Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 10

1. I therefore agree with the several scholars who have insisted that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, and I suggest that this makes best sense of all the evidence—as well as providing a location from which he wrote not only his letter to Philemon but also the other Prison Letters, including Ephesians itself. That letter, as I shall suggest presently, is a circular written to churches in the area and is therefore couched in more general terms than normal. But it was also in Ephesus that Paul experienced what we might call the “Corinthian crisis.” This had several elements, and though it may now be impossible to ascertain all the details of what had happened, the key points stand out. For our purposes, what really matters is the effect all this had on Paul himself and the way he responded to it. Because these two things are going on at the same time—trouble in Ephesus itself and trouble in relation to Corinth—we will have to move backward and forward between the two in order to understand why Paul felt as if he had received the death sentence.

- How would you describe the magnitude of complexity for Paul here?

2. But the dark powers do not give up so easily. Something terrible happened that resulted not only in imprisonment, but in crushing despair. Since Luke has foreshortened his account here as elsewhere, we cannot be sure exactly when this took place. The positive, early phase of Paul’s time in Ephesus ends with the burning of the magic books. That is when Paul decides to revisit Greece, going overland through Macedonia and then down to Corinth; so he sends Timothy and Erastus on ahead. All Luke says then is that Paul “spent a little more time in Asia,” and that may be when everything suddenly went horribly wrong. On balance, though, I think it more likely that the catastrophe happened after the riot that Luke so graphically describes in Acts 19:23–41. Luke says that Paul was able to leave town “after the hue and cry had died down,” but that hue and cry might well have included not only the riot he describes, one of his splendid set pieces, but also the time that he does not describe, the disaster that struck, perhaps in the aftermath of the riot, just when Paul thought he had once again escaped real trouble. If you take on the shadowy powers that stand behind the corruption and wickedness of the world, you can expect the struggle to take unexpected and very nasty turns.

- How do you imagine Paul’s reaction to this sudden change?

3. This must mean—this can only mean—that when Paul goes to a dinner with Jewish friends (or when he invites them to share his own meal), they will eat kosher food, and he will do the same. But it must mean—it can only mean—that when Paul goes to dinner with non-Jewish friends, he will eat whatever they put in front of him. What would then make the difference is “conscience”—not Paul’s, but that of anyone else who might be offended, who might be led back into idolatry. This must have been a much harder path to tread than that sketched in the apostolic letter issued after the Jerusalem Conference. There, simple abstinence from all relevant foods was enjoined. But Paul has seen that this is not only unnecessary; it violates the foundational principles of Jewish belief itself. His own pragmatic solution must have seemed not just paradoxical, but perverse to some. 

Think, for instance, of a Jewish family in Corinth who had shared a meal with Paul and watched him keep all the Jewish customs, only to find out that the same week he had dined with a Gentile family and eaten what they were eating. One might imagine a certain surprise in the other direction too, though the Gentile family would most likely just shrug their shoulders and see no harm in it. But, once again, what Paul is doing in writing this letter is teaching the Corinthians to think as Messiah people; he is building on the foundation of Israel’s scriptures, interpreting them afresh in the light of the crucified and risen Messiah himself.

-How have you experienced similar resistance to cherished traditions?

4. Love is not just a duty. Paul’s point is that love is the believer’s destiny. It is the reality that belongs to God’s future, glimpsed in the present like a puzzling reflection, but waiting there in full reality for the face-to-face future. And the point is that this future has come forward into the present time in the events involving Jesus and in the power of the spirit. 

That is why love matters for Paul—more even than “faith,” which many have seen as his central theme. Love is the present virtue in which believers anticipate, and practice, the life of the ultimate age to come.

- Why is this conclusion so profound…both then and now?

