Paul: A
Short Introduction
1 How
important was Paul?
Two figures dominate the pages of the New Testament. The
first is Jesus,
the second, Paul. Although Paul
himself would undoubtedly have
protested that even to link his
name with that of Jesus in this way was
improper – since he was the ‘slave
of Christ’, whose mission was to proclaim
Jesus Christ as Lord – it is nevertheless true that Paul’s
influence
on the development of what came to
be known as ‘Christianity’ was
immense. Thirteen of the
twenty-seven documents that make up the New
Testament claim to be written by him, and the larger part of
the Acts of
the Apostles is devoted to relating
the story of Paul’s missionary endeavours.
Paul is the central figure in the New Testament between the
middle
of Acts and the end of Philemon.
Why was Paul so important? It is, in fact, worth reframing
that question
and asking whether he was as
important in his own lifetime as we
suppose. Or was his later influence
due rather to the devotion of some of
those who were close to him, and
who carefully preserved his letters –
perhaps even wrote, in his name,
letters for the churches of the next generation,
saying what they believed would
have been his message for their
particular situations? And since
Paul is so clearly Luke’s ‘missionary
hero’, the impression we gain from
Acts – that the spread of the
Christian gospel throughout the Mediterranean world was due
almost
entirely to Paul and his
fellow-workers – may be a distorted one. What
role did other Christians play in
the spread of the gospel? How important
a figure was Paul in the councils
of the Church of his day? To many
of his fellow-Christians, he seems
to have been – to borrow Paul’s own
phrase – something of ‘a thorn in the flesh’. To the outside world, he was
totally insignificant – except on those occasions when he was a nuisance to
the authorities. And though he undoubtedly planted the Christian gospel in
various strategic cities in the Roman world, the communities he formed were
small, and largely ignored or
abused by those around them.
PAUL’S LEGACY
Paul’s legacy to later generations, however, was undoubtedly
enormous,
and he influenced the Church for
all time. He is important, first, because
his insistence that membership of
God’s people had been thrown open to
Gentiles, and that the gospel must therefore be taken to
them without
demanding that they should become
Jews in order to receive it, meant
that what had begun as a Jewish
sect became, within a few generations,
a largely gentile movement;
although Paul was not alone in taking up
this position, he seems to have
understood the issues involved more
clearly than anyone else, and he
certainly threw himself into the gentile
mission without reserve. He is
important, secondly, because the profound
insights expressed in his epistles
have fed and shaped Christian
theology, spirituality and ethics
ever since.
Paul’s conviction that the gospel was intended for the
Gentiles was
not unique to him, and he was not
alone in preaching to them.
According to Galatians 2: 6–12, it is true, the leaders of
the
Church had recognized that Paul was called by God to be the
apostle to
the uncircumcised – though some
Jewish Christians clearly disapproved
(v. 12). But if Luke is to be
believed, then even before Paul began his
missionary work, there were moves
in this direction. Luke tells us how
Philip, one of the Greek-speaking members of the early
Christian community,
had preached the gospel to
Samaritans and to an Ethiopian
eunuch – someone who was not only
not Jewish, but who (as a eunuch)
was debarred from becoming a
proselyte – and had baptized them; his
work in
records, too, a tradition that
Peter had been persuaded by a vision to
visit Cornelius, a Gentile, and to
preach the gospel to him; then, when
the Holy Spirit descended on
Cornelius, Peter realized that Gentiles
might be baptized (Acts
10:1–11:18). When Paul himself began his
mission work it was in
had already been preached, not only
to Jews but to Gentiles also (Acts
11:19–20).
How reliable are these traditions? Scholars differ in the
value they place
upon them, but it seems reasonable
to suppose that they reflect a development
that was already taking place
before Paul became a Christian. Paul
may have been the apostle to the
Gentiles par excellence, but he himself is
aware that others were working in
the same field (Rom.
Indeed, the news that Christian Jews were mixing with
Gentiles and worshipping
with them may well have been one of
the factors that led the pre-
Christian Paul to persecute the Christian
community with such vehemence.
Paul’s second legacy is in his writings. But to what extent
was the
interpretation of the gospel
expressed in Paul’s epistles his own interpretation,
and to what extent did he share it
with other early Christians? In
what ways did his beliefs overlap
with theirs?
