Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 5

1. The early Christians did not focus much attention on the question of what happened to people immediately after they died. If that question came up, their answer might be that they would be “with the Messiah” or, as in Jesus’s remark to the dying brigand, that they might be “with him in paradise.”  But they seldom spoke about it at all. They were much more concerned with the “kingdom of God,” which was something that was happening and would ultimately happen completely, “on earth as in heaven.” What mattered was the ultimate restoration of the whole of creation, with God’s people being raised from the dead to take their place in the running of this new world. Whatever happened to people immediately after death was, by comparison, unimportant, a mere interim. And however much it might seem incredible, the early Jesus-followers really did believe that God’s kingdom was not simply a future reality, though obviously it had a strong still-future dimension. God’s kingdom had already been launched through the events of Jesus’s life. Unless we get this firmly in our heads, we will never understand the inner dynamic of Paul’s mission.

- How might Paul have envisioned this final restoration of creation?

2. It would be easy, in the midst of that dense summary, to miss a central point. Like most Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus had long believed that the nations of the world had been enslaved by their own idols. They worshipped nongods, and in Jewish thought, rooted in the scriptures, those who worshipped idols became enslaved to them, trapped in a downward spiral of dehumanization. This is what Paul means by “the power of the satan”—the word “satan” is the Hebrew term for “accuser,” used popularly and often quite vaguely to refer to the dark power that appears to grip, distort, and ultimately destroy human societies and individuals. And Paul believed that in his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth had overcome the power of darkness.Something happened when Jesus died as a result of which “the satan”—and any dark forces that might be loosely lumped together under such a label—no longer had any actual authority. (Paul explains at various places in his writings how this had been achieved; but what matters for our understanding of his mission is thatit had happened, that the dark power had been defeated.) Paul’s mission was not, then, simply about persuading people to believe in Jesus, as though starting from a blank slate. It was about declaring to the non-Jewish nations that the door to their prison stood open and that they were free to leave. They had to turn around, away from the enslaving idols, to worship and serve the living God.

- What was the false power of idolatry then...and now?

3. First, if Paul believed and taught that with Jesus and his death and resurrection something had happened, a one-off event through which the world was now irrevocably different, so he also believed that, when he announced the message about Jesus (the “good news,” the “gospel”), a similar one-off event could and would take place in the hearts, minds, and lives of some of his hearers. Paul speaks about this one-off event with the term “power”: the power of the gospel, the power of the spirit in and through the gospel, or the power of “the word of God.” These seem to be different ways of saying the same thing, namely, that when Paul told the story of Jesus some people found that this Jesus became a living presence, not simply a name from the recent past. A transforming, healing, disturbing, and challenging presence. A presence that at one level was the kind of thing that would be associated with a divine power and at another level seemed personal—human, in fact. This then became the focal point of what we said before: people turned away from the idols they had been serving and discovered, in Jesus, a God who was alive, who did things, who changed people’s lives from the inside out.

- How does this life-changing power resonate with your life?

4. And, with this, Saul appears to come of age. He is not now simply a teacher or prophet working within the church as in Antioch. He is out on the front line and finding sudden energy and focus to meet a new kind of challenge. He emerges not only as the new spokesman, but with a new name. Luke changes gear effortlessly: “Saul, also named Paul.” From now on this is how he will be referred to and, in Acts and the letters, how he will refer to himself. Why the change? “Saul” is obviously a royal name, that of the first king of Israel, from the tribe of Benjamin. Saul of Tarsus, conscious of descent from the same tribe, seems to have reflected on the significance of the name, quoting at one point a passage about God’s choice of King Saul and applying it to his own vocation. Some have speculated that he deliberately set aside this name, with its highborn overtones, in order to use a Greek word connected to the adjective paulos, “small, little”—a sign, perhaps, of a deliberate humility, “the least of the apostles.” Well, perhaps. Others have supposed that he simply chose a name better known in the wider non-Jewish world, shared even by the governor in the present story. Like most Roman citizens, Saul/Paul would have had more than one name, and it is quite possible that he already possessed the name “Paul” and simply switched within available options. It is worth noting as well, however, that in Aristophanes, known to most schoolboys in the Greek world, the word sauloswas an adjective meaning mincing, as of a man walking in an exaggeratedly effeminate fashion. One can understand Paul’s not wishing to sport that label in the larger Greek-speaking world. One way or another, Paul he would be from now on.

- What do you appreciate most about this name change?

5. This was, of course, dramatic and revolutionary. Paul had sat through many synagogue addresses in his youth, and he must have known that people simply didn’t say this kind of thing. He wasn’t giving them a new kind of moral exhortation. He certainly wasn’t offering a new “religion” as such. He was not telling them (to forestall the obvious misunderstanding about which I have spoken already) “how to go to heaven.” He was announcing the fulfillment of the long-range divine plan. The Mosaic covenant could only take them so far. The story that began with Abraham and pointed ahead to the coming Davidic king would, so to speak, break through the Moses barrier and arrive at a new world order entirely. No Jew who had been brought up on the Psalms (not least Psalm 2, which Paul quotes here and which other Jews of his day had studied intensively) could miss the point. If the new David had arrived, he would upstage everything and everyone else—including the New Rome and its great emperor over the sea. This was both exciting and dangerous. Small wonder that many of the synagogue members, both Jews and proselytes, followed Paul and Barnabas after the close of the synagogue meeting. Either this message was a complete hoax, a blasphemous nonsense, or, if it was true, it meant the opening up of a whole new world.

- What individuals & groups were most affected by this message?

6. I think it far more likely that the poor physical condition to which Paul refers is the result of the violence to which he had been subjected. In the ancient world, just as today, the physical appearance of public figures carries considerable weight in how they are assessed. Someone turning up in a city shortly after being stoned or beaten up would hardly cut an imposing figure. The Galatians, however, had welcomed Paul as if he were an angel from heaven or even the Messiah himself. As Paul would later explain, the bodily marks of identification that mattered to him were not the signs of circumcision, but “the marks of Jesus”—in other words, the signs of the suffering he had undergone. When, later on, he faces suffering at other levels as well—including what looks like a nervous breakdown—he will, through gritted teeth, explain that this too is part of what it means to be an apostle.

- Where are “the marks of Jesus” visible in your life and in others?

7. For Paul and Barnabas, what mattered was that Israel’s God, the creator of the world, had done in Jesus the thing he had always promised, fulfilling the ancient narrative that went back to Abraham and David and breaking through “the Moses barrier,” the long Jewish sense that Moses himself had warned of covenant failure and its consequences. And if that had now happened, if the Messiah’s death had dealt with the “powers” that had held Jew and Gentile alike captive and his resurrection had launched a new world order “on earth as in heaven,” then the non-Jewish nations were not only free to turn from their now powerless idols to serve the living and true God, but their “uncleanness”—the idolatry and immorality that were always cited as the reason Jews should not fraternize with them—had itself been dealt with. The radical meaning of the Messiah’s cross was the reason, on both counts, that there now had to be a single family consisting of all the Messiah’s people.

- Where has the Church failed and succeeded at this agenda?