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Then Barnabas came and asked his aid in ministering to the church at Antioch. Working together (43-44?), they made so many converts that Antioch soon led all other cities in the number of its Christians. There for the first time ... the name Christianoi—followers of the Messiah or Anointed One. There too, for the first time, gentiles (i.e., people of the gentes or nations) were won to the new faith. Most of these were “God-fearers,” predominantly women, who had already accepted the monotheism, and in some part the ritual, of the Jews.

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...To the Jew circumcision was not so much a ritual of health as a holy symbol of his people’s ancient covenant with God; and the Christian Jew was appalled at the thought of breaking that covenant. For their part Paul and Barnabas realized that if these emissaries had their way, Christianity would never be accepted by any significant number of gentiles; it would remain “a Jewish heresy” (as Heine was to call it), and would fade out in a century. They went down to Jerusalem (50?) and fought the matter out with the apostles, nearly all of whom were still faithful worshipers in the Temple. James was reluctant to consent; Peter defended the two missionaries; finally it was agreed that pagan proselytes should be required only to abstain from immorality and from the eating of sacrificial or strangled animals.34 Apparently Paul eased the way by promising financial support for the impoverished community at Jerusalem from the swelling funds of the Antioch church.35

The issue, however, was too vital to be so easily laid. A second group of orthodox Jewish Christians came from Jerusalem to Antioch, found Peter eating with gentiles, and persuaded him to separate himself, with the converted Jews, from the uncircumcized proselytes. We do not know Peter’s side of this episode; Paul tells us that “he withstood Peter to his face” at Antioch,36 and accused him of hypocrisy; perhaps Peter had merely wished, like Paul, to be “all things to all men.”

...Revisiting his churches in Asia Minor, Paul attached to himself at Lystra a young disciple named Timothy, whom he came to love with a profound affection that had long been starved for an object. Together they went through Phrygia and Galatia as far north as Alexandria Troas. Here Paul made the acquaintance of Luke, an uncircumcized proselyte to Judaism, a man of good mind and heart, probably the author of the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts—both designed to soften the conflicts that from the beginning marked the history of Christianity...

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It was a brave effort to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy.† ...Paul offered his gospel to the gentiles of Corinth, and made many converts among them. Christianity may have seemed to them an acceptable variation of the mystery faiths that had so often told them of resurrected saviors; possibly in accepting it they assimilated it to these beliefs, and influenced Paul to interpret Christianity in terms familiar to the Hellenistic mind.

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He spent some happy months with the little congregations he had founded in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beraea. ... They had accused him of profiting materially from his preaching, laughed at his visions, and renewed the demand that all Christians should obey the Jewish Law. Paul reminded the turbulent community that he had everywhere earned his living with the work of his hands; and as to material profit, what had he not suffered from his missions?—eight floggings, one stoning, three shipwrecks, and a thousand dangers from robbers, patriots, and streams.40 Amid this turmoil word was brought him that the “party of the circumcision,” apparently violating the Jerusalem agreement, had gone into Galatia and demanded of all converts the full acceptance of the Jewish Law. He wrote to the Galatians a wrathful epistle in which he broke completely with the Judaizing Christians... Then, not knowing what sharper tribulations awaited him there, he left for Jerusalem, eager to defend himself before the Apostles...

3. The Theologian

The leaders of the mother church gave him “a hearty welcome” (57?); but privately they admonished him:

You see, brother, how many thousand believers there are among the Jews, all of them zealous upholders of the Law. They have been told that you teach all Jews who live among the heathen to turn away from Moses, that you tell them not to circumcize their children, nor to observe the old customs. . . . They will be sure to hear that you have come. So do what we tell you. We have four men here who are under a vow. Join them, undergo the rites of purification with them, and pay their expenses. . . . Then everybody will understand that there is no truth in the stories told about you, but that you yourself observe the Law.41

Paul took the advice in good spirit, and went through the rites of purification. But when some Jews saw him in the Temple they raised an outcry against him as “the man who teaches everybody everywhere against our people and the Law.” A mob seized him, dragged him from the Temple, and “were trying to kill him” when a squad of Roman soldiers rescued him by arrest. Paul turned to speak to the crowd, and affirmed both his Judaism and his Christianity. They shouted for his death. The Roman officer ordered him to be flogged, but desisted when he learned of Paul’s Roman citizenship. The next day he brought the prisoner before the Sanhedrin. Paul addressed it, proclaimed himself a Pharisee, and won some support; but his excited opponents again sought to do him violence, and the officer withdrew him into the barracks. That night a nephew of Paul came to warn him that forty Jews had vowed not to eat or drink until they had killed him. The officer, fearing a disturbance that would compromise him, sent Paul in the night to the procurator Felix at Caesarea.

