Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (14 page)

Word of unlikely occurrences had preceded Paul’s knock at the door. This Pharisee, riding his horse hard toward Damascus in hot pursuit of his favorite prey, had been knocked from his mount by—what? By what the man himself had come to call an intervention of God. As he scrambled in the dust of the road, overcome by a blinding light, a Voice asked a question that the dismounted rider could not have found more unexpected or unwelcome: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Forever after, this would be for Saul the moment at which his life took a completely new direction: God cared about him in the same way he had cared about the great figures of Israel’s past. Only a few men had heaven ever addressed by name—and always with their name spoken twice: “Abraham, Abraham”; “Moses, Moses.” God himself was telling his child that his road was a mistaken one and giving him a new direction. The identity of the Voice was evident: it was the same Voice that had spoken to the patriarchs and prophets, but the meaning of its words would take the fallen rider many moons to ponder. In persecuting “God’s Gathering,” Saul-Paul had been persecuting Jesus, the discredited prophet, who had died so ignominiously. But if the
Voice of God now spoke on behalf of this prophet—indeed, so identified with him that the Voice could say “me” of Jesus—then this Pharisee who had been so certain of the righteous godliness of his course must come to discover that the hated
Messianists were, collectively and in some mysterious sense yet to be fathomed, the Body of Jesus and that the dead Jesus, now exalted by God, was somehow identifiable with God himself. From then on Paul would speak of his overthrow on the road to Damascus, the blinding
light, and the questioning Voice as his encounter with Christ, his own belated “resurrection appearance.” Jesus risen had come to him just as surely as he “showed himself to the disciples”—to Peter and the others—so that Paul, who had not known Jesus previously, ever after thought of himself as one “born out of time.”

This dismounting on the Damascus road was just as disorienting to Paul as the empty tomb had once been to the little embalming party organized by Mary Magdalene. According to Luke, Paul, temporarily blinded, had to be led “by the hand” into Damascus, where he found himself unable to eat or drink for several days. His sight, as well as his appetite, returned after an encounter with a Damascene disciple of Jesus named
Ananias, who, already aware that Paul was to be God’s “chosen instrument,” laid healing hands on the stunned man. In Luke’s theatrical account of these events, Paul, now feeling course through him that infusion of courage characteristic of so many of these early “conversion” experiences, stands up and asks to be baptized.

Our two sources for Paul’s story are his own words, as preserved for us in his surviving letters, and the evangelist Luke’s second work, the
Acts of the Apostles, which recounts the early years of the
Jesus Movement and in which Paul figures as the central character. To the ear of most scholars, Paul, who is remarkably cut-and-dried about his extraordinary experiences, is much more trustworthy than the literary Luke, who, anxious to present the movement to his readers in the most favorable light, tends to smooth over all rough edges and, in highly colored presentations, to dramatize events that must originally have appeared more commonplace. But whatever the actual, physical details of Paul’s Damascus experience, there can be no
doubt that the man himself saw it as the turning point of his life, the moment in which he went from being a devout persecutor of a movement that he thought a tremendous danger to Judaism to becoming the most arresting advocate of this movement in his day. Following what can only be described as his “meeting with Jesus,” Paul spent the remainder of his life preaching that Jesus, crucified to death and now risen, was the long-awaited
Messiah of the Jews and the fulfillment of all their hopes.

For Paul, it will become extremely important that this Gospel he will come to preach far and wide is “no human message, for I did not take it from any man, nor was it taught me: rather, it was revealed to me by Jesus Christ himself!” Given this stress, it is no surprise that Paul never makes mention of
Ananias (who, unless he is Luke’s literary invention, must have taught Paul
something
)
.
In Paul’s brief account of the period of his conversion in his letter to the Galatians, he will insist that the revelation he was given at Damascus is not in any sense secondhand, so much so that “I was in no hurry to confer with anyone, nor to run up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was. No, I went off immediately to Arabia and later came back to Damascus.”

