The Mystery of Paul

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Paul: A Critical Life

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor
(New York and Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) xv1 + 416 pp., $35

Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

A.N. Wilson
(New York and London: Norton, 1977) xiii + 274 pp., $25

What Saint Paul Really Said
Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

Tom Wright
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 192 pp., $14

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No wonder many people think of Paul as the real founder of Christianity: The number of letters in the New Testament written by him, the number of letters attributed to him and the space devoted to his activities in the Acts of the Apostles attest to his towering presence in the Christian scriptures. At the other extreme, when he is not being touted as the founder of Christianity, Paul is portrayed as Jesus’ evil twin: Jesus preached love, Paul set up an organization; Jesus told simple stories, Paul propounded complicated dogma; Jesus was a loyal rabbi, Paul wanted a new religion. Or all of the above.

Paul is the preferred target when intellectuals wish to attack Christianity because he can be described as the manager, ideologue and entrepreneur of the movement, while Jesus, it is commonly (and wrongly) supposed, was not concerned with practical issues. (To mention only two of Jesus’ practical concerns: proper worship in the Temple¹ and the nature of the purity laws—“There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him” [Mark 7:15].)

Three new books on Paul manage to avoid these stereotypes for the most part, much to their authors’ credit. They realize that Paul’s network of relationships fell far short of being an organization, that his theological reflections did not amount to a complete system of thought and that his object and hope was not for a new religion, but—as he said himself—for all of Israel to be saved (Romans 11:26).

To be sure, there is a dark side to the portrait of Paul: Christianity’s intellectual critics often distort the work of this passionate intellectual, portraying him as a person whose only concern was to use Jesus to deny the validity of Judaism. The light side of the same portrait reveals that the content of Paul’s thought has proven to be one of the most seminal influences on the way we think about humanity, whether at the level of the individual or at the level of society. “For I do not do the good that I will, but I perform the evil that I do not will”—a single sentence within an eloquent analysis (Romans 7:19) brings home the truth of living with a divided being and a torn self-consciousness.

The tendency to psychologize Paul is understandable; it is natural to look for some sort of psychic irregularity in any great figure. But it simply does not illuminate the mystery of Paul to say he was a bigot who found love (as Jerome Murphy-O’Connor does) or a greedy zealot who found guilt (as A.N. Wilson does) or a violent revolutionary who learned to experience and seek peace (as Tom Wright does). The pictures drawn by these three authors in their recent books rely too much on guesswork rather than on critically sound arguments. They fail to get at Paul’s true originality.

What is intriguing, even mysterious, about Paul is this: Why did he come to say what he did? Where did his convictions and ideas derive from, and how did they become influential within Christianity (and beyond Christianity)? These three books all contribute answers to those questions; they 038teach us a great deal about Paul in his historical context (Murphy-O’Connor), about Paul in his religious and intellectual milieu (Wilson), about Paul as a Judaic theologian (Wright).

Pride of place should go to Murphy-O’Connor’s study, which is at once refreshing and comprehensive. Every teacher must consider it carefully, as the author, a professor of New Testament at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem, wends his way through the major issues of Pauline scholarship. Some readers might be daunted by the depth and persistence of the references to both primary sources and critical literature. But all except beginners should be urged to persist. This is no doubt the most demanding, but also the most rewarding, of the three books. It provides both Murphy-O’Connor’s views, some quite original and daring, and a good sense of what the enormous field of Pauline studies looks like at the moment.

Part of my enthusiasm stems from Murphy-O’Connor’s prose, which is lucid and lively, even when he is discussing scholarship that is less so. He understands that we should begin our study with the letters Paul himself wrote and use Acts only as an ancillary resource. He agrees with Acts that Paul was a Roman citizen, born in Tarsus, who was also called Saul, although he is more skeptical about Paul having relatives in Jerusalem (pp. 35–46). Yet at times Murphy-O’Connor is perhaps a little credulous; he stretches Paul’s stay in Jerusalem as a Pharisee to a period of some 15 years, during which he studied under Gamaliel, the great Pharisee teacher, in the period before the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. (p. 59). Murphy-O’Connor assumes that Paul practiced no trade and did not work manually during this time but was a professional student (p. 86).

