St Paul E-Book

Karen Armstrong

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 229

Beschreibung

St Paul is known throughout the world as the first Christian writer, authoring fourteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. But as Karen Armstrong demonstrates in St Paul: The Misunderstood Apostle, he also exerted a more significant influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the world than any other figure in history.It was Paul who established the first Christian churches in Europe and Asia in the first century, Paul who transformed a minor sect into the largest religion produced by Western civilization, and Paul who advanced the revolutionary idea that Christ could serve as a model for the possibility of transcendence. While we know little about some aspects of the life of St Paul - his upbringing, the details of his death - his dramatic vision of God on the road to Damascus is one of the most powerful stories in the history of Christianity, and the life that followed forever changed the course of history.

Leseprobe

St. Paul

ALSO BY KAREN ARMSTRONG

A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths

Islam: A Short History

Buddha

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

The Bible: A Biography

The Case for God

Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

This edition published by special arrangement with Amazon Publishing.

First published in the United States of America in 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Karen Armstrong, 2015

The moral right of Karen Armstrong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78239-813-4E-book ISBN: 978-1-78239-814-1Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78239-815-8eISBN: 978-1-78239-814-1

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Jenny Wayman

Contents

Introduction

1. Damascus

2. Antioch

3. Land of Japheth

4. Opposition

5. The Collection

Afterlife

Notes

St. Paul

Introduction

WHILE JERUSALEM WAS celebrating Passover c. 30 CE, Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea, ordered the crucifixion of a peasant from the tiny hamlet of Nazareth in Galilee. Passover was nearly always an explosive time in the Holy City, where Roman rule was bitterly resented. Pilate and Caiaphas, the high priest, had probably agreed to deal promptly with any potential troublemaker, so they would certainly have taken careful note of Jesus of Nazareth’s provocative entrance into the city a week earlier, riding on a donkey as Zechariah had prophesied and acknowledging the homage of the enthusiastic crowd, who shouted: “Liberate us, Son of David!” Was he claiming to be the longed-for Messiah, a descendant of the great King David who would free Israel from foreign bondage? As if that were not enough, Jesus had immediately charged into the temple and overturned the money changers’ tables, accusing them of making this sacred place a den of thieves. When he was nailed to his cross, “an inscription was placed over his head, citing the charge against him: ‘This is Jesus, the king of the Jews.’”1

Jesus had been born during the reign of the emperor Augustus (r. 31 BCE–14 CE), who had brought peace to a war-weary world by defeating rival Roman warlords and declaring himself sole ruler of the Roman Empire. The ensuing peace seemed little short of miraculous, and throughout his far-flung domains, Augustus was hailed as “son of God” and “savior.” But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly by an army that was the most efficient killing machine the world had yet seen; the slightest resistance met with wholesale slaughter. Crucifixion, an instrument of state terror inflicted usually on slaves, violent criminals, and insurgents, was a powerful deterrent. The public display of the flayed victim, his broken body hanging at a crossroads or in a theater and, all too often, left as food for birds of prey and wild beasts, demonstrated the merciless power of Rome.2 Some thirty years before Jesus’s death, after crushing the revolts that had broken out after the death of King Herod the Great, the Syrian governor P. Quinctilius Varus had crucified two thousand rebels at once outside the walls of Jerusalem.3 Forty years after Jesus’s death, in the last days of the Roman siege of Jerusalem (70 CE), starving deserters trying to flee the doomed city, averaging about five hundred a day, were scourged, tortured, and crucified. The Jewish historian Josephus, an eyewitness, recorded the horrifying spectacle: “The soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures; and so great was their number, that space could not be found for the crosses nor crosses for the bodies.”4

One of the most terrible things about crucifixion was that the victim was denied a decent burial, a disgrace that was insupportable in the ancient world in a way that is difficult for modern people to appreciate. The victim was usually left alive to be torn apart by carrion crows. In Judea, if the soldiers were persuaded to observe the Jewish law decreeing that a body be buried immediately after its demise, they might lay it in a shallow grave where it would soon be devoured by the wild scavenger dogs that prowled hungrily below the dying man. But from a very early date, Jesus’s followers were convinced that Jesus had been buried in a respectable tomb, and, later, the authors of the four gospels developed an elaborate story to explain how his disciples had persuaded the Roman authorities to permit this.5 This was a crucial element in the earliest Christian tradition.6

