Part 103
Alexander, L. (199312), 'Chronology of Paul', in G. F. Hawthorne,
R. P. Martin, D. G. Reid (eds.), The Dictionary of Paul and his Letters (Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press), 115-23.
Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).
63. Introduction to the Pauline Corpus
T E R E N C E L. DONALDSON
A. Overview. 1. No less than thirteen of the twenty-seven writings of the New Testament are letters attributed to the Apostle Paul. They constitute fully one-quarter of the New Testament's bulk; if one adds to this the portion of the Acts of the Apostles where Paul is the main character, Paul's proportion of the New Testament climbs to almost a third. The proportion devoted to the life and ministry of Jesus (i.e. the four gospels) is higher, but not by much.
limited to the Reformed segment of Christendom. Hymnody, homilies, iconography and other forms of aesthetic representation, across the Christian spectrum and down through the centuries; the nineteenth-century missionary movement; the 'introspective conscience of the west' (Stendahl 1976:78—96); popular idiom ('all things to all people'; 'thorn in the flesh'; 'charisma'); contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue; socialscientific models of conversion—the influence of Paul has been pervasive and far-reaching.
2. The significance of Paul's literary legacy, of course, is not simply a matter of its quantity. His letters (at least those that can be attributed to him with some certainty) represent the earliest extant writings of the Christian movement. Further, they are real letters, written to actual congregations whose life circumstances are reflected, albeit with some ambiguity, in the texts themselves. In addition, they are at times highly personal letters, at least in the sense that the desires, emotions, thinking processes, and very personality of their author are vividly portrayed. Moreover, their author was no marginal figure. While his place within the early Christian movement needs to be determined with care, it is clear on any reading of Christian origins that, by virtue of the groundbreaking nature of his missionary activity among the Gentiles and the intellectual vitality that he brought to bear on the defence and nurture of his young congregations, Paul was a major player in the first, formative generation of the movement. In sum, then, Paul's letters represent a window into nascent Christianity of inestimable value.
4. For these reasons and more, Paul's letters are significant and deserve the careful attention not only of Christian readers but also of all who aspire to an informed perspective on the Western cultural inheritance. But the very things that make for Paul's significance also bring with them various problems that feed into and affect the experience of reading him.
5. For one thing, the sheer bulk of Pauline material in the NT can easily lead readers to overestimate his place and significance in early Christianity. Evidence even from his own letters indicates that Paul was somewhat of a maverick, operating for the most part outside the main circle of earliest Christianity and relating only awkwardly to its original leaders. He may well have represented the wave of the future: since the middle of the second century those characteristic elements that it took all his formidable resources to establish and defend—full and equal membership for Gentile believers, no obligation to adhere to the law of Moses, and so on—have simply been taken for granted as basic elements of the Christian faith. But the very success of Gentile Christianity can serve to obscure the degree to which Paul's mission represented radical innovation in his own day, and this in turn can result in misperceptions of the nature of his thought and rhetoric.
3. The significance of the Pauline corpus is not restricted to its value as source material for the reconstruction of Christian origins, however. The letters not only play a passive role, providing a window into the circumstances lying behind them; they have also been agents in their own right, affecting the lives of their readers—both the original readers and those who subsequently read, as it were, over their shoulders—and thereby helping to shape the history of Christianity and of Western culture as a whole. The Epistle to the Romans, for instance, has had a striking chain of influence—from the unknown early readers who, for whatever reason, preserved the letter in the first place; to Augustine's conversion, precipitated by the random reading in a moment of crisis of a particularly pertinent passage (13:13—14); to Martin Luther's rediscovery of Augustine and his own experience of spiritual release while wrestling with the phrase, 'the just shall live by faith' (1:17) as he prepared lectures on the epistle; to John Wesley's experience of a heart 'strangely warmed' while listening to a reading of the Preface to Luther's commentary; to Karl Earth and his own commentary on the epistle, which represented a dramatic break with the sunny liberalism in which he had been nurtured and a rediscovery and reworking of Reformation themes. This chain of influence, of course, represents a particular strand of Christianity, one in which Paul has been especially revered. But Paul's influence has by no means been
6. In addition, and partly for this reason, Paul has not always fared well at the hands of his interpreters—admirers and champions included. To cite one particular example, the Reformation reading of Paul, in which the theme of justification by faith is identified as the heart of his gospel and the interpretative centre of his thought, is increasingly being seen as a misreading; to approach Paul with the assumption that his concerns and contentions were analogous to those of a Luther or a Calvin is to look at him through a distorting lens that skews some aspects of his theological discourse and leaves others in obscurity. Further, the interpretation of a normative text in a religious culture inevitably has social effects. Thus Paul's name has come to be associated with developments in Western society that many have found undesirable: for example, the treatment of Jews and Judaism as a people rejected by God; the institution of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the colonialization of Africa and the Far East, to which the activity of Christian missionaries was a contributing factor; patriarchal structures and the exclusion of women from full participation in church and society; intolerant attitudes towards those of homosexual orientation.
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place. Here the reconstructive task is both aided and complicated by the existence of the Acts of the Apostles, with its connected narrative of Paul's missionary activity. Aided, in that Acts deliberately sets out to provide us with the kind of sequential account that is glimpsed only occasionally, and with difficulty, in the letters. Complicated, in that the Acts account, partly because of the author's own purposes and partly because of the limitations within which the author did his work, is not infrequently at variance with the picture emerging from the letters themselves. Perhaps this is the place to mention the additional fact that several of the letters bearing Paul's name also bear characteristics that make it difficult to understand them as written by Paul himself. In at least some of these cases it is best to understand them as the product of a Pauline school carrying on his legacy into a subsequent generation. Further, a tradition going back as far as the second century sees the epistle to the Hebrews as written by Paul as well. While there is no scholarly justification for the attribution, the reference to 'our brother Timothy' in Heb 13:23 serves to situate this epistle somewhere in the larger Pauline circle. In any case, the reconstruction of the nature, modus operandi, sequence, chronology, and aftermath of Paul's missionary enterprise is another requisite element of the interpretative task.
Also, Paul has sometimes been blamed for constructing a complex religion centred on sin, guilt, and death, far removed from the life-affirming message of Jesus (cf. Muggeridge and Vidler 1972: 11-16).
7. The very factors making for Paul's significance, then, also serve to condition our perception of his writings, interposing between the modern reader and the letters themselves a set of lenses and filters that shape the reading process. These interposed optical paraphernalia should not be seen simply as an obstruction; the history of the effects of Paul's letters in the centuries between their time of writing and our own day is an important part of the overall significance of the letters themselves. Still, the first step in coming to terms with the letters is to try to bridge the intervening distance and to read the letters directly and on their own terms; put differently, to bracket out the particularities of our own contemporary perspectives and attempt to read the letters as they would have been understood by their original intended readers.
8. This is a laudable goal, towards which a formidable array of Pauline scholars have bent their collective energies over the past two centuries of historical-critical investigation. But here we encounter a second set of problems, arising from the letters themselves: as the author of 2 Peter observed long ago, many aspects of Paul's letters are 'difficult to understand' (2 Pet 3:16). In part, the difficulties are due to the fact that we are dealing with letters per sc', in part, they derive from the particular way in which Paul writes letters. But in each case, the nature of these writings means that in order to understand them we need to go beyond them, to interpret them in the framework of at least three hypothetical scholarly reconstructions.
