1. The Persecutor
The founder of Christian theology was born at Tarsus, in Cilicia, about the tenth year of our era. His father was a Pharisee, and brought up the youth in the fervent principles of that sect; the Apostle of the Gentiles never ceased to consider himself a Pharisee, even after he had rejected the Judaic Law. The father was also a Roman citizen, and transmitted the precious franchise to his son. Probably the name Paul was the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Saul, so that both names belonged to the apostle from infancy.22 He did not receive a classical education, for no Pharisee would have permitted such outright Hellenism in his son, and no man with Greek training would have written the bad Greek of the Epistles. Nevertheless, he learned to speak the language with sufficient fluency to address an Athenian audience, and he occasionally referred to famous passages in Greek literature. We may believe that some Stoic theology and ethics passed from the university environment of Tarsus into the Christianity of Paul. So he uses the Stoic term pneuma (breath) for what his English translators call spirit. Like most Greek cities, Tarsus had followers of the Orphic or other mystery religions, who believed that the god they worshiped had died for them, had risen from the grave, and would, if appealed to by lively faith and proper ritual, save them from Hades, and share with them his gift of eternal and blessed life.23 The mystery religions prepared the Greeks for Paul, and Paul for the Greeks.
After the youth had learned the trade of tentmaking, and had received instruction in the local synagogue, his father sent him to Jerusalem, where, Paul tells us, he was “educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the Law.”24 Gamaliel was reputedly the grandson of Hillel; he succeeded Hillel as president of the Sanhedrin, and carried on the tradition of interpreting the Law with a lenient regard for the frailty of mankind. Stricter Pharisees were shocked to find him gazing appreciatively even upon pagan women.25 He was so learned that the Jews, who keenly honor scholarship, called him “the beauty of the Law,” and gave to him first, as to only six men after him, the title of rabban, “our master.” From him and others Paul learned that shrewd and subtle, sometimes casuistic and sophistical, manner of Biblical interpretation which was to disport itself in the Talmud. Despite Paul’s initiation into Hellenism he remained to the end a Jew in mind and character, uttered no doubt of the Torah’s inspiration, and proudly maintained the divine election of the Jews as the medium of man’s salvation.
He describes himself as “insignificant in appearance,”26 and adds: “to keep me from being too much elated, a bitter physical affliction was sent me”;27 he does not further specify. Tradition pictured him at fifty as a bent and bald and bearded ascetic, with vast forehead, pale face, stern countenance, and piercing eyes; Dürer imagined him so in one of the greatest drawings of all time; but in truth these representations are literature and art, not history.
His mind was of a type frequent among Jews: penetrating and passionate rather than genial and urbane; emotional and imaginative rather than objective and impartial; he was powerful in action because he was narrow in thought. Even more than Spinoza he was a “God-intoxicated man,” consumed with religious enthusiasm in the literal sense of this word—holding “a god within.” He believed himself divinely inspired, and endowed with the ability to work miracles. He was also a practical soul, capable of laborious organization, impatiently patient in founding and preserving Christian communities. As in so many men, his faults and virtues were near allied and mutually indispensable. He was impetuous and courageous, dogmatic and decisive, domineering and energetic, fanatical and creative, proud before man and humble before God, violently wrathful and capable of the tenderest love. He advised his followers to “bless them that persecute you,” but he could hope that his enemies—“the party of circumcision”—“would get themselves emasculated.”28 He knew his failings, struggled against them, and begged his converts to “put up with a little folly from me.”29 The postscript to his first epistle to the Corinthians sums him up: “This farewell I, Paul, add in my own hand. A curse upon anyone who has no love for the Lord! Lord, come quickly! The blessing of the Lord Jesus be with you! My love be with you all.” He was what he had to be to do what he did.
