Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (18 page)

Delegations of Judaizers began to follow in Paul’s footsteps, visiting the gentile churches he had established and telling them that, unless they learned and implemented all the laws of the Jews, they would be lost. If they were not “justified” according to the Law, they would be omitted in the great roundup of the saved when Jesus returned. You can imagine how puzzled this would have left the
Galatians, how nonplussed would have been the worldly but infantile
Corinthians, how confused the devout and generous Macedonians. It left Paul boiling with anger. How dare these busybodies interfere with his apostolate!

To an
Orthodox Jew of a later period it would be clear that the observant Jews were right: one cannot be a Jew if one does not keep the laws of Judaism, as laid out in the
Torah and interpreted in rabbinical commentaries to our own day. To a Christian of a later day it would be clear that what the observant Jews of Jerusalem and Antioch were trying to impose on the Greek converts—
halakha—made no sense, for this whole system of “observance” lies outside authentic Christianity. In Paul’s day the issue was not nearly so clear to anyone. The word
church
was only gradually beginning to take on the meaning it has for Christians today, and no one had even thought of the word
Christianity
yet. Everyone—from emperors to rabbis—thought of the insignificant Jesus Movement, if they thought of it at all, as a variant form of Judaism. The Judaisms of the first century were myriad, a spectrum that ran from the completely apocalyptic obsessions of the
Essenes and the strict observance
of the
Pharisees to the laxity of the
Sadducees and the strictly political obsessions of the
Zealots; and there was, in any case, nothing new about Messianism among the Jews, who had seen any number of announced “messiahs” come and go (and would continue to experience periodic waves of messianism right into our own time). The movements that would become
normative Judaism and Christianity were, in this very period, in the process of being born. If these two children of ancient Judaism would soon enough come to view each other as implacable enemies, that time still lay in the future. And it remains for us—with the many advantages of modern scholarship and hindsight—to recognize the ineradicable bloodlines of these brothers, who have lost track of their relationship.

The issue of whether or not to impose the Law on gentile converts became the first great theological crisis for the fledgling Church, and it took many years to settle. The issue first came to a head at a meeting of apostles and elders in Jerusalem—sometimes referred to rather too grandly as the “
First Council of Jerusalem”—at which, at least according to the consensus-favoring Luke’s account, Paul’s approach basically carried the day. But according to the less irenic Paul, Peter, who appears to have been moderator of the meeting, was a shilly-shallier. And even though Luke presents Peter as having had a vision in which God told him that all food is “clean” (and could, therefore, be eaten without sin), Paul tells us that when Peter visited Antioch, following the Jerusalem meeting which had decided in Paul’s favor, Peter lacked the courage to stand up to the most insistent of the Judaizers:

This passage, penned in the heat of controversy, can easily make Paul look as if he is rejecting Judaism, but that would be to consider what is happening here through the lens of later categories, long after positions had calcified. Paul gloried in what he would have called his essential—and fulfilled—Judaism. Though he was as indulgent and patient with his absurd gentiles as his urgent temperament would allow, he never forgot whence he—and Jesus—sprang. In the most considered letter he ever wrote—to the church already established at Rome, not long before he made his first visit there—Paul, the great nonboaster, who “boasts only of [his] weaknesses,” at last allows himself to boast a little of his background and to touch publicly on his abiding love for the People who gave him birth. By this time, it is becoming clear that that Judaism, as a whole, will never consider Jesus to be its fulfillment:

P
AUL
INSISTED
THAT
since the
Law of Moses is fulfilled in Christ, all the laws of the Jews, instituted to bring a certain
righteousness upon Israel, are now beside the point and can only confuse converts, especially simple gentile ones with a tradition of magical thinking, who may imagine that all will be well for them if only they keep all these rules—613 halakhot, by the count of the medieval rabbis. No one is made righteous by keeping rules, thought Paul, who had spent half his life in their careful observance. It is God who makes us righteous through his grace (the bountiful
strength of the Spirit), especially through the grace available to us because of the saving actions of his son, Jesus.

We are not asked to observe scads of minute (and sometimes contradictory) rules. We are invited to have faith in Jesus.
Martin Luther, the revolutionary Augustinian friar who initiated the
Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Germany, was right to see the many duties, obligatory rituals,
and automatic magic enjoined by the medieval church as only too reminiscent of the
laws of Judaism that Jesus had bracketed and Paul had rejected altogether—rules that enabled their keepers to pretend to a righteousness that could never be attained by merely human effort. But when Luther claimed to be Pauline by asserting that “man is saved by
faith alone,”
he was misunderstanding Paul—as so many have done in so many different ways. Unfortunately, it has taken four centuries to sort out the confusion, which still reigns in the churches if not in the universities, where scholars have come to a broad consensus. Yes, man is saved by faith, if by that you mean faithful commitment to the cosmic Christ—that is, to the poor, to the afflicted, and to the healing of the world. But this “faith” of which Paul spoke with such feeling is not a single thread, hanging above the abyss, by which the believer is attached to God—some new-fangled form of automatic, if perilous, salvation—nor is it Kierkegaard’s blind “leap of faith” over the abyss itself. For when you have sorted through the whole, long, tangled Judeo-Christian tradition, Paul would say, what remains is not one,
sola fides
, but three: “For in the end, faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of all is love.”