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When Festus succeeded Felix he suggested that Paul should stand trial before him at Jerusalem. Fearing that hostile environment, Paul exercised his rights as a Roman citzen, and demanded trial before the emperor. King Agrippa, passing through Caesarea, gave him another hearing, and judged him “mad with great learning,” but otherwise innocent; “he might be let go,” said Agrippa, “if he had not appealed to the emperor.” Paul was put on a trading vessel, which sailed so leisurely that it encountered a winter storm before it could reach Italy. Through fourteen days of tempest, we are told, he gave crew and passengers an encouraging example of a man superior to death and confident of rescue. The ship broke to pieces on Malta’s rocks, but all on board swam safely to shore. Three months later Paul arrived in Rome (61?).

The Roman authorities treated him leniently, awaiting his accusers from Palestine, and Nero’s leisure to hear the case. He was allowed to live in a house of his choosing, with a soldier to guard him; he could not move about freely, but he could receive whomever he wished. He invited the leading Jews of Rome to come to him; they heard him patiently, but when they perceived that in his judgment the observance of the Jewish Law was not necessary to salvation, they turned away; the Law seemed to them the indispensable prop and solace of Jewish life. “Understand, then,” said Paul, “that this message of God’s salvation has been sent to the heathen. They will listen to it!”42 His attitude offended also the Christian community that he found in Rome. These converts, chiefly Jews, preferred the Christianity that had been brought to them from Jerusalem; they practiced circumcision, and were hardly distinguished by Rome from the orthodox Jews; they welcomed Peter, but were cold to Paul. He made some converts among the gentiles, even in high place; but a bitter sense of frustration darkened the loneliness of his imprisonment.

.....influenced perhaps by Platonist and Stoic denunciations of matter and the body as evil; recalling, it may be, Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a “scapegoat” for the sins of the people, Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ: that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam, and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the Son of God.* 50 Such a conception was more agreeable to the pagans than to the Jews. Egypt, Asia Minor, and Hellas had long since believed in gods—Osiris, Attis, Dionysus—who had died to redeem mankind; such titles as Soter (Savior) and Eleutherios (Deliverer) had been applied to these deities; and the word Kyrios (Lord), used by Paul of Christ, was the term given in Syrian-Greek cults to the dying and redeeming Dionysus.52 The gentiles of Antioch and other Greek cities, never having known Jesus in the flesh, could only accept him after the manner of their savior gods. “Behold,” said Paul, “I show you a mystery.”53

Paul added to this popular and consoling theology certain mystic conceptions already made current by the Book of Wisdom and the philosophy of Philo. Christ, said Paul, is “the wisdom of God,”54 the first-born Son of God; “he is before all things, in him all things exist . . . through him all things have been created.”55 He is not the Jewish Messiah who will deliver Israel from bondage; he is the Logos whose death will deliver all men. Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known, and could stand on an equality with the immediate apostles, who were no match for him in metaphysical speculation; he could give to the life of Christ, and to the life of man, high roles in a magnificent drama that embraced all souls and all eternity. Moreover, he could answer the troublesome questions of those who asked why Christ, if very god, had allowed himself to be put to death: Christ had died to redeem a world lost to Satan by Adam’s sin; he had to die to break the bonds of death and open the gates of heaven to all who should be touched by the grace of God.

Two factors, said Paul, determine who shall be saved by Christ’s death: divine election and humble faith. God chooses from all eternity those whom he will bless with his grace, and those whom he will damn.56 Nevertheless, Paul bestirred himself to awaken faith as a rod to catch God’s grace; only through such “assurance of things longed for,” such “confidence in things unseen,”57 can the soul experience that profound change which makes a new man, unites the believer with Christ, and allows him to share in the fruits of Christ’s death. Good works and the performance of all the 613 precepts of the Jewish Law will not suffice, said Paul; they cannot remake the inner man, or wash the soul of sin. The death of Christ had ended the epoch of the Law; now there should no more be Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for “in union with Christ Jesus you are all one.”58 ...