5. It was at this point that the enemy struck and struck hard. I explained earlier why I am convinced that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus. Some suggest that this occurred at least twice. We know enough about the sort of things that happened to Paul from one place to another to guess what may have landed him in jail. In Philippi it was an exorcism that ruined a business whose owners said that Paul was teaching Jewish customs illegal for Romans, in other words, a spiritual battle with economic consequences framed as a religious problem with political implications. In Thessalonica he was accused of turning the world upside down by saying that there was “another king.” In one place after another, Jewish horror at the message of a crucified Messiah—and, we may suppose, at the teaching that this Messiah was now welcoming non-Jews without circumcision—led to opposition, which was sometimes augmented by local hostility from non-Jews who may have had no special sympathy for the Jewish people, but who saw Paul as a social and cultural threat. Sometimes, in other words, opposition was aroused because pagans saw him as a dangerous kind of Jew; sometimes it was because Jews saw him as flirting dangerously with paganism. The irony, surely not wasted on Paul, did not make it any easier for him when facing violence.

- Why was the gospel such a huge threat? What did it require?

6. For reasons that will become clear, I think Paul interpreted his imprisonment as the revenge of the powers into whose world he had been making inroads. He was used to confronting synagogue authorities; he knew how to deal with Roman magistrates. He knew Jewish law and Roman law just as well as they did. He was easily able to turn a phrase and win a rhetorical point and perhaps a legal one too. But in this case, he had sensed that something else was going on. The forces ranged against him were not simply human. He had stirred up a hornets’ nest with his powerful ministry in Ephesus. 

Think of all those magic books going up in smoke. Just as Jesus warned his followers not to fear those who could merely kill the body, but rather to fear the dark power that could wreak a more terrible destruction, so Paul was learning that human authorities, though important in themselves, might sometimes be acting merely as a front for other powers that would attack through them. And, though he had taught, preached, and celebrated the fact that in his death Jesus had defeated all the dark powers and that in his resurrection he had launched God’s new creation, that dogged belief, seen from the cold and smelly depths of a prison, with no light at night, flies and vermin for company, and little food in his stomach, must have been tested to the uttermost and beyond. Hence the despair.

- How does your experience with despair compare to Paul’s?

7. I think that, like a plant in harsh winter, Paul in prison was forced to put his roots down even deeper than he had yet gone into the biblical tradition, and deeper again, still within that tradition, into the meaning of Jesus and his death. The roots slowly found moisture. From the depth of that dark soil, way below previous consciousness, he drew hope and new possibilities. The fruit of that labor remains to this day near the heart of Christian belief. I think, in other words, not only that the four Prison Letters were all written from Ephesus, but that the writing of them grew directly out of the struggle Paul had experienced. Their vision of Jesus the Messiah, sovereign over all the powers of the world, was Paul’s hard-won affirmation of the truth he had believed all along but had never before had to explore in such unpromising circumstances. And I think that as he pondered, prayed, and heard in his mind’s ear phrases and biblical echoes turning into poetry, he began to long once more to share this vision with those around him. And with that longing and that prayer he found he was, at an even deeper level than he had known before, trusting in the God who raises the dead. The poems of Philippians 2 and Colossians 1 and the sustained liturgical drama of the first three chapters of Ephesians all bear witness to this celebration—not of Paul’s faith or stamina, but of the victory of God and the lordship of Jesus. 

As he says in 2 Corinthians 4, right after a passage that belongs very closely with the poem in Colossians 1, “We have this treasure in earthenware pots, so that the extraordinary quality of the power may belong to God, not to us.” That, I think, was what was going on while Paul was in prison. Some have suggested that this whole experience was in effect a “second conversion,” in which Paul finally learned the humility that had previously eluded him. I do not subscribe to this view. Things are more complicated, and indeed more interesting, than that. But I do think that his long-held practice of Jesus-focused prayer, taking the ancient scriptural poems and patterns and finding Jesus at their heart, was crucial in helping him to find his way out of despair and back into hope. Christology and therapy go well together, even if, like Jacob, an apostle may limp, in style and perhaps also in body, after the dark night spent wrestling with the angel.

- Like Paul, how have you arrived at a deeper level of humility?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 9

1. Aquila and Priscilla (in Paul’s letters he abbreviates her name as Prisca) were a Jewish couple who came from Pontus, on the Black Sea shore of ancient Turkey. They had, however, been living in Rome until Claudius banished the Jews for rioting. It is hard to pin down exactly what had gone on, or indeed when. Suetonius gives no date for the incident, but the convergence of other evidence makes it likely that it happened around AD 49, and that Aquila and Priscilla arrived in Corinth—adding to the many Roman businesspeople already there—not long before Paul did himself. Like him, they were tentmakers. They seem not only to have struck up an instant friendship, but to have become sufficiently close for Paul to lodge in their house, share in their business, and also travel with them to Ephesus. By the time Paul wrote Romans, they were back in Rome again. The way Luke tells the story of their first meeting and going into business together makes the moment seem full of hope and fresh possibility.