That puts a well-connected Paul in Jerusalem in 30 C.E., the year of the crucifixion, but Murphy-O’Connor points out that Hasidic students in Jerusalem today maintain their principle of avoiding knowledge of secular events; it is even reported that they were completely unaware of Anwar Sadat’s peace visit to Israel in 1977, which brought the whole of Jerusalem into the streets (pp. 61–62). Still, the young Paul was not painfully isolated; in Murphy-O’Connor’s reconstruction he also had a wife and children. They perished in an earthquake or an epidemic (pp. 62–65), which fed Paul’s desire to persecute Christians (pp. 64–65):

A well-known psychological mechanism switches anger from unacceptable to acceptable channels of expression. As a Pharisee, Paul believed God had a hand in all that happened in history…[O]ne part of his theology would lead him logically to ascribe blame to God, but this was forbidden by another part of his religious perspective, which prescribed complete submission to God’s will. If his pain and anger could not be directed against God, it had to find another target.

Murphy-O’Connor is happy with this explanation because it accounts for both Paul’s zeal in persecution and his silence regarding his wife.

One of the outstanding features of Murphy-O’Connor’s work—here and elsewhere—is that he directly confronts and responds to critical questions. He does not hide behind the academic dodge (commonly called being judicious) of weighing other people’s answers until the original question seems to disappear. What he says about Paul the Pharisee, complete with wife and children, is not out of line with other controversial stands in this book. He is willing, for example, to accept the hypothesis of Paul’s imprisonment in Ephesus several years before his final arrest, despite the description in Acts of a generally peaceful ministry there. Moreover, he assigns Colossians, Philemon and Philippians to this early period, before Corinthians and Romans and just after Galatians (pp. 158–184). With that rearrangement, Murphy-O’Connor goes against the majority view among scholars, which sees the conciliatory tone in Colossians, Philemon and Philippians as late and heavily reworked both by Paul and his followers. Murphy-O’Connor thus finds himself agreeing with some Evangelical scholars who take Paul’s uncompromising combativeness in Corinthians and Romans as the “last word” in Paul’s evolving 039theology—and therefore as his final legacy to Christians.

There is nothing inherently implausible in imagining Paul as widowed or divorced. Still, Paul’s argument for remaining single in 1 Corinthians 7:8 includes the wish that people might follow his example: “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.” That is the sort of advice a married man obviously should not give and would not likely get away with giving. Although it is just possible that a widowed or divorced person might offer such counsel, it seems more likely that Paul would call on others to imitate him as one who had remained unmarried (in this regard, see also 1 Corinthians 9:5: “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife?”). Discussion of this issue shows no sign of abating. Murphy-O’Connor has assured that it will become even more heated, and it certainly cannot be settled here. But the weight of the evidence, or lack of it, suggests that Paul did not mention having a wife for the simple reason that he did not have one. Still, if we are not in a position to resolve so basic an issue, can we say that anyone is capable of writing a critical life of Paul?

What is even more interesting is the use Murphy-O’Connor makes of his own speculative findings. He doesn’t trace Paul’s persecution of Christians to the authorized activity of the high priest, as Acts has it, but instead characterizes it as the behavior of an immature religious bigot working out his personal problems (p. 69). Paul’s conversion made a huge difference: He ended his life of scholarly leisure and began to earn his living as a tentmaker (pp. 85–89), identifying his purpose from the outset as preaching the gospel to the gentiles, of all people (pp. 79–80, 93–95). Although Murphy-O’Connor acknowledges that the Pharisaic community in Jerusalem must have offered Paul considerable support, as he sees it, Paul’s conversion involved framing his life in a new way in conscious relationship to others (p. 120):

The conviction that led him to a new life had nothing to do with rational evidence. It was a leap of faith rooted in an unknowable impulse. Yet he would not have been human had he not felt the need for some justification. This he found in those whose lives exhibited, not only the fruits of the effort he was making (and perhaps considered inadequate), but the pattern of behavior appropriate to the new mode of existence.