One of the reasons that it is so difficult to answer these
questions is
that Paul’s letters are the
earliest Christian documents to have come
down to us. The accounts of Jesus’
own teaching, the Gospels, were
almost certainly written after
Paul’s death, and have been shaped by the
needs and beliefs of those who
passed on the tradition and wrote the
Gospels. In the Acts of the
Apostles, Luke tells us something of the early
years of the Church, but there were
no written records of what was said
and done, and he is dependent on
oral traditions. These were formative
years, when men and women, reeling
from recent events and trying to
understand their significance, had
not yet formulated their faith. We
cannot assume that Luke’s account
of what the apostles said represents
the way they expressed their
beliefs at the time. Writing, as he does, with
the benefit of hindsight, he is
likely to assume that they understood then
what in fact they came to grasp only later.
PRE-PAULINE TRADITION
In the absence of reliable accounts of what Christians
before Paul had
believed, scholars have turned to
Paul’s own letters in an attempt to
discover ‘pre-Pauline’ tradition.
Neat summaries of faith found in his
writings are, they suggest, credal statements that were used in the early
Christian communities, and which Paul has adopted and
incorporated
into his letters. There must, to be
sure, have been ways of expressing
Christian belief that would quickly become recognizable summaries:
‘Jesus is Lord’ is an obvious one – quoted both in Romans
10:9 and 1
Corinthians 12:3. Paul himself refers to ‘the tradition’
that he
received, in 1 Corinthians 15:1ff,
and this tradition consists of a
summary statement of Jesus’ death,
burial, resurrection and appearances
to various witnesses. Each of these
summaries is quoted because
it is relevant to the subject under
discussion; the one quoted in 1
Corinthians is clearly adapted by Paul, who has added a
reference to
an appearance of the risen Christ
to himself to the list of names
included in the tradition.
Are there other such summaries of the gospel elsewhere?
There are
indeed – but are they Paul’s own
summaries, or did he ‘inherit’ them
from other Christians? In favour of the latter, it is suggested, is the fact
that these summaries are often
‘rhythmic’ in structure and sometimes
employ ‘unPauline
vocabulary’. Unfortunately, in order to uncover the
‘rhythmic structure’, it is often
necessary to delete certain phrases as
‘Pauline additions’! In Romans
1:3–4, for example, we find this
summary of the gospel concerning
God’s Son,
who was descended from David
according to the flesh
and was declared to be Son of God
[with power] according to
the Spirit [of holiness by
resurrection from the dead].
If such credal summaries were
indeed in circulation, we can understand
why Paul might quote this couplet
at the beginning of a letter written to
a Christian community which does
not know him, in order to establish
that they share a common faith. If
that was his intention, however, it
would surely have served his
purpose better if he had quoted the
summary without any additions of
his own! In fact, the whole passage
may well have been written by Paul
himself, since it is particularly appropriate
as an introduction to the Epistle
to the Romans, where Paul is
going to discuss what is involved
in life lived ‘according to the flesh’ and
‘according to the Spirit’ and the
way in which, through Christ, Christians
can move from one sphere to the other.
If the ‘rhythmic structure’ of these passages is not always
obvious,
neither is the ‘unPauline’
character of the vocabulary. The language of
the summary in Romans 4:25, for
example, which refers to Christians’
belief in God,
who raised Jesus our Lord from the
dead –
who was handed over to death for
our trespasses
and was raised for our
‘justification’,
sounds remarkably Pauline, though
it is often assumed to be a traditional
formula that he inherited. This
time, the rhythmic structure is plain, and
there are no ‘additions’ in need of
excision. Are we to conclude that
Paul’s understanding of the gospel agreed exactly with that
of those who
were responsible for formulating
this particular summary? Or that he
wrote the summary himself?
At other times, the vocabulary is unfamiliar. Romans 3:24–5,
thought by many to be pre-Pauline,
speaks of Jesus as the one ‘whom
God put forward as a hilasterion’
– a Greek word whose meaning is
disputed and which occurs nowhere
else in Paul. But do we have
enough authentic Pauline material
to be able to say which words were
and which were not part of his
vocabulary? The answer is clearly ‘no’.
On the whole, it seems probable that Paul himself was
responsible for
using this striking image. It is
certainly appropriate in the context in
which he uses it.
Perhaps the most notable example of so-called ‘pre-Pauline
tradition’
is to be found in Philippians
2:6–10. Once again, its ‘rhythmic structure’
and confessional character – the
passage, like so many others, is introduced
with the word ‘who’ – distinguish
this section from its context.
The use of parallelism and dramatic ‘punchlines’
make this a powerful
summary of the gospel:
Who, being in the form of God,
Did not consider as something-to-be-exploited
Equality with God,
But made himself nothing,
Taking the form of a slave!
Having been born in human likeness,
and being found in human
appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death,
even death on a cross!
Therefore God has highly exalted him,
and given to him the name
that is above all names,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under
the earth,
and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father!
Was this passage written by Paul himself? It is possible. It
is also possible
that he was making use of a
‘spiritual song’ composed by someone else.
