CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 8
Persecutor of the Church
1. Campaign of repression
By his own repeated account, paul’s first relation to the young Christian movement was that of a persecutor.1 “I am the least of the apostles”, he could say in later days, “unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Corinthians 15:9). “You have heard of my former life in Judaism”, he reminds his Galatian converts, “how I persecuted the church of God beyond all measure and tried to destroy it” (Galatians 1:13). It would be unnecessary to ask where this persecuting activity took place, were it not that some have tried to locate it anywhere but in or around Jerusalem—in Hellenistic communities in and around Damascus, for example.2 But in those early days, where would one find the church of God if not pre-eminently in Jerusalem? It was “the churches of Christ in Judaea” who heard it said, a few years after his conversion, “Our former persecutor is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy” (Galatians 1:23), and while this report may conceivably have been referring to him as the persecutor of Christians in general, it is more natural to understand it of his record as a persecutor of Christians in fairly close touch with the churches of Judaea. The news that he was now preaching the Christian faith came from Syria and Cilicia, but it was not the new converts from those parts who described him as “our former persecutor”.
There is nothing in the evidence of Paul’s letters on this score which conflicts with the testimony of Acts. According to this testimony, he associated himself with Stephen’s accusers, guarding the outer garments of the witnesses as, in conformity with the ancient law, they threw the first stones at his execution.3 Then he took part enthusiastically in the campaign of repression against the church of Jerusalem, “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1), arresting and imprisoning men and women, endeavouring to make them renounce their faith when they were brought before synagogue courts, and pursuing refugees beyond the frontiers of Judaea in an attempt to bring them back to face trial and punishment. Luke’s record certainly agrees with Paul’s own evidence that he persecuted the church beyond all measure and provides a commentary on his statement that this activity was the measure of his zeal for the law and the ancestral traditions.
An out-and-out zealot for those traditions such as he declares himself to have been would certainly have offered vigorous opposition to any tendency to “change the customs delivered by Moses”.4 Gamaliel might counsel patience and moderation but, as Paul viewed the situation, it was too serious for such temporizing measures. If Stephen saw the logic of the situation more clearly than the apostles, Paul saw it more clearly than Gamaliel. In the eyes of Stephen and Paul alike, the new order and the old were incompatible. If Stephen argued, “The new has come; therefore the old must go”, Paul for his part argued, “The old must stay; therefore the new must go”. Hence the uncompromising rigour with which he threw himself into the work of repression.
Paul might have agreed that on one conceivable condition the customs delivered by Moses might be changed. It is possible that he had been taught that Messiah, when he came, would change the customs or even abrogate the law. There was an ancient Jewish chronological scheme, probably going back beyond the time of Paul, which divided world history into three ages of two thousand years each—the age of chaos, the age of law (beginning with the revelation to Moses on Sinai) and the messianic age. These three ages would be followed by the eternal sabbath rest.5 Those who accepted this scheme might well have believed that the validity of the law was but temporary, lasting only to the dawn of the messianic age. If Paul had been brought up to accept it, then no doubt he would have expected the law to be superseded by a new order when Messiah came.
But that Jesus of Nazareth could be the expected Messiah, as his disciples maintained, was out of the question. It is unlikely that the status, career and teaching of Jesus conformed in any way with Paul’s conception of the status, career and teaching of the Messiah—but that was not the conclusive argument in Paul’s mind. The conclusive argument was simply this: Jesus had been crucified. A crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. Whether his death by crucifixion was deserved or resulted from a miscarriage of justice was beside the point: the point was that he was crucified, and therefore came within the meaning of the pronouncement in Deuteronomy 21:23, “a hanged man is accursed by God”. True, the pronouncement envisaged the hanging until sundown, on a tree or wooden gibbet, of the dead body of an executed criminal, but as formulated it covered the situation in which someone was hanged up alive.6 It stood to reason, therefore, that Jesus could not be the Messiah. The Messiah, practically by definition, was uniquely endowed with the divine blessing—“the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him” (Isaiah 11:2)—whereas the divine curse explicitly rested on one who was crucified. A crucified Messiah was worse than a contradiction in terms; the very idea was an outrageous blasphemy. In later years Paul acknowledged that in preaching a crucified Messiah he was preaching something which was “a stumbling block [a skandalon] to Jews” (1 Corinthians 1:23) and showed, by quoting Deuteronomy 21:23, how necessary it was in his eyes to demonstrate from Scripture why one who (as he had come to realize) was indubitably the Messiah must nevertheless die under “the curse of the law” (Galatians 3:13).7 But when he was first confronted by people who publicly affirmed that the crucified Jesus was the Messiah, his course was clear: they were guilty of blasphemy, and should be dealt with accordingly. No heed could be paid to them when they supported their affirmation by the claim that Jesus had come back from the dead and appeared to them. In making this claim they were either deceivers or self-deceived, for none of the arguments which they used for Jesus’ messiahship could stand against the one irrefragable argument on the other side: a crucified man could not conceivably be the elect one of God.
The law and the customs, the ancestral traditions, and everything that was of value in Judaism, were imperilled by the disciples’ activity and teaching. Here was a malignant growth which called for drastic surgery. The defence of all that made life worth living for Paul was a cause which engaged all the zeal and energy of which he was capable. When the chief priests and their associates launched their attack on the disciples, Paul came forward as their eager lieutenant. Their motives may have been partly political, while his were entirely religious, but their action provided him with the occasion to protect the interests of the law. If the principal threat to those interests came from Stephen’s party, then let that party be attacked and suppressed first of all; but the disciples of Jesus as a whole, however outwardly observant of the law they might be, undermined it by proclaiming their crucified master as Messiah.
2. Mission to Damascus
Paul’s own narrative implies that his conversion to the faith which he was attempting to wipe out took place at or near Damascus:8 the narrative of Acts tells us what took him to Damascus. The violence of the persecution drove many of the disciples, especially the Hellenists, out of Judaea, but even so they were not necessarily out of reach of the Sanhedrin. When the Jewish state won independence under the Hasmonaeans, it had powerful patrons in the Romans, who let the countries surrounding Judaea know this and demanded that Judaea should be granted the rights and privileges of a sovereign state, including the right of extradition. Thus, a letter delivered by a Roman ambassador to Ptolemy VIII of Egypt in 142 B.C. concludes with the requirement: “if any pestilent men have fled to you from their country [Judaea], hand them over to Simon the high priest, that he may punish them according to their law” (1 Maccabees 15:21).9 Those rights and privileges were confirmed anew to the Jewish people (even though they no longer constituted a sovereign state), and more particularly to the high-priesthood, by Julius Caesar in 47 B.C.10 Paul in his crusading zeal resolved that the high priest should exercise his right of extradition against the fugitives, and procured from him “letters to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1).
It appears that there was already in Damascus a community of followers of the Way, with whom the fugitives from Judaea could hope to find refuge. These Damascene disciples were not the subjects of the extradition papers which Paul carried; he may not even have been aware of their presence there. It was the refugees whom he had come to apprehend,11 no doubt hoping that if he could accomplish this purpose satisfactorily in Damascus, he could repeat the procedure in other foreign cities.12 But the first disciple of Jesus with whom he had to do in Damascus was a member of this local community, one Ananias, “a devout man according to the law, well spoken of by all the Jews who lived there” (Acts 22:12).
Until the last moment of his pre-Christian career, then, Paul showed himself to be (in his own words) “as to zeal a persecutor of the church” (Philippians 3:6).