In other words, where Paul once had bonded with Pharisees, he now bonded with Christians. This insight, based on Abraham J. Malherbe’s exegesis of 1 Thessalonians,² is a profoundly important aid in understanding Paul. Whether or not Murphy-O’Connor’s speculations regarding Paul’s early life are convincing, what emerges from the pages of Paul’s own letters is a deep commitment to working out who the people of God are on the basis of the faith shared by being joined by Christ in baptism.

Although Murphy-O’Connor’s book is wonderfully lucid, few studies of Paul can compete with A.N. Wilson’s for the sheer pleasure of reading it. He is a skilled writer, with several novels and biographies to his name, and his imaginative powers are considerable. Sometimes, though, his imagination gets the better of critical common sense: The fire in Rome that Nero blamed on the Christians might have been their fault after all, he suggests. After that devastating conflagration, the rumor spread around Rome that Nero had caused it so he could rebuild the imperial capital. Nero’s response was to acknowledge that it was indeed a case of arson but that it was the Christians who had set it. A credulous Wilson writes, “Who knows? An accidental fire might well have started in the hutment of some early Christian zealot baking bread or sizzling kebabs” (p. 4). Speculation is fine, but Wilson does nothing to explain the rumor, attested by Tacitus, that the fire was started by order, nor does his theory accord with what one would expect to be available by way of food and cooking facilities in an underclass Roman hutment. Sizzling kebabs would not have wiped out Rome. The comment just seems to be a way of trying to make Nero somehow more palatable.

More to the point, Wilson paints an implausible picture of Paul’s career in Jerusalem. He inverts the principle that Paul’s letters should be given preference to Acts and denies that Paul was truly a Pharisee (p. 51). Instead, Wilson exaggerates Acts to make Paul a member of the Temple police, and he argues that Paul’s interest was financial—as a way of obtaining hides (p. 52):

One can only assume that in a city where 20,000 sheep were slaughtered in a single day 040there was a lively trade in sheepskin and other leathers. A useful place if you happened to make your money converting animals hides into tents. If one were also a tentmaker with a religious obsession, where better to spend some years of your youth than Jerusalem?

Had Wilson spent a little more time with ancient descriptions of tentmaking and of the operation of the Temple, that rhetorical question could have been avoided. Murphy-O’Connor may easily be consulted on both points for clarification. First, not all tents were made of hides (many were made from fiber), but more importantly, the Temple priests would not have parted with anything connected with the sacrificial system. Unlike Murphy-O’Connor, Wilson does not shy away from the implication that Paul may have been aware of the arrest and execution of Jesus; indeed, Wilson even concludes that Paul took an active part in those events—because Jesus’ interference with Temple activities was bad for Paul’s hide business (p. 55)!

Precisely because Paul was partially responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, according to Wilson, he came to see Jesus and the Torah as fundamentally opposed: Before his conversion he saw the Temple as something authorized by the Torah, and therefore good, and Jesus as a hindrance to the running of the Temple, and therefore bad; after his conversion, Paul viewed the two in reverse, with the Torah as a burden and Jesus’ teachings as the way to God. Wilson can only understand that Pauline opposition in psychological terms (p. 72):

The great blessing in the life of a Jew, the Divinely-given Teaching (Torah), becomes in Paul’s vision a Law which is a curse. The accursed thing, the Roman torture, becomes a blessing in which he glories.

