Paul: An Apostle's Journey

By Douglas A. Campbell

Douglas Campbell has made a name for himself as one of Paul’s most insightful and provocative interpreters. In this short and spirited book Campbell introduces readers to the apostle he has studied in depth over his scholarly career.

Enter with Campbell into Paul’s world, relive the story of Paul’s action-packed ministry, and follow the development of Paul’s thought throughout both his physical and his spiritual travels.

Ideal for students, individual readers, and study groups, Paul: An Apostle’s Journey dramatically recounts the life of one of early Christianity’s most fascinating figures—and offers powerful insight into his mind and his influential message.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781467448666

Douglas A. Campbell

Douglas Campbell is a New Testament professor at Duke Divinity School.  His main research interests comprise the life and thought (i.e. theology and its development) of Paul with particular reference to soteriological models rooted in apocalyptic as against justification or salvation-history. However, he is interested in contributions to Pauline analysis from modern literary theory, from modern theology, from epistolary theory, ancient rhetoric, ancient comparative religion, modern linguistics and semantic theory, and from sociology. His recent publications include The Rhetoric of Righteousness in Romans 3:21-26, and he edited The Call to Serve: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Ministry in Honour of Bishop Penny Jamieson. Dr. Campbell has also written The Quest for Paul's Gospel: A Suggested Strategy (2005), and The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (2009). 

Book preview

Introduction

Paul’s influence

The apostle Paul is the most influential political philosopher in the USA today, and arguably in the rest of the world as well, and this surely makes him one of the most important figures in human history. He is not a contemporary philosopher, but he still exerts an unprecedented influence on current American culture and politics—far more than any modern figure, whether we are talking about someone like John Locke, who greatly influenced the Constitution, or a figure like David Brooks, who writes in the New York Times and is read by 1.3 million people every day. This is quite an achievement when we consider that Paul lived two thousand years ago and left a literary legacy of just a dozen letters or so (and one of them is very short). It is nevertheless this tiny literary legacy that drives his influence.

Thirteen letters gathered together in the New Testament bear Paul’s name and comprise about 25 percent of that scriptural collection.¹ But he exerts an influence out of all proportion to this percentage. Of all the writers in the New Testament, Paul addresses churches directly and provides clear instructions about the significance of what Jesus did. Consequently he tends to be the go-to person for most modern Christian preachers, and especially for those who are Protestants of some sort who make up about one quarter of the current worldwide Christian population. The rest of the New Testament, and even of the Bible as a whole, is then frequently read in his terms, through Paul’s spectacles we might say. And the Bible has had an enormous impact on modern American culture, and on Christian and post-Christian countries elsewhere, and still does—a Pauline Bible.

A third of the world’s population—almost 2.2 billion people—is in some sense Christian; there are fewer and fewer Christians in European and post-European countries but more and more everywhere else. When these adherents go to church they will most likely hear a short passage written by Paul that they will have expounded to them as Scripture. Many of these listeners will try to understand this ancient paragraph, to reflect upon it, and to apply it, believing that God is speaking through it. It may be the basis for their prayers, meditations, exhortations, corrections, teaching, thanksgiving, and praise. The most zealous of these church attenders will read and ponder texts written by Paul every day. Few writers in the entire human race, if any, have had this influence. It should be no surprise to learn then that the interpretation of Paul is deeply and even bitterly contested.

He wrote a long time ago, not very much that he wrote has been preserved, and what he says is enormously important. These three factors create a situation ripe for interpretative conflict. We want Paul to say certain things, irrespective of whether he actually said them, because the stakes for him doing this are so high. If Paul says it, in some sense God says it. Did he support capital punishment? Was he anti-gay? Did he care about abortion? Did he believe in low tax rates? Many of these questions seldom if ever crossed the busy missionary’s mind, but we need him to say something about them, and different people want him to say different things.

The interpretation of Paul is consequently one of the most important tasks for the Christian in the world today as well as being one of the most debated and confused. I myself would go so far as to suggest that the real Paul has been largely buried under later arguments and conflicts about how to read him. His presentation today—and certainly in the US—frequently derives more from the culture and politics of the person reading him than from Paul himself, which is why I am writing this book.

