Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 2

1. The historian and biographer can study, and should study so far as possible, the levels of motivation that are available, not least the implicit narratives that run through a culture or through the mind of a political leader or an isolated individual. Something like that was attempted before the buildup to the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces and their allies in 2003. Two enterprising American writers produced a survey of the popular cultural figures (in movies, TV shows, and comic strips) listed as favorites by presidents over the previous century.2 Again and again the presidents favored Captain America, the Lone Ranger, and similar characters’ scripts, in which heroes act outside the law to restore peace to beleaguered communities. The narrative seemed worryingly familiar. That wasn’t psychoanalysis, but it was a study of motivation. We can in principle inspect the implicit narratives that drive people to particular actions.

- Where have you witnessed such “narratives in action” of late?

2. If I say that Saul of Tarsus was brought up in a world of hope, many readers may misunderstand me. “Hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. The optimist looks at the world and feels good about the way it’s going. Things are looking up! Everything is going to be all right! But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God. This God had made the world. This God had called Israel to be his people. The scriptures, not least the Psalms, had made it clear that this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end, to be true to his promises, to vindicate his people at last, even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering.

- Where, in your life, are you optimistic and where are you hopeful?

3. “Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.

- Where are you currently practicing hope in your life? Why?

4. When the One God finally puts away the idolatry and wickedness that caused his people to be exiled in the first place, then his people will be free at last, Passover people with a difference. That was the ancient hope, cherished not only by Saul of Tarsus but by thousands of his fellow Jews. By no means were all of them as “zealous” as Saul was. Few, perhaps, had his intellectual gifts. But they were mostly aware, through scripture and liturgy, of the ancient divine promises and of the tension between those promises and the present realities. One way or another, it was a culture suffused with hope. Hope long deferred, but hope nonetheless. That is the great story in which Saul and his contemporaries were living. That is the narrative they had in their heads and their hearts. That story gave shape and energy, in a thousand different ways, to their aspirations and motivations. It explains both hope and action. This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

- How has this biblical ancient hope shaped your hope in Jesus?

5. To explain what this meant in the language of psychology would be like trying to copy a Titian with a child’s crayons. To understand the explosion that resulted, we need history, we need theology, we need a strong sense of the inner tensions of the first-century Jewish world and the zealous propagators of Jewish culture. This moment shattered Saul’s wildest dreams and, at the same split second, fulfilled them. This was—he saw it in that instant—the fulfillment of Israel’s ancient scriptures, but also the utter denial of the way he had been reading them up to that point. God the Creator had raised Jesus from the dead, declaring not only that he really was Israel’s Messiah, but that he had done what the One God had promised to do himself, in person. Saul had been absolutely right in his devotion to the One God, but absolutely wrong in his understanding of who that One God was and how his purposes would be fulfilled. He had been absolutely right in his devotion to Israel and the Torah, but absolutely wrong in his view of Israel’s vocation and identity and even in the meaning of the Torah itself. His lifelong loyalty was utterly right, but utterly misdirected. He had a zeal for God, but had not understood what the One God was up to. Everything was now focused on the figure from whom there streamed a blinding light, the figure who now addressed Saul as a master addresses a slave, the figure he recognized as the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Heaven and earth came together in this figure, and he was commanding Saul to acknowledge this fact and to reorient his entire life accordingly.

- What do you imagine went through Saul’s mind at this moment?

6. So when Christian tradition speaks of the “conversion” of Saul, we need to pause. In our world, as we saw earlier, we normally apply that term to someone who “converts” from one “religion” to another. That was not the point. Not for one second did Saul cease to believe in the One God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was just that...well, what had happened was...how could he put it? Twenty years or so later he would write of glimpsing “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah.” That was one way of putting it. There would be other ways too. This wasn’t about “religion,” whether in the ancient or the (very different) modern sense. It was about Jesus. About Jesus as the point at which—exactly as the martyr Stephen had claimed—heaven and earth were now held together, fused together; it was about Jesus as being, in person, the reality toward which the Temple itself had pointed.

- What is the difference between being religious and following Jesus?

7. Jesus himself had used the image of baptism to speak of his approaching death. Paul would later make it clear that this dramatic plunging into water and coming up again spoke in powerful and effective symbolic language about the dying and rising of Jesus and about the new world that had come to birth through those events. To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one. Insofar as it marked out members of the family, it functioned somewhat like circumcision for a Jew, except of course that women were included as well. Equally, it was a bit like a slave being branded (so that the slave was now under a new master), though of course slaves and free alike were baptized. The important thing was that, having been baptized, one now belonged to the Messiah. Saul was now a “Messiah man,” shaped in the pattern of the Jesus who had summed up the divine purposes for Israel.

- How does your baptism into Christ shape your present and future?

8. Something else happened at the same time: Saul received Jesus’s own spirit. The fourth and last point of immense significance in Ananias’s visit to Straight Street is that Saul was promised the gift of the spirit, and everything in his subsequent life and writings indicates that he believed this had happened then and there. The story in Acts doesn’t say that Saul spoke in tongues or prophesied. The idea that things like that had to happen for the spirit’s gift to be genuine is a much later fiction. What Acts offers instead is the remarkable statement that Saul went at once to the synagogue in Damascus and announced that Jesus was the son of God (a theme to which we shall return in due course). There was a new power coupled with a new sense of direction.

- How does your faith in Jesus provide a new sense of direction?

9. But what happens when half the people in the town don’t want this new king? Saul discovered the answer to that all too soon, not that he would have been particularly surprised. The local Jewish community in Damascus was shocked at the sudden turnaround of this hotheaded young man, transformed from persecutor to proclaimer. Not just shocked; they were deeply offended (as of course Saul himself had been) at the suggestion that Israel’s history would reach its climax in a crucified messiah. Not all Jews in this period, so far as we can tell, believed in a coming messiah in the first place. Those who did hope for such a figure envisaged the messiah as a warrior hero. He would be a new David; he would overthrow the wicked pagans, restore the Temple to make it fit for Israel’s God to come back to at last, and establish a worldwide rule of justice and peace. Jesus of Nazareth, as everybody knew, had done none of those things. Saul of Tarsus could produce all the scriptural “proofs” he liked from his long years of study. But the synagogue in Damascus was not going to be convinced.

- Where do you and other Christians today face such opposition?