Archbishop Mark’s podcast series “The Birth of the Church: Why the loser won” continues with the second episode. Why did Paul persecute Christians? It’s a fascinating look at a critical time in world history.
Episode 2 – Paul and the persecution of Christians:
Subscribe to our podcast to receive each episode directly to your device.
- Episode 2: Paul and the persecution of Christians - Transcript
Episode 2: Paul and the persecution of Christians - Transcript
Author: Archdiocese of Brisbane
So welcome to this second of our podcasts, exploring the man and the mystery that we know as Saint Paul. Last time I was speaking. I asked really two questions about Paul, just as an introduction to the man and the mystery. And the first of those was, what is Saint Paul? Is he the founder of Christianity, as some say? Or are there other ways of speaking more truly about what he is. That he’s one of the most extraordinarily influential people in human history, that’s certain. So, we looked at that question, what is Saint Paul? How would we describe him and his contribution?And then I turned from the question of ‘what’ to the question of ‘who’. Who is this man, Saul of Tarsus? Who has affected all of us in ways we barely recognise. But who was he? What was his background? So, they were the kinds of stories that broke the ice last time.
Keeping in mind what I said, too, that this isn’t just about Paul, the man. It is about Paul as a crucial figure, in some ways the crucial figure in bringing the church to birth. So that in these podcasts, really what I’m exploring is the fascinating and still important story of how the church came to birth. From the womb of the synagogue. Because there’s no question Christianity begins initially as seeming to be yet another Jewish messianic sect. It was part of Judaism.
What then led it by the end of the first century even, to become a quite distinct phenomenon. Where we’re told in the Acts of the Apostles that it was at Antioch, that they were first called Christians. In other words, a group of people, a community different enough and recognisably different enough, to merit a name, the Christians, the Christianoi.
So that’s our story really is about the birth of the church. From the womb of the synagogue. And this isn’t just an antiquarian interest either. It’s a question that has real relevance to us today as we grapple with all sorts of questions that are new. And as we make our way through what Pope Francis has called not just an era of change, but a change of era. In all of this, Paul and his story can be I think, a unique resource. It’s happened before. I think it can happen again.
As I come to trace or even tell the story of Saint Paul and the birth of the early Church. One of the questions is the question of sources, what am I relying upon? What sources am I relying upon in order to construct the story? Because it does have to be constructed. There are all kinds of gaps.
Some of what I will present can be no more than well informed guesswork filling the gaps. It’s extraordinary, given the influence of Saint Paul how little we know about important times in his life. But there is enough in the New Testament to allow us to construct the story. And the man himself is so fascinating as a personality.
And I said last time that it’s unusual in the early, in the ancient world that there is such a distinctive sense of personality. The man himself then, is so fascinating, I think. That you’re drawn almost automatically to construct the story of his life. And various scholars have written biographies of Saint Paul. The Dominican, the Irish Dominican Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, well known to many in Australia. It is one of those who has written a very interesting biography of Saint Paul. But inevitably he does in that book what I will do in this podcast, and that is, construct a narrative, fill in the gaps that are often quite large.
Now we have certainly as the most trustworthy source, the letters of Paul. So that’s where we start. Now, the letters again, in no way seek to tell the full story of Paul’s life, to provide a biography. The letters were written in situations of pastoral necessity, often quite dramatic moments in the Pauline communities. So, they weren’t seeking to give a full biography of Saint Paul. So again, they’re full of gaps.
But when push comes to shove, it’s the letters upon which we rely. In other words, from the horse’s mouth. Now, talking of the horse’s mouth, you have to understand that the Pauline letters that we find in the New Testament aren’t all, as it were, from the horse’s mouth. There is the Pauline tradition embodied in those letters, and it has three layers. So let me just say a word about this as we begin.
There are certain letters, they’re often called authentic, which is a bit dubious because it presumes that the others are inauthentic, which is not quite the case. But there are some letters that were unquestionably from the horse’s mouth. They are from Paul. Keeping in mind that Paul didn’t write any of his letters, he dictated them all to a scribe. Sometimes he grabbed the stylus, the pen and signed the letter. But he would be dictating his letters. And just by the way, he would I think, dictate letters over a period of time, even a period of days. There are some of his letters, like the letter to the Philippians, which some scholars have said, ah, perhaps it’s a number of letters that have been stitched together. It doesn’t seem to me to be the case. I think what’s more likely is that Paul was dictating a long session to the scribe. And then at one point he said, let’s rest it there for today, and he picked it up again the following day. So, he’s dictating these letters, perhaps over a period of time. And that can explain some of the hitches and hiatuses that you find in the texts themselves.
