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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
The apostle Paul was kind of a jerk. He was arrogant and stubborn. He called his opponents derogatory, racist names. He legitimized slavery and silenced women. He was a moralistic, homophobic killjoy who imposed his narrow religious views on others. Or was he? Randolph Richards and Brandon O'Brien explore the complicated persona and teachings of the apostle Paul. Unpacking his personal history and cultural context, they show how Paul both offended Roman perspectives and scandalized Jewish sensibilities. His vision of Christian faith was deeply disturbing to those in his day and remains so in ours. Paul behaved badly, but not just in the ways we might think. Take another look at Paul and see why this "worst of sinners" dares to say, "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ."
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PAULBEHAVINGBadly
WAS THE APOSTLE A RACIST, CHAUVINISTJERK?
For my daughter-in-law, Anastasha Richards
For my daughter, Eliza O’Brien
CONTENTS
PREFACE
When our wonderful editor and friend, Dr. Al Hsu, approached us about writing Paul Behaving Badly, we were excited. This should be easy. What could go wrong? Two fine books have been written in recent years that are similar to this one: God Behaving Badly by David Lamb and Jesus Behaving Badly by Mark Strauss. The way has been paved for us. We just have to walk in it.
Then it occurred to us that Paul wasn’t God or Jesus. Obviously. More to the point, Jesus was perfect and God is, well, God. But Paul was a mortal human. He was the one who wrote: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom 7:15). Before you even begin reading the other two books, you feel somehow that everything is going to be okay. Surely neither God nor Jesus ever really behaved badly, right? But it is very possible that Paul did. After all, he’s only human.
We encourage you to stay with us while we investigate the case against Paul. We ask that you trust us. We love God’s Holy Word and believe it to be 100 percent true. We also believe that the Bible will stand up to a good hard look and thorough investigation. Because we hold these convictions, we do our best to make compelling arguments against Paul in every chapter. Some may feel we’ve been unfair to him or that we’re abusing Scripture or being irreverent. We assure you that our motives are pure. Bear with us. When it is done, we think you’ll be satisfied.
We (Randy and Brandon) represent different generations but we both grew up in the evangelical church. While it is en vogue these days to bash the church for all it gets wrong, we were and are deeply blessed by faithful men and women who taught us to love God and revere his Word. We both have dedicated our lives to teaching the Bible and theology to the next generation of believers. Randy has been teaching since 1988 in evangelical colleges in Texas, Indonesia, Arkansas and now Florida. Brandon, a younger scholar, has been an editor and writer since 2007 and has taught in universities in Illinois and Arkansas. We both currently teach Bible and theology in colleges that hold a high view of Scripture. Both of us have served as pastors in churches around the country. This book flows out of our desire to equip Christians who don’t have extensive biblical or theological training to think critically and faithfully about the Scriptures and their meaning for us in the twenty-first century.
This is our second book together. Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes was our first attempt to bring current scholarly research into conversation with issues of interest to Christians outside the academy. We hope we have had the same success in this volume. In both of our books, we include personal stories because we are convinced stories communicate truth. But this book isn’t about us; it’s about Paul—that brash, bold apostle to the Gentiles.
Introduction
THE PROBLEMSWITH PAUL
The apostle Paul spent a lot of time defending himself in court and evading arrest. He was hauled before the Roman authorities on several occasions for behaving badly—for disrupting temples and fomenting unrest, charges taken very seriously in the first century. Three times (that we know of) Jewish leaders hatched a plot to assassinate Paul for speaking against the temple in Jerusalem or against the law of Moses. On at least one occasion, Jews and Gentiles plotted together to snuff out Paul (Acts 14:1-7). Jews and Gentiles didn’t often see eye to eye, but apparently members of both groups considered the apostle from Tarsus a menace that needed to be silenced. Paul summarizes a few other instances when he faced disciplinary action for his bad behavior:
Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones. . . . I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger . . . from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; . . . and in danger from false believers. (2 Cor 11:24-26)
We might find this record of abuses admirable if we didn’t have the nagging feeling that Paul brought some of it on himself. Sure, the Jewish leaders also plotted to have Jesus executed, but when Jesus appeared before Pilate there was “no basis for a charge against him” (Jn 18:38). It is true the twelve disciples are all said to have died martyrs’ deaths at the hands of Gentiles, but they managed to preach and teach until the end of their lives without being constantly harassed by Jewish officials. In other words, Paul has the dubious distinction among the earliest Christians of irritating everyone at some point—and sometimes everyone all at once. Persecution can be the consequence of faithfulness, but it can also be evidence of orneriness.
