CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 9
Paul Becomes a Christian
1. On the Damascus road
With astonishing suddenness the persecutor of the church became the apostle of Jesus Christ. He was in mid-course as a zealot for the law, bent on checking a plague which threatened the life of Israel, when, in his own words, he was “apprehended by Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12) and constrained to turn right round and become a champion of the cause which, up to that moment, he had been endeavouring to exterminate, dedicated henceforth to building up what he had been doing his best to demolish.
What caused this revolution? His own repeated explanation is that he saw the once-crucified Jesus now exalted as the risen Lord. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” he asks indignantly when his apostolic credentials are questioned (1 Corinthians 9:1), referring to the same occasion as that mentioned later in the same letter (1 Corinthians 15:8) where, after listing earlier appearances of Christ in resurrection, he adds, “Last of all … he appeared also to me” (perhaps in the sense, “he let himself be seen by me”). The resurrection appearance granted to him, he insists, was as real as the appearances witnessed by Peter, James and many others on the first Easter and the days immediately following. When, in 2 Corinthians 4:6, he says that “God … has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ”, his language perhaps implies a reminiscence of the same event—more particularly of that great “light from heaven, brighter than the sun” which flashed about him as he and his companions approached Damascus, according to the evidence of Acts (9:3; 22:6; 26:13).
The evidence of Acts corroborates Paul’s claim to have seen the risen Christ but also insists time and again that he heard him speak. “The God of our fathers”, he is told by Ananias of Damascus, “appointed you to see the Just One and to hear a voice from his mouth” (Acts 22:14; cf. 9:17). Whatever variations there are in Luke’s three accounts of Paul’s conversion, all three agree that about midday, as he was approaching Damascus, he “heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ And he said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said, ‘I am Jesus [of Nazareth], whom you are persecuting’ ” (9:4 f.; 22:7f.; 26:14 f.).
Some verbal communication, beyond the heavenly vision in itself, is implied in Paul’s statement that “he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles” (Galatians 1:15 f.). Objective as the revelation was, it was experienced inwardly as well as outwardly: it was granted, as Paul puts it, not merely “to me” but “in me”. He speaks as if the call and commission were part of the one conversion experience.1
No single event, apart from the Christ-event itself, has proved so determinant for the course of Christian history as the conversion and commissioning of Paul. For anyone who accepts Paul’s own explanation of his Damascus-road experience, it would be difficult to disagree with the observation of an eighteenth-century writer that “the conversion and apostleship of St. Paul alone, duly considered, was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation”.2
With no conscious preparation, Paul found himself instantaneously compelled by what he saw and heard to acknowledge that Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified one, was alive after his passion, vindicated and exalted by God, and was now conscripting him into his service. There could be no resistance to this compulsion, no kicking out against this goad3 which was driving him in the opposite direction to that which he had hitherto been pursuing. He capitulated forthwith to the commands of this new master; a conscript he might be,4 but henceforth also a devoted and lifelong volunteer.
Attempts to account for Paul’s experience in physiological or psychological terms are precarious, and inadequate to boot unless they take adequately into consideration the fact that it involved the intelligent and deliberate surrender of his will to the risen Christ who had appeared to him—the risen Christ who, from this time on, displaced the law as the centre of Paul’s life and thought.
“Blinded with excess of light”, Paul was led into Damascus, to the house of one Judas in the “street called Straight” (a name which survives to this day in the Darb al-Mustaqim), where presumably arrangements had been made for him to lodge. There he was visited by Ananias, one of the local disciples of Jesus, who greeted him as a brother and a fellow-disciple. Immediately Paul recovered his sight and was baptized in the name of Jesus. The man who had set out for Damascus to work havoc among the disciples there now found himself welcomed into their fellowship.
2. The covenanters of Damascus
Damascus has been claimed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. It is mentioned in the biblical story of Abraham (Genesis 14:15; 15:2), who indeed is said in later (Hellenistic) tradition to have reigned in Damascus.5 In patriarchal times it was an Amorite centre, but came into the power of the Aramaeans about 1200 B.C. In the period of the Hebrew monarchy it was the capital of an Aramaean kingdom which waged intermittent war with the kingdom of Israel until both were overrun and annexed by the Assyrians in the late eighth century B.C. It was subject successively to the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Graeco-Macedonian empires. Throughout the third century B.C. it lay on the frontier between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid realms, and was claimed by both. When, as a result of their victory at Paneion in 200 B.C., the Seleucids extended their realm south to the Egyptian frontier, Damascus passed decisively into their power.
