Six Things I Bet You Did Not Know About the Apostle Paul!
Let me give you six things about the apostle Paul, I bet you did not know.
#1 Paul was not a Christian
Paul was a Jewish Christian (or Judean Messiah-follower in technical scholarly parlance). But he was not a Christian as something that superseded or replaced Jews and Judaism.
Paul did not, in his mind, belong to a religion called “Christianity” and think of himself as a “Christian.”
Paul saw himself as a Jew, who adhered to a Jewish way of life as a Messiah follower not despite being a Messiah follower.
Yes, we can have big debates about Paul and his “former way of life in Judaism” (Gal 1:13), then there is Paul and the “parting of the ways” between Christianity and Judaism, but Paul does not see himself abandoning or abrogating Israelite religious hopes, fixtures, and identity as expressed in the Jewish scriptures.
Paul was not a Christian, he was a Jew, a somewhat anomalous and idiosyncratic Jew due to his messianic beliefs, but a Jew all the same.
Some scholars even prefer to talk about Paul as an example of “apostolic Judaism.”
#2 The One Thing Paul Taught in All the Churches
What is the one thing Paul said he taught in all the churches?
Inerrancy? Justification by faith? Women must be silent? Nope, not even close.
Listen to these words from 1 Cor 4:16-17
I appeal to you, then, be imitators of me. For this reason I sent you Timothy, who is my beloved and trustworthy child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus, as I teach them everywhere in every church.
I learned this from my former PhD student Jason Hood (see his awesome book, The Imitation of God).
What Paul tells all of his converts in all of the churches is to imitate him as he imitates Christ.
I have to tell you that nothing is more mind-blowing than reading 1 Corinthians, Philippians, and 1 Thessalonians and paying attention to all the times that Paul mentions imitation of Christ and imitation of other Christ-followers.
The Pauline life is the imitatio Christi life.
#3 Paul Did Not Write All of His Letters
Okay, there are debates about Pauline authorship, pseudepigraphy, forgery, etc., especially when it comes to 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1-2 Timothy, and Titus. If you want the deets about the debates, see Bird/Wright on The New Testament in its World.
But, even if we accept that all thirteen letters are authentically Pauline, Paul did not write all of them himself or alone.
Paul dictated Romans to Tertius, see Rom 16.22, “I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord.”
Paul wrote many of his letters with co-authors, collaborators, and maybe even with a whole team of colleagues.
When it comes to the prison epistles I think it breaks down like this:
Paul himself wrote to Philemon.
Paul and Timothy wrote to the Colossians.
Timothy and others probably turned Colossians into a general letter called Ephesians.
Paul and Timothy wrote to the Philippians.
So many of Paul’s letters were written not just by Paul but by a Pauline circle.
#4 Paul was a Diaspora Jew
The word “diaspora” means “dispersion,” you know, think of the American diaspora with all the American people who live outside of America. In Paul’s day, 80% of all Jews lived outside of Judea! Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew of the Diaspora who grew up in the region of Cilicia, in the city of Tarsus, and was a Roman citizen.
Now, Paul did have something of a Jewish education, he followed the traditions of the Pharisees, he had spent considerable time in Judea, and some of his biblical interpretive techniques could be called proto-rabbinic.
However, Paul really is a product of the Hellenistic east, the Greek culture that permeated the eastern Mediterranean since the time of Alexander the Great. Now, Hellenism existed in different forms and frames in the eastern Mediterranean, it was not monolithic, and it intersected with local cultures, whether one is talking about Cilicia or Arabia.
Paul wrote in Greek, he read his Bible in Greek (i.e., the Septuagint), and he was clearly aware of Greek rhetoric and philosophy.
So, when we think of Paul, we need to think not only of Judaism and Jewishness, but also a Hellenistic intellectual with messianic beliefs and forms of devotion.
Paul is a figure who stands between the Jewish, Greek, and Roman worlds.
# 5 Paul may have invented the concept of the individual
Paul wrote to the Galatians:
There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring,heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:28-29)
Paul is able to separate what most kept together: worship, ethnicity, and tribe. We might call that cult, kin, and community.
Paul made it possible to imagine worship and community independent of ethnicity and culture. A genuinely trans-cultural and trans-national movement. Now, yes, some ancient religions included worshippers from many places and different races, but only Paul created a kind of meta-identity of being “in Christ” as the basis of who a person really is and the grounds for their value before God and others.
Larry Sidentop’s book The Invention of the Individual, alleges that whereas the ancient Greeks and Romans believed in a cosmos shaped by a social hierarchy, Paul introduced a revolutionary idea of a person’s moral equality before God. It was possible to separate a person from their ethno-tribal affiliation by giving them a new one, an identity, created by their worship and belonging to a specific God, i.e., Jesus. A further implication was social equality before each other. For Sidentop, Paul invented both Christianity and the very idea of the individual. Paul is, in the end, perhaps even the author of human rights.
# 6 Paul inspired orthodox and heterodox Christianities
If you read the church fathers, many of them draw heavily on Paul and his letters. Yes, Justin Martyr has next to nothing on Paul, but others such as Clement of Rome and Irenaeus are replete with mentions of Paul and quotations of his letters.
But many other Christian groups, heresies, and heterodox sects, also took inspiration from Paul.
The most famous is Marcion, a man from a wealthy ship-building family in Sinope on the Black Sea in the second quarter of the second century. He started his own church that separated the god of creation from the God of redemption. He used Paul to pit Jesus against the God of the Old Testament.
Consider these words from Galatians 4:
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental principles?How can you want to be enslaved to them again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and years. (Gal 4:8-10).
Paul talks as if converting to Judaism and observing the Law would be, for Gentiles, the equivalent of putting themselves under the power of a hostile and alien god no different to the pagan gods. Add to that some Law vs. Gospel rhetoric in Romans and Galatians, throw in some platonic cosmology, and you can see where Marcion was coming from!
Paul had fans and interpreters of many types and stripes.
Were they helpful, which one did you find the most mind-blowing or informative? Is there anything I missed?
And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring,heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:28-29) If you contend that Paul was not a christian ( though I understand that his " home " church at Antioch was the " birthplace" of the title of " christians" for followers of Jesus or the way), then this statement from Paul in Galatians surely would NOT have been acceptable to the typical Jew of Paul's day- So Paul was truly an idiosyncratic Jew as you have said !
#5 is fascinating, suggests a possible direct line from Paul’s invention of the individual to equality as the conceptual building block of our Western democracies. Others have suggested that scientific inquiry, another valued Western ideal, has roots in the Christian revelation. This is highly speculative thinking and a trifle chauvinistic but it appeals to me, perhaps because I think there can be a political force for good in the world, as opposed to tyranny and the darkness of superstition.