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?