The Real Paul

The scripture referred to is Acts 19:1-20.

Ever so often history has to be revised based on new data. For instance, they had to rewrite the history of World War II when the big secret finally came out—that almost from the beginning, we had cracked the German and Japanese military codes. Historians then had to rethink the reasons that the Allies succeeded in beating the Axis powers. It didn't diminish what everyone did, of course, but knowing what the enemy intended to do beforehand because we had read their orders made our generals look less prescient. There was a lot less luck involved in the Battle of Midway, for instance, because we knew what the Japanese had planned. We still had to counter their moves and advance our objectives but these revelations emphasized how important intelligence was in winning the war.

Not all attempts at revisionist history are successful, though. For years a certain British historian had studied the Kennedy assassination. He became convinced that the man who pulled the trigger was not the flaky, loose cannon named Lee Harvey Oswald but a Russian double. He said that Soviet intelligence had substituted this agent for the unstable American when Oswald defected to Russia. Eventually this historian convinced Oswald's widow to allow the assassin's body to be exhumed to determine his true identity. The result: the man in the grave was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald. This troubled loner, who in life acted alone because he was too volatile and unreliable to be recruited into anyone else's grand plan, remains in death a thorn in the side of conspiracy theorists. People just can't admit that one lone nut with a gun can kill the most powerful man in the world.

Like this British historian, there are some people who keep coming up with sensationalistic new theories about the Bible. Unlike the Oswald affair, these theories often cannot be so easily disproved because of the lack of physical evidence. Many of these theories revolve around the “search for the historical Jesus.” People keep trying to find a Jesus of history who is different from the Christ of faith. But more than a century ago, Albert Schweitzer showed that these so-called scholars tend to find exactly the Jesus they were looking for. The flavor of the month these days tends to be a Jesus who is an enlightened political and social radical with no pretensions to messiahship or divinity. The other biblical person most subject to radical revisionism is Paul.

Paul wrote most of the books of the New Testament. His letters to the churches he founded or visited are the earliest Christian writings we have, older than the gospels. These letters and the Book of Acts are the main sources for our knowledge of the first century church. This era is so crucial to our understanding of the origins of Christianity and Paul is such a fascinating character that naturally scholars are attracted to figuring him out. Unfortunately, the difficulty of keeping track of all of the nuances of such a complex person, the “publish or perish” pressures on an academic career, and the dismaying lack of care and subtlety found in media reporting, have presented us with a number of one-sided Pauls. Since this is a sermon and not a symposium, I'm not going to go into a detailed refutation of these caricatures of Paul but instead will sketch as faithful a portrait as I can based on the only primary source data we have: the New Testament.

Paul was born Saul to a Jewish family in Tarsus, a cosmopolitan city in what is now Turkey. Though a Roman citizen, he was a zealous Pharisee, convinced that the salvation of this people depended on a strict adherence to the Torah or Law of Moses. He went to Jerusalem to train under the famous rabbi Gamaliel. He rose to prominence and became a feared opponent of the Christian movement. He asked the Sanhedrin, the Jewish supreme court, for authority to hunt down and arrest some of these Jewish heretics who had fled to Syria. While traveling to Damascus, he encountered the risen Jesus. (Acts 22:2-8)

Our passage from Acts tells us how that encounter went. From his letter to the Galatians, we know that Paul went to Arabia shortly after his conversion. (Galatians 1:17) He had to rethink his entire life. If Jesus had been resurrected, then the Christians must be right and Paul had to be very wrong. How could he reconcile what the Old Testament said with what Jesus did on the cross and what he said about God's love and forgiveness?

Paul came to realize that the Law was essentially an educational tool. After all, Torah literally means “instruction.” In it God revealed what was right and what was wrong. But no one could be saved by the Law. It had no power to transform a bad person into a good one, anymore than a description of the signs of being a healthy person or an unhealthy one can cure a disease. The Law could not change the inner person. Only God's grace, his undeserved goodness towards us, could do that. And God's grace can only work in our lives if we let him—that is, if we trust him.