So, you’ve got seven or eight letters that are from Paul himself, unquestionably. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, some question, 2 Thessalonians. And the letter to Philemon, that little gem that sits there in the New Testament. Now they are the so-called authentic letters. But there is a second layer of the Pauline tradition.
They often call it Deutero-Pauline. Deutero is simply the Greek word for second. Now these are letters like Ephesians and Colossians. Now they come later, it seems, and often their language and their theology is different. Not totally different at all, but quite distinctive and different from the language and vision that you find in the so-called authentic letters.
But it’s also possible, I think, that what happened was that Paul wanted to write a letter to the Ephesians and the Colossians, didn’t have time to dictate it. So, what he did to a trusted adjutant was say, listen, this is what I want to say to the Church at Ephesus, this is what I want to say to the church at Colossae. I can’t, I haven’t got time to dictate. I’m on the move. So, would you communicate with them the kind of message that I’ve just communicated to you? So, someone else perhaps could have written or dictated the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians. But embodying the core of the Pauline teaching.
So, whilst the language and the theology are different, they are not totally different. They remain within the stream of Pauline preaching and teaching. Then the third level of the Pauline tradition in the New Testament are the so-called pastoral letters. That is like 1 and 2 Timothy. Now these are certainly at a later date. And again their language and their theology is different from the letters that you find from the horse’s mouth.
Now, this may seem strange to us that people at a later time would claim to be writing for Paul. That this seems almost a case of literary fraud. But this wasn’t the way the ancient world understood things. That these were, that Paul brought to birth a whole stream of apostolic preaching and teaching. And certain great voices emerged within that tradition. Who didn’t want to be known as individuals or in any way original. They simply sought to echo at a later time, or to pass on at a later time, the Pauline teaching.
So, in other words, that they assumed the name Paul. It’s a bit like Saint Francis of Assisi calls to, brings to birth in the life of the church, a whole stream, a tradition of apostolic and evangelical witness. And all the Franciscans who have followed him since then, in a sense, bury themselves in Francis. They become Francis. Or we say with the Pope, it is Peter who speaks. It’s not Jorge Mario Bergoglio. It is Peter who speaks. In other words, his voice is the voice of Peter, continuing that tradition of apostolic preaching and teaching, which looks back to Saint Peter. So, there would have been nothing strange in the ancient world for people to claim to speak in the name of Paul as part of that great tradition that began with him but continued through New Testament times. And of course, continues in our own time.
So, there are some brief reflections upon the question of sources with regard to the letters. Now, the other source, however, that we will use is the Acts of the Apostles. Now, this is a little more complex. Partly because the ancient world had a very different understanding of what it means to write history. Now, was Luke trying to write history when he writes the Acts of the Apostles? Absolutely. But history, as the ancient world understood it.
They had a far less empirical sense of the task. It wasn’t just the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts. Not that history ever is historiography, the writing of history. But the Acts of the Apostles is a highly wrought recounting of the story of the early church. It embodies a particular theology. It’s a very Pauline theology, in fact.
So, we can’t expect from the Acts of the Apostles the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts. But nor can we simply discard it as some kind of fable, you know, as if Luke made it all up. He does take a core of fact. But then he embroideries the presentation of the facts, the construction of the narrative to suit a theology. And to embody a very particular vision of the birth of the church.
And others would have provided other accounts of the birth of the church. But Luke’s is the one that has prevailed. And in part Luke wins because Paul wins. And similarly, Paul wins because Luke wins. And I said last time that the subtitle of these podcasts should be ‘Why the Loser Won’. Because Paul, in his own time as we’re about to see, looked very much a loser, but he looks triumphantly a winner when you open the pages of the New Testament now. And there’s a reason for that that we will explore.
So, we will look to Acts. But we won’t do so naively. We will understand the kind of history that we are dealing with. And this is true not just of the New Testament, but all historiography in the ancient world. If you think of the great Greek historian Xenophon and Thucydides and all of them. They again tell a story and not just present the facts, the whole facts and nothing but the facts. So that’s all by way of background and introduction.
