Introduction
Introduction
No excuse is offered for the publication of yet another book on Paul save the excuse offered by the second-century author of the Acts of Paul: it was written amore Pauli, for love of Paul. For half a century and more I have been a student and teacher of ancient literature, and to no other writer of antiquity have I devoted so much time and attention as to Paul. Nor can I think of any other writer, ancient or modern, whose study is so richly rewarding as his. This is due to several aspects of his many-faceted character: the attractive warmth of his personality, his intellectual stature, the exhilarating release effected by his gospel of redeeming grace, the dynamism with which he propagated that gospel throughout the world, devoting himself single mindedly to fulfilling the commission entrusted to him on the Damascus road (“this one thing I do”) and labouring more abundantly than all his fellow-apostles—“yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me”. My purpose in writing this book, then, is to share with others something of the rich reward which I myself have reaped from the study of Paul.
1. Paul the letter-writer
Of all the New Testament authors, Paul is the one who has stamped his own personality most unmistakably on his writings. It is especially for this reason that he has his secure place among the great letter-writers in world literature—not because he composed his letters with a careful eye to stylistic propriety and the approving verdict of a wider public than those for whom they were primarily intended, but because they express so spontaneously and therefore so eloquently his mind and his message. “He is certainly one of the great figures in Greek literature”, said Gilbert Murray;1 and a greater Hellenist even than Murray, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, described him as “a classic of Hellenism”. Paul, he said, did not directly take over any of the elements of Greek education, yet he not only writes Greek but thinks Greek; without realizing it, he serves as the executor of Alexander the Great’s testament by carrying the gospel to the Greeks.
At last, at last, once again someone speaks in Greek out of a fresh inward experience of life. That experience is his faith, which makes him sure of his hope. His glowing love embraces all mankind: to bring them salvation he joyfully sacrifices his own life, yet the fresh life of the soul springs up wherever he goes. He writes his letters as a substitute for his personal activity. This epistolary style is Paul, Paul himself and no other.2
No mean tribute from a Hellenist of Hellenists to one who claimed to be a Hebrew of Hebrews!
Paul’s letters are our primary source for his life and work; they are, indeed, a primary source for our knowledge of the beginnings of Christianity, for they are the earliest datable Christian documents, the most important of them having been written between eighteen and thirty years after the death of Jesus. Some writers have no doubt used the letter-form to conceal their true thoughts; Paul’s transparent honesty was incompatible with any such artificiality. He tries, where necessary, to be diplomatic, whether he is writing to his own converts or to people personally unknown to him; but even so he wears his heart on his sleeve.
This spontaneity was no doubt facilitated by Paul’s practice of dictating his letters instead of writing them out himself. As he dictates, he sees in his mind’s eye those whom he is addressing and speaks as he would if he were face to face with them. Even if he made use of amanuenses, the style is his own, especially in the “capital epistles” (a designation conveniently used for the letters to the Galatians, Corinthians and Romans). Where the amanuensis was one of his close associates, like Timothy or Luke, some greater stylistic discretion may have been allowed to him. But when Paul warmed to his theme, it can have been no easy task for any one to write down at his dictation. If his amanuenses followed the customary procedure, they would take down what Paul dictated with a stylus on wax tablets, possibly using some system of shorthand, and then transcribe the text in longhand on to a papyrus sheet or roll.
Because of the self-evident spontaneity of Paul’s letters, any account of him which is irreconcilable with their evidence must be suspect. From the first century we have one account of Paul composed (it appears) in complete independence of his letters; that is the account given in the Acts of the Apostles (a work which was designed as the second part of a history of Christian origins whose first part we know as the Gospel of Luke). This is our principal secondary source for the life and work of Paul, and the present work is based on the conviction (for which arguments have been set out elsewhere)3 that it is a source of high historical value. The differences between the portrait of Paul drawn in his undisputed letters and that drawn in Acts are such differences as might be expected between a man’s self-portrait and the portrait painted of him by someone else for whom he sat either consciously or (as in this instance) unconsciously. The Paul of Acts is the historical Paul as he was seen and depicted by a sympathetic and accurate but independent observer, whose narrative provides a convincing framework for the major epistles at least and may be used with confidence to supplement Paul’s own evidence.4
2. Paul and the expansion of Christianity
It is, however, not only as a man of letters but perhaps even more as a man of action that Paul has made his mark on world history. Consider, for example, two historical phenomena which would be surprising if they were not so familiar.
