CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 28
Farewell to Macedonia and Achaia
1. Paul looks west
Towards the end of the ephesian ministry, says luke, “paul resolved in the Spirit to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem, saying, ‘After I have been there, I must also see Rome’ ” (Acts 19:21). That Paul did make such plans about this time is corroborated in detail by what he himself says in his letters; yet there is a difference in emphasis between Luke and Paul. Luke has Rome in view as the goal of his narrative, and underlines this rôle of Rome by making it Paul’s own goal. Paul himself bears witness in his letter to the Roman Christians, written shortly after this time, of his long-cherished and often frustrated desire to visit their city; “I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome” (Romans 1:15). But in this letter Paul makes it plain that he has no intention of making a prolonged stay in Rome. For one thing, to settle in Rome, where there was already a thriving Christian community, would involve him in “building on another man’s foundation”1—something which formed no part of his policy (we know what his attitude was to those who came into his own mission-field and built on his foundation).2 For another thing, Rome in his mind was a halting place, or at best an advance base, on his way to Spain, where he planned to repeat the programme which he had just completed in the Aegean world (Romans 15:23 f.):
But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be sped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a little.
The statement that he “no longer has any room for work in these regions” throws light on Paul’s conception of his task. There was certainly much room for further work in the area already evangelized by Paul, but not (as he conceived it) work of an apostolic nature. The work of an apostle was to preach the gospel where it had not been heard before and plant churches where none had existed before. When those churches had received sufficient teaching to enable them to understand their Christian status and responsibility, the apostle moved on to continue the same kind of work elsewhere. So Paul travelled along the Roman highways, the main lines of communication, preaching the gospel and planting churches in strategic centres. From those centres the saving message would be disseminated; thus Thessalonica served as a base for the further evangelization of Macedonia, Corinth for Achaia and Ephesus for proconsular Asia.3 Paul’s time was limited, and there was much ground to cover, if the prophecy of Jesus was to be fulfilled, that before the final consummation “the gospel must first be preached to all the nations” (Mark 13:10).4 If Spain beckoned to him as his next mission-field, that was probably because the other lands bordering on the Mediterranean (including the North African coast west of Cyrenaica) were already being evangelized. Narbonese Gaul (the present-day Provence), part of which had been colonized by Ionian Greeks centuries before and still maintained close links with the Aegean world, came to be regarded as falling within the sphere of the churches of Asia.5 But Spain, the oldest Roman province in the west6 and a bastion of Roman civilization in that part of the world, had not yet heard the gospel and so must be evangelized as quickly as possible.
But Spain differed in one material respect from the provinces which Paul had evangelized thus far: they were Greek-speaking, but Spain was Latin-speaking. Paul would not have been entirely unfamiliar with Latin.7 He knew it to be the language of the Roman army and had heard it spoken in such Roman colonies as Philippi and Corinth,8 even if his work was carried out chiefly among Greek-speaking residents in those cities. When he claimed his citizen rights, he may have done so in the Latin form: ciuis Romanus sum.9 But to visit a country where Latin was the medium of communication, and to preach the gospel acceptably in that language, required special preparation. This may explain Paul’s statement in his letter to the Christians of Rome that he had by this time preached the gospel “from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum” (Romans 15:19).10 The idea of visiting the nearest Latin-speaking territory to his existing mission-field and undertaking evangelism there may have been in his mind when he expressed the hope to his Corinthian friends that, with the increase of their faith, he might have an opportunity to “preach the gospel in the lands beyond you” (2 Corinthians 10:15 f.). The precise reference of these words may be unclear—they might point to his further plans to visit Rome on the way to Spain—but what he says to the Romans is plainer: by the time he wrote to them from Corinth at the beginning (probably) of A.D. 57 he had carried the gospel as far west as Illyricum.
Illyricum was the Latin name of the province bordering on the Adriatic Sea. The Greek name of the territory was Illyria, but in Greek usage Illyria stretched farther south than Roman Illyricum, including Dyrrhachium, one of the western termini of the Via Egnatia11 (which lay within the Roman province of Macedonia). The Illyrians originally spoke an Indo-European vernacular, belonging to the same group as the languages of modern Albania. Illyricum came under Roman control in the course of the second century B.C. In 59 B.C. it was allocated to Julius Caesar along with Cisalpine (and later Narbonese) Gaul as part of his proconsular province. Under Augustus its northern frontier was extended to the Danube (c. 9 B.C.). In consequence of a rebellion some years later, which was put down by Tiberius, adopted son and heir-designate of Augustus, the northern part, Pannonia, was detached and became a separate province (A.D. 9); the southern part continued to be known as Illyricum but also bore the name Dalmatia (which it receives in 2 Timothy 4:10). It was an imperial province, governed by a legatus pro praetore with legionary troops under his command. In the early years of the principate of Tiberius the legionary troops were employed to good purpose in road-construction which opened up the mountainous interior of Illyricum.