Jesus’s atrocious death would be central to the religious and political vision of Saul of Tarsus, the first extant Christian author. Paul was his Roman name. In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul. Jesus’s demonstration in the temple was not, as is often assumed, a plea for a more spiritual form of worship. As he rampaged through the money changers’ stalls, he quoted the Hebrew prophets who had harsh words for those who were punctilious in their devotions but ignored the plight of the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. For nearly five hundred years, Judea had been ruled by one empire after another, and the temple, the holiest place in the Jewish world, had become an instrument of imperial control. Since 63 BCE, the Romans had ruled Judea in conjunction with the priestly aristocracy, who collected the tribute extorted in kind from the populace and stored it in the temple precincts. Over the years, this collaboration had brought the institution into such disrepute that peasants were refusing to pay the temple tithe.7 At Qumran, beside the Dead Sea, Jewish sectarians were so disgusted with this corruption of their most sacred institutions that they had withdrawn from mainstream society, convinced that God would soon destroy the temple and replace it with a purified shrine not made by human hands. So Jesus was not the only person to regard the temple as a “den of thieves,” and his violent demonstration, which probably cost him his life, would have been understood by the authorities as a threat to the political order.

Galilee, the scene of Jesus’s mission in the north of what is now the state of Israel, was home to a society traumatized by imperial violence. Nazareth was only a few miles from the town of Sepphoris, which the Roman legions had razed to the ground during the uprisings after Herod’s death. Herod Antipas, the sixth son of Herod the Great, governed the region as the client of Rome and had financed his extensive building program by imposing heavy taxes on his subjects, laying claim to crops, livestock, and labor and expropriating between 50 to 66 percent of the peasants’ produce. Failure to pay the required tax was punished by foreclosure and confiscation of land, which swelled the estates of the Herodian aristocracy, as well as those of the bankers and bureaucrats who flocked into the region to make their fortunes.8 When they lost land that had been in their family for generations, the more fortunate peasants worked on it as serfs; others were forced into banditry or menial labor. This could have happened to Jesus’s father, Joseph the carpenter.

In about 28 CE, huge crowds had flocked from Judea, Jerusalem, and the surrounding countryside to listen to the fiery preaching of John the Baptist beside the River Jordan. Clad in rough camel’s hair that recalled the garb of the prophet Elijah, John had urged them to undergo baptism as a token of repentance to hasten the coming of the Kingdom that God would establish to displace the wicked rulers of this age. This was no purely spiritual message. When members of the priestly aristocracy and their retainers presented themselves for baptism, John denounced them as a “viper’s brood”; they would not be saved on the Day of Judgment simply because they were descendants of Abraham.9 In Israel, ritual immersion had long signified not only a moral purification but also a social commitment to justice. “Your hands are covered with blood,” the prophet Isaiah had told the ruling class of Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. “Wash, make yourselves clean. Take your wrongdoing out of my sight. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.”10 The sectarians at Qumran performed frequent ablutions, both as a rite of purification and as a political commitment “to observe justice to men” and “to hate the unjust and fight the battle of the righteous ones.”11 But John offered baptism not merely to an elite group but also to the common people. When these impoverished, indebted folk asked him what they should do, he told them to share what little they had with those who were even worse off — an ethic that would become central to Jesus’s movement: “Whoever has two shirts must share with him who has none, and whoever has food must do the same.”12

Jesus was among the people baptized by John; when he emerged from the water, it was said that the Holy Spirit descended upon him and a heavenly voice proclaimed: “You are my beloved Son in whom I delight.”13 After their baptism, all Jesus’s followers would later cry aloud that they too had become children of God and members of a community where everybody lived as equals. The Spirit would be crucial to this early movement; it was not a separate divine being, of course, but a term used by Jews to denote the presence and power of God in human life. When John was arrested by Antipas c. 29 CE, Jesus began his own mission in Galilee, “armed with the power of the Spirit.”14 Crowds thronged around him, just as they had come to John, to hear his startling message: “The Kingdom of God has already arrived.”15 Its coming was not scheduled in a remote future; the Spirit, the active presence of God, was evident now in Jesus’s miracles of healing. Everywhere he looked, he saw people pushed to the limit, abused, and crushed. “He felt sorry for them because they were harassed [eskulemenoi] and dejected [errimmenoi], like sheep without a shepherd.”16 The Greek verbs chosen by the evangelist had political as well as emotional connotations of being “beaten down” by imperial predation.17 They were hungry, physically sick, psychologically disturbed, and probably suffering from the effects of the hard labor, poor sanitation, overcrowding, indebtedness, and acute anxiety endured by the masses in any premodern agrarian economy.18 In Jesus’s parables, we see a society in which rich and poor are separated by an impassable gulf; where people are desperate for loans, heavily indebted, and preyed upon by unscrupulous landlords; and where the dispossessed are forced to hire themselves out as day laborers.19