11. Thirdly, there is an inherently theological dimension to the rhetoric of these letters. To be sure, the letters are not to be read as if they were theological treatises; a recognition of the essentially occasional and situational nature of the letters was a decisive step forward in Pauline scholarship. Nevertheless, while the letters must be seen as responses to particular circumstances in the life of Paul and his communities, it is also evident that to deal with these various contingent situations Paul engaged in a style of theological argumentation that drew on already-existing vocabulary, structures, and patterns of thought. As Dunn (1998: 15) has observed with reference to the search for the theology of Paul, 'the letters themselves indicate the need to go behind the letters themselves'. Again, however, the interpreter is faced with a difficult task. Partly because of the sheer fecundity of Paul's agile mind, and partly because the letters use and allude to his 'theology' without ever laying it out in any systematic way, it has been notoriously difficult to discern the central element or essential structure of his theological thought.
9. First, there are the individual contexts presupposed by the letters themselves. As Roetzel (1998) has reminded us, Paul's letters are 'conversations in context'; more to the point, in reading these letters we are hearing only one side of the conversation, with no clear indication of the context. As in any conversation, the epistolary author as conversation partner can simply take for granted a whole set of details crucial to the meaning of the letter but so well known to the intended readers that they require no explicit mention. Who, to take one simple example, was the 'famous brother' (2 Cor 8:17) who accompanied Titus in the delivery of 2 Corinthians 8 and so could remain unnamed in the letter? Or with what strand of early Christianity can we identify those who were 'unsettling' the Galatians (Gal 5:12), and what were their motives? Later readers like ourselves, who are not privy to the whole conversation and its context, are forced to draw out from whatever slender clues the text affords a sense of these contextual takenfor-granteds, as an essential first step in the determination of meaning.
12. A proper understanding of Paul's letters, then, necessarily involves us in substantial projects of contextual reconstruction. In turn, these projects depend for their success on a larger engineering project, that of bridging the social and cultural gap between the modern reader and the first-century Graeco-Roman world. To a modern reader, for example, Paul's language of'bewitchment' in Gal 3:1 may seem quaintly metaphorical. But in a culture where the power of the evil eye was widely feared, the text would have had quite a different impact
10. Such reconstruction of provenance and life setting forms part of the interpretative task for any individual letter from antiquity (and—mutatis mutandis—for any ancient text at all). But in the case of Paul we are dealing not simply with one individual letter, but with a whole series of letters that evidently had an integral role to play in an extended missionary agenda. A proper understanding of any one of them, then, will depend to a certain extent on a second scholarly reconstruction, namely, the larger sequential framework of Paul's own life and activity within which the individual letter finds its
(Elliott 1990). Likewise, ancient and modern readers would bring distinctly different cultural assumptions to a reading of 2 Cor 8—9, in which Paul is encouraging the Corinthian Christians to contribute to his collection for the Jerusalem church. In contrast to modern readers in the Western world, who tend to see charitable giving as a universal obligation, Paul's Corinthian converts would have understood benefaction to be the domain of the wealthy, who themselves would
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assume the role of benefactor less out of a sense of moral obligation than in expectation of public honour. What we think we know is often a greater barrier to understanding than what we do not know, and this is as true of the cultural assumptions we bring to a reading of the NT as of any other area of life.
2. As has already been observed, however, the use of Acts as a source for Paul is not without problems. For one thing, despite the impression given by the author of Acts (let us for convenience call him Luke) that he is providing us with a full and continuous account of Paul's itinerary, Paul himself makes reference to details—for example, trips (the hasty and painful visit to Corinth in 2 Cor 2:1) and various incidents of hardship (2 Cor 11:23-7, especially the references to shipwrecks, synagogue discipline, and imprisonments)—about which Luke seems unable to tell us anything.
13. The foregoing is not meant to discourage the casual or novice reader from reading Paul, as if one has to acquire a massive body of background and contextual knowledge before being able to approach the letters themselves. The process is spiral: initial familiarization with the text raises questions of interpretation and meaning that can be answered only on the basis of further information about the text's original context; increasing awareness of contextual background precipitates further questions that can be answered only on the basis of a more careful and critical reading of the text; and so on. Further, the process is ongoing and open-ended. It is not as if the range of questions diminishes as knowledge increases. As will become apparent not only in this introductory essay but also in the commentaries on the individual letters to follow, there is a great deal of disagreement and debate among Pauline scholars at almost every point. One enters this interpretative spiral, then, not so much to arrive at a definitive interpretation as to become a participant in an ongoing process of discussion, debate, and new insight.
Further, at points where the two accounts do overlap, they are sometimes strikingly at odds. The parade example of this is the narration of Paul's first post-conversion visit to Jerusalem in Gal 1:18—24 an(^ Acts 9:26—30. In Acts, it is a highprofile visit. Although the disciples were 'all afraid of him', after Barnabas had convinced 'the apostles' of the reality of his new-found faith, Paul 'went in and out among them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord', at least until opposition from the (non-Christian) Hellenists increased to the point that the 'brothers' felt it necessary to escort him to safety in Caesarea. In Galatians, by contrast, the visit is a much less public affair. Paul's purpose in going up to Jerusalem was 'to visit Cephas', which he did for fifteen days, not seeing 'any other apostle except James the Lord's brother'. Even after his departure, he was 'still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea that are in Christ', who simply had oral reports that their former persecutor was now 'proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy'.
14. The process may be ongoing, but it is not without its key moments and fresh phases. Indeed, this is a particularly exciting time to be engaged in the discussion of Paul and his letters. The final quarter of the twentieth century saw some significant developments: richer descriptions of Paul's cultural environment, both Jewish and Graeco-Roman; fundamental shifts in the way his thought is perceived and put together, especially with reference to his Jewish upbringing and 'conversion'; fruitful application of methods and insights drawn from the social sciences; increased appreciation of the rhetorical and epistolary conventions at work in the letters; and so on.
Even when one gives full weight to the diverging purposes of Luke (who wants to emphasize harmony in the early church and the smooth progression of the faith outwards from Jerusalem) and Paul (who wants to downplay his contacts with Jerusalem and to defend his independence as an apostle), the differences between the two accounts are substantial. Acts and the letters are not to be treated simply as equal and complementary sources. Paul's own testimony needs to be given primacy. The letters represent our primary source for his life and thought.
The purpose of this introductory essay is to lead readers into the interpretative spiral described above and to convey some sense of the current state of the discussion. To do this, the material will be organized as follows.
3. Nevertheless, Acts is not simply to be dismissed; Luke clearly has independent access to information about Paul's career. He displays no awareness of Paul as a letter-writer, which means that Acts cannot be seen merely as an embellished narrative presentation of details gleaned from the letters. Further, there are frequent points of contact, in details of itinerary, between Acts and the letters (see the list in Brown 1997: 424). Even the accounts in Gal i and Acts 9, as discussed above, despite their differences in detail and emphasis, contain a similar sequence: conversion near Damascus (Gal 1:15-17; Acts 9:1-19); subsequent trip to Jerusalem (Gal 1:18; Acts 9:26); time spent in Cilicia/Tarsus (Gal 1:21; Acts 9:30) and Syria/Antioch (Gal 1:21; Acts 11:25—6). Moving out from Galatians but still within the same sequence of events, the account of Paul's flight from Damascus in Acts 9:23-5 has its first-person counterpart in 2 Cor 11:32—3. Similar observations could be made about Paul's progression down the Greek peninsula (i Thess 2-3; cf Acts 16-18) or his final trip to Jerusalem with the collection money (i Cor 16:1-4; 2
B. The Sources. 1. Our two main sources of biographical information concerning Paul are the Acts of the Apostles and the letters themselves. There are some additional snippets in later Christian writings—e.g., a stylized descriptive portrait in Acts of Paul 3.1; accounts of his martyrdom under Nero (i Clem. 5.5—7; 6.1; Eusebius Hist. Ecd. 2.25). But even if we were to exploit them to the full (e.g. Riesner 1998), we would simply be adding minor embellishments to a portrait based primarily on our two main sources.