- Think back to when you began worshiping at St. Mark.  Who do you recall took the initiative to welcome you and to extend friendship?

2. As for the non-Jewish world—well, the suggestion that a Jew might be the new “Lord” over all other Lords was bad enough, but a crucifiedman? Everybody knew that was the most shameful and horrible death imaginable. How could such a person then be hailed as Kyrios? And if the answer was (as it would be for Paul) that God had raised this man from the dead, that would merely convince his hearers that he was indeed out of his mind. Everybody knew resurrection didn’t happen. A nice dream, perhaps—though many would have said they’d prefer to leave the body behind for good, thank you very much. Anyway, there’s no point living in fantasy land.

- Where does this mindset exist today?  How do we address it?

3. This reminds us, as Paul is writing from Corinth, just what a challenge he faced in city after city. It is hard for any Christian worker today in all but the newest mission fields to imagine this. After two thousand years, most people in most cultures have at least a sketchy idea of what a Christian way of life might be, at least in theory and allowing for cynicism about actual Christian practice. But when Paul arrived in a new town, there was no expectation. Nobody had the slightest idea that there was a new way of life suddenly available, let alone what it might look like. Paul had to model it from scratch. He had done so, and he was naturally overjoyed that it had worked; they were copying him, not least in facing up to suffering. He was overflowing with joy and clearly regarded the Thessalonian church as a pinnacle of his life’s work so far.

- What are the challenges of modeling the Christian life today?

4. There are three matters about which Paul is eager to say more. Each of these will be important—and more than important—in Corinth, and here we get an early taste of them. It looks as though these are issues that were bound to come up precisely because the early Christian worldview was so radically different from anything people had imagined before. If we make a list of three topics beginning with “sex” and “money,” we might expect the third to be “power,” but in this case it is the parousia, the “appearing” of Jesus.

- How does Paul characterize each of these for Christians?

5. So—back to the Thessalonians’ question—what should one think about believers who had died before the Lord’s return? It is significant that Paul is writing about this while in Corinth, because it is in the two letters to Corinth later on that he gives the fullest account of these important matters. But here in 1 Thessalonians he makes a start. Speaking pastorally, Paul distinguishes between two different types of grief. He tells the Thessalonians that they do not have the hopeless kind of grief, the bleak, dark horror of loss with no mitigating circumstances or beliefs, but rather a hopeful grief, which, although there is still the tearing, wrenching sense of loss, has within it the strong and clear hope of reunion. Paul doesn’t say exactly when the reunion will occur, because that’s not where he wants the focus to be. The point is that all will in the end be together “with the Lord.”

- How do you distinguish between these two types of grief personally?

6. Followers of Jesus, then, must get used to living with a form of theological jet lag. The world all around is still in darkness, but they have set their clocks for a different time zone. It is already daytime on their worldview clock, and they must live as daytime people. This is one of the greatest challenges Paul faced: how to teach people who had never thought eschatologically that time is going somewhere and they must learn how to reset their watches; how to teach Jews who had thought the ultimate kingdom was going to come all at once that the kingdom had already broken in to world history with Jesus, but that it was not yet consummated and wouldn’t be until his return and the renewal of all things. This is a more familiar challenge to us in the modern West, though it isn’t always thought of in this way.

- What opportunities await for our light to shine in the darkness?

7.  He had one more message for them, again reminding us that the church was from the first a community of mutual support. Here, within twenty years of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, was a “family” already running into the problem of people taking advantage of generosity, of agapē! Paul’s instruction here is brisk: those who won’t work shouldn’t eat. This no doubt made the point at the time, but for us the important thing is perhaps what Paul and the Thessalonians were all taking for granted: that the followers of Jesus were to live as “family,” with all that this entailed in mutual support. Paul stressed the responsibilities of the individual: “Do your own work in peace” (as Paul himself had done, deliberately setting the example), “and eat your own bread.” The modern Western church has taken individualism to an extreme, and there are great strengths in focusing on the challenge to every single church member, both to believe and to work. But for Paul this did not undermine, but rather gave appropriate balance to, the more foundational reality, that those who belonged to the Messiah were “brothers and sisters.”