What is clear is that – as we shall see later – he uses this
passage in the
course of his argument in a typically
‘Pauline’ way.
The search for ‘pre-Pauline tradition’ in Paul’s own letters
takes us
nowhere. There had probably been
little time for anything but the
briefest of summaries to develop
before Paul’s own conversion. If there
are any quotations in his letters,
they are on the whole too brief, and too
close to Paul’s own beliefs, to
enable us to distinguish anything distinctive
about his own theology. Moreover,
it should be obvious that Paul
would not ‘borrow’ any confessions
of faith unless he agreed with them.
What he clearly inherited, and what was certainly being
preached before
Paul, is summed up in the tradition he cites in 1
Corinthians chapter 15
– the conviction that Jesus died
and had been raised from the dead – and
in the confession that he had
therefore been made Lord.
If pre-Pauline summaries of Christian belief are difficult
to discover
in the letters, so too are
traditions about Jesus’ own teaching, of which
we might have expected frequent
echoes. Paradoxically, the clearest
parallel between a reference to
what Jesus did and said in Paul and the
tradition preserved in the Synoptic
Gospels occurs in 1 Corinthians 11:
23–6 – the account of the Last Supper – which Paul insists
he received
‘from the Lord’. Perhaps these
words should be understood to mean that
the tradition originated with the
Lord, rather than as a claim to direct
revelation; however, Paul is not
necessarily denying that the tradition
was passed on by those present at
the Last Supper. Elsewhere Paul
appeals to commands given by the
Lord, not himself: these include the
prohibition of divorce and the
instruction to evangelists to rely on the
community for their support. Other
appeals to ‘the Lord’ or ‘the
word of the Lord’ seem to reflect
teaching attributed to Jesus in the
Gospels, but this may have been delivered by Christian
prophets speaking
in the name of the Lord.
If we cannot deduce the pre-Pauline gospel from Paul’s own
writings,
we may find it more helpful to
compare those writings with other New
Testament documents. Even though
these were written subsequently they
may help us to uncover Paul’s
unique contribution to the development of
Christian thought. In what ways did Paul’s
understanding of the gospel
differ from that of his
fellow-Christians? Was he basically in agreement
– or disagreement – with his
fellow-Christians? And to what extent was
his preaching true to the teaching
of Jesus himself? Was he guilty, as has
sometimes been argued, of
‘distorting’ the original gospel? These are
questions which we cannot answer,
however, until we have examined
Paul’s letters, and discovered what his understanding of the
gospel in fact
was. They are questions, therefore,
to which we must return at the end
of this book, when we shall be in a
better position to understand and
assess Paul’s contribution to the
development of Christianity.
Notes
1. Acts is traditionally attributed, together with the Gospel clearly written
by the same author, to Luke, who is mentioned several times in Paul’s letters.
There is no way of establishing whether or not the tradition is true, but there is
no particular reason to dispute it. It is convenient – and possibly accurate! – to
refer to the author as ‘Luke’.
2. 2 Cor. 12:7.
3. Deut. 23:1. Contrast the promise of future inclusion in Isa. 56:3–5.
4. The contrast between ‘Jews’ and ‘Hellenists’ in this
passage indicates that the latter term
must refer here to Greek-speaking
Gentiles.
5. Traditions about what was said are likely to be less
reliable than traditions about what was done.
6. The words in square brackets are generally assumed to be
Paul’s own.
7. For a discussion of its meaning, see pp. 77–9.
8. A similar example of language which, though unusual, turns out to be highly appropriate, is found
in 1 Thessalonians 1:10. Although this is understood by many to be a summary of the gospel, it is a
somewhat inadequate one! It is better understood as a summary of the themes that Paul intends to
discuss later in the letter. See M. D. Hooker, ‘1 Thessalonians 1.9–10: a Nutshell – but What Kind
of Nut?’ in Geschichte – Tradition – Reflexion, Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag,
Volume III Frühes Christentum, ed. H. Lichtenberger (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1996),
pp. 435–48.
9. Col. 3:16.
10. See pp. 98–9, 104, 106–7, 111–13
11. Rom. 1:4; 10:9; 1 Cor. 12:3;
Phil. 2:11.
12. 1 Cor. 7:10–11. Cf. Matt.
5:31–2; 19:3–9; Mark 10:2–12; Luke 16:18.
13. 1 Cor. 9:14. Cf. Matt. 10:1–15; Mark 6:7–11; Luke 9:1–5; 10:1–12. Interestingly, however, Paul clearly
does not consider himself bound by this instruction!
14. Rom.
15. 1 Thess. 4:15–17. Cf. Matt. 24:30–31.