Had Paul used the form Illyria, his language could be adequately explained as indicating an extension of his Macedonian ministry as far west as Dyrrhachium; it is his use of the Latin form Illyricum that suggests his crossing the frontier into the Roman province of that name, and a reason for his doing so—to familiarize himself with a Latin-speaking environment—lies ready to hand. But apart from his bare mention of Illyricum, nothing is known of his visit there.
2. After Ephesus
The period following Paul’s completion of his Ephesian ministry is summed up by Luke in the briefest possible terms (Acts 20:1–3a):
After the uproar [over the alleged threat to the cult of Ephesian Artemis] ceased, Paul sent for the disciples and having exhorted them took leave of them and departed for Macedonia. When he had gone through these parts and had given them much encouragement, he came to Greece. There he spent three months …
But the interval between his leaving Ephesus (probably in the summer of A.D. 55) and his spending three months in Greece (that is, in the province of Achaia and more particularly in Corinth) appears to have been considerably longer than could be gathered from Luke’s summary; eighteen months, indeed, would not be an excessive estimate. The earlier part of the period forms the setting for some of the correspondence mentioned or preserved in our 2 Corinthians, with its travelling to and fro between Corinth, Macedonia and the province of Asia. Room must then be found for Paul’s journey to western Macedonia and Illyricum.
There are, moreover, allusions in the Pastoral Epistles to visits paid to other places in the Greek world which, in the opinion of some students of these documents, can best be fitted into this period. The criticism and exegesis of the Pastoral Epistles are beset by too many problems for certainty to be attainable about these allusions, but some of the visits, it is urged, could be more reasonably accommodated in this phase of Paul’s career than relegated to the limbo period following his two years under house-arrest in Rome.12 For example, the reference in Titus 3:12 to his plan to winter in Nicopolis (a Roman colony founded by Augustus in Epirus to commemorate his victory at Actium) has been related, very precariously, to his visit to Illyricum, on the ground that, being on the west coast of Greece, Nicopolis would provide convenient winter-quarters on his return from Illyricum.13
Even more precariously, it has been asked if Paul could have spoken of having no more “room for work in these regions” if Crete remained unevangelized—the implication being that his travels during the period before he expressed himself in those terms to the Roman Christians included a visit to Crete in the company of Titus, whom he left behind to continue the missionary work they had started together and to organize church life in the island (Titus 1:5).14 But, inadequate though our knowledge of his travels during this period is, it is very difficult to fit a Cretan visit into them.
In so far as we can trace Paul’s movements from the close of his Ephesian ministry, they may be tabulated, very tentatively, as follows:15
A.D.
55
Spring
Painful visit to Corinth; Paul sends severe letter (“Corinthians C”) by the hand of Titus
Summer
Deadly peril in Asia; Paul leaves Ephesus
Late Summer
In Troas
October
Paul leaves Troas for Macedonia, meets Titus, sends letter of reconciliation (“Corinthians D”)
55–56
Winter-spring
In Macedonia; news of interlopers at Corinth; Paul sends letter of rebuke (“Corinthians E”)
56
Summer
In Illyricum
Autumn
In Macedonia (?)
57
January-March
In Corinth
3. The collection for Jerusalem
One fact emerges clearly from those letters of Paul which can be dated in this period—that he was greatly taken up during these months with the completion of the contributions to the Jerusalem fund made by his churches in Macedonia and Achaia. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance which Paul attached to this work and to the safe conveyance of the money to Jerusalem in the hands of delegates of the contributing churches.
At an earlier stage in Paul’s career he and Barnabas had a meeting with the leaders of the Jerusalem church at which it was agreed that those two men, who had already made a good beginning with the work of Gentile evangelization, should continue to prosecute it, while the Jerusalem leaders would concentrate their missionary activity on Jews. The Jerusalem leaders added a special request that Barnabas and Paul should continue to remember “the poor”16—a request which is best understood against the background of the famine relief which the church of Antioch had sent to the Jerusalem believers by the hand of Barnabas and Paul. In reporting this request Paul adds that this was a matter to which he himself paid special attention. It was in his mind throughout his evangelization of the provinces to east and west of the Aegean, and in the closing years of that period he applied himself energetically to the organizing of a relief fund for Jerusalem in the churches of Galatia, Asia, Macedonia and Achaia.
We first learn about this fund from the instructions given to the Corinthian Christians in 1 Corinthians 16:1–4; they had been told about it and wanted to know more. From what he says to them we learn that he had already given similar instructions to the churches of Galatia—presumably in the late summer of A.D. 52, when he passed through “the Galatic region and Phrygia” on his way from Judaea and Syria to Ephesus (Acts 18:22 f.). Thanks to Paul’s Corinthian correspondence, more details are known about the organizing of the fund in Corinth than in any of the other contributing churches.