He began by attacking Christianity in the name of Judaism, and ended by rejecting Judaism in the name of Christ; at every moment he was an apostle. Shocked by Stephen’s disrespect for the Law, he joined in killing him, and led the first persecution of Christians in Jerusalem. Hearing that the new faith had made converts in Damascus, he obtained authorization from the high priest to go there, arrest all “who belonged to the Way,” and bring them in chains to Jerusalem (A.D. 31?).30 It may be that the fervor of his persecution was due to secret doubts; he could be cruel, but not without remorse; possibly the vision of Stephen stoned to death, perhaps even some youthful glimpse of Golgotha, troubled his memory and his journey, and fevered his imagination. As his party neared Damascus, says the Acts,
a sudden light flashed upon him from heaven, and he fell to the ground. Then he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, sir?” he asked. “I am Jesus,”. . . said the voice. . . . Saul’s fellow-travelers stood speechless, for they heard the voice but could not see anyone. When he got up from the ground and opened his eyes he could see nothing. They had to take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus. For three days he could not see.31
No one can say what natural processes underlay this pivotal experience The fatigue of a long journey, the strength of the desert sun, perhaps a stroke of heat lightning in the sky, acting by accumulation upon a frail and possibly epileptic body, and a mind tortured by doubt and guilt, may have brought to culmination the half-conscious process by which the passionate denier became the ablest preacher of Stephen’s Christ. His Greek environment in Tarsus had spoken of a Soter or Saviour who redeemed mankind; his Jewish lore had told of a Messiah to come; how could he be sure that this mysterious and fascinating Jesus, for whom men were ready to die, was not the promised one? When, weak and still blind at the end of his journey, he felt upon his face the kindly, soothing hands of a converted Jew, “something like scales dropped from his eyes, and his sight was restored; he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, regained his strength.”32 A few days later he entered the synagogues of Damascus, and told their congregations that Jesus was the Son of God.
2. The Missionary
The governor of Damascus, urged by the offended Jews, issued an order for Paul’s arrest; Paul’s new friends lowered him in a basket over the city walls. For three years, he tells us, he preached Christ in the hamlets of Arabia. Returning to Jerusalem, he won the forgiveness and friendship of Peter, and lived with him for a while. Most of the apostles distrusted him, but Barnabas, himself a recent convert, gave him a cordial hand, and persuaded the Jerusalem church to commission its persecutor as a bearer of the Good News that the Messiah had come and would soon establish the Kingdom. The Greek-speaking Jews to whom he brought the Gospel tried to kill him, and the apostles, perhaps fearing that his ardor would endanger them all, sent him to Tarsus.
For eight years he was lost to history in his native city; and perhaps again he felt the influence of the mystic salvation theology popular among the Greeks. 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 “Believers,” “Disciples,” “Brethren,” or “Saints,” as they had called themselves, received from the pagans, perhaps in scorn, 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.
The Antioch converts were not as poor as those in Jerusalem; a considerable minority belonged to the merchant class. With the enthusiasm of a youthful and growing movement, they raised a fund to spread the Gospel. The elders of the church “laid their hands upon” Barnabas and Paul, and sent them out on what history, unduly belittling Barnabas, calls the “first missionary journey of Saint Paul” (45-47?). They sailed to Cyprus, and met with encouraging success among the many Jews of that island. From Paphos they took ship to Perga in Pamphylia, and traveled over dangerous mountain roads to Antioch in Pisidia. The synagogue gave them a courteous hearing; but when they began to preach to gentiles as well, the orthodox Jews persuaded the municipal officers to banish the missionaries. Similar difficulties developed at Iconium; and at Lystra Paul was stoned, dragged out of the town, and left for dead. Still “full of the joy of the Holy Spirit,” Paul and Barnabas carried the Gospel to Derbe. Then they returned by the same route to Perga, and sailed to Syrian Antioch. There they found themselves faced by the most crucial problem in the history of Christianity.
For some leading disciples of Jerusalem, hearing that the two preachers were accepting gentile converts without requiring circumcision, had come to Antioch “to teach the brethren that unless they were circumcized as Moses prescribed, they could not be saved.”33 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.”