At first glance these two sources seem to complement each other neatly. Acts provides us with biographical information on Paul's life and ministry, and the circumstances in which the individual churches were founded; the letters provide us with direct information on his thought and his interaction with churches after he had moved on to new fields of mission. We might seem to be in the happy position of being able to combine two complementary sources to construct a full picture.
Cor 7—9; Rom 15:25—9; cf. Acts 19:21—21:19). Thus while Acts and the letters are not simply to be interlaced, critical and cautious use can be made of the Acts account to supplement
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(works) rather than something offered freely by God in divine grace, to be received in humble faith. The essence of Paul's conversion is understood, in this reading of it, to consist in the recognition that Judaism was a works-religion that did not work, and the correlative discovery that Christianity offered freely, on the basis of faith, the righteous status that Torahreligion was not able to provide. Sometimes such a recognition of the futility of Judaism is understood to be the essence of the Damascus experience itself; in encountering the risen Jesus Paul saw Judaism for the inferior and inadequate religion that it was. Often, however, the recognition is shifted further back, Paul's problem with Judaism seen as something emerging during his upbringing. It is argued, usually with appeal to Rom 7, that Paul's experience of Judaism was one of frustration and despair. He had tried hard to gain God's approval by keeping the law in a zealous fashion, but found that no matter how hard he tried he always fell short. In this reading, his conversion is seen as fundamentally the discovery that Christ provided the solution to an existential problem that he had already experienced in his Jewish upbringing.
the information on Paul's life and activity contained in the letters.
C. Paul's 'Conversion'. 1. Any biographical accounting of Paul needs to begin with what in popular parlance is called his 'conversion'. The appropriateness of the term is debated, and will be discussed a little later. Without foreclosing on the debate, we will refer to the event as Paul's Damascus transformation or Damascus experience. This experience—which Paul understands as an encounter with the risen Christ—is not only foundational for everything that follows, it is the perspective from which our sources present what they do about anything that precedes. Luke does not seem to tire of the story; after providing a full narrative in Acts 9, he repeats it (with some interesting variations in detail) on no less than two other occasions (22:3-21; 26:2-18). Modern readers might wish that he had used this space instead to fill in some of the gaps in his narrative—the activity of Peter, for example, or the origins of the church in Rome. Paul is somewhat more reticent, speaking of it on three occasions (Gal 1:15-16; i Cor 9:1; i Cor 15:8-10; perhaps also 2 Cor 4:6), but always in the context of some other issue. Still, the consequences of the experience—the conviction that God had raised Jesus, making him Christ and Lord; the conviction that God had commissioned Paul, making him apostle to the Gentiles—are everywhere present, as assumption or as theme.
4. This is not the only way in which Paul's Damascus transformation is perceived as essentially an abandonment of Judaism. Another interpretation takes its point of departure not from Paul's faith/works contrast but from his universal gospel. How is Paul's interest in Gentiles to be accounted for? The answer, it is suggested, is that Paul came to abandon a frame of reference in which the distinction between Jew and Gentile is central, for one in which that distinction is abolished, one in which 'there is no longer Jew or Greek' (Gal 3:28). Again, such an exchange of one type of religion (this time a particularistic one) for another (a universalistic one) is sometimes seen as the essence of the Damascus experience itself. Just as often, however, it is rooted in the idea that already in his upbringing Paul had experienced frustration with Jewish particularism and, in some interpretations, had struggled, valiantly but vainly, to suppress an attraction to the wider Hellenistic world.
2. To reconstruct Paul's biography, then, it is necessary to begin with his Damascus experience. To reconstruct it accurately, however, it is necessary to understand the nature of the experience. It was an event that divided Paul's life into a 'before'—'my earlier life in Judaism' (Gal 1:13)—and an 'after'—'an apostle' (Gal 1:1) 'entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised' (Gal 2:7); a proper understanding of Paul depends on how we correlate these three biographical points. More specifically, the characteristic features of Paul's apostolic self-understanding stand in such patent contrast to the typical 'life in Judaism' that one cannot really understand the later Paul without understanding how the transformation worked itself out. How was it that a self-proclaimed 'zealot for the traditions of [his] ancestors' (Gal 1:14) was transformed into a zealous advocate of a mission to Gentiles, offering them a righteous status before God not by adherence to the Torah but by faith in Christ?
5. Such interpretations, in which Paul's Damascus experience is seen as essentially an abandonment of a Jewish context for something different, have had a long and successful history, at least in part because they seem to provide a coherent explanation of central elements in Paul's post-Damascus frame of reference—especially his role as apostle to the Gentiles, and the gospel he preached to Gentiles, offering them a righteous status before God without demanding adherence to the Torah. But more recent study of Paul has tended to demonstrate that such coherence is purchased at a high price, specifically, an unacceptable level of incoherence with respect to the first of the three biographical points—Paul's earlier life in Judaism.
3. It was mentioned above that there have been some significant shifts in Pauline scholarship in recent years; one such has to do with the understanding of Paul's Damascus transformation. Older scholarship tended to understand this transformation as involving a perception on Paul's part of some fundamental deficiency in Judaism and his consequent abandonment of Judaism for a different religion that was able to offer what Judaism lacked. In this family of interpretations the appropriateness of the term 'conversion' is assumed. There are several branches of the family. One, stemming from the Reformation, emphasizes Paul's polemical contrast between justification by works and justification by faith. It is assumed that this works/faith contrast represented Paul's fundamental critique of Judaism; he understood Judaism to be a legalistic religion, one in which a person's status with God was something earned through meritorious Torah observance
By the early part of the twentieth century Jewish scholars (e.g. C. Montefiore, S. Schechter, and later H.-J. Schoeps), along with Christians sympathetic to Judaism (e.g. G. F. Moore, J. Parkes), had already pointed out that Judaism was not the legalistic religion of meritorious achievement that it had often been made out to be. Jewish religion, they objected, started not with the Torah but with the covenant, a relationship between God and Israel established entirely on the basis of divine grace. The Torah was given as a means not of earning
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equal terms'? Why are Christ and Torah mutually exclusive? But for present purposes, the significant point of Sanders's work is that it opens up the possibility of seeing Paul's Damascus experience as primarily the acceptance of a new set of convictions about Jesus rather than the abandonment of an old set of convictions about Judaism. The way is open to see Paul not as a frustrated Jew, nor as one who fundamentally misunderstood the religion of his ancestors and contemporaries, but as a covenantal nomist who had an experience convincing him that the God of Israel had raised Jesus from death.
a relationship with God, but rather of responding in gratitude to God and of maintaining the relationship already established by God's gracious election of Israel. Further, Jewish religion did not require flawless performance of the law, as Paul's argument in Romans and Galatians seems to assume. The law itself recognized the inevitability of sin, making provision, in the sacrificial system, for repentance, atonement, and forgiveness—an aspect of Torah-religion that Paul studiously avoids in the pertinent passages. This more accurate depiction of Judaism has been most convincingly developed and demonstrated by E. P. Sanders (see Sanders 1977), who terms it a religion of'covenantal nomism' rather than of legalism. Prior to Sanders's work, however, the conclusion often drawn from this argument about the true nature of Judaism has been that if the traditional reading of Paul is accurate, then Paul must have seriously misunderstood Judaism. If Paul really perceived Judaism as a religion of meritorious achievement requiring perfect performance, then his critique of Judaism is badly off-target from the outset.
