CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 13
Paul and the Hellenistic Mission
1. Paul returns to the Greek world
With his return to “the regions of syria and cilicia” Paul was irrevocably committed to the Hellenistic world. He had been sent or brought to Jerusalem in his youth by his parents in order to be immunized against the infection of the Hellenistic world—that “place of evil waters” (as the sage Abtalyon called it a generation or more before the birth of Paul), which brought death to those who drank from them and caused the name of God to be profaned.1 Now he had come back to this ill-omened territory to claim it and its inhabitants for his new master.
Judaea, and even Jerusalem, formed part of the Hellenistic world.2 Greek was spoken alongside Aramaic (and possibly Hebrew) in the holy city itself3 and, as we have seen, Hellenistic Jews had their synagogues there in which the scriptures were read and worship was conducted in Greek. The pagan influences of Hellenism were kept at bay from the circle in which Paul received his education, but even the sages knew Greek and were capable of giving their pupils prophylactic courses in Greek language and culture. Simeon the son of Gamaliel is said to have had many pupils who studied “the wisdom of the Greeks” alongside as many others who studied the Torah,4 and it need not be doubted that Gamaliel the elder also had such pupils. It is quite probable that Paul acquired the rudiments of Greek learning in Gamaliel’s school. But from his return to Tarsus throughout the rest of his active life he was exposed to the Greek way of life in one city after another, for he no longer led a cloistered existence, but lived for the most part as a Gentile among Gentiles in order to win Gentiles for the gospel.5 The knowledge of Greek literature and thought that his letters attest was part of the common stock of educated people in the Hellenistic world of that day; it bespeaks no formal instruction received from Greek teachers. The direction of his faith and life was by now too firmly fixed—first by his Jewish upbringing and then by his submission to Jesus as Lord—for Hellenism to exercise a decisive influence on his mind. We can recognize in his writings concepts and expressions, drawn especially from popular Stoicism, which were in the air at the time and which he freely pressed into service in a Christian context;6 but while he preached the gospel to the Hellenes, it was no hellenized gospel that he preached. His proclamation of deliverance and life through Christ crucified brought his gospel into basic conflict with accepted standards of Hellenistic value and gave it the quality of “folly” which it had in the eyes of those of his hearers who made their assessments by what Paul called “the wisdom of the world” (1 Corinthians 1:20 ff.).
For about ten years from his arrival back in Tarsus only the scantiest information has been preserved about Paul’s movements and experiences. He himself makes it clear that he spent those years in evangelization: this was the period during which the Judaean churches heard reports of how their former persecutor was “now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy” (Galatians 1:23).7 If, by his own account (Galatians 1:22), he was personally unknown to those churches—from which the church of Jerusalem cannot be excluded—that was because his former persecution had been directed more particularly against the Hellenistic disciples, few of whom now remained in Judaea.
It is possible that during these years he endured some of the hardships which he later lists in 2 Corinthians 11:22–27 as credentials of his apostolic commission. When, for example, he speaks of having on five occasions “received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one”8—none of these occasions being mentioned elsewhere either by himself or by Luke—they must be assigned to a stage in his Christian career when he still submitted to synagogue discipline. Presumably he could have claimed exemption from this discipline on the ground of his Roman citizenship, but that would have meant in effect the denial of his Jewishness and the renunciation of his regular policy of using the synagogue as his preliminary base of operation. So long as he made a practice of visiting the synagogue as an observant Jew in each new city to which he came, he was obliged to accept its discipline, until he finally withdrew from it. It may well be that some of his experiences of the thirty-nine lashes belong to this Cilician phase of his life. Whether more of the “countless beatings”9 and other instances of harsh treatment to which he refers in the same context can also be located in this phase it is not possible to say with any certainty.
2. Jewish missionary enterprise
There is evidence of considerable proselytizing activity among the Gentiles in the earlier part of the first century A.D.10 “Love your fellow-creatures”, said Hillel, “and draw them near to the Torah.”11 The conversion to Judaism of the ruling house of Adiabene, east of the Tigris, about A.D. 40, is the most conspicuous instance of proselytization known to us from this period, and illustrates the missionary activity of Jews whose business made them travel from time to time in foreign parts.12 Among the groups from the dispersion listed by Luke as being present in Jerusalem for the festival of Pentecost in A.D. 30 were “visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes” (Acts 2:10). One of the seven leaders of the Hellenistic section in the primitive church of Jerusalem was “Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch” (Acts 6:5).13 Philip, another of the Hellenistic leaders, baptized an Ethiopian proselyte or God-fearer who was travelling home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and sent him “on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:27–39), while Peter about the same time baptized the God-fearer Cornelius, a Roman centurion stationed in Caesarea, together with his household.14 God-fearers were Gentiles who attached themselves in varying degrees to the Jewish worship and way of life without as yet becoming full proselytes. To become a full proselyte, a member by conversion of the Jewish religious community, a male Gentile was normally required to submit to circumcision, in addition to undergoing a ceremonial bath (“proselyte baptism”), offering a sacrifice and undertaking to keep the law of Moses.15 For this reason it was easier for Gentile women to become proselytes: the three last requirements sufficed for them. But proselytes and God-fearers, especially God-fearers, were present in large enough numbers throughout the provinces of the Roman Empire to provide a nucleus for the churches which Paul planted in one city after another.