I (Brandon) understand where Paul’s opponents were coming from. There was a time while I was in college that I didn’t much care for the apostle Paul. I believed his writings were Scripture, that they were true and divinely inspired, so I didn’t question whether Paul was right about the theology he propounded. But, boy, did he rub me the wrong way. He struck me as arrogant about his superior spirituality. “If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh,” Paul wrote to the Philippians, “I have more.” He considered himself “a Hebrew of Hebrews” and, “as for righteousness based on the law, faultless” (Phil 3:4-5). Want to know how to live the Christian life successfully? “Follow my example” (1 Cor 11:1) and “become like me” (Gal 4:12). Goodness. Aren’t we called “Christ followers” and not “Paul followers”? In the words of Paul, I heard the arrogance of a handful of church leaders I knew, each of them insisting they were “God’s man” and that their opinions were therefore divinely inspired. Disagree with me, I could easily imagine Paul saying, and you’re disagreeing with God.
Paul also had a way of belittling folks that made me bristle. He called the believers in Galatia “foolish” (Gal 3:1). In the same letter he even boasted about confronting a brother publicly: “When Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Gal 2:11). And this from a Christian man who commanded another group of believers: “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Rom 12:18). I found it difficult to harmonize the example of Paul with the example of Jesus. Where Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28), Paul said, “Expel the wicked person from among you!” (1 Cor 5:13). Where Jesus said, “Turn . . . the other cheek” (Mt 5:39), Paul said that if anyone disagreed with him, “Let them be under God’s curse” (Gal 1:8-9).
Reading Paul, it was hard to imagine myself as a faithful Christian if he was the model of faithful Christianity. None of that confrontation and bravado is in my constitution. I didn’t denounce Paul, but I sure didn’t like him.
I (Randy) had other problems with Paul. He intimidated me. I wouldn’t admit it, but I just preferred to study John. John seemed simpler. I didn’t find John confusing. I certainly agreed with Peter when he said that Paul’s letters “contain some things that are hard to understand” (2 Pet 3:16). When I entered PhD studies on the New Testament, I avoided taking any courses on Paul for as long as I could because Paul said that we aren’t under the law, but then he used the law to make his point. Understanding Paul was hard.
Matters became more complicated for each of us when, deeper into our theological studies, we discovered that there is no shortage of people who totally reject Paul’s perspective on the Christian life. We thought Paul was arrogant, but others believed he was a misogynist and that his view of women was responsible for generations of gender inequality and the patriarchal subjugation of wives and daughters. We thought he was insensitive, but others considered him a racist and anti-Semite. The charge certainly seemed to stick since Christians have quoted Paul to justify their persecution of Jews and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in America. We felt he failed to embody the meekness and gentleness of Jesus. Others claimed he had invented Christianity. Jesus went around preaching, “The kingdom of heaven is near.” Paul preached about blood and faith and resurrection. Some learned critics argued Paul’s emphasis on sin and atonement departed radically from Jesus’ simple gospel of peace and forgiveness. Not only that, they claim, but this departure from Jesus’ teaching was no accident. The preeminent Jesus scholar Albert Schweitzer wrote of Paul, “If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and had taught His disciples the ‘Our Father.’ Even where they are specially relevant, Paul passes over the words of the Lord.”1
One critic of Paul’s has argued that Paul reinforces the dominant, middle-class values of Western society, whereas Jesus’ teaching is too radical for most to appreciate:
Unlike Jesus of Nazareth, however, who was a Liberal who built up the weak and the poor, while tearing down the mighty, Paul of Tarsus was a Conservative who did a great deal of putting down the weak: women, slaves, Jews, homosexuals and the poor, while empowering those in power. . . . Paul has proven himself the dream theologian of Conservatives, who for centuries has provided them any number of bible passages to help white, European, male, prosperous, heterosexual “Christians” keep the rest of mankind under their feet.2
It seems to us these charges go too far. Our distaste for Paul’s personality did not pose any real threat to our Christian faith. But is it possible to dismiss all these charges as merely issues of Paul’s personality? After all, he does tell wives to submit to their husbands and slaves to obey their masters (Eph 5–6). That seems anti-woman and pro-slavery. Paul does say the Jews killed Jesus, that “they displease God and are hostile to everyone” (1 Thess 2:15). That certainly seems anti-Semitic. But if you believe, as we do, that Paul’s writings are God-breathed, then acknowledging that Paul thought poorly of women means acknowledging that God thinks poorly of women; admitting Paul was a racist means admitting that God is a racist; believing that Paul and Jesus preached two different gospels implies that God inspired two different gospels. We are not willing to agree to those things.