8. What emerges, then, is an understanding of Paul's Damascus experience in which it is seen not as the solution to an already-perceived problem with Judaism, nor as the abandonment of one religion (Judaism) for another (Christianity). Instead, the outcome of the experience was in the first instance a new estimation of the person and significance of Jesus in the purposes of the God of Israel. This led to an unprecedented reconfiguration of the constituent elements of Judaism, for reasons that we will explore in a moment. But reconfiguration is quite a different thing from abandonment.
6. One way of explaining this supposed misunderstanding of Judaism is to lay it at the door of Paul's diaspora upbringing; if Paul had been raised in Judea, closer to the source, he would have experienced a truer form of the faith and thus would have depicted it more accurately (Schoeps 1961: 173). But this leads to a second way in which the traditional interpretations of Paul fail to integrate what we know about his earlier life in Judaism. Not only is it recognized that no sharp distinction can be drawn between Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism, the idea that Paul fundamentally misunderstood Judaism does not square well with his own comments about his earlier life. For one thing, he locates himself within a traditional, covenant-centred form of the faith. He is a Hebrew of the Hebrews (Phil 3:5; cf 2 Cor 11:22); a zealot for the traditions of his ancestors (Gal 1:14); a Pharisee, a group for which we have only Palestinian evidence (Phil 3:5; see Hengel and Schwemer 1997: 36). Further, whenever he looks back on this period of his life, he does so with a great deal of pride and satisfaction (Gal 1:13—14; Phil 3:4/7—6; 2 Cor 11:22). Phil 3:6 is particularly instructive; as one of the grounds for which he might have confidence in the flesh, he points to the fact that 'as to righteousness under the law, [he was] blameless'. The statement resonates with the pride of accomplishment (blameless!) rather than despair over the impossibility of the law's demands. With the recognition that the T of Romans 7 is not autobiographical (Kummel 1929), the way has been cleared to ask whether instead of Paul misunderstanding Judaism, Paul's interpreters have misunderstood him.
For this reason, 'conversion' has been seen as perhaps not the best term to use to describe Paul's experience. Both in popular parlance and in much social-scientific study, 'conversion' implies a transformation that is more radical, more discontinuous with the convert's past, and more driven by psychological imbalance, than was the case with Paul. At the same time, to describe the experience as a 'call', as Stendahl does (Stendahl 1976: 7—23), is not a fully satisfactory alternative either, even when one gives full value to Paul's use of prophetic call language in Gal 1:15 (cf. Isa 49:1; Jer 1:5). This term fails to do justice to the fact that Paul's experience represented a much more decisive shift, a more sharply demarcated before and after (cf. Phil 3:4—11), than was ever the case with an Isaiah or a Jeremiah. While Paul continued to worship and serve the same God, his framework of service shifted decisively from one organizing centre (Torah) to another (Christ). What term to use, then, for this decisive shift? One alternative is to return to 'conversion', redefining it so that both continuity and discontinuity are preserved (Segal 1990). Such an approach can claim support from more recent social-scientific studies (e.g. Rambo 1993), which recognize a much broader range of conversion types. Perhaps the safer approach, however, is to choose less loaded terms, such as transformation or reconfiguration.
9. But why was the reconfiguration so sharply polarized? Why were the two organizing centres—Torah and Christ—set over against each other in such an antithetical way? Or to pose the question with respect to the comparative biographies of Paul and James, who both became leaders in the church as the result of an experience understood to be an encounter with the risen Christ (for James, see i Cor 15:7): why did the experience lead in Paul's case to a Christ—Torah antithesis while in the case of James of Jerusalem, who seemed to be able to combine Christ-faith and Torah-religion in a much more harmonious way, it led rather to a Christ-Torah synthesis?
7. This question has been posed most forcefully by E. P. Sanders in his epoch-making book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). In the book Sanders demonstrates convincingly that Paul can be much better understood if we assume (i) that in his upbringing he had experienced Judaism as a religion of covenantal nomism, but that (2) in his Damascus experience he had come to believe that God had provided Christ as a means of salvation for all on equal terms, and that (3) since entrance into the community of salvation was through Christ, Torah-observance could not be imposed as a condition of membership. Anticipating some discussion to follow, we need to observe that Sanders leaves a number of loose ends and logical disjunctions; in particular: why 'for all'? Why 'on
10. In contrast to Paul's conversion per se, the answer to this question does seem to lie in his pre-Damascus experience. Even prior to his own experience of Christ, Paul had already
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How, then, was the community of the righteous to be determined in the period between the resurrection and the end? Was it defined by adherence to Torah or to Christ? Would the community redeemed by Christ at the eschaton be one demarcated by Torah-observance or by Christ-adherence? The unprecedented two-stage appearance of the Messiah in Christian belief had the effect of putting Christ and Torah in tension with each other, as rival boundary markers for the people of God. The overlapping of the ages in Christian proclamation brought Christ and Torah into conflict.
come to some conclusions about the incompatability of Christ-faith and Torah-religion. What is important here is not simply that Paul persecuted the church, but that he understood it as an expression of zeal (Phil 3:6; cf Gal 1:14). In the context of Torah-piety, zeal implies more than simply fervour. At least since the time of the Maccabees, zeal and zealotry referred to the willingness to use force to defend Torahreligion from some perceived threat (e.g. i Mace 2:24, 26, 27, 50; Jub. 30.18; Jdt 9:2-4; see Donaldson 1997: 285-6; Dunn 1998: 350—2). If Paul's persecution of the church was an act of zeal, then he must, even at this early stage, have seen Christ-religion and Torah-religion as mutually exclusive. Further, since even after his Damascus experience this incompatability between Christ and Torah seems to have remained (even if transformed), the conflict between the two must have been of such a nature that it could not be resolved simply by changing his estimation of Jesus. The Christ-Torah antithesis must have been perceived as a more fundamental incompatibility.
14. My suggestion is that because of his perspective as an outsider, the pre-Christian Paul perceived this rivalry and conflict much more clearly than those inside. He was a faithful observer of the Torah, 'as to righteousness under the law, blameless' (Phil 3:6). But the Christian message as he heard it implied that this was not enough; to truly belong to the community of the righteous, he had to believe in Christ. He also observed that the church was prepared to admit as full members many who, 'as to righteousness under the law', were far from 'blameless'. Torah observance, it appeared, was also unnecessary. Undergirding his persecution of the church, then, was a fundamental perception that—whether the early Christians recognized it fully or not—the Christ they preached represented a categorical rival to the Torah in its community-defining role. Since this rivalry was rooted not simply in Paul's lack of belief in Christ but in the nature of the Christian message itself, it did not disappear with his new belief in Christ. The Christ-Torah antithesis remained, even though his perception of its implications shifted dramatically.
11. What, then, was the nature of this incompatibility? Several possibilities have been explored in scholarly discussion (Donaldson 1997: 169—72). Some suggest that the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah was in itself an affront to Jewish expectation and thus incompatible with Torahreligion. Others focus on the specific means of Jesus' death— crucifixion—noting that the Torah itself sees as cursed 'anyone hung on a tree' (Deut 21:22—3), a text that by the first century was being interpreted with respect to crucifixion (4QpNah 1.7-8; iiQTemple 64.12; cf. Gal 3:13). Still others suggest that Paul's estimation of the Torah had been deeply affected by the fact that it was precisely his zeal for the law that had led him to persecute Christ's church. But none of these suggestions seem to produce a tension between Christ and Torah so intractable that a well-motivated Jewish believer could not have found a way to resolve it.