We badly need to recover the real Paul. We don’t do this by pretending that we don’t have reasons for reading him or positions that we want him to endorse. We all do, and I am no exception. I am deeply invested in what he says. But we recover his authentic voice by being honest about our reasons and positions, and assessing carefully, with the help of others, whether they are distorting the evidence that he has left behind for us. So I will try to do just this. And the best way to do this is by telling his story.

Storytelling

Paul led a very interesting life. He traveled a lot, got into numerous confrontations, jams, and controversies, and met and converted a lot of people. We have letters from him to about fifteen churches, eleven of which he personally founded, and this was no mean feat within the deeply hostile ancient pagan world. God worked mightily through him at times, while Paul probably felt utterly abandoned by God at others. He spent many years at the end of his life in prison, probably deeply frustrated. But it is only as we tell this story in detail that we will uncover the things that Paul thought about God and Jesus, and about missionary and church work, which is to say, his theology. This is because Paul learned all these things during this activity. They are intertwined together. We can’t understand his thinking unless we grasp it within all the other activity that was shaping it (and this is really the case for everyone). As we investigate this synthesis of thought and action we will find out more about what sort of person Paul was, which is important as well. What Paul thought, what he did, and what sort of person he was, are, as for all people, tightly bound up with one another. All these things can only be gathered together by a story, so a story we will tell.²

But as soon as we realize that this is the right form for our description, we are faced with an initial problem. What materials are we going to use to tell this story? We must ask a historian’s question about our sources that we will investigate carefully to work out what Paul was doing at any given moment. What are the sources for Paul and are they reliable?

The sources

There’s an interesting little trap here that many people fall into.

There are two sources for Paul’s life that are clearly way ahead of any others in importance: (1) his authentic letters; and (2) the book of Acts.

The book of Acts is interesting. It was probably written by the same person who authored the Gospel of Luke. Acts doesn’t concentrate exclusively on Paul, so it is not a bios or ancient biography of Paul in the way that the Gospels are ancient biographies of Jesus, but Paul does dominate the book. Only Peter rivals Paul’s importance, and Peter receives considerably less airtime than Paul does. So we do find a reasonably complete story of Paul in Acts ready-made for us. It stretches from just before his conversion through to a final dramatic voyage to Rome, after which the reader is meant to infer that he was executed.

Alongside Acts, however, we have letters from Paul’s own hand. These don’t tell us an integrated story in the way that Acts does. Only one letter supplies anything close to a long narrative sequence and that is clearly crafted to fit into a particular argument (Gal. 1:10–2:14). All the letters appear within Paul’s story as against outlining it. So it is very tempting to start with the book of Acts—and it does appear in the Bible so it must be true, right?—and slot the letters into that story where they seem to fit best. But it would be completely wrong to do so.

Imagine that a nuclear holocaust has taken place and human history has been largely obliterated. A billion years from now scientists and scholars from Alpha Centauri come to earth to undertake research. One of the lucky travelers in the research team is a historian of US presidents. She wants to write a dissertation on the presidency of George W. Bush. In the ash heap of what was the White House she is fortunate enough to find two pieces of evidence: an old copy of a book titled Bush: My Time Working with the Greatest President Ever written by his close friend and advisor Karl Rove; and an old flash-drive with 500 emails from Bush to his advisors discussing various political events and what to do about them. How does she proceed?

Does she read the book and then try to fit the evidence of the emails into it, discarding messages when they don’t seem to fit with that narrative? The book speaks constantly of Bush’s strength and decisiveness as a leader, but the emails reveal a slightly petulant figure who often didn’t know what to do. Or does she begin with the emails, squeezing as much information about Bush’s life and thought out of them, and then turn to the book to assess its contributions, partly controlling those contributions with the information that she has already gathered from Bush himself? The latter obviously. The book is part history and part propaganda, but the letters come straight from the horse’s mouth. The letters must control the spin that is present in Rove’s book.