It is almost impossible to construct an accurate picture of the historical Jesus. Paul, writing twenty years after Jesus’s death, is the earliest extant Christian writer, but he tells us next to nothing about Jesus’s earthly life. The four canonical gospels were written much later— Mark in the late 60s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s and 90s, and John c. 100, all four deeply affected by the Jewish War (66–73 CE) that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. Living in one of the most violent periods of Jewish history, so terrible that it seemed like the End of Days, the evangelists struggled to make sense of the hideous death toll, the massive devastation, and the widespread suffering and bereavement. As they did so, they seem to have introduced a fiery, apocalyptic element into their gospels that may not have been present in Jesus’s original teaching. Scholars have noted that Matthew and Luke both based their accounts not only on Mark’s narrative but also on another text that has not survived, which they quoted almost verbatim. Scholars call this lost gospel “Q,” from the German quelle (“source”). We do not know exactly when it was written, but because it does not refer at all to the Jewish War, it was probably put together in Galilee sometime before 66 and may even have been committed to writing as early as the 50s, at the same time Paul was dictating his own letters to the scribe. Unlike the canonical gospels, Q did not tell the story of Jesus’s life but was simply a collection of his sayings. In Q, therefore, we have a source that may bring us closer to what Jesus told the troubled people of Galilee.

At the heart of this proto-gospel is the Kingdom of God.20 This was not a fiery apocalypse descending from on high but essentially a revolution in community relations. If people set up an alternative society that approximated more closely to the principles of God recorded in Jewish law, they could hasten the moment when God intervened to change the human condition. In the Kingdom, God would be sole ruler, so there would be no Caesar, no procurator, and no Herod. To make the Kingdom a reality in the desperate conditions in which they lived, people must behave as if the Kingdom had already come.21 Unlike the state of affairs in Herodian Galilee, the benefits of God’s Kingdom were not confined to a privileged elite, because the Kingdom was open to everybody, especially the “destitute” and the “beggar” (ptochos) whom the current regime had failed.22 You should not invite only your rich neighbors to a feast, Jesus told his host at a dinner. “No, when you have a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.” Invitations must be delivered “in the streets and alleys of the town” and “the open roads and hedgerows.”23 It was a politically explosive message: In the Kingdom the first would be last and the last first.24

In this Kingdom, Jesus taught, men and women must love even their enemies, giving them practical and moral support. Instead of taking cruel reprisals for injury, as the Romans did, they must live according to the Golden Rule: “To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too; to the man who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and do not ask for your property back from the man who robs you. Treat others as you would like them to treat you.”25 The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer of the Kingdom, uttered by people who could only hope to have enough food for one day at a time, who were terrified of falling into debt and being hauled to the tribunal that would confiscate their small holdings:

Father— Holy be Your Name!— may your empire come!

Give us each day our daily bread;

And forgive us our debts, for we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into trial.26

There was nothing novel in Jesus’s teaching. The ancient laws of Israel had urged exactly this kind of self-help and mutual aid. According to what may be the earliest strands of the Torah (the Law of Moses), instead of being appropriated by an aristocracy, land should remain in the possession of the extended family; interest-free loans to needy Israelites were obligatory; contract servitude was restricted; and special provision was made for the socially vulnerable— orphans, widows, and foreigners.27 At the end of every seven years, all debts must be remitted and slaves set free. Wealthy Israelites must be openhanded with the poor and give them enough for their needs.28