We are, however, willing to admit that the charges against Paul have merit. We cannot merely harrumph and dismiss charges of immorality, misogyny and racism as trivial. So what we propose to do in the remainder of this book is to put Paul on trial as people have done for two thousand years. Each chapter compiles the common charges against Paul—that he was rude and arrogant, a chauvinist and racist, a prude and a homophobe, a hypocrite and a twister of Scripture. We have collected the evidence and make the case against Paul on all the charges as ardently and honestly as we can. It turns out these charges aren’t empty slander. Then we switch sides. We take the charges seriously by responding reasonably and not being dismissive. Specifically, we mine Paul’s historical and cultural context in an effort to hear what he has to say and interpret what he means in a way that would make sense to his original audience. But this exercise isn’t as straightforward as it may seem.
THE CHALLENGEOF INTERPRETATION
One of the challenges of interpreting Paul is that his writings are what scholars call “occasional writings.” That doesn’t mean that Paul only wrote periodically. It means that when he wrote, it was with a specific audience and situation in mind. His writings were specific to a particular occasion (hence, “occasional”). This wouldn’t necessarily pose a problem for us if we had all the information to reconstruct the occasions for which Paul wrote. If we knew, for example, what questions people had asked him, what crises he was responding to, what books were on his desk when he penned his thoughts, well, the work would be half done for us. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to all that information.
What we have to work with are Paul’s letters compiled in the New Testament. These letters are half a correspondence. In some cases, they are Paul’s responses to letters he received from others. But we don’t have their letters with their questions and concerns, so we’re listening in on only one side of a private conversation. We don’t know the exact dates all the letters were composed, so we can’t say with absolute confidence what situations or events may have shaped Paul’s thoughts on a subject. So then we must weigh all the evidence and make educated guesses. Like all good readers of Paul, we try to recreate the world in which Paul was ministering and writing, and interpret what he had to say in that context.
And, of course, another challenge we face when interpreting Paul is that we bring to the project all our own presuppositions, cultural assumptions and personal baggage. We discovered in the process of writing that Paul is indeed guilty of behaving badly, but not always in the ways one might first imagine. Sometimes it seems Paul is guilty of behaving badly in the eyes of his Jewish, Roman and (broadly speaking) Gentile original audiences. He frequently offended their sensibilities, challenged their assumptions and exposed their misperceptions. We are usually okay with that. Other times, though, Paul appears guilty of behaving badly in the eyes of our contemporary secular culture. We are usually less okay with this. When Paul offends modern sensibilities, breaking our cultural virtues and exemplifying our capital vices, he embarrasses us in front of our cultured friends and family. He becomes the uncle we can’t disown but can’t in good conscience endorse. And then sometimes Paul is guilty of behaving badly in the eyes of the church, both in his day and ours. It is in these moments that Paul causes us the most grief. Not even his fellow Christians were or are always sure what to make of him.
So, Is Paul’s View God’s View?