The presence of those proselytes and God-fearers throughout the provinces was the product of Jewish religious witness and missionary activity among the Gentiles. Those Jews who shared in this activity took seriously Israel’s mission, promulgated through the prophet of consolation, to be Yahweh’s witnesses in the world and declare his praise among the nations (Isaiah 43:10–12, 21). It has been suggested by some that Paul himself, before his conversion, had conceived a desire to take a leading part in this activity, to bring Gentiles into obedience to the law.16 This cannot be proved. But if there is any truth in the suggestion, then it would serve as a background for his new vocation to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles—the law being displaced in his plan of missionary campaign, as it was in his personal life, by the crucified and exalted Jesus.
3. The gospel comes to Syrian Antioch
Paul was far from being the only Christian missionary in Syria and Cilicia during those years, The Hellenistic disciples who had shaken the dust of Jerusalem and Judaea from their feet, considering perhaps that the severe persecution they had undergone after Stephen’s death would bring on the city and region divine retribution which nothing could avert, settled in the surrounding territories and began to propagate their faith there.17 If a high estimation of the holiness of Jerusalem had earlier brought them from their original homes to settle there, their disillusionment was all the greater when the holy city drove them out. If, as they now found, pagan or semi-pagan environments would provide them with greater freedom to serve God and maintain their witness to his saving act in Christ, the place of such environments in the divine scheme must be reappraised. Philip, one of Stephen’s colleagues in the Jerusalem church, who seems to have taken over the Hellenistic leadership after Stephen’s death, initiated a remarkably successful Christian mission in a Samaritan city, and then took up residence in the largely Gentile city of Caesarea Maritima.18 Other Hellenistic fugitives travelled farther afield—some, quite probably, to Alexandria and Cyrene, from which a number of them had originally come, and others, of whom Luke tells us more particularly, to Phoenicia and Syria, as far north as Antioch.
Antioch on the Orontes (modern Antakya in the Hatay province of Turkey), standing at the foot of Mount Silpius, some eighteen miles upstream from its seaport Seleucia Pieria, was founded in 300 B.C. by Seleucus Nicator, first ruler of the Seleucid dynasty, and named by him after his father Antiochus. As the capital of the Seleucid empire it rapidly became a city of importance, and when Syria became a Roman province in 64 B.C. Antioch was the seat of administration and residence of the imperial legate.19 It remained the provincial capital when Eastern Cilicia was united with Syria in 25 B.C. It was at this time the third largest city in the Roman world, planned on the grid pattern, surpassed in population only by Rome and Alexandria. Julius Caesar, Augustus and Tiberius enlarged and adorned it, while Herod the Great contributed colonnades on both sides of the main street and paved the street itself with polished stone.20 It was a centre of commerce as well as a political capital; the products of Syria passed through it on their way to the rest of the Mediterranean lands. Since it was near the frontier between the settled Graeco-Roman world and the Orient, it was more cosmopolitan than most Hellenistic cities.