If Paul’s instructions to his converts in Corinth had been carried out, then each householder among them would have set aside a proportion of his income week by week for some twelve months, so that the church’s contribution would have been ready to be taken to Jerusalem in the spring of the following year by the delegates appointed by the church for that purpose. The tension which developed soon afterwards between many of the Corinthian Christians and Paul perhaps occasioned a falling off in their enthusiasm for this good cause. Next time Paul wrote to them about it (in the aftermath of the reconciliation resulting from the severe letter which he sent to them by Titus) he expressed the assumption that they had been setting money aside for the fund systematically ever since they received his instructions, and told them how he had been holding up their promptness as an example to the Macedonian churches. But when one reads between the lines, it is plain that he had private misgivings on this score; hence he sent Titus back to Corinth with two companions17 to help the church to complete the gathering together of its contributions “so that you may be ready, as I said you would be; lest if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready, I should be humiliated—to say nothing of you—after my confident boasting” (2 Corinthians 9:3 f.). As we have seen, some of them probably felt that this was a subtle way of putting irresistible pressure on them: he was “crafty”, they said, and got the better of them “by guile” (2 Corinthians 12:16).
At the time when Paul sent Titus and his companions to Corinth to see about this matter, he himself was in Macedonia, helping the churches of that province to complete their share in it. The political situation which made it impossible for Paul to stay in Macedonia five or six years previously had now passed; perhaps the change of emperor in A.D. 54 had something to do with this.18 Even so, the Macedonian churches had been passing through a period of unspecified trouble as a result of which they were living at bare subsistence level, if that; and Paul felt that he could hardly ask them to contribute to the relief of fellow-Christians who were no worse off than themselves. But they insisted on making a contribution, and Paul was greatly moved by this token of divine grace in their lives (2 Corinthians 8:2–4):
for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of liberality on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own free will, begging us earnestly for the favour of taking part in the relief of the saints—
and the secret of their generosity, he adds, was that, having given themselves to the Lord, they took it as a matter of course that their property (such as it was) was equally at his disposal. He pays the Macedonian Christians this tribute in a letter to the Corinthians in order to encourage the latter to give as generously from their comparative affluence as the Macedonians gave from their destitution.
Paul makes one further reference to this relief fund in his extant letters, and this reference is particularly informative, because it comes in a letter to a church which was not of Paul’s planting and which therefore was not involved in the scheme and indeed had no prior knowledge of it. Writing to the Roman Christians to prepare them for his intended visit to their city on the way to Spain, he tells them that the business of this relief fund must be completed before he can set out on his westward journey (Romans 15:25–28):
At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem with aid for the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem; they were pleased to do it, and indeed they are in debt to them, for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this, and have “sealed” this fruit to them, I shall go on by way of you to Spain.
The members of the Jerusalem church are the “saints” par excellence, being at once the faithful remnant of Israel and the nucleus of the people of God in the new age. If Gentile believers can also be called “saints”, it is because they have become “fellow citizens with the saints” of Jewish stock and with them “members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). The solidarity of Jewish and Gentile Christianity, in particular the strengthening of fellowship between the church of Jerusalem and the Gentile mission, was a major concern of Paul’s, and his organization of the relief fund was in large measure designed to promote this end. He knew that many members of the Jerusalem church looked with great suspicion on the independent direction taken by his Gentile mission: indeed, his mission-field was repeatedly invaded by men from Judaea who tried in one way or another to undermine his authority and impose the authority of Jerusalem. But in denouncing them Paul was careful not to give the impression that he was criticizing the church of Jerusalem or its leaders. On the other hand, many of his Gentile converts would be impatient of the idea that they were in any way indebted to the church of Jerusalem. Paul was anxious that they should recognize their substantial indebtedness to Jerusalem. He himself had never been a member of the Jerusalem church and denied emphatically that he derived his gospel or his commission from that church, yet in his eyes that church, as the mother-church of the people of God, occupied a unique place in the Christian order. If he himself were cut off from fellowship with the Jerusalem church, his apostolic activity, he felt, would be futile. Such was the part that Jerusalem played in his thinking that, when he indicates to the Roman Christians the limits of his ministry up to the time of writing, he says that he has preached the gospel “from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyricum” (Romans 15:19). That he should mention Illyricum as the westernmost limit thus far is natural; but why should he name Jerusalem as the place where he began?19 According to his own account in the letter to the Galatian churches, he began his ministry in Damascus and Arabia.20 Yet for Paul in measure, as for Luke absolutely,21 Jerusalem is the starting-place of the gospel; perhaps both of them recognized in this the fulfilment of the oracle preserved in Isaiah 2:3 and Micah 4:2:
out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.`
Paul certainly had much more regard for Jerusalem than Jerusalem had for Paul.