In the period when the Seleucid empire was rapidly disintegrating, Damascus was seized by the Nabataean king Aretas III (c. 85 B.C.). The Nabataeans were Arabs; their homeland was the territory between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, and Petra was their capital. The Nabataean kingdom was incorporated in the Roman Empire as the province of Arabia in A.D. 106, but in its heyday it was a power to be reckoned with, posing a recurrent threat to the Hasmonaean and Herodian rulers of Palestine. The Nabataeans did not retain Damascus for long. During the Mithridatic wars it was taken from them by Tigranes I of Armenia (72/1 B.C.). He lost it in 66 B.C. to the Romans, in whose control it thereafter remained (apart from the brief Parthian occupation of Syria in 40–39 B.C.), as one of the cities of the Decapolis,6 under the general supervision of the governors of Syria. It was from Damascus that Pompey’s lieutenant Scaurus set out in 64 B.C. to intervene in the quarrel between the Hasmonaean brothers Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, both of whom sought Roman support—which led inevitably to Pompey’s occupation of Judaea the following year. In the time of Tiberius the territory assigned to Damascus extended west to border on that of Sidon.
Under the Seleucids Damascus had become largely hellenized. Its tutelary deity was identified with Dionysus, who came to figure in its foundation legend. It was planned on the Hippodamic grid pattern7 and appears to have had the installations essential to a Hellenistic city: when, for example, Herod the Great presented it with a gymnasium,8 this was presumably designed to replace an earlier one. Greek may well have been the language most commonly used in Damascus in Paul’s time; yet Aramaic would also be heard in its streets—this being the language not only of the desert-dwellers to the east but also (probably) of its Jewish colony. This colony was a sizeable one, even if we do not accept at face value Josephus’s estimate that 10,000 or even 18,000 Jews were massacred in Damascus in A.D. 66.9
Damascus, which plays a part in Muslim eschatological tradition as the place to which Jesus will descend to destroy Antichrist,10 may well have figured in this way in a branch of Christian tradition from which the Muslims took over the expectation. Any such Christian tradition would be too late to have first-century relevance; it could, however, have had Jewish antecedents. In some strands of Jewish tradition, too, Damascus or the surrounding territory figures as the place where Gentile dominion will be finally overthrown, and while most of these strands are of late attestation, there is one which dates back to pre-Christian times.11
Two imperfect manuscripts of early mediaeval date, discovered towards the end of the nineteenth century in the genizah of the ancient synagogue of Fostat (Old Cairo), were recognized to be copies of a composition provisionally called the Zadokite Work or the Book of the Covenant of Damascus.12 Not until the discovery of the Qumran texts in 1947 and the following years was it realized that this composition came from the same community as those others. Not only did the contents match those of some of the Qumran documents, but additional fragments of the same composition, centuries older than the Cairo manuscripts, were identified among the Qumran finds. The composition was called the Zadokite Work because of the place of esteem which it gives to Zadok and his dynasty (the legitimate high-priesthood in Israel); it was called the Book of the Covenant of Damascus because it speaks of “those who enter the new covenant in the land of Damascus”,13 presumably the same people referred to as “the repentant of Israel who went out from the land of Judah and sojourned in the land of Damascus” under the leadership of “the expositor of the law”.14 The “land of Damascus” was evidently a district where this covenant community spent some time in the early period of its existence; Damascus also figured in its expectation of the end of the age then current, for another “expositor of the law” was expected to come to Damascus then15—in company, it appears, with the Davidic Messiah.16
“Damascus” has been held by some scholars to be a code-name for the community’s place of exile17—a code-name chosen because they interpreted their emigration as the fulfilment of the prophecy of Amos 5:26 f., quoted in the strange form: “I have exiled the tabernacle of your king and the pedestal of your images from my tent to Damascus”.18 But the form of the quotation—not to speak of its interpretation—is so strange as to suggest that it was adapted to fit the fulfilment: the interpreters, that is to say, sought a text to suit their migration to Damascus and found it in Amos 5:26 f.19
The covenanters regarded the “Teacher of Righteousness” (who was no longer alive) as the first leader and organizer of their community. If Damascus be taken literally, the question arises of the relation of this community to that of Qumran, which also venerated the Teacher of Righteousness as its first leader and organizer. The means of reconstructing the history of the community are too scanty to make any firm answer possible.20 Perhaps the community as a whole resided in “the land of Damascus” for some years: at one time the attractive suggestion was made that it resided there during the thirty years or more of its abandonment of the Qumran centre at the end of the first century B.C. (driven thence, perhaps, by the Parthian invasion), but the palaeography of the Qumran fragments of the Zadokite Work points to a date several decades earlier. Another possibility is that one branch of the community lived in the land of Damascus for a time while the main body lived at Qumran. The troubles under Alexander Jannaeus might provide an appropriate historical setting, but we do not know. There is serious reason to believe, however, that those who betook themselves to the land of Damascus did so “in order to anticipate there the appearance of the Messiah, or, in general, the inauguration of the messianic drama”.21
3. With the disciples at Damascus