This reading of Galatians 3:13, 14—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law…that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (a passage to which Wilson returns on several occasions)—is compelling. It identifies the conflict Paul refers to again and again, between the promise of the covenant and the attempt—the failed attempt, in Paul’s mind—to guard the covenant by adhering to the laws of the Torah. Wilson mines Acts to discover the same conflict—Jesus versus Torah—resolved by the salvation offered through Christ alone.

But the portrait of Paul as a policeman of the Temple and the suggestion that the Temple wielded the kind of jurisdiction Acts attributes to it—that it could send a policeman to far provinces to persecute Christians—are really quite implausible. The embellishment of Paul’s active trade in sacred pelts is fanciful. These weaknesses need to be acknowledged, but they should not distract the careful reader from the underlying strength of much of what Wilson says. The dialectical tension between the promise of the covenant and the obligations of the Torah is precisely the starting point of Paul’s thought (at least, after his baptism) and the fulcrum of his religious experience. As we have already seen, Paul was profoundly aware of the division within human consciousness that causes us to do what we hate and not do what we love (Romans 7:19). In Romans 7 he explains why this is the case. Law sets up an ideal, for example, not to covet. Obviously, that injunction is good, but just as surely as we hear of what is good, sin arises within us to rebel against that ideal (Romans 7:7–13). What is needed to overcome that terrible contradiction is a renewal of spirit (Romans 7:6). And baptism for Paul is where God’s spirit arises within the believer, to make the believer a child of Abraham (see Galatians 3:26–4:7).

Scholars will no doubt delight in citing Wilson’s mistakes and missteps, but the good sense of some of what he says also needs to be considered. Of the three books reviewed here, his is the only one that takes serious account of Paul’s formative experience in the Diaspora. Although Murphy-O’Connor is more precise in evoking Tarsus, Wilson makes the connection to the religious milieu of the city and produces a comparison between Paul and Philo of Alexandria, the important Jewish philosopher of the first century (pp. 24–29). Because he is aware of the variety possible within early Judaism (pp. 38–39), Wilson can imagine Paul converting his experience of the cross of Jesus into a Mystery 041similar to the death and rising to life of Herakles, the Greco-Roman divine hero who goes to Hades and returns from that world of the dead with the wife of a friend (p. 60):

In the mind of the Romanised Jew, the tormented Pharisee, the temple guard and tentmaker for the legions, it was Paul himself who was nailed to that instrument of torture, Paul who died, Paul who suffered, Paul who rose.

If we take away the psychological speculation, we have here a sure-footed attempt to find new terrain for Paul, to place him in the Diaspora rather than in Palestine. Wilson rightly points out that the ground of Paul’s religious thought—especially his powerful conception of the believer’s identification with Christ—is his background as a Jew in the Diaspora, someone with both Judaic and Hellenistic influences.

Tom Wright, the prolific theologian, dean of England’s Lichfield Cathedral, and BR columnist, closes his study of Paul with a comprehensive critique of Wilson’s position (pp. 167–178). Wright is at his most scathing when discussing Wilson’s attempt to place Paul in the context of the Disapora. Enough has been quoted from Wilson’s prose to make it plain that his tone, when it concerns Christianity and Judaism, is mostly patronizing, but it is not quite true to say that he assumes throughout that Judaism was a local, almost tribal religion (see Wright, p. 171). In fact, Wilson is prepared to describe the Pharisees in remarkably universalistic terms (Wilson, p. 121):

They taught that the Teaching (Torah) which came from Almighty God—while itself being holy and unchangeable—was of universal application. It was addressed to all mankind, to Gentiles as well as to Jews, and it was therefore necessary in every age and in every place to interpret the Torah for those willing or able to listen to it.

Although there is much to criticize in Wilson’s book, its attempt to balance the Judaism and the Hellenism implicit in Paul’s thought makes it both worthwhile and intriguing.