If Paul’s letters are inspired—if they are the Word of God—then we can’t just sweep them under the rug as “the way the ancients thought.” We wouldn’t want to dismiss Paul’s instructions, but we also recognize that ancients thought differently. God rebukes Job for questioning him when Job doesn’t even understand the world around him: Job is ridiculed for not knowing where the earth’s footings are (Job 38:6) and for never visiting the storerooms where God keeps the snow (Job 38:22). God’s Word also states: “The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises” (Eccles 1:5). Today, Christians still consider Job and Ecclesiastes to be the Word of God, so we say that God worked within the ancients’ understanding of the cosmos. We don’t want to find ourselves like the Christians who opposed Galileo, so we allow Job and the ancients to live in their world. We need to allow Paul the same opportunity.
In the pages that follow, we aim to hold Paul’s feet to the fire about these important issues. We think he’d approve. Paul admired the Bereans for searching the Scriptures to confirm the truth of his message after they had given him an honest listen (Acts 17:11). In the final assessment, the portrait of Paul that will emerge from this investigation is complex and nuanced. He was a real human being with real emotions and deep convictions. To be perfectly honest, you may not be comfortable with Paul’s position even after it’s been clarified. You might even react like many of Paul’s early Christian hearers. If Paul causes an uproar in your church, it wouldn’t be the first time (Acts 15).
PAULIN HIS TIMEAND OURS
In the introduction of nearly every biography, authors note that their subjects were products of their time. The impulse is a good one because it is an effort to take context seriously. If you want to understand someone’s motives and the significance of their beliefs or actions, you have to consider them in light of the age and culture in which they acted. That’s why so many biographies use “the life and times” in their titles. You can’t understand a person without also understanding their context.
In that spirit we should offer a brief overview of Paul’s life, but since entire books have been dedicated to that subject, let us instead highlight a few items.3 Where one was raised is more important than it might seem, for it determines one’s heart language and thus one’s worldview. Based on the best reading of Acts 22:3, evangelical scholars think Paul was born in Tarsus but raised in Jerusalem. Thus his perspective would be that of a Palestinian Jew, a Judean, and from a family of Pharisees (Acts 23:6). Paul received the highest level of education that traditional Jewish culture allowed, studying under the premier rabbi of the time, Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). He spoke Hebrew and Aramaic, was a rising star in Jerusalem and led the movement opposing Christianity (Acts 22:4).
Having said that, it is unwise to draw too strong a distinction between Palestinian Judaism and the broader Greco-Roman culture. Let’s use a modern analogy. Many committed Christians in our churches would assert they are not like the “pagan culture” of general America. In many religious ways, that is true. Yet in many other ways, it is not true. They speak “American” (a dialect of English) and have a general American viewpoint on such things as money, politics (“freedom is worth fighting for”), marriage, careers, leisure and what constitutes the good life. Most of them have the same kind of education as other Americans. Likewise, Paul shared many things in common with the broader culture of his day. He spoke Greek. He used “pagan” money and transportation systems. He likely went to plays and city games.4 He wrote letters like his contemporaries did. He used Greco-Roman rhetoric and quoted their philosophers (Acts 17:28). He was at home in a typical Roman city, not just with the streets and city layout but also with how government functioned. He was a Roman citizen and probably a member of the tentmakers trade guild.
On the one hand, then, Paul was different—uniquely gifted and called by Christ. On the other hand, he was a first-century Jewish denizen of the Roman Empire. We certainly shouldn’t expect him to act like a twenty-first-century American. We all know that Paul was not like us. We should expect him to be a man of his time. Nonetheless, determining just what that means is sometimes harder than we think.
That’s why a key part of our approach to the subject matter in this book is to dig deeper into Paul’s contemporary context. Sometimes, for example, we will be frustrated with Paul because he seems too conservative for us—because he’s not saying enough about the inherent value of women or slaves. As we get to know Paul’s historical context we will discover that his compatriots were often frustrated with him because he was too progressive on those issues; he went way further in his support of women and slaves than any of his contemporaries. In short, we will see that Paul is guilty of behaving badly in every age. Even though his opinions do not change with time, our perceptions of them do change.