Probably in the year 50 Paul left on his second missionary journey. He had quarreled with Barnabas, who now disappeared from history in his native Cyprus. 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. From Troas Paul, Timothy, and another aide, Silas, sailed to Macedonia, for the first time touching European soil. At Philippi, where Antony had conquered Brutus, Paul and Silas were arrested as disturbers of the peace, were scourged and jailed, but were freed on the discovery that they were Roman citizens. Passing on to Thessalonica, Paul went to the synagogue, and for three Sabbaths preached to the Jews. A few were convinced, and organized a church; others roused the town against Paul on the ground that he was proclaiming a new king; and his friends had to spirit him away to Beraea during the night. There “the Jews received the message with great eagerness”; but the Thessalonians came to denounce Paul as an enemy of Judaism, and he took ship for Athens (51?), discouraged and alone.
Here, in the heart of pagan religion, science, and philosophy, he found himself quite friendless. There were few Jews to give him a hearing; he had to take his stand in the market place, like any modern haranguer of city crowds, and compete with a dozen rivals for passing ears. Some listeners argued with him; some laughed at him, and asked, “What is this ragpicker trying to make out?”37 Several were interested, and led him up to the Areopagus, or Hill of Mars, for a quieter hearing. He told them how he had noted, in Athens, an altar inscribed “To an Unknown God”; this dedication, which probably expressed the desire of the donors to thank, appease, or enlist the aid of a god of whose name they were not certain, Paul interpreted as a confession of ignorance concerning the nature of God. He proceeded with high eloquence:
Whom therefore ye worship though ye know him not, him I declare unto you. God, who made the world and all things therein . . . dwells not in temples made with hands. … It is he that giveth life and breath unto all. . . . And he made of one blood all the nations of mankind . . . that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him, though he be not far from us; for in him we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said.III . . . Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by the art and device of man. Howbeit, those past times of ignorance God hath overlooked; but now he commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world … by that Man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all, in that he hath raised him from the dead.38
It was a brave effort to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy.IV Nevertheless, it impressed only a few; the Athenians had heard too many ideas to have much enthusiasm for any. Paul left the city in disappointment and went to Corinth, where commerce had gathered a substantial community of Jews. He stayed there eighteen months (51-52?), earning his living as a tentmaker, and preaching every Sabbath in the synagogue. The leader of the synagogue was converted, and so many others that the alarmed Jews indicted Paul before the Roman governor, Gallio, on the charge of “trying to induce people to worship God in ways that are against the law.” Gallio replied: “As it is only a question of words and titles and your own law, you must look after it yourselves; I will not decide such matters”; and he dismissed them from the court. The two parties fell to blows, “but Gallio paid no attention.”39 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.
From Corinth Paul went to Jerusalem (53?) to “salute the church.” Soon, however, he was off on his third missionary journey, visiting the Christian communities in Antioch and Asia Minor, and reinvigorating them with his fervor and confidence. At Ephesus he spent two years, and “did such extraordinary wonders” that many looked upon him as a miracle-worker, and sought to cure ailments by applying to the sick the linens Paul had used. The manufacturers of the images that pagan worshipers dedicated in the Temple of Artemis found their trade slackening; perhaps Paul had repeated here his Athenian indictment of image worship, or idolatry. One Demetrius, who made silver models of the great shrine for pious pilgrims, organized a protest against Paul and the new faith, and led to the city theater a crowd of Greeks whose catchword, repeated for two hours, was “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” A local official dissolved the gathering, but Paul thought it the better part of valor to leave for Macedonia.
He spent some happy months with the little congregations he had founded in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beraea. Hearing that dissension and immorality were disordering the church at Corinth, he not only reprimanded it in several epistles, but went down to it in person (56?) to face his detractors. 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, and declared that men were to be saved not by adherence to the Mosaic Law, but by an active faith in Christ as the redeeming Son of God. Then, not knowing what sharper tribulations awaited him there, he left for Jerusalem, eager to defend himself before the Apostles, and wishing to celebrate in the Holy City the ancient feast of Pentecost. From Jerusalem, he hoped, he might go to Rome, even to Spain, and never rest till every province of the Empire had heard the news and promise of the risen Christ.
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.