Luke, who may have known nothing of this Arabian adventure, omits it altogether; and we can only wish that Paul had more to say on the subject. His “Arabia” would have been the kingdom of the Nabateans, whose fabulous capital was the desert city of Petra, carved from the pink rock of the Great Rift Valley and looking today in its uninhabited state like the unreal movie set it has become. What must it have been in Paul’s day when it was still a bustling capital? But Paul, who will in his zeal visit many of the great cities of the ancient
world, traversing its roads and sea-lanes and encountering many of its most exotic wonders, has no time for tourism. He is a man with a mission; and every ounce of energy will be directed toward his goal—the divine commission given him on the Damascus road—of spreading the Gospel as far as possible.

According to Luke, Paul had to quit Damascus for good because his uncompromising preaching in the synagogues there “threw the Jewish community … into confusion” and even invited their murderous attention, which Paul escaped in the knick of time by being lowered from the city wall in a basket by his new Messianist friends in the dead of night. If it doesn’t take much imagination to see the confusion of the Jewish community, who had so recently known the preacher as the implacable foe of the
Jesus Movement, it takes only imagination to appreciate the Scheherazade-like detail of Luke’s basket. Whatever the real reason for Paul’s exit, we can more securely trust Luke’s information that Paul’s appearance in Jerusalem (where he went next) alarmed “the disciples,” who “were all afraid of him” and that it took them some time to cool down and find him credible. According to Paul himself, by the time he arrived in Jerusalem, three years had elapsed since his conversion, and the express purpose of his visit was “to meet the Rock,” with whom he “stayed fifteen days.”

If readers can only be curious about where Paul went in “Arabia” and what he did there (probably a novice’s unsuccessful attempt at preaching), what would we not give to know something of the conversations that passed between the relentless former Pharisee and his host, the formerly faithless fisherman, during Paul’s two-week sojourn? The Voice that spoke to Paul from heaven (or from within himself) had such personal impact that it reoriented his whole course, but it
could hardly have filled in for him all the events of Jesus’s earthly life. For this, he had no doubt the stories already circulating in the communities of Jesus’s disciples, stories that would eventually attain written form in the four gospels. But who could give Paul a sense of Jesus—what he looked like, how he sounded, how he moved, what he meant—more palpable than Peter? Surely, a fortnight with this principal friend of Jesus was worth a lifetime of gathering stories from here and there. So, though we have no record of their conversations, we can take it for granted that they did not waste their time on pleasantries and that at the end of those two weeks the insatiable Paul had as much information on his new Lord as one man could impart to another.

But Paul also had something of importance to impart to Peter, who though faithful to Jesus (after his one night of betrayal) had a naturally muddled mind. Peter, the bighearted friend, was not the sort of fellow you would wish to rely on for drafting a difficult document, whether of science, law, or theology. In the gospel stories, he is full of generous intentions and can-do attitudes, but woefully short on self-knowledge, analysis, and follow-through. Paul, angular, tense, and hardly anyone’s ideal buddy, possessed nevertheless the very qualities that Peter lacked.

Paul was born in
Tarsus, by his own description “no mean city” but rather the cosmopolitan capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, a great crossroads where Asian and European, Jew and Greek met in often fruitful intercourse. He had received two very different kinds of education. Within his family circle, which was Pharisaic and devoted to the Mosaic Law, he had learned biblical Hebrew in order to study the sacred scrolls. As a young man (or perhaps even earlier as an adolescent),
he was sent by his pious father to study in Jerusalem with the most learned rabbis. According to Luke, Paul’s teacher was Gamaliel himself, remembered in subsequent Jewish literature as the most renowned rabbi of his time. It is obvious from Paul’s self-descriptions in his surviving correspondence that he gloried in his lineage: “An Israelite am I, of
Abraham’s seed, of
Benjamin’s branch”—the same tribe to which Saul, Israel’s first king, belonged. If he boasts of his descent, even more does he glory in his commitment to Judaism: “If anyone has cause to be confident in his body, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day; a member of the people of Israel; … a Jew of Jews; as regards the Law, a Pharisee; … as regards righ-teousness before the Law, blameless.” Elsewhere, he makes the claim that “I, in Judaism, outstripped most of my peers because of my zeal for the traditions of my fathers.”