Now the danger in calling people products of their time is that we risk giving too much credit to the influence of a particular culture. We can’t assume that someone’s historical context will explain away all his or her behavior. Humans no doubt absorb a great deal of the zeitgeist of their era, but they also are free to transcend it. Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi were both men of their time—men of the same time. It goes without saying that they left quite different legacies behind them. So we may discover after studying a person’s historical context that they are even more enigmatic than we imagined. We may discover that Paul, to be specific, is not only out of sync with our time, but that he was also out of sync with his time. We believe that historical context can tell us a lot about where a person’s worldview begins, but it does not necessarily determine where that person’s worldview will end. We will appeal to context throughout this book as essential for understanding Paul in his own words, but in the process we will work hard to make sure we allow Paul to be the revolutionary he was. This makes him hard to pin down at times. We think he’d be happy to hear that.
PAULON A PEDESTAL
There are those who dislike Paul, who view Paul as so much a product of his time that his opinions are now outdated and outmoded. That whatever value his viewpoint may have had, it has passed its expiration date. They deem him irrelevant and out of step with the times.
However, there are others who think too highly of Paul. Western Christians tend to run straight to Paul when they want the “New Testament” answer to a tough question. They don’t ask Jesus. They ask Paul.
It is important to remember that Paul is not the Son of God. His writings point to the Son of God. It is important to remember that while Paul, by divine inspiration, wrote the words of God, he was not himself the Word of God. Jesus is alive. Paul is dead (biologically speaking). But too often we elevate Paul to a position of honor just short of where we set Jesus. We believe that Paul’s writings are inspired, but we do not believe Paul’s personality was inspired. One of our goals in this book is to humanize Paul—to remind us that he was a human being with all the foibles and potentials we all carry.
So with that we invite you to start this journey with us. We ask you to read with an open mind, prepared to better understand one of history’s most influential and controversial figures.
one
PAUL WASKIND OF A JERK
Charles Monroe Sheldon considered Christ the supreme model of Christian behavior. That’s why the Topeka pastor wrote the novel In His Steps (1896), a story about a minister who challenges his congregants to judge all their actions by first asking themselves, “What would Jesus do?” The title is borrowed from Peter’s words in 1 Peter 2:21, and the book is one of the best-selling publications of all time. The subtitle became a popular catchphrase a century later (WWJD) and challenged a new generation of Christians to follow the example of Jesus.
Jesus himself said, “Follow me,” so we expect our ministers and mentors to encourage us to be more like Jesus. All of us should be more like Jesus. Christians expect the disciples of Jesus to say, as Peter did, “Follow the example of Jesus,” but it takes a special kind of chutzpah for a disciple to say, “Follow my example.”
Paul had chutzpah.
“Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters,” he encourages the Philippians (Phil 3:17, emphasis added). At the very least, he claimed an intermediary role between Jesus and other Christians. “Follow my example,” Paul exhorts, “as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). This from the man who challenges the Romans to “not think of yourself more highly than you ought” (Rom 12:3). It may be that Paul’s first-century readers had no problem with this instruction from their spiritual mentor. Maybe it didn’t sound brash to people then, but few modern Christians could summon the self-confidence to say these words about their own life: “Follow my example.” Coming from someone else, even from the pen of an apostle, the advice sounds arrogant.
In another letter, Paul tells the Galatians that God “set me apart from my mother’s womb” (Gal 1:15). We might not blink at that statement. We typically assume that all of us are chosen in our mother’s womb, but that’s not what Paul meant. The Bible only identifies a handful of people as set apart by God from before birth: Samson, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Jesus. God specially appointed all of them for a specific role in redemptive history. That’s what Paul had in mind. He was like those guys. He was exceptional.