15. One final element of Paul's Damascus experience requires mention here, though we can deal with it only briefly. In the discussion carried out above concerning Paul's description of his experience as a 'call', we did not pay much attention to the focus of the call—'to proclaim [God's Son] among the Gentiles' (Gal 1:16). At least in retrospect, then, Paul sees his role as 'apostle to the Gentiles' (Rom 11:13) as the direct outcome and inner meaning of his Damascus experience. But how are we to understand his all-embracing concern for the salvation of the Gentiles?
12. My suggestion moves in a different direction, and builds on two more fundamental aspects of Jewish and JewishChristian belief: (i) the relationship between Torah and Messiah in Jewish expectation; and (2) the unprecedented 'already/not yet' shape of early Christian belief. In Jewish patterns of thought (at least those that included the concept of a Messiah), the respective functions of Torah and Messiah were neatly differentiated by the distinction between this age and the age to come. In this age, the Torah functioned as a badge of membership or a boundary marker for the covenant people of God. To live a life of loyalty to the Torah was a mark of membership in the covenant community; to be a member in good standing was to be righteous; it was the community of the righteous as demarcated by the Torah in this age that could expect to be vindicated by God in the age to come, when the Messiah appeared. There was thus no confusion of roles: the Torah served to determine the identity of the people whom the Messiah would come to deliver; put differently, the Messiah did not function as a boundary marker or badge of membership.
This question, too, has been altered by the interpretative shift described above. In older patterns of interpretation, Paul's interest in the Gentiles has been understood as entailing, or as the result of, an abandonment of Judaism. In his conversion experience, it was argued, Paul left behind a world where the distinction between Jew and Gentile was fundamental, and entered a wider world where there was no differentiation. The ways in which this line of interpretation were worked out varied with the ways in which the process of abandonment was reconstructed (see above, and also Donaldson 1997: 18—27). But the heart of the matter in each case was that Paul's 'universalism' (i.e. his concern for Gentile salvation) was tied up with a rejection of Jewish particularism.
16. More recent study, however, has brought to the fore two things that suggest a different explanation. The first has to do with Paul himself, the second with Jewish attitudes towards Gentile salvation. First, it is clear that 'Jew' and 'Gentile' continue to be important categories for Paul. While he insists that there is no distinction with respect to sin ('all, both Jews
13. But the Christian message—that God had revealed the identity of the coming Messiah by raising Jesus from death—had the effect of blurring this neat distinction. The Christ who would come to redeem the righteous in the age to come had already appeared before this age was at an end.
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and Greeks, are under... sin', Rom 3:9) or salvation ('for there is no distinction between Jew and Greek', Rom 10:12), this does not mean that Jewishness has lost all theological significance for Paul. Indeed, by describing himself as apostle to the Gentiles, he indicates that he continues to inhabit a world where the distinction between Jew and Gentile is operative. Paul sees himself as a Jew (Rom 11:1), commissioned by the God of Israel to bring a message of salvation, not to an undifferentiated mass of generic humanity, but to Gentiles, that part of humanity that exists in distinction from Israel. Further, the ultimate goal of this mission is the final salvation of'all Israel' (Rom 11:26). What is needed, then, is a much more Israel-centred understanding of Paul's interest in the Gentiles.
credentials and accomplishments with great flourish (esp. Gal 1:13—15; i Cor 15:9; Phil 3:4—6; 2 Cor 11:22; Rom 11:1). But his purposes are never purely biographical; what he tells us and how is determined by the rhetorical needs of the moment. In addition to the explicit information he does convey in passing, of course, the letters also contain a wealth of implicit evidence—familiarity with the Mediterranean world, facility in Greek, knowledge of the Septuagint and of Jewish interpretative tradition, and so on.
Still, the information conveyed to us by Paul himself is much less specific than that contained in the Acts account, where it appears both in the narration of his persecuting activity (7:58-8:3; 9:1-3) and in the speeches of self-defence made after his final arrest (22:1—5,19—20; 23:6; 26:4—12). But while its secondary status needs to be remembered, the information in Acts, with only two or three exceptions, is both consistent with Paul's own statements and not so patently in keeping with Luke's special purposes as to come under suspicion.
17. This brings us to the second point. While Jewish selfunderstanding is undeniably particularistic (the one God of all has chosen Israel from among the nations for a special covenanted relationship), Judaism also had its own forms of universalism. That is, by Paul's day Judaism had developed ways of finding a place for Gentiles within God's saving purposes for the world, ways that offered Gentiles a share in salvation without denying the special nature of Israel's own covenant relationship. One of these patterns of universalism, of course, was proselytism; the community of Israel was willing to accept as full members of the family of Abraham those Gentiles who embraced the Torah and its way of life (e.g. Jdt 14:10; Tacitus, Hist. 5.5.2). Another pattern, based on a quite different perception of things, was prepared to see the possibility of Gentiles being accounted righteous and having a share in the age to come as Gentiles, without having to accept those aspects of the Torah that differentiated Gentiles from Jews (e.g. Jos. Ant. 20.34-48; t. Sank. 13.2). A third looked to the future, and expected that as one of the consequences of Israel's end-time redemption, many Gentiles would finally acknowledge the God of Israel and thus be granted a share in the blessings of the age to come (e.g. Isa 2:2-4; Tob 14:5-7). 18. This is not the place to survey the pertinent Jewish material in any detail. Nor is it possible here to explore Paul's conceptions concerning the Gentiles and their place 'in Christ' against this background (on both points see Donaldson 1997). For present purposes it is sufficient to say that Paul's Gentile mission is best understood as a Christ-centred reinterpretation of one of these Israel-centred patterns of universalism. That is, Paul's concern for the Gentiles had its origin in attitudes already present in Judaism, even though with his Damascus experience they came to be oriented around a different centre. His call 'to proclaim [God's Son] among the Gentiles' results not from a rejection of Jewish particularism but from a reinterpretation, from his standpoint 'in Christ', of some aspect of Jewish universalism.
2. According to Luke, Paul was a diaspora Jew—specifically, a native of Tarsus, the prosperous chief city of the region of Cilicia (21:39; 22:3)- The letters certainly confirm the general identification; even without Acts, Paul's facility in Greek and the ease with which he navigated the Hellenistic world identify him as a diaspora Jew. With respect to the more specific reference to Tarsus, the only evidence in the letters with a bearing on the matter is Paul's statement that after his first visit to Jerusalem he 'went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia'
(Gal 1:21). Syria is understandable; someone who had spent time in Damascus (Gal 1:17) could readily gravitate to Antioch, an important centre of the Jewish diaspora. But Cilicia is less to be expected, unless, as Luke indicates, Paul had a special personal affinity for the area. This detail in Galatians, then, lends a definite plausibility to Luke's identification of Tarsus as Paul's home city.
Luke goes further, however, to identify Paul as a citizen both of Tarsus (21:39) and of Rome (16:37-9; 22:25-9; 23:27)> me latter by birth. This is not outside the realm of possibility. Jews certainly could be Roman citizens without compromising their traditional observances (e.g. Jos. Ant. 14.228-37). Tarsus itself was lavishly rewarded for services rendered, both by Mark Antony after the death of Cassius and Brutus (Appian, Historia, 5.1.7), and by Octavian after the battle of Actium (Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, 34.8). One could readily imagine circumstances in which even a Jewish family would have been able to share in this largesse. At the same time, however, full weight needs to be given to two additional items of information. First, Paul himself nowhere alludes to Roman citizenship, despite his readiness to boast about other items on his curriculum vitae when it served his purposes. Second, Paul's Roman citizenship could be seen as too neatly consistent with one of Luke's major themes—namely, that Roman officials repeatedly took the Christians' side, or at least demonstrated that they considered the movement to be no real threat to the order of the empire. But on the other hand, the sole premiss of Paul's final trip to Rome, as it is narrated in Acts, is his Roman citizenship, with the concomitant right of appeal to the imperial tribunal (Acts 25:10-12, 21; 26:32). Unless we are prepared to dismiss this whole account, despite the verisimilitude of its first-person narration (27:1-28:16), we need to
Later on in this introductory essay we will return to the matter of Paul's thought and its characteristic themes and structure. For the present, however, we need to discuss the temporal and geographical framework of his life.