Let’s turn now to the story of Paul on the basis of that understanding. Now, last time we saw that Paul had come to Jerusalem from Tarsus. And I suggested that it may have been, and here again, it can only be informed guesswork. In order to pursue his rabbinic or pharisaic studies. He was obviously a very gifted student. And this was often the way, that gifted young boys would be sent to the great schools of Jerusalem at quite an early age. To become teachers themselves.
So, here he was in Jerusalem. Trained to be a rabbi, but in the pharisaic tradition. Now, here, let me just say a word about the Pharisees. The first thing to say about them is they get a very bad press in the New Testament. I mean, if I called you, whoever you are a Pharisee, you would not take it as a compliment. This is because they get such a bad press in the New Testament. And that often reflects the great conflicts that followed, particularly the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 by the Romans. That’s a story we can’t explore here. But a lot of the conflicts in the New Testament reflect the conflicts that occurred really within Judaism after the destruction in 70. And it was those conflicts in many ways that led to the final stages of the birth of the church from the womb of the synagogue.
Now, the Pharisees were a radical renewal movement in a chaotic time. They came to birth in that first century of the common era as a response to the growing sense of alarm that the chaos brought. The great emblem of the chaos of this time was the Roman occupation of the Holy Land. And that this seemed to be the ultimate travesty that the chosen people were prisoners in their own land. The Promised Land had become a prison. And the prisoners were the Roman army, the great imperial presence of the time.
Now, the Pharisees said that things had got so bad, not just because of the Roman occupation, but there were other things that had gone wrong, famine and so on. So the feeling abroad in the Jewish, among the Jewish people at the time was that things had got so bad that surely God must be about to intervene to bring the kingdom. That God would make some final intervention, the coming of the kingdom. That would end all the affliction of his chosen people, drive the Romans from the promised land and set the people of God free.
The Pharisees said, this will only happen, however, if we are radically obedient to God’s law. Keeping in mind that for the Jewish people, obedience of God’s law is the road, the royal road to freedom. The whole Bible embodies the mystery of a liberating obedience. We tend to think of law as a necessary evil, and obedience as the very opposite of freedom. That’s not the way scripture or the Jewish people see it, or the Christian people for that matter. Certainly, it wasn’t and isn’t the way Paul saw it. That in so far as we could obey the law of God perfectly, we would hasten the coming of the kingdom, that final liberation of God’s people. And we would know the freedom of God.
Now, the word Pharisee means the separate ones. It comes from the verb to separate or to cut off. So that they saw themselves as stepping aside from an evil world with all its chaos, in order to be radically obedient to the liberating law of God, in order to hasten the coming of God’s kingdom. So, this was the whole theological and imaginative framework of Paul’s life as a Pharisee.
And just by the way, there’s no question that Jesus of Nazareth resembles the Pharisees in all kinds of ways, much more than he did the other groups who were abroad among the Jewish people at this time. Groups like the Sadducees who were the old priestly aristocracy. A much, much more conservative group than, say, the Pharisees. So, in part, what I’m trying to do is to rehabilitate the Pharisees. They’re not quite as bad as the New Testament at times makes them seem.
So, Paul is in Jerusalem as a Pharisee, pursuing his studies and passionately given to the vocation, as it were, of the Pharisees, in order to hasten the coming of God’s kingdom. Now, it’s probably that passionate commitment that in the end provokes him to persecute the Christians.
Now, there’s something puzzling about this, at least to me. That Paul makes it very clear in Galatians, where he says, you’ve heard of my former life in Judaism. How I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people. So, he was a bit of a child prodigy, it would seem, or at least a youthful prodigy. But he makes it very clear there in Galatians, Chapter 1 that he did persecute the church.
Now, the historical records of this time, which are very, very incomplete, don’t tell us of intra Jewish persecution, Jew, persecuting, Jew. But that doesn’t mean to say it didn’t happen. Because again, there was this drive to purify the chosen people in order to hasten the coming of God’s kingdom.
And Paul’s own words, I think, have to be taken at face value. So, while the records, with all their gaps and inadequacies don’t tell us of intra Jewish persecution at this time. Paul makes it abundantly clear that he was a persecutor. Now, why?
Again, that sense of passionate defence of the identity of God’s chosen people and seeing the Christians, this messianic sect, as somehow a threat to that. Now, the messianic sects within Judaism, and there were quite a lot of them, were always political dynamite. And again, this is very evident in the gospels. That the Romans, in fact, were a tolerant regime. As long as you accepted the totalitarian claims of Rome.