Wright slips into the pattern of more conventional recent scholarship by seeking to place Paul in a predefined Judaic niche. Where Murphy-O’Connor looks to the Pharisaism of Hillel (who, in turn, derived it from Gamaliel), the first-century contemporary of Jesus, Wright tries to make the young Paul into a follower of Shammai, Hillel’s intellectual opponent. He does so on the grounds that Paul described himself as zealous for the traditions of his fathers (Galatians 1:14), that zeal was a characteristic of revolutionary aspirations and that the followers of Shammai were especially revolutionary in that sense (Wright, pp. 25–35).

All of these assertions are problematic. Rabbinic literature presents a stereotype of opposition between Hillel and Shammai; what each of them actually taught is a matter of debate, and no responsible scholar would claim to know the attitudes of either of them. Given the state of the evidence, it would take more than simple assertion to show that Shammai was actually on the side of revolution. (As Wright knows, Acts in any case puts Paul in the circle of Gamaliel, quite a different Pharisee.) Zeal, of course, can be what animates Zealots (as Josephus named the uncompromising group that controlled Jerusalem during Rome’s final siege of the city), but one might also be zealous for spiritual gifts, which is just what Paul tells his readers to be in 1 Corinthians 14:1: “Make love your aim, and be zealous for spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy.” Paul describes himself in terms of his zeal to persecute the church in Philippians 3:6, but he does not portray zeal for revolution as the center of his former life. This part of Wright’s argument falls short of an acceptable scholarly standard.

That center is, rather, occupied by the Torah (or Law, as Paul says in his Greek idiom). When Paul calls himself a Pharisee in Philippians 3:5, he does not identify himself with any particular group, but he says he was, as to Law, a Pharisee. That is an interesting qualification. It may suggest that Paul was more a Pharisee in his own mind than he was in public affiliation—he may have favored a more lenient, flexible interpretation of the Law. In the description of Stephen’s preaching and eventual stoning, Acts refers to his dispute in Jerusalem with several groups of Jews from the Diaspora (Acts 6:9).

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Some of the people involved came from Cilicia, whose principal city was Tarsus. This section of Acts, of course, is where Paul is introduced, as the young Saul, at whose feet the witnesses against Stephen deposited their clothing (Acts 7:58). In its implicit characterization of Saul-Paul as a zealous outsider, Acts may be more historically accurate than the books reviewed here.

The real strength of Wright’s study is not its speculation regarding Paul’s early life, but its engagement with the issue of Paul’s theology. In centering that on the cross, Wright insists that Paul means that the entire scriptural story, the great drama of God’s dealings with Israel, came together when the young Jew from Nazareth was nailed up by the Romans and left to die (Wright, p. 49). That realization carried with it two profound implications that are the focus of Wright’s helpful discussion. First, the great victory Israel anticipated was not purely in the future, but had already occurred. Second, faith in what God had done in Christ, rather than faith in the Torah, now became the marker of the people of God (see especially pp. 93–94).

That shift in Paul’s definition of Judaism—that when you believe in Christ you are a son of Abraham—a shift that Wright persistently, and correctly, describes as within Judaism, at least in Paul’s understanding, involves attributing divinity to Jesus. Wright devotes a chapter to this theme (pp. 63–75) and shows that Paul saw the human Jesus as the revelation of the one God (p. 72). So profound was Paul’s conviction and experience that he came to contend that at the heart of Jewish monotheism—within the oneness of the one God—lay a plurality, a reciprocal relationship (p. 72). The connection between how God is revealed and how God is understood to be within the divine nature leads to a productive understanding of Paul’s conception of God and Jesus. I hope Wright will pursue it further.

What remains after all the theories about Paul, of course, is the mystery of Paul. But turn back to our original question: How did Paul manage to make his extraordinary contribution to the way we think about ourselves individually and in human society?

In a way, all of our authors deepen our sense of the mystery because they demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Paul was not interested in speaking about humanity as such. Trying to convince a few dozen congregations of primitive Christians about the nature of God, he wound up giving a lesson about being human that would endure for at least two millennia.