Somewhat strangely, most people get things the wrong way around in the case of Paul. They use Acts first, as an overarching frame for his life, slotting in the letters where they can, and sometimes discarding them when they can’t. This is all clearly a big mistake.

We don’t know very much about Acts. It is an anonymous work that later tradition ascribes to Luke without much reason for doing so. We don’t know who wrote it, when it was written, or, most important of all, why. It might be a wonderful piece of historical work, carefully investigated and meticulously crafted. Or it might be the equivalent of an ancient novel, written in large measure to entertain, filled with fables and exaggerations and anecdotes. There’s nothing wrong with the Bible containing entertaining and somewhat fanciful stories; think of Esther or Jonah, or the framing stories of Job and Ecclesiastes, or the delightful tale of Tobit included in Catholic Bibles. Readers just need to recognize what is going on and read accordingly. But is Acts like this? Or does it lie somewhere between these two poles? We just don’t know.

Conversely, the letters are not easy, but they are firsthand. They attest directly to the events that were unfolding all around Paul as he wrote them, and often quite unselfconsciously. Paul wasn’t trying to write history, so for much of the time they provide disinterested historical evidence. Paul gives us information about his life when he is not even aware that this is what he is doing. They are priceless sources.

We ought to begin reconstructing Paul’s life from his letters then, and use this information to control the information supplied by Acts.³ With an initial biographical framework in place—a basic story—drawn from the letters we will be able to undertake an accurate assessment of the veracity of Acts. Does its information about Paul measure up with what Paul himself said happened, or not? If it does, how does it help us?

Cutting a long story short, I judge that the individual stories in Acts—what we might call its episodic veracity—are 99 percent accurate. The order of those stories, however—its sequential veracity—is not strictly historical or chronological. The material is arranged in strips or panels and positioned partly to suggest important overarching themes or truths about the early church, much as the Gospels do as they arrange their stories about Jesus. The author wants his readers to understand that the church was based on an important partnership between Peter and Paul, but that authorization flowed from Peter to Paul, so Peter’s activities as a missionary are positioned before most of Paul’s in the story. It was more likely the other way around—Paul going on far-flung missionary work before Peter did. A few other similar things are going on.⁴

The author’s arrangement of the key characters in the story is carefully worked out so that they constantly travel to Jerusalem, and they meet and authorize one another, again, from Peter and the rest of the Twelve onward. This allows a chain of eyewitnesses to extend through the book from the first apostles, who traveled around with Jesus, down through Paul, who was a controversial early Christian leader, to the author himself at the end of the book. Yet all these characters constantly loop back to the original church in the mother city of Jerusalem. The result of this careful plotting is a multiplication of Paul’s journeys to Jerusalem during his ministry. Paul himself only speaks in his letters of three visits to Jerusalem but the careful reader of Acts will see that it has him traveling there five times.

My judgment is that the author of Acts knew exactly what was going on and knew that Paul went to Jerusalem on just three important journeys. He supplies a great deal of information about three visits, while the echoes of these visits that come up twice in other places in the story occupy a mere one and a half verses. To avoid getting tripped up by them in strict historical terms, we must conflate these brief statements into the major events they echo, and continue to presuppose just three action-packed visits by Paul back to Jerusalem during his ministry.⁵ So we will have only three Jerusalem visits in the story of Paul that follows.

Once we have made this adjustment, I can find only one other place where the author of Acts presents the situation inaccurately in strict historical terms. He seems to want Paul to arrive in Athens and then to be tried as Socrates was, in heroic solitude, alone. This wasn’t the case. Paul went to Athens as he usually did, with his mission team, which at the time, as he tells us himself, comprised Silas and Timothy.⁶ This subtle modification of events by the author is a clear and well-motivated move intended to highlight the scandalous and shortsighted nature of Paul’s coming trial and execution. Paul, like Socrates, was a good and wise person who was tried and executed foolishly and unjustly.