Jesus dispatched his disciples— fishermen, despised tax collectors, and farmers— to implement this program in the Galilean villages. It was in effect a practical declaration of independence. His followers need not become serfs, laboring for the enrichment of others; they could simply take themselves out of the system and create an alternative economy, surviving by sharing whatever they had.29 The American scholar John Dominic Crossan believes that in Jesus’s instructions to these missionaries, we find the kernel of the early Jesus movement. When they arrived in a village, Jesus told them, they must knock on a door and wish the householder peace; if he was kind enough to admit them, they must stay in that house, working with their hosts and “sharing their food and drink: for the worker deserves his pay. . . When you enter a town and you are made welcome, eat the food provided for you, heal the sick there, and say: ‘The Kingdom of God has come upon you.’”30 The Kingdom became present whenever somebody had the compassion to admit a needy stranger to his home, when that stranger received food from another and then offered something in return. Peasants, Crossan explains, had two overriding anxieties: “Shall I eat today?” and “Shall I become ill and fall into debt?” In Jesus’s system, if one person had food then everybody could eat, and there would always be somebody to care for the sick. This interdependence and mutual sharing was both a Way of Salvation and a Way of Survival.31

This was not simply a social program masquerading as religion; premodern men and women had no concept of the secular as we know it. All the great spiritual traditions have insisted that what holds us back from enlightenment is selfishness and egotism; they have also said that a practical concern for everybody (not simply those who belong to your own class or those you find congenial) was the test of true spirituality. By making the heroic effort to share their meager resources, withhold their anger and desire for vengeance, and minister to others even when they were enfeebled themselves, Jesus’s and, later, Paul’s followers were systematically dethroning themselves from the center of their world and putting another there. They were thus achieving the selfless state of mind that others have sought in yoga, the aim of which is to extract the “I” from our thinking and behavior— the self-obsession that limits our humanity and holds us back from the transcendence known variously as Brahman, Dao, Nirvana, or God.

But Jesus knew that some people would hate this program and even regard it as seditious. He warned his disciples that it would set people against one another and split families.32 In Roman Palestine, anyone who followed him had to be prepared for the ordeal of the cross.33 His teachings were difficult: Not everybody wanted to love his enemies, turn his back on his family, if necessary, and leave the dead to bury the dead.34 The later portions of Q show that Jesus’s envoys encountered opposition and rejection, especially from those who feared or were reliant upon the Herodian system.35 When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem to proclaim the Kingdom and denounced the extortion and injustice of the priestly aristocracy, he was executed as a dissident.

The crucifixion could have spelled the end of the Jesus movement. But some members of Jesus’s inner circle, who seem to have fled Jerusalem and returned to Galilee after his arrest, had startling visions in which they saw his broken, bleeding body raised to new life, standing, vindicated, at the right hand of God’s throne in the highest place in Heaven. This, they concluded, meant that God had designated Jesus as the Messhiah, the “anointed” descendant of King David who would establish God’s Kingdom and inaugurate a reign of justice. The first to see the risen Jesus was Simon, also called Peter or Cephas (“Rock”); next Jesus appeared to a group of disciples known henceforth as the Twelve and then to a crowd of more than five hundred of his followers; finally he appeared to his brother James.36 An out-pouring of the Spirit accompanied these extraordinary visions, which empowered these frightened men to go public, uttering inspired prophecy and performing miracles of healing, convinced that this was the new age predicted by the prophet Joel:

I will pour out my spirit on all mankindYour sons and daughters shall prophesyYour old men shall dream dreams,And your young men see visions.Even on the slaves, men and women,I will pour out my spirit in those days.37

In the past, prophets had usually been aristocrats attached to the royal court, but now the Spirit was inspiring humble members of society— fishermen, carpenters, artisans, and peasants— to inform their fellow Israelites that Jesus, the Messiah, would soon return to inaugurate God’s Kingdom. His resurrection was no mythical event of the distant past; Jesus’s exaltation had been witnessed by hundreds of people who were still very much alive and well.