D. Paul's Formative Years. 1. 'My earlier life in Judaism' (Gal 1:13): Paul does not tell us a great deal about his Jewish upbringing and pre-Christian activities. This is not due to reticence; when it serves his purposes, he can parade his
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lem as the place of Paul's education. Speaking to the Jerusalem crowd after his arrest, Paul is depicted as saying: T am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law' (Acts 22:3). This reading of the verse takes the latter two participial clauses (brought up, educated) as referring to the same process—study under Gamaliel. It is possible, however, to read the verse as referring to two stages—primary nurture
give at least some credence to Luke's statements about Paul's citizenship.
3. As we have already observed, however, Paul's own selfdescription places more emphasis on his Jewish identity and credentials. To put this information into its proper perspective, we need to keep in mind the extent and significance of the Jewish diaspora. By the beginning of the first century, as was observed by the geographer and historian Strabo, 'this people [i.e. of Judea] has already made its way into every city, and it is not easy to find any place in the habitable world which has not received this nation and in which it has not made its power felt' (quoted by Jos. Ant. 14.114-18). Of interest in this statement is not only the geographical spread of Jewish communities (also Jos. J. W. 2.399; AgAp2-38—9; Philo, Place. 7.45; Acts 2:5—11), but also what this translation calls their 'power', rendering a Greek verb that usually has the sense 'to gain the mastery of, to prevail over'. The word is not to be taken literally, as if Jews had become dominant in any of the cities where they had taken up residence. But it does describe the fact that in city after city Jews had been able to create and maintain Torah-centred islands in the midst of the larger Hellenistic sea. And perhaps this image distorts things somewhat, in that Jewish communities were by no means sealed off from the life and culture of the cities that sustained them. The example of Sardis, where the Jewish community was able to acquire space for their synagogue in the central civic edifice that also housed the bath and gymnasium, is perhaps a little late (3rd cent. CE) to be directly relevant. But any difference between this example and the circumstances of diaspora Jews in the first century in Sardis and elsewhere is one of degree, not of kind. Diaspora realities can also be seen reflected in the long list, compiled by Josephus, of decrees issued by Julius Caesar and his successors which defined and protected the rights of the Jewish communities in various cities of Asia and elsewhere (Jos. Ant. 14.186—264). While not as much is known of the Jewish community in Tarsus as in some other cities, a Jewish presence in the first century is nevertheless 'well attested' (Murphy-O'Connor 1996: 33).
(brought up in this city) and secondary training (educated strictly at the feet of Gamaliel according to our ancestral law). This latter reading, which suggests that Paul moved to Jerusalem as a child, is probably more consistent with the comment in Acts 23:6 that he was also the 'son of Pharisees'.
5. But is it consistent with Paul's own statements about Jerusalem? There is a significant body of scholarship that rejects wholesale Luke's identification of Jerusalem as the locale for both Paul's education and his persecuting activity
(e.g. Knox 1950: 34-6; Haenchen 1971: 297, 625). This rejection is based partly on a consideration of Luke's purposes: it is in keeping with his interpretative programme (cf. Acts 1:8) to have the apostle responsible for taking the gospel 'to the ends of the earth' to be linked closely with Jerusalem. But further, it is based more fundamentally on Paul's own statement that even after his conversion and first visit to Jerusalem, he 'was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea' (Gal 1:22). Surely, it is argued, the Jerusalem church would have known its chief persecutor.
6. In the context of Galatians, however, Paul is talking about his contacts with Jerusalem as a Christian: apart from Cephas and James, he declares, the church in Jerusalem and Judea had not seen the transformed Paul with their own eyes. With respect to the possibility of a period of residence in Jerusalem, then, Paul's statement that he was a Pharisee weighs in more heavily than does his comment about the churches in Judea
(Murphy-O'Connor 1996: 52-4). This does not mean, however, that Luke's depiction is to be accepted in toto. Surely if Paul had had any meaningful association with Gamaliel it would have been included in one of his catalogues of Jewish credentials. The claim to be a 'son of Pharisees' probably belongs to a similar category.
4. Paul's biographical statements, then, brief and tangential though they may be, come more vividly to life when placed in the context of this vibrant diaspora reality. It was in one of these Greek-speaking Jewish communities, integrated into the life of the larger city but without wholesale assimilation, that he was born (perhaps in the first decade of the century) and nurtured in the ancestral faith. There were inevitably different degrees of Hellenization within the diaspora, but Paul locates his origins at the more rigorously observant end of the spectrum. While most (male) Jews could presumably describe themselves, as Paul does in Phil 3:5, as 'circumcised on the eighth day', and 'a member of the people of Israel', not all would be able to name their tribe (Benjamin), or—since the term probably indicates facility in Hebrew or Aramaic—to categorize themselves as 'a Hebrew born of Hebrews' (cf 2 Cor 11:22).
7. In all probability, then, Paul journeyed to Jerusalem as a young man, where he joined the Pharisees, pursuing his 'zeal for the traditions of his ancestors', and 'advancing in Judaism beyond many of [his] people of the same age' (Gal 1:14). Probably we are to see him as attached to one of the Hellenistic synagogues in Jerusalem, perhaps even the 'Synagogue of the Freedmen' (Hengel 1991: 69), which included in its membership expatriates of Cilicia (Acts 6:9). It is also possible that during this period he took a special interest in Gentile proselytes. In Gal 5:11 he refers to a time when he 'was preaching circumcision'. In the context of Galatians, this statement means more than simply that he himself was once a Torahobserver; it means that he once was engaged in encouraging Gentiles to be circumcised and thus to become full adherents of Torah-religion (cf. Gal 5:3). When was this? It is unlikely that there was a period after his Damascus experience where he preached a kind of Judaizing gospel to Gentiles. The statement more likely refers to his pre-Damascus period, where we might envisage him as playing the same sort
The next item in the Philippian catalogue—'as to the law, a Pharisee' (Phil 3:5)—is a little harder to envisage in a diaspora setting, however. While Jews everywhere were identified by their adherence to the law, the only evidence we have for Pharisees as a specific group stems from Judea. Here the information from Acts is relevant, for Luke identifies Jerusa-
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Further, to understand Paul it is necessary to recognize two things that flowed from this experience. One was a reconfiguration of his basic, world-ordering convictions. Paul had already come to some conclusions about how the message of a crucified and risen Messiah related to the basic convictions of covenantal nomism. His previous perceptions of Christ 'according to the flesh' (2 Cor 5:16) produced the conviction that Christ and Torah were mutually exclusive; they were rival ways of marking the community of the righteous. Consequently his new conviction—that God had raised Jesus and that the claims made about him in Christian preaching were thus grounded in God's action—was not a simple, selfcontained conviction; rather, it set in motion a thoroughgoing process of convictional restructuring. Not that his new convictions were simply the inversion of the old. He continued to believe in the God of Israel, in Israel's election, even in the divine origin of the Torah. But these native convictions were redrawn around a new centre, the foundational conviction that the crucified Jesus had been raised by God.
of role with Gentile synagogue-adherents as Eleazar did with King Izates of Adiabene (Jos. Ant. 20.43—5), namely, insisting that only by becoming full proselytes would they be pleasing to God.