With this small additional adjustment I judge pretty much everything else the author of Acts says to be on the money—not always in strict order in terms of the overarching story, but the events and incidents are accurate in and of themselves. Acts is highly accurate for an ancient historian’s work. In fact, I think that this is only explicable with the realization that for much of the time the author was there, as from time to time the narrative suggests.⁷ But what does this story look like now that we have broken with the strict sequence that the book of Acts suggests and that many of us know so well?

Dates, times, and places

We don’t know a lot about much of Paul’s life—his early childhood years, his Jewish training, the middle part of his Christian ministry, and his long final imprisonment and trial—but we do know a lot about two periods. These two periods are like two spotlights shining on an otherwise dark stage.

The first begins just before his call on the road to Damascus and extends through the first eight years or so of his missionary work. I calculate that this period ran from 34 to 41 CE, so this biographical spotlight is broader but a little dimmer than the one that follows. We know quite a bit about what Paul was doing during this time, first when Tiberius was the emperor of Rome, then the infamous Gaius, better known as Caligula,⁸ and finally Claudius. During this period Paul, as usual, did a lot of journeying, from Damascus, through Syrian Antioch, all the way to Greece.

For the next seven years we don’t know so much about what Paul was doing. We just have fragments of information like 2 Corinthians 11:23–27, which speaks of various struggles arising from the challenges of traveling in the ancient world, and from trying to gain a hearing in its paranoid and xenophobic cities. Times have obviously been tough, but we have no evidence that Paul achieved anything significant during this period.

Paul starts coming back into view later in 49 CE. Things come into sharper focus in 50; then we know a lot about 51, which I call his year of crisis. This level of detail continues into the spring of 52 and then the details fall off very rapidly, so this is where our second spotlight starts to fade out. It is rather smaller than our first one—that is, shorter in time—but brighter, extending from early 49 through the spring of 52 CE for three important years. During this period we don’t see Paul traveling to new places very much. But it does begin with him traveling through a part of modern-day Turkey that he hadn’t been in before as he heads to Ephesus, an important city on the east coast of the Aegean Sea. At the end of this period, in the spring of 52 CE, he heads back to Jerusalem in an anxious frame of mind.

We only have information from Acts from this point onward but we can still see things happening for the next five years or so, hence from 52 through 56 CE. Paul travels to Jerusalem and is arrested and imprisoned, eventually traveling to Rome. But after Acts ends its story around 56 we have very little to go on, and it seems most likely that Paul was executed soon after.

In short, Paul’s story has these two zones of illumination followed by the lingering details found in Acts concerning his final travels under guard, all of which we could recast in more dramatic terms as scenes in a play or drama.

An opera

As I write this, the rap opera Hamilton is on everyone’s lips, so imagine an opera unfolding about Paul (which a student did suggest to me once that we should co-write together). It is arranged in two acts (so clearly I have given this proposal some thought).

The key protagonist bursts onto the stage mature and not a little angry in act 1. He is hunting down the blasphemous members of the Jesus movement. But a dramatic conversion takes place, and then eight years of revolutionary missionary work unfold, extending from just near the Jesus movement’s headquarters, in Jerusalem, to the distant pagan land of Greece. By the end of this period our hero has succeeded in creating and nurturing a chain of little communities as far as the ancient metropolis of Corinth—the Las Vegas of the ancient world. He has battled ancient pagan culture, along with occasional opposition from local Jews, and has managed to create and to establish small Christian communities in half a dozen pagan towns and cities—a great achievement.

His success now stalls for a bit. Our hero works hard for many years in other regions but achieves very little. Then, suddenly, after an interval of about eight years, things take off again. Mass conversions even take place in the city of Ephesus. But in the midst of these new successes, further challenges arrive. Our hero is repeatedly detained and imprisoned. Charlatans and competitors begin to infiltrate his communities and to challenge his teachings. One of his largest and most important churches to the west, in Corinth, begins to fracture around other leaders and a host of challenging issues—as usual, many involving sex. But our hero fights back. He writes letters furiously, travels, sends delegates, and even escapes a riot, finally ending up in the spring of 52 CE in Corinth, exhausted, but with everything under control. The curtain falls on act 1.

