not move about freely, but he could receive whomever he wished. He invited the leading Jews of Rome to come to him; they heard him patiently, but when they perceived that in his judgment the observance of the Jewish Law was not necessary to salvation, they turned away; the Law seemed to them the indispensable prop and solace of Jewish life. “Understand, then,” said Paul, “that this message of God’s salvation has been sent to the heathen. They will listen to it!”⁴² His attitude offended also the Christian community that he found in Rome. These converts, chiefly Jews, preferred the Christianity that had been brought to them from Jerusalem; they practiced circumcision, and were hardly distinguished by Rome from the orthodox Jews; they welcomed Peter, but were cold to Paul. He made some converts among the gentiles, even in high place; but a bitter sense of frustration darkened the loneliness of his imprisonment.

He found some solace in sending long and tender letters to his distant flocks. For ten years now he had written such epistles; there were doubtless many more than have come down to us under his name.^V They did not come directly from his pen; he dictated them, often adding a postscript in his own rough hand; he left them apparently unrevised, with all their repetitions, obscurities, and bad grammar on their head. Nevertheless, the depth and sincerity of their feeling, their angry devotion to a great cause, their profusion of noble and memorable speech make them the most forceful and eloquent letters in all literature; even Cicero’s charm seems slight beside this passionate faith. Here are strong words of love from one to whom his churches were his fiercely protected children; violent attacks upon his numberless enemies; reprimands to sinners, backsliders, and divisive disputants; and everywhere tender exhortations.

Be filled with thanksgiving. Let the presence of Christ dwell in you, a well-spring of abounding wisdom; teach and encourage one another with hymns and songs of the spiritual life; make music in your hearts in gratitude to God.⁴⁴

Here are great phrases that all Christendom quotes and cherishes: “the letter kills, the spirit gives life”;⁴⁵ “evil communications corrupt good manners”;⁴⁶ “to the pure all things are pure”;⁴⁷ “the love of money is the root of all evil.”⁴⁸ Here are frank confessions of his faults, even of his statesmanlike hypocrisies:

I have made myself everyone’s slave, so as to win over all the more. To the Jews I have become like a Jew to win Jews ... to those without the Law I have become like a man without any law ... I have become all things to all men, that I might save some of them. I do it all for the sake of the Good News, that I may share its blessings with the rest.⁴⁹

These epistles were preserved, and often publicly read, by the congregations to which they were addressed. By the end of the first century many of them were widely known; Clement of Rome refers to them in 97, Ignatius and Polycarp soon afterwards; gradually they entered into the subtlest theology of the Church. Moved by his own somber spirit and remorse, and his transforming vision of Christ; influenced perhaps by Platonist and Stoic denunciations of matter and the body as evil; recalling, it may be, Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a “scapegoat” for the sins of the people, Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ: that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam, and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the Son of God.^{VI 50} Such a conception was more agreeable to the pagans than to the Jews. Egypt, Asia Minor, and Hellas had long since believed in gods—Osiris, Attis, Dionysus—who had died to redeem mankind; such titles as Soter (Savior) and Eleutherios (Deliverer) had been applied to these deities; and the word Kyrios (Lord), used by Paul of Christ, was the term given in Syrian-Greek cults to the dying and redeeming Dionysus.⁵² The gentiles of Antioch and other Greek cities, never having known Jesus in the flesh, could only accept him after the manner of their savior gods. “Behold,” said Paul, “I show you a mystery.”⁵³

Paul added to this popular and consoling theology certain mystic conceptions already made current by the Book of Wisdom and the philosophy of Philo. Christ, said Paul, is “the wisdom of God,”⁵⁴ the first-born Son of God; “he is before all things, in him all things exist . . . through him all things have been created.”⁵⁵ He is not the Jewish Messiah who will deliver Israel from bondage; he is the Logos whose death will deliver all men. Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known, and could stand on an equality with the immediate apostles, who were no match for him in metaphysical speculation; he could give to the life of Christ, and to the life of man, high roles in a magnificent drama that embraced all souls and all eternity. Moreover, he could answer the troublesome questions of those who asked why Christ, if very god, had allowed himself to be put to death: Christ had died to redeem a world lost to Satan by Adam’s sin; he had to die to break the bonds of death and open the gates of heaven to all who should be touched by the grace of God.

Two factors, said Paul, determine who shall be saved by Christ’s death: divine election and humble faith. God chooses from all eternity those whom he will bless with his grace, and those whom he will damn.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Paul bestirred himself to awaken faith as a rod to catch God’s grace; only through such “assurance of things longed for,” such “confidence in things unseen,”⁵⁷ can the soul experience that profound change which makes a new man, unites the believer with Christ, and allows him to share in the fruits of Christ’s death. Good works and the performance of all the 613 precepts of the Jewish Law will not suffice, said Paul; they cannot remake the inner man, or wash the soul of sin. The death of Christ had ended the epoch of the Law; now there should no more be Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for “in union with Christ Jesus you are all one.”⁵⁸ As to good works combined with faith, Paul never tired of inculcating them; and the most famous words ever spoken about love are his own:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of preaching, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I can move mountains; if I have not love I am nothing. And though I give away everything that I am, and give myself, but do it in pride, not love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient and kind. It is not envious or boastful. ... It does not insist on its rights. ... It never fails. So faith, hope and love endure, these three; and the greatest of these is love.⁵⁹

To sexual love, and marriage, Paul gives the most discouraging toleration. One passage ⁶⁰ suggests, but does not prove, that he was married: “Have we not” (he and Barnabas) “a right to take a Christian wife about with us, like the rest of the apostles, and the Lord’s brothers, and Peter?”—but in another ⁶¹ he calls himself single. Like Jesus, he had no sympathy for physical desire.⁶² He was horrified when he heard of promiscuity and perversions.⁶³ “Do you not know,” he asked the Corinthians, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit that is within you? . . . Honor God with your bodies.”⁶⁴ Virginity is better than marriage, but marriage is better than concupiscence. The marriage of divorced persons is forbidden, except after mixed unions. Women are to be obedient to their husbands, slaves to their masters. “Everyone ought to remain in the station in which he was called” (i.e., converted to Christianity). “If you were a slave when you were called, never mind. Even if you can gain your freedom, make the most of your present condition instead. For a slave who has been called to union with the Lord is a freedman of the Lord, just as a freeman who had been called is a slave of Christ.”⁶⁵ Freedom and slavery meant little if the world was soon coming to an end. By the same token national liberty was unimportant. Let “every soul be in subjection to the higher powers, for there is no power but God, and the powers that be are ordained by God.”⁶⁶ It was ungracious of Rome to destroy so accommodating a philosopher.