In his letter to the Galatians (above all, in chapters 3–4), Paul spells out how he pursues the truth of God in a way that distinguishes him from other Christian teachers. For him, the covenant with Abraham was a promise God made to all people when he said, “In you all the nations shall be blessed” (Galatians 3:8, quoting Genesis 12:3). That promise was put on hold when God gave the Torah, and in the end, that Law proved to be an obstacle to the promise. Finally, however, in the case of Christ Jesus, Paul was convinced, we all have a focus of faith that makes us the inheritors of the promise, God’s own children and Abraham’s. God pours Spirit upon us just as he did upon Jesus.

That is the original argument of Paul, spelled out in various ways in his letters. We can read how Paul found his insight (Galatians), how he fought for it in controversy (1 and 2 Corinthians), how he framed it on cooler reflection (Romans) and how he felt about it (Philippians). What was original about his argument was not that Jesus was the Son of God or that non-Jews might receive baptism. Those were matters of broad consensus. James, Peter, Barnabas and others all agreed that circumcision was not to be required of all Christians.³ (There were teachers who insisted upon circumcision, but contrary to what Wilson seems to believe, the New Testament shows us they were not in a commanding position.) Then again, it is just silly to argue that Paul invented the Eucharist (as Wilson does, p. 165); many New Testament texts attest that there were a variety of eucharistic practices, and Paul was never in a position during his lifetime to determine the practice of the church as a whole.⁴

All the arguments that portray Paul as the great originator of Christianity miss the point. (Wilson gets closest to making this argument on p. 18, but even he does not actually subscribe to it.) There were Christians before Paul. And there were Christians after Paul who disagreed with him, primarily about his broad definition of Israel. During his active career, Paul was quite aware that every other major teacher in Christianity, including his colleague Barnabas, disagreed with him (see especially Galatians 2). So it just will not do to pretend that Paul was the heroic founder of the religious movement known as Christianity even before he became a major figure within it (see Acts 11:19–26).

Paul’s genius was that he saw that movement as the fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham. Wright clearly understands the covenantal center of Paul’s thought, but unfortunately, he attributes a similar theology to Jesus (pp. 178–183). Curiously, he is the only writer of the three who diminishes Pauls creativity. In effect, he sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the covenant in Jesus’ own messianic understanding (a generalization few scholars would agree with), so that all Paul needs to do is offer that fulfillment beyond the borders of Israel, among the gentiles (see p. 181). But all you need do is consult a New Testament concordance to see that Paul, not Jesus, provided Christianity with an original theology of the covenant with Abraham.

Paul’s teaching of the hidden covenant, promised to us and yet not part of our natural awareness, is precisely what brings us to the two great influences of his thought. Because if God has indeed called you, and wills you to have the divine Spirit within you, you have to wonder what it is within yourself that can resist such love. And alongside that flaw within us, Paul’s teaching asks, How can the life of a society, inhibited by self-interest and legalism, come to reflect the glory of God? The perception of both these deep conflicts, the division within and the tension without, derives from Paul’s vision that our humanity is rooted in a single covenant, promised to Abraham and sealed in Christ. That vision proved finally not to be compatible with the centrality of the unchanging Torah, which emerged as the supreme axiom of rabbinic Judaism. But it was a generation before Christianity discovered, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, that its faith had made Christ the formal replacement of every major institution of Judaism. Once that had occurred, Christianity could emerge with its Pauline profile, against all that people might have expected during the time of Paul himself.

Paul: A Critical Life Jerome Murphy-O’Connor (New York and Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) xv1 + 416 pp., $35 Paul: The Mind of the Apostle A.N. Wilson (New York and London: Norton, 1977) xiii + 274 pp., $25 What Saint Paul Really SaidWas Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? Tom Wright (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 192 pp., $14 037 No wonder many people think of Paul as the real founder of Christianity: The number of letters in the New Testament written by him, the number of letters attributed to him and the space devoted to his activities in the […]