Act 2, like act 1, opens in dramatic circumstances. There is a sudden new twist in the plot—enemies! The pause in Corinth turns out to be a mere lull in an ongoing battle. Lethal opponents arrive in and around Corinth, attacking Paul and his teachings. They drag him before the local governor asking for the death sentence! To understand where they come from, however, we have to flash back three years to a series of bitter disputes that took place in Syrian Antioch and Jerusalem between Paul and his supporters, and certain nameless Jewish Pharisees. These prestigious new converts insist that all of Jesus’s followers should become Jews and obey the Torah. This attacks Paul’s communities at their very heart! His movement will be wiped out if they succeed.

Again, our hero fights back. He writes letters, stands his ground in court, and prepares to travel to Jerusalem to confront the problem at its source. He even finds the presence of mind to pen one of the most famous texts in human history, his letter to the Romans. This letter—unbeknownst to him, his last will and testament—states in closing that he is journeying back to Jerusalem, hopeful that his conflict with the other Christian leaders living there can be resolved satisfactorily. The arrival of a very large sum of money to give to the Jerusalem poor might make the necessary accommodations rather easier as well. Following this visit our hero says that he wants to travel to strategic new evangelistic pastures like Rome itself, and then beyond Rome to Spain. But these dreams are stillborn. A dramatic and tragic story plays out instead.

Our hero travels to Jerusalem and a riot breaks out around him. He is arrested and imprisoned. This marks the beginning of four years of incarceration and trials interspersed by a horrific sea voyage to Rome. After a long imprisonment in Rome, our hero is summarily tried, unfairly condemned, and executed, at which moment our story—our opera—comes to a close, except to note that the letters our hero dashed off in the midst of all his labors and troubles lived on long after him as one of the most important literary legacies in human history.

Before we plunge into this story in detail, one further feature of its telling is worth noting.

Discoveries

We are interested in what Paul thought about things. What he thought was bound up tightly with all the other ways he acted, but by the end of this book we do want to be able to give a brief account of Paul’s gospel. Gospel is Paul’s shorthand for what he thought God was up to when God sent Jesus to enter our human situation to save us in some sense. A host of critical questions circles around this basic claim, and Paul supplied a lot of important answers to them. He was a very smart guy, as well as an early and a particularly significant one. Consequently, Paul was on much more than a geographical journey in his ministry. He was on a theological journey as well. He learned things as he went along. Different situations and diverse people forced him to think things through, doubtless something he did with much prayer and a great deal of searching of the Scriptures in the local synagogues. We will note carefully the lessons Paul learned at each stage of his work. We can detect these lessons accumulating, step by step, as he worked his way around the cities dotting the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. So we will know, by the end of this journey, how to plant and to nurture a Christian community, Paul-style, and how to defend it.

PART 1

CHAPTER ONE

Conversion

When Paul was Saul

Paul tells us very little about his life prior to his call. He says that he was a Jew descended from the tribe of Benjamin. He writes in Greek but he also knows Hebrew, the language of Judea, the Jews’ homeland, and of most of their Scriptures. He belonged to a particular sect within Judaism known for its precision vis-à-vis God’s Scriptures, the Pharisees. Perhaps think here of Catholics who have become Jesuits. The book of Acts adds some details to this.¹

Paul grew up in the city of Tarsus on the Cilician plains. These lie on the southern coast of present-day Turkey where it wraps around the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. Paul would have received the equivalent of his primary and secondary education from the small Jewish community living there, and from the city’s Greek system when he went to the local gymnasium. The Greek secondary schools of the ancient world were known as gymnasia, and we still speak of gyms today because the Greek education included a lot of physical training and competition. Paul then went off to college in Jerusalem to do a degree in Pharisaism, perhaps following in his father’s footsteps. He was known at this time by his Jewish name, Saul. The original Saul, Israel’s first king, was the tribe of Benjamin’s most important biblical representative, although things didn’t work out so well for