- How do we find appropriate balance regarding these issues today?

8. While he was traveling—on the sea, on the roads—he prayed. When he tells people that they should “never stop praying,” this can hardly be something that applies to everybody else but not to himself. But how do you go on praying all the time? Is it simply ceaseless chatter, a stream-of-consciousness monologue (or indeed dialogue) with the God who through the spirit was as present as breath itself? This may have been part of it, but reading back from the letters Paul wrote over the next three or four years I think we can be much more precise and focused. At several points in his letters he seems to be adapting Jewish prayers and liturgies to include Jesus in recognition of the new life that had erupted into the ancient tradition. 

- How has our Lutheran liturgy provided you with prayer material?

9. It is easy as we follow the outward course of Paul’s life to forget that the inward course was just as important. But unless we step to one side from his relentless journeyings and imagine him praying like this, praying as he and his friends break bread in Jesus’s name; praying as he waits for the next ship, for the turn of the tide, for the right weather to sail; praying for sick friends and for newly founded little churches; praying as he makes his way toward what may be a wonderful reunion with old friends or an awkward confrontation with old enemies—unless we build this into the very heart of our picture of this extraordinary, energetic, bold, and yet vulnerable man, we will not understand him at all. In particular, we will not understand what happened next.

- To what extent does your prayer life mimic Paul’s?

- How is your prayer life different?

Paul, by N.T. Wright

Chapter 8

1. So when Paul was brought to the Areopagus, probably in late 50 or early 51, and when he began by declaring that temples to the gods were a category mistake, we should not suppose that he was engaging a philosophers’ debating society. The Areopagus was a court. Paul was on trial. It was a dangerous moment. It could have gone badly wrong. He has no leisure, physical or mental, to play the detached philosopher. It is, however, utterly characteristic of the man that he would seize the opportunity not merely to defend himself—though that is what he is doing throughout the speech—but to do so in such a way as to challenge, with considerable rhetorical skill, the basic assumptions of the Greek worldview.

- What do you imagine ran through Paul’s mind at this opportunity?

2.There is evidence that philosophers were banished from cities because of their teaching. In particular, Athens itself had staged the trial of Socrates (399 BC), seen from that day to this as one of the most important events in the history of philosophy. What was Socrates’s crime? Corrupting the young and introducing foreign divinities. Since there were political motives as well behind Socrates’s trial, we cannot be entirely sure what this meant, but the memory lived on. In Athens of all places, conscious of its long and distinguished history and of the association of that history with the goddess Athene and the victory over the Persians by which her preeminent status had been assured, to have an outsider like Paul bringing strange new teachings would have been much more than a mere philosophical curiosity. He would have been a potential threat to society, to stability, to the worship of the divinities by whose beneficence the city lived, moved, and had its being. He had to be investigated.

- In what ways was Paul a potential threat to the Athenians?

3. To the philosophers in the marketplace, Paul seemed a mere oddity. His essentially Jewish view of the One God and a created universe and his specifically Christian variation on this simply didn’t fit. They were scornful: What can this man be on about, they wondered, scattering words around like someone sowing seeds in every direction? The one thing they picked up on was that he was talking about someone called Jesus and someone or something called “Anastasis”—the Greek word for “resurrection.” They assumed “Jesus and Anastasis” were a new pair of divinities, and “Anastasis,” a feminine noun in Greek, was Jesus’s consort; the two were a divine couple, rather like Isis and Osiris (though there the female is always mentioned first). The result, though, was clear. To the philosophers, Paul seemed to be proclaiming foreign divinities. The echoes of Socrates’s trial were obvious. That is why they took him to the Areopagus.

- Was this Paul’s strategy in order to gain a broader audience?