We may wish we knew something about the antecedents of the community of Jesus’ disciples at Damascus—that is, if we are right in inferring from Luke’s record that such a community had been established there before the arrival of refugees from Judaea after the death of Stephen. Unfortunately, we have no evidence to guide us and are driven to speculate. One scholar has ventured the speculation that the founders of the community were actually members of the holy family, brothers and other relatives of Jesus, and that they settled in the region of Damascus because they expected Jesus to be speedily manifested in glory there.22 This cannot be disproved—there is no reason why one should wish to disprove it—but equally it cannot be proved. The most that can be said is that the community was probably Galilaean rather than Judaean in its provenance, if only because Galilee (where Jesus had more disciples during his ministry than he had in Judaea) lay so near to Damascus and the other cities of the Decapolis. We know that a generation or two later there were several Jewish-Christian settlements in and around the Decapolis, but they are scarcely relevant to this much earlier settlement in Damascus.23
Still more speculative is the possibility of contact, or even mutual influence, between these disciples in Damascus and the covenanters attested in the Zadokite Work; and most speculative of all is the question how far, if at all, Paul’s thinking was indebted to these new friends among whom he first enjoyed Christian fellowship. It has been pointed out that the Qumran texts and the Pauline letters share a twofold concept of divine righteousness—the personal righteousness of God and the righteous status which he freely bestows on those who trust in him24—but here we should probably recognize a parallel development; Paul’s doctrine, as we shall see, was shaped in the light of his own quite exceptional experience of law and grace, The antithesis of flesh and spirit is also common to Paul and Qumran, but this too is distinctively developed by Paul.25
It was not to the disciples in Damascus, nor indeed to the disciples anywhere else, that Paul was indebted for the basic elements in his theology. In this regard his own claim about the gospel which he preached may safely be admitted: “I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12). It did not come in its fulness all at once, of course, but, as Paul saw it, it was all implicit in the Damascus-road revelation. It was this that put a new perspective on all his previous experience and training. Formerly, all the elements in his life and thought were organized around the central focus of the law. When the revelation of Jesus Christ showed him in a flash the bankruptcy of the law, the law could no longer be the magnet which drew all those elements together in a well-defined pattern. With the removal of the magnet they would have been dispersed and disorganized, had the law not been immediately replaced at the centre by the risen Lord, around whom Paul’s life and thought were reorganized to form a new pattern. Inevitably it took time for him to think through all that was involved in this reorganization—in fact, the remainder of his mortal life was insufficient for him fully to explore what he called “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). But he could at least declare his new faith in the affirmation “Jesus is the risen Lord” or “Jesus is the Son of God”; indeed, Luke says that he quickly declared it in the latter words in the synagogues of Damascus to which he had been accredited by the high priest for a very different purpose.26 Paul himself says that on receiving the revelation he “did not confer with flesh and blood” but “went away to Arabia and returned again to Damascus” (Galatians 1:16 f.), so perhaps his preaching in the Damascene synagogues should be dated after he returned from his Arabian journey (of which Luke has nothing to say).
Why did Paul go away to Arabia? A common answer is that he went into the desert to reflect on his new situation, perhaps to commune with God in the vicinity of “Horeb, the mount of God”, where Moses and Elijah had communed with him in days gone by.27 This may indeed have been part of his purpose, but probably his three days of blindness in Damascus had been sufficient for his mind to be reorientated. The implication of his own narrative relates his Arabian visit rather closely to his call to preach Christ among the Gentiles; the point of his reference to it in writing to his Galatian converts is to underline the fact that he began to discharge this call before he went up to Jerusalem to see the apostles there, so that none could say that it was they (or any other authorities on earth) who commissioned him to be the Gentiles’ apostle.
By “Arabia” in this context we naturally understand the Nabataean kingdom, which was readily accessible from Damascus. At this time it was ruled by Aretas IV (9 B.C.—A.D. 40). If Paul preached the gospel to the subjects of Aretas, we may wonder where he found a point of contact in their outlook which could dispose them to listen with some interest to his message that the crucified Jesus had been vindicated and exalted by God as universal Lord; but we should not underestimate Paul’s resourcefulness and versatility. It certainly appears from a piece of evidence elsewhere in his correspondence that it was not simply a quiet retreat that Paul sought in Arabia. In a later reminiscence he recalls a humiliating experience from his early Christian days: “At Damascus the ethnarch of King Aretas guarded the city of the Damascenes in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped his hands” (2 Corinthians 11:32 f.). The “ethnarch of King Aretas” was probably the representative of the king’s subjects who were resident in Damascus, just as the Jewish colony in Alexandria appointed an ethnarch to be their representative and spokesman before the civic and imperial authorities there.28 But why should the Nabataean ethnarch take this hostile action against Paul, if Paul had spent his time in Arabia in silent contemplation? If, on the other hand, he spent his time there in preaching, he could well have stirred up trouble for himself and attracted the unfriendly attention of the authorities. Since the Nabataean territory came up almost to the walls of Damascus, the ethnarch, with an adequate body of his fellow-nationals to help him, may have watched the city gate from the outside, so as to arrest Paul if he left the city. By the help of his friends, however, he left Damascus in such a way as to avoid the ethnarch’s notice.29 It was probably now, in the third year after he set out for Damascus on his anti-Christian errand, that he paid his first visit to Jerusalem since his conversion.