Poor Paul. In addition to being repeatedly misinterpreted, he has been convicted of everything: a traitor to Judaism, an oppressor of women, and, most recently, a self-hating closet queen. He was none of these, and I hope my presentation of his intimate, if anguished, relation to Judaism (which rests on the careful scholarship of many twentieth-century Jews and Christians) will erase the first charge from the minds of my readers. The charge of being a secret, self-hating homosexual comes from a recent book by a bishop of the American Episcopal church; I would pass over this in silence, except that
it has been given so much publicity. So far as I can judge, the charge is without probative evidence of any kind and based on egregious misinterpretation and wild conjecture. The bishop, for instance, thinks that when Paul makes oblique mention in Second
Corinthians to “a thorn in the flesh” he must be referring to this secret torment.
Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, who may have spent as much time with the texts and terrain of Paul as any living interpreter, suggests with sly Irish wit that Paul is referring here to his Corinthian converts, a far more likely conjecture.

Though we know much of Paul’s personality, we know no more of his sexual life than we do of Jesus’s.
¹³
Murphy-O’Connor speculates, as others have done, that he was a widower whose wife had died in some tragedy, this because of pretty good circumstantial evidence, such as that rabbis had to marry by the time they reached the age of thirty (or so). But this undoubted rabbinical obligation cannot be firmly dated to the first half of the first century. We just don’t know much of anything about what today would be called the man’s “personal life.”

Paul’s supposedly oppressive judgments on women have been taken out of context (such as when he is asking the
Corinthians to consider being just a tad more conventional) or are ironic statements misinterpreted by casual readers (what comes of having your letters, written for occasions long forgotten, circulate for two thousand years). The worst instances of Pauline “sexism”—such as the infamous remarks in
First Timothy forbidding women to speak in church and telling them to stick to childbearing—belong to letters attributed to Paul but written forty years or more after his death.
¹⁴
Women were as free to speak, to evangelize, and to administer the Pauline churches as was any man. First Timothy belongs to the period of the patriarchalization of the Christian churches, when bishops began to emerge as the only legitimate leaders and, surveying the disorder (or, more simply, lack of uniformity) they saw before them, endeavored to put all the “excessive” enthusiasms of the Pauline churches back into the box. Paul is actually the New Testament’s ultimate democrat; and it is a pathetic irony that the first person in history to exclude consciously all social grades, isms, and biases from his thinking, believing that nothing—not birth, nor ethnicity, nor religion, nor economic status, nor class, nor gender—makes anyone any better than anyone else, should so often be made to stand at the bar accused of the opposite of what he believed so passionately.

He was a man under pressure, a sometimes contentious overreacher,
who accomplished more in one lifetime than most of us would achieve in ten. If he had his continuing disagreements with the Rock, the lives of both men took in the end an unexpected turn that has kept their memories forever entwined. Both showed up in Rome in the 60s and were martyred there during Nero’s anti-Christian persecution, the empire’s first. It was not the fact that Rome was the center of the empire but this twin
martyrdom—this double act of state barbarism—that gave the city its centrality in the newly emerging Christian world. Peter was crucified upside down (because he beseeched his executioners not to crucify him as his abandoned Lord had been). Paul of Tarsus, Roman citizen, could not be dealt this ultimate humiliation reserved for non-Romans. He was beheaded. Peter is thought to have been buried where he died on Vatican
Hill and where the most magnificent of all Christian churches rises above his humble bones. Despite the monumental San Paolo fuori le Mura, the shrine raised to Paul beyond the city’s ancient walls, we are less than certain where Paul’s bones may lie, an appropriate uncertainty perhaps for the most itinerant of all apostles.

But one can well imagine the old
gymnasion
boy, the sweat-streaming long-distance runner and winner of many a laurel crown, now going to the block in his grizzled sixties and thinking, as he wrote (in
Second Timothy): “As for me, I am now being poured out as if I were a libation, and the time has come for me to depart. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. All there is to come for me now is the crown of justice that the Lord, the just judge, will give me on that Day, and not only me but all those who in their hearts have longed for his return.” “For of this I am certain,” he wrote to the Romans. “Not death nor life, nor angels,
nor princes, nor anything present, nor anything to come, nor any power, whether of highest
heaven or deepest abyss, nor anything else in all of creation, shall ever separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Some years after the Neronic executions of Peter, Paul, and many other unfortunate members of the
Jesus Movement, a believer named John, exiled for his beliefs to the distant Aegean isle of Patmos, was the recipient of a revelation. Like a great film, John’s revelation, recorded in the
Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is full of potent, troubling images that are impossible to erase from the memory once they have played before your eyes. John finds himself addressed by “one
like a Son of Man,”
whose eyes burn like flame, out of whose mouth comes a two-edged sword, and who tells John: “I am Alpha and Omega [the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet], the Living One, who was dead—but, look, I live forever and ever, and hold the keys to death and
Hades.” This initial vision, obviously of Jesus, instructs John to write to the “seven churches of Asia” (among them Paul’s
Ephesus) and tell them what he will be shown. If the figure of the Son of Man is easy to identify, the symbolic visions that follow sometimes seem to defy interpretation.

John is vouchsafed a vision of heaven, where an immense number of
angels are gathered around God’s throne and where there hover
“four living creatures, all studded with eyes”
and twenty-four elders, all worshiping in song
“the One-seated-there,”
who is described not physically but in terms of light—
“like jasper and carnelian,” encircled by a rainbow “like
an emerald”;
and before the throne is spread a “crystal sea.” To the right of the One is a scroll “inscribed front and verso and sealed with seven seals.” John weeps “disconsolately because no one has been found worthy to open the scroll and read it.” One of the elders tells him, “Do not weep. Look,
the Lion
of the tribe of
Judah, the Root
of David, has triumphed, so he can open the scroll, breaking its seven seals.”