Jews formed part of the population of Antioch from its foundation onward, even before Judaea itself was governed from Antioch (as it was during the first half of the second century B.C.). In 145 B.C. the city had experience of Jews in another rôle than that of settlers and merchants, for Demetrius II, involved in civil war with a rival contender for the Seleucid throne, whose forces occupied most of Antioch, enlisted the support of three thousand soldiers from the army of Jonathan the Hasmonaean, who showed their skill in urban fighting and, after working considerable and perhaps unnecessary destruction, helped to regain control of the city for the king.21 By the beginning of the Christian era, proselytes to Judaism are said (by Josephus) to have been specially abundant in Antioch;22 one of them, Nicolaus, became in turn a convert to the faith of Jesus and is listed, as was mentioned above, among the Hellenistic leaders in the church of Jerusalem.23
To this city of Antioch, then, came a number of Hellenistic refugees from Jerusalem, including (Luke tells us) some men whose original homes were in Cyprus and Cyrene.24 The refugees were active propagandists for their faith, although for the most part they confined their propaganda to their fellow-Hellenists—Greek-speaking Jews—but when these men of Cyprus and Cyrene came to Antioch, they conceived the idea of letting the local Greeks, pagans though they were, share in their good news. Large numbers of those Greeks hailed the good news as something which exactly met their need. In their great city there would have been many competing cults and mystery religions which held out the promise of salvation from the power of evil or from a sense of estrangement in an unfriendly world. When the visitors told their good news of salvation through Christ, the terms in which they spoke would not be entirely unfamiliar to their hearers; but there was something about the Christ whom they proclaimed as saviour which was peculiarly attractive and not paralleled in any of the lords or saviours celebrated in those other cults. Perhaps they spoke of him as one who existed in the form of God before he came to earth as man, who as man accepted humiliation and death, and was accordingly exalted by God above all creation and endowed with the title “Lord” (kyrios) in the highest sense which it was capable of bearing. This possibility hangs on the view that the hymn in honour of Christ which Paul incorporates in Philippians 2:5–11, widely believed to be pre-Pauline,25 was current as early as the Hellenistic mission in Syrian Antioch. The hymn in any case harks back to the fourth Servant Song which, as had been said already,26 gave rise to an important strand of christological thinking in the early Jerusalem church.
It is natural that the designation “Christian” should first have been given to the followers of Jesus in Antioch, and by Gentiles. As the Herodians in the Gospels were adherents of Herod,27 so the Christians (christianoi) were adherents of Christ (such forms consisting of the stem of a personal name followed by an originally Latin suffix, -ianus). Greek-speaking Jews at that date would not have referred to Jesus as Christ, for that was still a title (christos, the “anointed” one, corresponding to the Semitic messiah);28 to refer to him thus would have been to acknowledge him as Messiah. But in Gentile ears Christ was simply an alternative name for Jesus; it had no such associations for them as it had for Jews. Christos sounded exactly like a fairly common slave-name, Chrēstos (Latin Chrestus), and among Greeks and Romans there was considerable confusion between, the two spellings,29 as also between christianoi and chrēstianoi. Even in Acts 11:26, where it is mentioned that “in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians”, a few Greek witnesses to the text (including the first hand in Codex Sinaiticus) exhibit the spelling chrēstianous (accusative plural) instead of christianous. The latter is certainly what Luke wrote, but the former may well represent what some of the Antiochenes thought they were saying.
The leaders of the Jerusalem church at this stage appear to have exercised a general supervision or, indeed, control over the spread of the gospel into adjacent territories. For example, when Philip’s recent preaching in a Samaritan city won a large number of converts there,30 Peter and John came from Jerusalem and welcomed these new converts into the messianic fellowship.31 A similar situation faced them now, when news came to Jerusalem of the revolutionary extension of the gospel among the Gentiles of Antioch. Who could tell what wild syncretism, so congenial to Antioch, might not develop from it if proper direction were not given? A delegate was accordingly sent to Antioch to see what was going on. The results might have been disastrous if the wrong type of delegate had been chosen; fortunately, the man who was sent was Barnabas, the “encourager”.32 No doubt the forward movement at Antioch presented features which some members of the church of Jerusalem would have found deeply disturbing, but Barnabas found much cause for satisfaction. “When he came and saw the grace of God, he was glad”, says Luke (Acts 11:23), so he settled down at Antioch and gave the Hellenistic missionaries and their converts the sympathetic encouragement and wise guidance that they needed. Before long, a large and growing church was established in Antioch—a church which, with the rapid progress of the gospel among the Greek population, was bound very quickly to have more members of Gentile birth than of Jewish birth.
In this situation, Barnabas began to feel the need of a colleague to share the responsibility of supervising the life and activity of this new church, and his mind turned to Paul. He knew of Paul’s vocation to the evangelizing of Gentiles, and perhaps heard reports from time to time of what Paul had been doing in this regard in Cilicia. All that he knew of Paul convinced him that there was no man more suitable to join him in his work at Antioch, so he journeyed to Tarsus to find him, and persuaded him to return to Antioch with him. If we say that Paul was thus (about A.D. 45) brought back into the main stream of Christian action, Paul would not necessarily have agreed; wherever he was would have been the main stream in his eyes at any particular time. But he was brought into the main stream of recorded Christian action (so far as records are extant), for it is now that he reappears in Luke’s narrative, after his departure for Tarsus at the end of his brief visit with Peter in Jerusalem. The evangelization of Antioch and the path of Christian advance from that city would be of special interest to Luke if, as tradition asserts, he was himself an Antiochene by birth.33