First, Christianity arose as a movement within the Jewish community, not in the lands of the dispersion but in the land of Israel. Its Founder was a Jew, and so were his disciples, who in the years following his departure from them proclaimed only to Jews the good news with which he entrusted them. Yet in little more than a generation after his death Christianity was recognized by the authorities of the Roman Empire as a predominantly Gentile cult, and to this day there are parts of the world where the antithesis Jew/Christian is simply another way of stating the antithesis Jew/Gentile.
Second, Christianity arose in south-western Asia, among people whose vernacular was Aramaic. Yet its foundation documents have come down to us in Greek, the language in which they were originally written; and over many centuries now it has been regarded, for better or worse, as a predominantly European religion.
Both of these phenomena, which in fact are but two aspects of one and the same phenomenon, are due principally to the energy with which Paul, a Jew by birth and upbringing, spread the gospel of Christ in the Gentile world from Syria to Italy, if not indeed to Spain, during the thirty years or so which followed his conversion to Christianity about A.D. 33. The energy with which he undertook and accomplished his commission may be illustrated by one phase of his apostolic ministry—the decade between A.D. 47 and 57. Here is Roland Allen’s summary:
In little more than ten years St. Paul established the Church in four provinces of the Empire, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. Before A.D. 47 there were no Churches in these provinces; in A.D. 57 St. Paul could speak as if his work there was done, and could plan extensive tours into the far West without anxiety lest the Churches which he had founded might perish in his absence for want of his guidance and support.5
His confidence was justified: they did not perish, but grew and prospered.
Paul was not the only preacher of Christianity in the Gentile world of that day—there were some who preached it in sympathy with him and others who did so in rivalry to him6—but he outstripped all others as a pioneer missionary and planter of churches, and nothing can detract from his achievement as the Gentiles’ apostle par excellence.
3. Paul the preacher of free grace
But Paul’s pre-eminent contribution to the world has been his presentation of the good news of free grace—as he himself would have put it (rightly), his re-presentation of the good news explicit in Jesus’ teaching and embodied in his life and work. The free grace of God which Paul proclaimed is free grace in more senses than one—free in the sense that it is sovereign and unfettered, free in the sense that it is held forth to men and women for their acceptance by faith alone, and free in the sense that it is the source and principle of their liberation from all kinds of inward and spiritual bondage, including the bondage of legalism and the bondage of moral anarchy.
The God whose grace Paul proclaimed is the God who alone does great wonders. He creates the universe from nothing; he calls the dead to life; he justifies the ungodly. This third is the greatest wonder of all: creation and resurrection are consistent with the power of the living and life-giving God, but the justifying of the ungodly is prima facie a contradiction of his character as the righteous God, the Judge of all the earth, who by his own declaration “will not justify the ungodly” (Exodus 23:7). Yet such is the quality of divine grace that in the very act of extending it to the undeserving God demonstrates “that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).
Paul’s understanding of God is completely in line with Jesus’ teaching. The God who, in one parable after another, freely forgives the sinner or welcomes the returning prodigal does not exercise the quality of mercy at the expense of his righteousness: he remains the self-consistent God whose very self-consistency is the reason sinners “are not consumed” (Malachi 3:6) or, in the words of another Old Testament prophet, “he does not retain his anger for ever because he delights in steadfast love” (Micah 7:18).