Five days later the high priest and some elders came up from Jerusalem, and accused Paul of being “a pest and a disturber of the peace among Jews all over the world.” Paul admitted that he was preaching a new religion, but added: “I believe everything that is taught in the Law.” Felix dismissed the accusers; nevertheless, he kept Paul under house arrest—accessible to friends—for two years (58-60?), hoping, perhaps, for a substantial bribe.
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.
He found some solace in sending long and tender letters to his distant flocks. For ten years now he had written such epistles; there were doubtless many more than have come down to us under his name.V They did not come directly from his pen; he dictated them, often adding a postscript in his own rough hand; he left them apparently unrevised, with all their repetitions, obscurities, and bad grammar on their head. Nevertheless, the depth and sincerity of their feeling, their angry devotion to a great cause, their profusion of noble and memorable speech make them the most forceful and eloquent letters in all literature; even Cicero’s charm seems slight beside this passionate faith. Here are strong words of love from one to whom his churches were his fiercely protected children; violent attacks upon his numberless enemies; reprimands to sinners, backsliders, and divisive disputants; and everywhere tender exhortations.
Be filled with thanksgiving. Let the presence of Christ dwell in you, a well-spring of abounding wisdom; teach and encourage one another with hymns and songs of the spiritual life; make music in your hearts in gratitude to God.44
Here are great phrases that all Christendom quotes and cherishes: “the letter kills, the spirit gives life”;45 “evil communications corrupt good manners”;46 “to the pure all things are pure”;47 “the love of money is the root of all evil.”48 Here are frank confessions of his faults, even of his statesmanlike hypocrisies:
I have made myself everyone’s slave, so as to win over all the more. To the Jews I have become like a Jew to win Jews … to those without the Law I have become like a man without any law … I have become all things to all men, that I might save some of them. I do it all for the sake of the Good News, that I may share its blessings with the rest.49
These epistles were preserved, and often publicly read, by the congregations to which they were addressed. By the end of the first century many of them were widely known; Clement of Rome refers to them in 97, Ignatius and Polycarp soon afterwards; gradually they entered into the subtlest theology of the Church. Moved by his own somber spirit and remorse, and his transforming vision of Christ; 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.VI 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 As to good works combined with faith, Paul never tired of inculcating them; and the most famous words ever spoken about love are his own:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of preaching, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I can move mountains; if I have not love I am nothing. And though I give away everything that I am, and give myself, but do it in pride, not love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient and kind. It is not envious or boastful. … It does not insist on its rights. … It never fails. So faith, hope and love endure, these three; and the greatest of these is love.59
To sexual love, and marriage, Paul gives the most discouraging toleration. One passage 60 suggests, but does not prove, that he was married: “Have we not” (he and Barnabas) “a right to take a Christian wife about with us, like the rest of the apostles, and the Lord’s brothers, and Peter?”—but in another 61 he calls himself single. Like Jesus, he had no sympathy for physical desire.62 He was horrified when he heard of promiscuity and perversions.63 “Do you not know,” he asked the Corinthians, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit that is within you? . . . Honor God with your bodies.”64 Virginity is better than marriage, but marriage is better than concupiscence. The marriage of divorced persons is forbidden, except after mixed unions. Women are to be obedient to their husbands, slaves to their masters. “Everyone ought to remain in the station in which he was called” (i.e., converted to Christianity). “If you were a slave when you were called, never mind. Even if you can gain your freedom, make the most of your present condition instead. For a slave who has been called to union with the Lord is a freedman of the Lord, just as a freeman who had been called is a slave of Christ.”65 Freedom and slavery meant little if the world was soon coming to an end. By the same token national liberty was unimportant. Let “every soul be in subjection to the higher powers, for there is no power but God, and the powers that be are ordained by God.”66 It was ungracious of Rome to destroy so accommodating a philosopher.