As for the suspicions entertained in the Jerusalem church about Paul and his Gentile mission, what would be more calculated to allay those suspicions than the manifest evidence of God’s blessing on that mission with which Paul planned to confront the Jerusalem believers—not only the monetary gift which would betoken the Gentile churches’ practical interest in Jerusalem but living representatives of those churches, deputed to convey their contributions? Writing to his friends in Corinth Paul holds out to them the prospect that their Jerusalem fellow-Christians will be moved to a deep feeling of brotherly affection for them “because of the surpassing grace of God in you” (2 Corinthians 9:14). That all suspicions would in fact be allayed was not a foregone conclusion—Paul asks the Roman Christians to join him in prayers that his “service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints” (Romans 15:31)—but if this would not allay them, nothing would.
Perhaps Paul envisaged this appearance of Gentile believers with their gifts in Jerusalem as at least a token fulfilment of those Hebrew prophecies which spoke of the “wealth of the nations” as coming to Jerusalem and of the brethren of its citizens as being brought “from all the nations as an offering to the Lord” on his “holy mountain” (Isaiah 60:5; 66:20).22 But if Paul had those prophecies in mind, perhaps the Jerusalem leaders had them in mind also, and drew different conclusions from them. In the original context, the wealth of the nations is a tribute which the Gentiles bring to Jerusalem in acknowledgment of her supremacy. In Paul’s eyes the contributions made by his converts to the Jerusalem relief fund constituted a voluntary gift, an expression of Christian grace and gratitude, but it is conceivable that the recipients looked on them rather as a tribute due from the Gentile subjects of the Son of David.23
There was, moreover, an intensely personal element in Paul’s concern for this relief fund. The Gentile delegates were to bring their offerings to Jerusalem, but the Gentile delegates themselves were Paul’s own offering, presented not so much to the mother-church as to the Lord who, many years before, had called Paul to be his apostle to the Gentiles. A major phase of Paul’s apostleship had now come to an end; before he embarked on a new phase he would render an account of his stewardship thus far. He looked on his stewardship as a “priestly service” and desired that “the offering of the Gentiles”, the fruit of that service which he was about to “seal” in Jerusalem, might be “acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:16). There were those who stigmatized his Gentile converts as unclean because they were uncircumcised and therefore excluded from the people of God; Paul knew that their hearts had been purified by faith, that they had been washed, sanctified and justified “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). They were thus fitted to be a “pure offering” to that God whose name, through the Gentile mission, had now become “great among the nations”, as another Hebrew prophet had put it (Malachi 1:11).
Paul had no thought of presenting this offering anywhere but in Jerusalem. To Jerusalem, then, he took a representative group of his Gentile converts. It may even have been in his mind to render the account of his apostolic stewardship and re-dedicate himself for the next phase of his ministry in those very temple precincts where, years before, the Lord had appeared to him in a vision and sent him “far away to the Gentiles” (Acts 22:21).24 His converts could not accompany him into the temple, but there in spirit he could consummate “the offering of the Gentiles” who had believed through his witness hitherto, and seek grace and strength for the future.
He may indeed have hoped that on a later occasion, when his contemplated evangelization of Spain was completed in its turn, he might visit Jerusalem again with a fresh offering of Gentiles from the western Mediterranean and render a further account, perhaps the final account, of his stewardship. This, as we know, was not to be; but Paul could not know what his impending visit to Jerusalem had in store for him. He did foresee the possibility of trouble; hence he bespoke the prayers of the Christians in Rome that he might “be delivered from the unbelievers in Judaea” (Romans 15:31). But the present visit to Jerusalem might well witness a partial anticipation of the rôle which Jerusalem was to fill in the end-time. For Jerusalem was not only the place from which the gospel set out; it was also to be the place from which the crowning phase of God’s saving plan for the world would be displayed.25
Even the “unbelievers in Judaea”, from whom Paul half-expected some opposition,26 might nevertheless be impressed by the visible testimony of so many representative believers from the Gentile lands in their midst.27 We know that at the very time when Paul was preparing to sail for Judaea with his converts and their gifts, he was pondering the relation, in the divine programme, between his Gentile mission and the ultimate salvation of all Israel: this also is a subject on which he lays bare his thought in his letter to the Romans.28 This letter was sent from Corinth, where he was the guest of his friend Gaius at the beginning of A.D. 57, shortly before his departure for Judaea. If, in telling the Romans about the collection for Jerusalem, he refers only to the contributing churches in Macedonia and Achaia, that was probably because these two provinces were uppermost in his thought and action at the time. He had colleagues in Asia Minor who could be entrusted with completing the arrangements for gathering the contributions in the churches there.
In the letter to the Romans, however, he sets this matter of the collection for Jerusalem, with the problem of Jerusalem itself, in the context to which, in his judgment, they properly belong—the context of God’s saving purpose for mankind.