But if you in any way resisted those claims, the Romans would come in like a ton of bricks. Now, that was the problem with the messianic sects. That they often seemed to question or undermine the totalitarian claims of the Roman regime. So, in other words, the messianic sects could be seen as a threat to God’s chosen people at this time. And therefore, if they got out of hand, they needed to be brought to heal and hence the persecution.
But in the end, we don’t know exactly why Paul was so determined to persecute the Christians, not just in Jerusalem, but he was on the way to Damascus. Now it’s not that far, as the crow flies, but given the difficulties of travel in those days, it was quite something to travel from Jerusalem into the diaspora to Damascus in Syria to pursue the persecution. So, this was a man who was seriously committed to dealing with the Christians, silencing them or eliminating them.
Now, the psychology of Paul again invites, call it speculation shall we. That very often human beings strike out against that which attracts them. This concern, this is paradoxical, that the attraction itself is experienced as a threat. And therefore, I strike out against that which attracts me in order to eliminate the threat.
So, one of my questions, I suppose to myself, as I ponder the personality of Saint Paul. Would be, was he somehow drawn to Christianity? Did he feel a sense of attraction to it? He certainly knew about it, obviously. And was he somehow drawn to it? Because if you read his words in Romans, Chapter 7, which are in a sense autobiographical. Paul talks there about he was searching, searching, searching for a freedom that he couldn’t find. And you hear this great cry of frustration, almost, cosmic frustration in Chapter 7 of Romans, where he says, who will deliver me from this body doomed to death, a freedom that’s bigger even than death. And the answer comes in the very next verse. Thanks be to God in Christ, Jesus, my Lord. In other words, in Jesus Paul eventually found the freedom that he and all the Pharisees, indeed all the Jewish people were searching for.
So, was there something deep, deep, deep in Paul that recognised in Jesus and the claims made for Jesus by the Christians that he was crucified and raised from the dead. That Paul found deeply, deeply attractive and yet deeply, deeply threatening. And therefore, does he strike out against the source of attraction because he knew that his whole religious cosmos was beginning to shake?
It’s speculation, but as I say, Paul is such a vivid character in personality that he almost invites that kind of speculation. It seems to me at least possible.
In the Acts of the Apostles, where you have the first persecution against the Christians in Jerusalem in Chapter 7, where Stephen, the protomartyr, the first of the martyrs, is stoned to death. We’re told very clearly that Saul was he didn’t seem to be one of those throwing the rocks. But he was there and he totally approved of the killing. So again, the Acts at a later time confirm what Paul says in the letter. That he was part of the persecution not only in Jerusalem, but also in the diaspora.
Now, at this stage, we turn, albeit briefly in this podcast, because I’ll look at this in the next. We turn to the event that really is the turning point of Paul’s whole life. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. The roots of the Damascus Road encounter reached deep, deep, deep into Paul’s life and again, you won’t understand what’s happening on the Damascus Road in Paul’s life unless you understand that passionate, life consuming search for freedom that is the heart of the whole Bible, in fact, and certainly was the heart of Paul’s life as both Jew and Pharisee.
Now, the question that’s asked about Damascus Road is, what is it? How do we describe this extraordinary event, which is recounted not once but three times in the Acts of the Apostles? We have the best-known account in Acts Chapter 9. But we have other accounts, and they’re interestingly different, different interpretations of the one crucial event in Chapters 22 and 26 of the Acts of the Apostles.
And you might ask, well, why have we got three accounts? Why wouldn’t one have done well? This was, again, the ancient world’s way of saying that this event was one of the great turning points of Christian history. It was one of those key moments in the process by which the church came to birth.
So, we’ll leave it there for now. But in the next podcast I will start with the Damascus Road encounter, as I’m calling it. Asking the question, what actually was it? And even more particularly, how did Saint Paul himself understand this extraordinary experience that he will spend the rest of his life unpacking to the day he died. He had his head chopped off in Rome. Paul was unpacking the extraordinary experience of this encounter on the road to Damascus.
But in all that I’ve said so far in tracing his story to this moment. You have to see the roots of an experience that might have seemed to come out of nowhere, a bolt from the blue, almost literally. But in fact, which had deep roots not only in Paul’s life as a Pharisee, but deep roots in the whole of Jewish experience and deep roots in the Jewish scripture. So, to the Damascus Road, we turn next time. And I will see you there.