Statements like these—follow my example because I’m exceptional!—have earned Paul a reputation for being kind of a jerk. The truth is, this is just the beginning. Paul asserted his opinions, even when he was wrong. He bossed around churches and bulldozed other leaders. In 2014, the famed German scholar Gerd Lüdemann noted Paul’s “streak of arrogance and a tendency to vacillate,” and said Paul’s claims of “authority reinforced his sense of infallibility and often led him to bully any who disagreed.”1 While we don’t think Paul ever vacillated, he does seem to bully. This description may bring to mind certain celebrity pastors who seem immune to rebuke, or leaders from your past (and ours) who delivered their opinions from on high as if they were speaking the very words of God.
Elsewhere Paul curses his opponents (Gal 1:8). Some people try to rehabilitate Paul’s reputation by exclaiming, “I’m sure that’s not what he really meant.” But that really is what he meant. He repeats it just to make sure we got it: “I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!” (Gal 1:9). Paul claims to be superior to many of his contemporaries in keeping Torah (Gal 1:14), claims to speak in tongues more than all the Corinthians combined (1 Cor 14:18) and claims to have worked harder than all the other apostles (1 Cor 15:10). Then he curses some others in Corinth (1 Cor 16:22). Taken in total, his conduct has caused at least one modern Christian to claim, “No Christian genuinely seeking the righteousness of God should imitate a man like Paul.”2
APOSTLETO THE GENTILES— AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!
Apostles held special status among the earliest Christians. In the New Testament, the term “apostles” usually designates Jesus’ twelve closest disciples. Throughout the Gospels and Acts, this core group is often identified by a collective name: the Twelve (see for example Mt 26:20; Mk 9:35; Lk 9:12; Jn 6:67; Acts 6:2). These men made up Jesus’ inner circle, his most intimate friends. To the masses Jesus spoke in parables, but to the Twelve he explained in detail the mysteries of the kingdom of God (Mk 4:10-11). They were the only people who saw Jesus calm the stormy sea, walk on water and break the bread of the Last Supper. Even after Jesus ascended to heaven, the apostles were forever affected by their experience with him in life. Everybody noticed. Even the enemies of the apostles, Israel’s leaders who tried to suppress the Gospel, noticed: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13, emphasis added). Having been with Jesus marked them as special.
When heresy and schism threatened the unity of the young church in the next generation after all the apostles were dead, church leaders appealed to the authority of the apostles to give church members confidence in their pastors and in the Scriptures. Clement of Rome, one of the first bishops of Rome who was possibly a companion of the apostle Paul (Phil 4:3), argued that the leaders of the local churches could be trusted because they were appointed by the apostles. The pastors were appointed by the apostles, the apostles were appointed by Christ, Christ was sent by God (1 Clement 42:1-4; 44:1-3). In the next couple of generations, “apostolicity” was an important criterion for a book to be considered part of the canon of Scripture. You could trust the content of the books written by folks like Matthew and John because they had been there. They had witnessed Jesus’ miracles and heard his teaching with their own ears. John himself asserts: “That . . . which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 Jn 1:1). So the earliest Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). Christian tradition inherited its reverence for the apostles from the New Testament itself.
There are times Paul seems not to care about all that. Paul was not one of the Twelve. He did not follow nor interact with Jesus before his crucifixion. Gerd Lüdemann observes, “He did not consider the life of Jesus of Nazareth to be an important topic. Paul never met Jesus personally and had little familiarity with his deeds and teachings.”3 This is overstating the case, though it is true Paul rarely quotes Jesus. And the only sense in which Paul ever spoke with Jesus was on the Damascus road, yet in that interaction Jesus told Paul off. Paul dismisses the fact that the other apostles had walked with Jesus; they knew him “according to the flesh” (2 Cor 5:16 ESV). He never expresses any disappointment that he didn’t follow Jesus through the villages of Galilee. Instead he brags about learning at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3).
Instead of honoring the apostles, Paul insisted that he was just as authoritative as any of them. He says the apostles were “reputed to be pillars” (Gal 2:9 NASB)—an expression not intended to be complimentary. He asserts “I consider myself not in the least inferior to the most eminent apostles” (2 Cor 11:5 NASB). He doesn’t consider the apostles’ proximity to Jesus to have elevated their status in the least. Luke thought it was important that he had received the message from those who had been there. He was careful to compose a faithful account “just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Lk 1:2). It mattered to Luke if you were an eyewitness. It didn’t matter to Paul that he wasn’t.