In ancient times, the Hebrew term messhiah had applied to anyone— a king, priest, or prophet— who had been doused with oil in a ceremony that appointed him to a divinely ordained task. But when Israel came under imperial rule, the title began to acquire a wholly new significance, as people looked forward to a different kind of king, a son of David endowed with righteousness and understanding, who would restore Israel’s lost dignity. According to the Psalms of Solomon, the Anointed One would liberate the Jewish people, expose corrupt officials, drive all foreign sinners out of the land, and reign in Jerusalem, which would once again become a holy city, attracting nations “from the ends of the earth.”38 This text was written in Jerusalem during the first century BCE but had been translated into Greek and was widely read in the diaspora, where Jews living under Roman occupation also looked forward to the coming of the Messiah (Christos in Greek). This was, of course, potentially seditious; it would be even more subversive if the man revered as the Christ had been executed by a Roman governor.

Q mentions neither Jesus’s death nor his resurrection; perhaps the Q community could not bear to think about his crucifixion and either did not know about the resurrection appearances or disapproved of them. They continued their mission but seem to have disappeared during the mayhem of the Jewish War. For the Twelve, however, the death of Jesus was not something to be glossed over, because it had saving power. In Judaism, a martyr was said to have died for the “sins” of Israel. This did not mean the personal faults of individual Israelites but the failure of the people as a whole to observe the divine commandments and carry out their social responsibilities— failings that God had punished with political catastrophe. His readiness to die for these principles made the martyr a role model. Jesus’s martyrdom, therefore, was a spur to action and would inspire continued effort to hasten the Kingdom.

So after their life-changing visions, the Twelve left Galilee and returned to Jerusalem, where, according to the prophets, the Messiah would inaugurate the new era.39 In the crowded slums of the lower city, the Twelve preached the good news to tradesmen, laborers, porters, butchers, dyers, and donkey drivers—“the lost sheep of the House of Israel.”40 In an urban setting that was quite alien to these uprooted peasants, they tried to reproduce the alternative communities Jesus had established in the villages of Galilee:

The whole community of believers was united in heart and soul. Not one of them claimed any possessions as his own; everything was held in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and all were held in high esteem. There was never a needy person among them, because those who had property in land or houses would sell it, bring the proceeds of the sale and lay them at the feet of the apostles to be distributed to any who were in need.41

The Twelve also began to preach to Greek-speaking immigrants from the diaspora, who had settled in Jerusalem to live a more authentic Jewish life. One of these diaspora Jews was Paul, who, Luke says, came from Tarsus in Cilicia. At first he was hostile to the Jesus movement, but eventually he would take the momentous step of bringing the gospel not only to the lost sheep of Israel but to the pagan nations as well.

I published my first book about Paul in 1983, at the very beginning of my career. The First Christian accompanied a six-part television series, which I wrote and presented. At the beginning of this project, I had thought that this was my chance to show how Paul had damaged Christianity and ruined the original, loving teaching of Jesus. Paul is an apostle whom many love to hate; he has been castigated as a misogynist, a supporter of slavery, a virulent authoritarian, and bitterly hostile to Jews and Judaism. When I started to study his writings in a first-century context, however, it did not take me long to realize that this was an untenable view. In fact, as I followed in his footsteps during the filming, I grew not only to admire but also to feel a strong affinity with this difficult, brilliant, and vulnerable man.

One of the first things I discovered was that Paul did not write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. Only seven of them are judged by scholars to be authentic: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. The rest— Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, known as the Deutero-Pauline letters— were written in his name after his death, some as late as the second century. These were not forgeries in our sense; it was common in the ancient world to write under the pseudonym of an admired sage or philosopher. These posthumous epistles tried to rein Paul in and make his radical teachings more acceptable to the Greco-Roman world. It was these later writers who insisted that women be subservient to their husbands and that slaves must obey their masters. It was they who spiritualized Paul’s condemnation of the “rulers of this world,” claiming that these were demonic powers rather than the ruling aristocracies of the Roman Empire.

Interestingly some feminist theologians find this argument a cop-out; they seem to feel a strong need to blame Paul for the long tradition of Christian misogyny. But it seems irrational for a scholar to close her eyes to critically persuasive data that suggest that Paul could not have written these later texts. Hating Paul seems more important than a just assessment of his work. In fact, as recent research has made clear, Paul took a radical stance on such issues in a way that makes him extremely relevant today. First, scholars such as Richard A. Horsley, Dieter Georgi, and Neil Elliott have shown that, like Jesus, Paul was a lifelong opponent of the structural injustice of the Roman Empire. In the premodern world, all civilizations without exception were based on a surplus of agricultural produce, which was forcibly