8. It is also during this period that Paul's zeal 'for the traditions of [his] ancestors' (Gal 1:14) took particular expression in his persecution of the nascent Christian movement (Gal 1:14, 23; Phil 3:6; i Cor 15:9). As has been noted already, there is no need to set Gal 1:22 over against the Acts account, and to restrict Paul's persecuting activity to an area outside Judea (Damascus). We can accept the Acts account at least to this point, that it was in Jerusalem that Paul took offence at the activity of the early Christians, particularly the Greek-speaking 'Hellenists' (Acts 6) who formulated their message in a manner that was much more critical of the temple and much less acquiescent to the Jewish religious establishment (cf Acts 7) than the 'Hebrews'. Perceiving the activity of the Hellenistic Jewish Christians as a threat to the well-being of the Torahcentred way of life, and also at a deeper level perceiving their basic message as setting Christ over against the Torah, he engaged in 'zealous' repression of the movement. When this resulted in the flight of Christians from Jerusalem to other Jewish centres, Paul became involved in attempts to repress the activity of the new movement in Damascus. That is, we can accept the basic itinerary of Acts 8 and 9, though some of the details (the ferocity of Saul's own activity, imprisonment rather than simple disciplinary action, official letters from the high priest) may well be the result of Lukan exaggeration.
11. The second thing that flowed from Paul's Damascus experience was that it was also and at the same time a call to be an apostle. Despite the chronological gap between the first experiences recounted in i Cor 15:5-7 and Paul's own—a gap alluded to in v. 8 ('last of all, as to someone untimely born') but ultimately dismissed as inconsequential—Paul claims that it constituted him an apostle on an equal basis with the others (w. 10—n; cf. Gal 1:1). One can readily imagine how this claim would have sounded to those 'who were already apostles before [him]' (Gal 1:17) and their Jerusalem followers, especially when this johnny-come-lately began to insist on a law-free mission to Gentiles with Paul himself as its divinely commissioned apostle. An uneasy relationship with the Jerusalem church marked Paul's ministry from the outset.
9. 'WhenGodwaspleasedtorevealhisSonto (in) me' (Gal 1:15— 16): Somewhere near Damascus (cf. 'returned', Gal 1:17), Paul had an experience that led to a radical reassessment of the person of Jesus and a thoroughgoing reconfiguration of his foundational convictions. In the history of interpretation, various attempts have been made to account for this experience without remainder by appealing to psychological preconditioning or even physiological manifestations (e.g. an epileptic seizure). But to reduce the range of possible explanations in this way is to fail to recognize the reality of religious experience, on the phenomenological level at the very least. Religious phenomena certainly have their psychological and physiological dimensions, but it is unfair to religious communities in general to reduce religious experience to nonreligious categories.
12. 'SothatlmightprodaimhimamongtheGentiles' (Gali:i6): Looking back, Paul locates the origin of his Gentile mission in the Damascus experience itself. Some interpreters have argued that this is just a matter of retrospect, Paul here collapsing a process that might have taken years, into the event that set the process in motion in the first place (e.g. Watson 1986: 28-38). But not only is there no evidence for such an intervening phase of any length, Paul's statements relating to his activity in Arabia suggest that from the very beginning he saw himself as commissioned to carry the gospel to Gentiles. Paul's sojourn in Arabia (Gal 1:17) is sometimes seen as a period of quiet reflection, where he contemplated the significance of his experience and worked out its theological implications. No doubt there was a period of time in which such reflection took place; certainly his new theological framework did not emerge instantaneously. But Paul's time in Arabia seems to have attracted the unfavourable attention of King Aretas himself (2 Cor 11:32). One does not usually arouse the ire of a ruling monarch by engaging in solitary theological reflection. Paul's Arabian experience suggests that he attempted to carry out an apostolic ministry among non-Jews at a very early date. If there was a period of reflection, we should think in terms of weeks, not years.
Paul, of course, understood this experience as an encounter with the risen Christ (Gal 1:15—16; i Cor 9:1; 15:8—9) and, moreover, as belonging to the same set of experiences as had brought the movement into being in the first place (i Cor 15:5-8). But the reality of a religious experience is one thing, the interpretation placed on it by the subject quite another. Any attempt to assess the reality lying behind the statement, 'Christ appeared to me', belongs in a book whose purposes are quite different from those of a commentary such as this.
10. To understand Paul and his letters, however, it is necessary to recognize that he saw no gap or caesura between the experience and the interpretation. For him the subjective experience ('God... was pleased to reveal his Son in me', Gal 1:15—16, my lit. tr.) and the objective reality ('[Christ] appeared ... to me'; i Cor 15:8) were a seamless unity.
13. From a first-century Judean perspective, Arabia was the kingdom of the Nabataeans, with its capital in Petra (Jos. J. W. 1.125: 'the capital of the Arabian kingdom, called Petra').
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James's delegation 'came' to Antioch, while Paul and Barnabas were already there; Gal 2:11—12); and he was associated with Barnabas in the earlier part of his known ministry but probably not later (the only evidence for direct association appears in Gal 2:1,9,13; cf. i Cor 9:6). Paul's arrival in Antioch brings his formative period to an end and sets the stage for the more public ministry narrated in Acts and reflected in his letters.
This means that Paul's sojourn in Arabia in Gal 1:17 needs to be co-ordinated with the account of his escape from the agents of King Aretas in Damascus (2 Cor 11:30—3). The reference here is to Aretas IV, king of the Nabataeans from about 9 BCE to 39 CE. Murphy-O'Connor (1996: 5-7) argues that Damascus came under Nabataean control in 37 CE, which would then have been when Paul's departure from Damascus took place, though certainty is not possible (cf. Riesner 1998: 84-9). Presumably Paul had created enough of a disturbance through his evangelizing activity in Arabia that he had to return to Damascus (Gal 1:17), which in turn became too hot for him to remain once Aretas had gained control of the city. This evidence suggests, then, that Paul's statement in Gal 1:16 should be taken at its temporal face value: right from the beginning, he felt himself called as an apostle with a special commission for the Gentiles.
E. The Chronology and Sequence of Paul's Mission. 1. Any full chronological reconstruction of Paul's active ministry requires the co-ordination of three interdependent lines of investigation: (i) discerning the relative chronology of the different geographical stages of his mission; (2) identifying some fixed dates as anchor points for an absolute chronology; and (3) placing the letters at their appropriate points within this chronological framework. This is not the place, of course, to attempt any such reconstruction. Even if it were possible to do so in a reasonably concise way, it would be inappropriate here; the authors of each of the sections to follow must be allowed the freedom to interpret their assigned segment of the Pauline corpus within their own reconstruction of Paul's career. What is required at this point is a more general introduction to the problems inhering in the evidence, the points at which crucial decisions need to be made, and the resultant range of reconstructions.