Time and again Paul emphasizes that “his gospel” is precisely that: his own. “I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it” (Gal 1:12). Following his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul’s “immediate response was not to consult any human being” (Gal 1:16). When Paul finally interacted with the Christian leaders in Jerusalem a decade later (Gal 2:1), he insists that they “added nothing to my message” (Gal 2:6). How arrogant it seems that Paul would be so unwilling to submit himself to the teaching of the apostles when others did—and on the grounds that he didn’t have to because he was an apostle too!
So confident was Paul in his understanding of the gospel that he felt free to challenge the Twelve. Peter, for example, was happy to eat with Gentiles in Antioch. But when “certain men came from James,” Peter withdrew from the Gentiles and he influenced other Jews to do the same (Gal 2:12). On the face of it, Peter appears guilty of little more than being cliquish. But Paul lays into him. When he saw that Peter was “not acting in line with the truth of the gospel” (Gal 2:14) Paul “opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Gal 2:11). And he did it “in front of them all” (Gal 2:14). In the process of calling Peter out, he delivers a theological treatise on the law and the gospel. He presumed to correct Peter’s gospel—a gospel Peter knew firsthand because he had walked with Jesus.
Imagine This
Paul is the newest staff member at the booming five-thousand-member church you started. He wasn’t there when the church was planted. He wasn’t part of the first meetings in your living room. He never had to load and unload the sound equipment in the hot sun at the rented high school. And yet he is so confident in his opinion that he corrects you publicly on stage and in your face. Or, Paul is the new employee you’ve hired at your company who has a fancy degree and no experience, but is certain that he’s doing it right and you’re doing it wrong. I wonder if it bothered Peter to be corrected in front of everyone. It certainly would have irritated me. I don’t mind being corrected, but there is a right way to do it and then there is a way that makes you a jerk.
Peter may have been wrong. Like all of us at times, Peter may have momentarily stepped off the path of discipleship. But show some respect. Peter was there when Jesus was arrested. Peter was there when Jesus fed the five thousand. Peter was the spokesperson at Pentecost. For goodness sake, Peter was chosen to be one of the three to witness the transfiguration! In a storm, Peter walked on water (Mt 14:29); Paul, in a storm, had to swim (Acts 27:42-44). Jesus commanded his disciples, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private” (Mt 18:15 NASB, emphasis added). Paul didn’t do that. He confronted Peter publicly and to his face. He shamed a highly regarded shepherd of God in front of the flock.
PAULON A PEDESTAL
Evangelicals often give Paul extra credit and justify his behavior because we have him on a pedestal that is just an inch or two shorter than Jesus. It’s an honest temptation since Paul wrote most of the New Testament. Even so, Paul’s contemporaries did not share that temptation. Luke, the writer of Acts and occasional traveling companion of Paul, obviously admired Paul but he still went out of his way to remind us that Paul wasn’t perfect. Many popular Greco-Roman stories of the day included a “divine-man” character. But Luke wants everyone to know that Paul wasn’t half-man, half-god. Paul wasn’t Hercules, so Luke tells two stories in which his readers would have immediately recognized that Paul was wrong.
In the first, Paul has a falling out with Barnabas, “a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means ‘son of encouragement’)” (Acts 4:36).
Notice that Luke starts the story by reminding us of Barnabas’s excellent pedigree and nickname that all of us would admire. Barnabas was the first disciple to vouch for Paul after Paul’s “conversion” from persecutor to propagator of the gospel (Acts 9:27). In Acts, Barnabas always acts with integrity (Acts 11:22-25). On the second missionary journey, Barnabas wants to take John Mark along. Paul disagrees, because he considers John Mark a quitter (Acts 15:37-38). The disagreement becomes so strong that Barnabas and Paul split. Who was right, Barnabas or Paul? Our instinct might be to justify Paul—he’s the hero, right? Not at the time. The first readers of the book of Acts would know John Mark had written a Gospel. Many would know that Mark was a later companion of Paul (Col 4:10; Philem 24) and that Paul considered Mark personally useful (2 Tim 4:11). In other words, while we modern readers give Paul the benefit of the doubt, in the first century that honor would have gone to John Mark and Barnabas. Besides, if you had a problem with Barnabas, you were the problem. He was a saint.