But grace is manifested not only in God’s acceptance of sinners but in the transformation of those thus accepted into the likeness of Christ. The words of Thomas Erskine have frequently been quoted to the effect that, “in the New Testament, religion is grace, and ethics is gratitude”.7 If this dictum were turned into Greek, one word, charis, would serve as the equivalent of both “grace” and “gratitude”; for the gratitude which divine grace calls forth from its recipient is also the expression of that grace imparted and maintained by the Holy Spirit, through whom the love of God is poured out into the hearts of believers. Jesus had cited the two commandments enjoining love to God and love to one’s neighbour as those on which “all the law and the prophets depend” (Matthew 22:40); so for Paul the free activity of this divine love in the lives of those redeemed by grace represented “the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Therefore, he insisted, the gospel of free grace did not annul the essential law of God, but rather established it (Romans 3:31).
Love is a more potent incentive to doing the will of God than legal regulations and fear of judgment could ever be. This at least was grasped by that strange second-century Christian Marcion, whose devotion to Paul’s teaching was not matched by his understanding of it. Marcion cut the gospel off from its past and its future, denying the Christian relevance of the Old Testament and of coming judgment. Paul, for his part, did not jettison the Old Testament (as we call it): for him its writings constituted the holy scriptures (Romans 1:2), the only holy scriptures he knew. He called them “the law and the prophets” (Romans 3:21) and described them as “the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2). They found their fulfilment and had their meaning made plain in Christ; when people read them without using this key to unlock their significance, “a veil lies over their minds” (2 Corinthians 3:15). Paul attached the greater value to them because they bore witness to the message of justification by faith in Christ: the gospel which in them was “preached beforehand to Abraham” (Galatians 3:8) was the gospel which Paul was commissioned to proclaim; it was no recent invention.
Neither did Paul repudiate the idea of coming judgment. In a moral universe divine retribution must be reckoned with; “else how could God judge the world?” (Romans 3:6). But Marcion was unrealistically radical as Paul was not. Let it be counted to him for righteousness, nevertheless, that he grasped Paul’s message of salvation by grace—grasped it as many more “orthodox” Christians of his century did not.
Tertullian, for example, writing his treatise Against Marcion after Marcion’s death, challenges him dramatically to say why he did not abandon himself to an extravaganza of sin since he did not believe that the God and Father whom Jesus revealed would judge mankind.8 “Your only answer”, says Tertullian, apostrophizing Marcion, “is Absit, absit (‘Far from it, far from it’)”—and on such an answer he pours scorn. But at this very point Tertullian shows that it is he, and not Marcion, who is out of tune with Paul. The Latin absit which Tertullian puts into Marcion’s mouth appears to be the equivalent of the Greek mē genoito (“God forbid” in older English versions of the New Testament), which Marcion, whose language was Greek, probably used.
But if Marcion repelled such a challenge as Tertullian’s with mē genoito, he was using these words in precisely the sense in which Paul used them when replying to the question: “What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? Far from it!” (Romans 6:15). Marcion, like Paul, realized that for one who through faith had received the new life (which was nothing less than Christ’s risen life shared by him with the believer) to go on in sin was a moral contradiction in terms: “How can we, who died to sin, still live in it?” (Romans 6:2). Paul, unlike Marcion, knew that he must one day give an account of his stewardship to the Lord who commissioned him; but it was not the prospect of his appearance before the tribunal of Christ that deterred him from sin. He who had formerly attained the standard of righteousness prescribed by the Mosaic commandments could not be content with a lower standard now that he was “under law to Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:21). Rather, since it was no longer he that lived but Christ that lived in him, the perfection of Christ was the goal to which he now pressed forward. Tertullian may have known this; perhaps he was simply trying to score a debating point against Marcion. Even so, he was inviting the retort: “And is your only reason for abstaining from sin your fear of the wrath to come?”
Marcion probably, and Paul certainly, knew the love of Christ to be the all-compelling power in life. Where love is the compelling power, there is no sense of strain or conflict or bondage in doing what is right: the man or woman who is compelled by Jesus’ love and empowered by his Spirit does the will of God from the heart. For (as Paul could say from experience) “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there the heart is free” (2 Corinthians 3:17).