14. ' Up to Jerusalem... into the regions of Syria and Cilicia... Antioch' (Gal 1:18, 21; 2:11): Of the other events in the period between his Damascus experience and the start of the missionary activity reflected in the letters, Paul tells us very little. 'After three years' he journeyed to Jerusalem, with the specific intention of'getting to know' Cephas/Peter, or of'making his acquaintance' (Gal 1:18; on this sense of the verb historein, see Jos. J.W. 6.81). Paul's larger purpose in Galatians i and 2 is to minimize his contacts with 'those who were already apostles before [him]' (Gal 1:17), in order to establish the point that he 'did not receive [his gospel] from a human source, nor was [he] taught it, but [he] received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ' (Gal 1:12). While this statement underlines the centrality of the Damascus experience for Paul's new commitment to Christ and the gospel, it should not be interpreted as implying that his early Christian experience was isolated and individual and that other Christians played no part in his formation. Presumably he did not baptize himself (Rom 6:3). Likewise, he was able to count on friends—Christians, in all probability—to help him over the city wall in Damascus (note the passive in 2 Cor 11:33: T was let down'). Even before his first visit to Jerusalem, then, he had been incorporated into a Christian community as a new convert, with all the socialization that would have entailed. Further, he describes such central Christian elements as the facts of the gospel itself (i Cor 15:1—7) and the narrative of the last supper (i Cor 11:23) as material that he had 'received' and then 'handed on', using the accepted, formal vocabulary for the transmission of tradition. It is probably not without significance that the two proper names mentioned in the summary of the gospel in i Cor 15:3—7 (Cephas, James) are precisely the two people that he met on his first Jerusalem visit (Gal 1:18-19). As C. H. Dodd is famously reported to have said, surely in two weeks Paul and Peter found more to talk about than simply the weather.
2. As might well be expected, the role of Acts is once again a key factor in the discussion. In both Acts and the letters Paul's mission activity is punctuated by visits to Jerusalem, and the main reconstructions of Pauline chronology are differentiated by their approach to these visits. Acts recounts no less than five such visits:
Visit i: Post-conversion visit (9:26-30) Intervening activity: Time spent in Tarsus and Antioch
(9:30; 11:25-6) Visit 2 : Famine relief visit (11:27—9; I2:25) Intervening activity: Mission activity in Cyprus and southern Asia Minor (13:1—14:28) Visit 3 : Jerusalem Council visit (15:1—30) Intervening activity: Mission activity in Macedonia and Achaia (16:1-18:17) Visit 4: Unspecified visit (18:18-23) Intervening activity: Mission activity in Ephesus and Asia (18:24-19:41) Visit 5 : Collection visit (20:1-21:26) Subsequent events : Arrest, hearings, journey to Rome (21:2728:31)
Two preliminary observations should be made about the final two visits. First, while Luke presents the fourth visit as a matter of some urgency to Paul (cf. 18:20-1), he provides no information at all about either the reason for the journey or its outcome. Second, while Luke is aware of the fact that the fifth visit was for the purpose of delivering collection money to Jerusalem (24:17), this aspect of the final journey is very much played down in Acts in comparison to the letters.
15. Of Paul's time in 'the regions of Syria and Cilicia' (Gal 1:21), very little can be said, unless we disregard the order in which these two geographical regions are listed and understand 'Syria' to refer to the kind of scenario recounted in Acts 11:25-6, where Paul was engaged as Barnabas's junior partner in a ministry of teaching and church leadership in Antioch. Be that as it may, other statements of Paul confirm the general picture arising from the Acts account: he was resident for a time in Antioch (both Cephas and
3. In the letters themselves, by contrast, there is evidence of only three visits:
Visit A. Post-conversion visit (Gal 1:18) Visit B. Jerusalem consultation (Gal 2:1—10)
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(Acts 13 and 14), cities that were located in the southern part of the Roman province of Galatia (though the region of the ethnic Galatians lay further to the north). While this approach is often dismissed as special pleading in defence of Acts, there is a case that could be made on the basis of Galatians itself, which contains details that might suggest an early date for the letter (e.g. the prominence of Barnabas and absence of Timothy; the absence of any explicit mention ofthe collection project or injunctions to contribute; the restriction of his whereabouts between the first two visits to the regions of Syria and Cilicia).
Visit C. Collection visit (i Cor 16:1-4; R°m !5:25; cf2 Cor
8-9).
Several preliminary observations should be made about this list as well. To start with, the first two visits are presented in conjunction with some additional chronological information: the first visit occurred three years after Paul's Damascus experience (Gal 1:18), and the second visit took place 'after fourteen years' (Gal 2:1)—though whether the fourteen-year period begins with the first visit or with the Damascus experience is not specified in the text and is a matter of some scholarly dispute. Further, since Paul's purpose in this section of Galatians is to make the point that his contacts with Jerusalem were minimal, the context requires that the list is complete. That is, the cogency of his argument would have been in jeopardy if he had failed to mention a visit; thus prior to the writing of Galatians, Paul had made two, and only two, visits to Jerusalem. Finally, the third visit, to deliver the 'collection for the saints' (i Cor 16:1), appears only in prospect; in all the references it is still a journey that lies in the future.
5. The other minority viewpoint, pioneered by John Knox (1950), attempts to build a chronology almost entirely on the basis of information in the letters. In addition to the Jerusalem visits, there are three chronological sequences appearing explicitly in the letters: (i) from Damascus to the confrontation with Peter (Gal); (2) missionary activity in the Greek peninsula (i Thess); (3) travels in connection with the collection (i Cor, 2 Cor, Rom). Knox, followed by a number of others
(e.g. Kurd 1965; Liidemann 1984), have argued that according to Paul's own statements there could not have been any more than three visits to Jerusalem. The key to this reconstruction is the injunction in Gal 2:10 that Paul 'remember the poor', which is understood to mark the inception ofthe collection project. That is, at the Jerusalem Council, in return for the recognition of his Gentile mission, Paul undertook a project to raise money from his Gentile churches as a sign of good faith towards the Jerusalem church. Since this was the project that occupied much of his time during the final, Ephesus-based phase of his known missionary activity, the founding of churches in Galatia, Macedonia, and Achaia must have happened prior to the Jerusalem Council; that is, this missionary activity is located in the fourteen-year period mentioned in Gal 2:1. This reconstruction has the effect (though not the intent) of placing the Jerusalem Council at a point in the sequence corresponding to the unspecified visit of Acts 18:18-23.
Of these two sets of visits, the first and the last in each case obviously correspond with each other, despite differences in detail. It is more difficult, however, to make sense of what comes in between. There are evident similarities between the meetings recounted in Acts 15 and Gal 2:1—10: the same participants (Paul, Barnabas, Peter, James), dealing with the same issue (circumcision of Gentile converts), coming to the same general decision (legitimacy ofthe Gentile mission). The majority of interpreters take these two passages as variant accounts ofthe same event (i.e. B = 3), and develop a chronological framework on the basis of this and other evident points of contact between Acts and the letters (with varying estimations of the reliability of information found only in Acts).
4. In addition to this majority position, however, there are two other minority approaches to Paul's chronological framework that need to be mentioned. One of them originated with the work of William Ramsay (1907), who was particularly concerned to demonstrate the historical reliability of Acts. The majority viewpoint described above tends towards the conclusion that Luke was mistaken in recounting an intervening visit between the post-conversion visit and that of the Jerusalem Council (i.e. the famine relief visit), since Paul's argument in Galatians leaves no room for it. In the position developed by Ramsay and followed by a number of others (e.g. Bruce 1977), it is argued instead that the consultation described in Gal 2:1-10 took place during the famine relief visit (i.e. B = 2). They argue that the private nature of this consultation (Gal 2:2) is more in keeping with Acts n than with Acts 15, and that Paul's statement of his eagerness to remember the poor (Gal 2:10) can readily be correlated with the famine relief project. Essential to this approach are two assumptions about the letter to the Galatians: first, that Galatians was written prior to the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15—perhaps the same delegation from Jerusalem that was creating dissension in Antioch (Acts 15:1) was pressuring the Galatian churches as well; and second, that the 'churches of Galatia' were those founded by Paul and Barnabas in Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Derbe, and Lystra during the so-called first missionary journey