4. The Martyr
“Do your best to come to me soon,” runs the doubtful second letter to Timothy,
for Demas has deserted me for love of the present world . . . Crescens has gone, and Titus; no one but Luke is with me. … At my first appearance in court no one came to help me; everybody deserted me. . . . But the Lord stood by me, and gave me strength, so that I might make a full presentation of the message and let all the heathen hear it. So I was saved from the jaws of the lion. . . . My life is already being poured out, and the time has come for my departure. I have had a part in the great contest. I have run my race, I have preserved the faith.66a
He spoke bravely, but he was desolate. One ancient tradition said that he was freed, went to Asia and Spain, preached again, and once more found himself a prisoner in Rome; probably he was never freed. Without wife or children to comfort him, with all friends gone but one, only his faith could support him; and perhaps that too was shaken. Like the other Christians of his age, he had lived on the hope of seeing Christ return. He had written to the Philippians: “We are eagerly awaiting the coming of a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. . . . The Lord is coming soon.”67 And to the Corinthians: “The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, those who have wives should live as though they had none . . . and those who buy anything as if they did not own it. . . . For the present shape of the world is passing away . . . Maranatha! Lord, come quickly!”68 But in his second epistle to the Thessalonians he reproved them for neglecting the affairs of this world in expectation of Christ’s early advent; the coming will be delayed until the “Adversary”—Satan—“makes his appearance and proclaims himself to be God.”69 We surmise from his last letters that he had struggled, during his imprisonment, to reconcile his early faith with the long delay in the Parousia or Second Appearance. More and more he put his hope beyond the grave, and made for his own solace the great adjustment that saved Christianity—the transformation of the belief in Christ’s earthly return into the hope of union with him in heaven after death. Apparently he was tried again, and convicted; Caesar and Christ came face to face, and Caesar won for a day. We do not know the precise charge; probably now, as at Thessalonica, Paul was accused of “disobeying the emperor’s decrees, and claiming that someone else called Jesus is king.”70 This was a crime of maiestas, punishable with death. We have no ancient record of the trial; but Tertullian, writing about 200, reports that Paul was beheaded at Rome; and Origen, about 220, writes that “Paul suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nero.”71 Probably, as a Roman citizen, he had the honor of a distinct execution, and was not mingled with the Christians crucified after the fire of 64. Tradition united him with Peter in a simultaneous, though separate, martyrdom; and a touching legend pictured the great rivals meeting in friendship on the road to death. Over the place on the Via Ostia, where the Church believed that Paul had found peace, a shrine was raised in the third century. Remade in ever fairer form, it stands today as the basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura—St. Paul beyond the Walls.
It is a fit symbol of his victory. The emperor who condemned him died a coward’s death, and soon nothing survived of his inordinate works. But from the defeated Paul came the theological structure of Christianity, as from Paul and Peter the astonishing organization of the Church. Paul had found a dream of Jewish eschatology, confined in Judaic Law; he had freed and broadened it into a faith that could move the world. With the patience of a statesman he had interwoven the ethics of the Jews with the metaphysics of the Greeks, and had transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into the Christ of theology. He had created a new mystery, a new form of the resurrection drama, which would absorb and survive all the rest. He had replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue, and in that sense had begun the Middle Ages. It was a tragic change, but perhaps humanity had willed it so; only a few saints could achieve the imitation of Christ, but many souls could rise to faith and courage in the hope of eternal life.
The influence of Paul was not immediately felt. The communities that he had established were tiny isles in a pagan sea. The church at Rome was Peter’s, and remained faithful to his memory. For a century after Paul’s death he was almost forgotten. But when the first generations of Christianity had passed away, and the oral tradition of the apostles began to fade, and a hundred heresies disordered the Christian mind, the epistles of Paul provided the framework for a stabilizing system of belief that united the scattered congregations into a powerful Church.
Even so, the man who had detached Christianity from Judaism was still so essentially Jewish in intensity of character and sternness of morality that the Middle Ages, adopting paganism into a colorful Catholicism, saw no kindred spirit in him, built few churches to him, seldom sculptured his figure or used his name. Fifteen centuries went by before Luther made Paul the Apostle of the Reformation, and Calvin found in him the somber texts of the predestinarian creed. Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter; Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.