This athletic metaphor—in which the young man’s advance in his understanding of Judaism is remembered as his distinguishing himself in a race—betrays something of Saul-Paul’s other world: besides being a yeshiva boy, he was also a
pais gymnasiou
, a gymnasium boy, a prep school kid. His father wished him not only to know thoroughly the world of his pious ancestors but to be able to negotiate the “modern” world that he would have to live in. Thus did he need to attain mastery over the exceedingly un-Jewish environment of Greek athletic competitions and Greek education. The
agon
—the Greek athletic contest—is one of the few reliable metaphors in the repertoire of this sparingly metaphorical author. (Not surprisingly, the strongly physical image of the living human body—its parts and unitive movement—underlies many of Paul’s other essays into metaphor.) Paul’s Greek flows from his pen with a facility far beyond that of Mark (or even
Matthew) and is obviously shaped by his knowledge of the models of classical rhetoric, disputation, and diatribe; and there is more than a hint that he was widely read in Greek literature and had read at least some Greek philosophy.

In their different ways, both Jewish and Greek intellectual traditions laid great stress on breaking things down into their component parts for the sake of minute analysis—what contemporary literary critics might call “deconstruction.” For the Jews the objects of analysis were
halakha and
haggada, the laws and stories inscribed in their holy books; for the Greeks the objects to be parsed were ideas about the nature of the universe. But both traditions prized serious reflection, careful analysis, and the ultimate fruit of these mental processes—understanding. Paul, the inheritor of both traditions, was able to bring to the somewhat amorphous enterprise of the
Jesus Movement intellectual tools beyond the scope of its relatively uneducated devotees, such as women and fishermen (even if spiked with the sophistication of the occasional tax collector).

Over the last century much has been made of Paul as the inventor of Christianity, the man who took the unfocused, anti-intellectual messianism of the bubble-headed followers of Jesus and constructed it into an effective theological weapon, which Christians would eventually use to beat not only the Jews but the whole of the ancient world. This is only partly true. Paul did not
invent
the faith of the early Church in the continuing reality and presence of Jesus. If Paul became in his own lifetime the most articulate spokesman for this faith, he was never much more than an articulator who knew how to zero in on the most essential elements of his argument and could thread his discourse with the welcome colors of his own very personal experience. If Paul had never left the Pharisaical
school, the
Jesus Movement that became Christianity would have survived and probably even prospered (if with a more limited scope), but it would have been a Christianity that lacked (at least for some time) Paul’s intellectual edge as well as his emotional edginess.

For beyond his education, by which he intertwined antiquity’s most rigorous intellectual traditions, we cannot neglect to consider the man’s natural temper: neither flatterer nor diplomat, neither charmer nor salesman, Paul was not the sort of man you would immediately associate with the effort to pitch a new idea, let alone a whole new worldview and way of life. Devoid of small talk, anecdotes, and the sort of chatter that puts people at their ease, Paul was an either/or kind of guy, an absolutist for whom the matter under discussion would always be All or Nothing. An intellectual overachiever, pushed repeatedly to success by a keenly competitive father, Paul had no time for ordinary social niceties and neither gave nor expected to receive normal social comforts. One can imagine him sitting uncomfortably in some conventional parlor, staring penetratingly at his hostess while trying to find some Meaning in her inquiry as to whether he took one lump or two.

But the combination of intellectual and emotional relentlessness that constituted Paul’s personality made this unlikely man the perfect vehicle for this moment in the development of the Jesus Movement. Had he appeared a little earlier—say, soon after the “raising” of Jesus and the descent of the Spirit—his intellectual ardor would probably have been too much for an inchoate community of simply educated disciples who were just beginning to get their minds around these inexplicable events. Once they had got their bearings again, come to understand what had happened as a coherent story, and begun
to give voice to their unique experiences, they were—whether they knew it or not—ready to hear from someone more intellectually incisive than they, someone who could give a more precise formulation to these experiences, someone who was part of them but also part of the larger world of which they had only limited knowledge. Had Paul arrived on the scene much later than he did (when the movement, settling down as an elaborated organization with defined structures, had become the Church it would become), his emotional edginess—his intolerance for muddleheadedness, his knowing when he was right and you were wrong, his essential abstraction from the details of ordinary life—would have made him a poor candidate to be an organization man; and he would soon have been isolated and eventually cast aside.