4. It is, above all, Jewish thought that speaks of the utter transcendence and yet the intimate personal presence of the One God. Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep. Paul has absorbed the ancient wisdom of Israel deep into his heart. Thus equipped, he can look out on local inscriptions, monumental temples, philosophical debates, and poetic fancies with equanimity. This is Paul the Jew at the top of his game.

- What do Greeks and Jews have in common here?

5. This complex man, then, carries in his own person the deeply biblical and Jewish worldview, which has been brought into startling new focus by Jesus and the spirit, but not abandoned or marginalized. From that point of view, he can travel the world of Rome and think the thoughts of Greece without fear or shame. In particular, his message of Jesus’s resurrection, without which his whole life and work would mean nothing, contains within itself the news that Jesus’s crucifixion was a victory, not a defeat. His denunciation of idols and temples in his Areopagus speech is not simply Jewish-style polemic, though it is that as well. 

It is the position of someone who believes that all the would-be divine powers in the world have been dethroned, shamed, led in someone else’s triumphal procession as a defeated rabble. The victory of Jesus on the cross, as we have seen, has a deeply intimate meaning for Paul: “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me.” But this is bound up tightly with its cosmic meaning: “He stripped the rulers and authorities of their armor,” he writes to the Colossians, “and displayed them contemptuously to public view, celebrating his triumph over them in him.” He is the Messiah’s man, and that includes all the other elements we have just listed.

- How does the intimacy of the cross transcend pagan idolatry?

6. All this is on display, then, as he addresses the graybeards in the senior court of Athens. His main point ought now to be clear: “What I am saying to you may sound ‘new,’ but it is in fact hidden within your own culture. It is well hidden; in fact, you have covered it up with foolish and unnecessary superstructures. But though the specific news about Jesus and the resurrection may be a shock to your system”—it was, and they laughed at him for it—“the underlying truth that it unveils is a truth about the world and its One Creator God to which, at its best, your culture dimly and distantly bears witness.” 

Paul is not trying to begin with Athenian cultural symbols and build up a philosophical argument that will arrive at Christian truth. He is managing at one and the same time to rebut the charge of “proclaiming foreign divinities” and to sketch a worldview, a metaphysic, in which it might just make sense to say that the One God has unveiled his purpose for the world by raising Jesus from the dead. He is a Sherlock Holmes figure, explaining to the puzzled police chiefs that their different theories about the crime all have some sense to them, but that there is a different overall framework, under their noses all the time but never observed, that will solve the whole thing.

- How brilliant was this game plan?!  Why did it work?

7. Here, then, comes Paul’s thoroughly Jewish and messianic view of God’s future. Like some other Jewish writers of the time and in tune with a good deal of other early Christian evidence, Paul is echoing Psalm 2. The nations of the earth can rage, plot, and strut their stuff, vaunting themselves against the true God; but God will laugh at them and announce that he has established his true king, his “son,” who will call the nations to account. “Now therefore,” says the psalm, “be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.” Again we sense Paul’s subtext. Athens, with its symbol of the owl, prided itself as the home of wisdom. No, Paul implies, true wisdom would consist in recognizing that the One Creator God has now unveiled his purpose for the world before all the nations. That purpose is focused on the Jesus who was crucified and raised and marked out thereby as God’s son, the one through whom God would fulfill his ancient promises and put the whole world at last to rights. Paul has thus worked his way around at last to explaining “Jesus and Anastasis”: it is Jesus and resurrection! These are new ideas, of course, and “foreign” in the sense of coming from the Jewish world, not being homegrown in Athens, and indeed flying in the face of the old slogan from Aeschylus. But at a deeper level, Paul is implying that this is not foreign at all; it is, rather, the reality to which so many signposts had been pointing.

- How did Paul’s conclusion go over with Athenians?

8. People have sometimes sneered at Paul for a failed bit of philosophical theology. Hardly anyone was converted—though one member of the court, Dionysius, came to faith along with a woman named Damaris and others. But that wasn’t the point. What mattered is that Paul went out from their presence.He got off.If this was a trial, he was acquitted. Jesus and Anastasis might be new, strange, and even ridiculous to these senior Athenians. But Paul had convinced them that the heart of his message was something to which their own traditions, read admittedly from a certain angle, might all along have been pointing.

- Why was Paul’s acquittal such an important event here?