Luke records another episode in Acts that illustrates his willingness to point out Paul’s faults. It also illustrates an insight into Paul’s personality—that being wrong didn’t stop Paul from being confident. When Paul wanted to travel to Jerusalem, the Christians in Tyre urged Paul “through the Spirit” not to go to Jerusalem (Acts 21:4). When Paul left Tyre, he traveled toward Jerusalem to Caesarea. While he was there, the prophet Agabus received a vision from the Holy Spirit and walked all the way from Judea (thirty miles!) to tell Paul not to go to Jerusalem. The apostles who traveled with Paul to Caesarea told him not to go to Jerusalem. The Caesarean believers told Paul not to go to Jerusalem.
Paul decided to go to Jerusalem. He simply “would not be dissuaded” (Acts 21:14). In his defense, he gave a very spiritual-sounding explanation for ignoring everyone’s advice. “I am ready not only to be bound,” Paul said, “but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 21:13). That’s good, because when he arrived in Jerusalem, he was promptly arrested.
Let’s avoid letting Paul off the hook on which Luke clearly puts him. Luke was careful with his words. He tells us Paul said that the Spirit wanted Paul to go to Jerusalem, and then Luke clearly states that the Spirit said otherwise: “Through the Spirit they urged Paul not to go on to Jerusalem” (Acts 21:4). If we want to keep Paul on his pedestal, we must reverse what Luke said. We think Paul was right and the others were wrong, but Luke says the opposite.4
The moral of the story is if you think the Holy Spirit is saying one thing and everyone else disagrees—particularly if everyone else includes famous prophets, the Twelve, and all the Christians along the Mediterranean coast—you should at least consider the possibility that you might have misunderstood the Spirit. But Paul, it seems, sometimes trusted his own instincts and interpretations more than those of others. Luke had no problem pointing out Paul’s stubbornness and misdirected certainty. We shouldn’t gloss over it either.
PAULINE IRONY: PEACEIN THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY
By the way we’ve described Paul so far (which is to say, in his own words), it is difficult to imagine that this confrontational Paul is the same man who exhorted other Christians, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (Rom 12:18). It is difficult to imagine that this obstinate Paul is the same man who urged the believers in Ephesus, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph 5:21). It is difficult to imagine that the boastful Paul who tirelessly defended his apostleship is the same man who lamented, “For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor 15:9). It would be simple enough to conclude that Paul was merely a hypocrite, that he taught one way and behaved another. (We address that charge in chapter seven.)
Instead, let us suggest that Paul was, like all of us, a complex personality and that he admittedly had a great capacity for stubbornness. Paul received the harshest discipline a synagogue member could receive: thirty-nine lashes. (Synagogue members couldn’t be executed, that is, receive forty lashes.) If Paul quit the synagogue, he wouldn’t have received the lashes. Yet he accepted the punishment in order to remain a member so he could keep preaching the gospel in synagogues. What’s more amazing is that he takes the beating more than once (2 Cor 11:24). Talk about stubborn! The stubbornness that got him into trouble was the same stubbornness that helped him persevere in the face of all manner of hardships.
At the same time that Paul could be stubborn, he also had a great capacity for humility. In Acts 21, just after Paul demonstrates his stubborn resistance to his colleagues’ warning not to enter Jerusalem, Paul also demonstrates his willingness to submit to the leadership of other apostles. News about Paul reached Jerusalem before he did. Jewish leaders there, known as “Judaizers,” were convinced that Paul had abandoned the law of Moses and that he was encouraging faithful Jews to do the same. The gossip wasn’t actually far off the mark. Paul had just written to the Romans: “Christ is the end of the law” (Rom 10:4 NRSV). Nonetheless, the rumors were slanderous, for Paul was accused of teaching apostasy.