Paul further realized that trust, or faith, has always been the basis of a good relationship with God. It was Abraham's trust of God that led God to accept him as a righteous person. It was not the keeping of the Law of Moses, which came centuries after Abraham. The righteous live by faith, that is, by trusting in God. (Galatians 3:6-11)

In this, Paul was following Jesus. Jesus said that trust in God could move mountains. (Matthew 21:21) Jesus could only heal those who trusted him to do so. (Mark 5:34; 6:5-6) Jesus said that it is impossible for humans to save themselves; it is only possible for God to save us. (Mark 10:23-27) So Paul did not invent this emphasis on faith in Christ; he just stated it explicitly. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

When Paul returned from Arabia, he had reconciled the older covenant of the people of God with the new covenant of Jesus the Messiah, which had the power to change anybody into one of God's people. This was the good news that he preached in Antioch. The church in Jerusalem sent Barnabas to investigate. (Acts 11:22-26) Barnabas and Paul became friends and were sent as missionaries to Asia Minor. There they preached in the synagogues, enraging some but intriguing others. Often those who were most interested in the good news of Jesus were Godfearers, Gentiles who attended synagogue but who hadn't converted to Judaism. And so Paul had to deal with the question of whether Gentiles who came to trust Jesus had to first convert to Judaism. (Acts 13)

Paul decided that they did not. The Law of Moses was given to the Jews, not the Gentiles. And, as he knew, the Law could not save. Besides, by following Jesus, Gentile converts were already putting themselves in danger of persecution. Why should the church put further burdens on Gentile Christians?

But the church in Jerusalem, under Jesus' brother, James, wasn't so sure. Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem, spoke with James and Peter and put their case before the apostles and elders of the mother church. A compromise was worked out. Gentiles needn't be circumcised or follow all 613 commandments of the Torah, but should follow the basic rules of abstaining from sexual immorality, and from eating blood and meat that wasn't drained of blood and food offered to idols. (Acts 15:1-29)

Still, the matter was not resolved in the mind of every Christian and Paul was dogged by this controversy for the rest of his life. Though he fiercely defended the principles of salvation by grace through faith and not by our own efforts, he tried to balance freedom in Christ with a sharp moral sense. (Ephesians 2:10) He wasn't going to allow people to twist this teaching into an excuse to indulge in spiritually, socially and personally self-destructive behavior. (1 Corinthians 6:12; 10:23)

Paul also worked to reconcile the diverse elements of the growing church. He saw the church as the body of Christ, in which different parts with different functions worked together for the good of the whole. (1 Corinthians 12:12-27) He saw the unifying principle as Christ's self-sacrificial love, which puts the good of the other person above that of yourself. (Philippians 2:3-11) If everyone was thinking of others and open to God's Spirit, the church could work things out. Living in the Spirit and not by the letter of the Law was radical.

Being on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift, Paul had to work out the implications of the gospel in real life situations. So coming from a patriarchal society, he struggled with the place of women in leadership in the church. And yet he worked with women deacons and allowed them to preach, pray and teach, provided their heads were modestly covered. He even mentions Junia, the only woman called an apostle in the New Testament. (Romans 16:1-3, 7; Acts 18:24-26; 1 Corinthians 11:5, 16:19)

Paul lived in a society in which slavery was pervasive. He did not call for a slave revolt but told Christian slaves to obtain their freedom if they could and if not, to do their job well. (1 Corinthians 7:21-23) He also told masters to treat their slaves fairly, because they too had a divine and just Master. (Colossians 4:1) And in a personal letter to a church leader, Paul strongly hints that the man should not punish his runaway slave as he was permitted by law but that he should free him. He says treat the slave as a brother in Christ and as you would treat me, Paul, your spiritual father. (Philemon)

In a society where meat markets were attached to pagan temples and sold surplus meat offered to idols, Paul said that each Christian should follow his conscience but always think of and make allowances for those whose faith was less robust. (1 Corinthians 8)

In a church divided between Jewish believers and Gentile converts, he emphasized how none of the two sides had spiritual superiority before God but all were sinners dependent upon God's gracious love. (Romans 3:9-24)

Throughout all the controversies, despite what appear to be contradictions, Paul maintained “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

More than that, Paul was a poet. While some of his passages are very dense with rabbinic hair-splitting logic, at other times his writing soars. He often breaks into what appear to be fragments of early Christian hymns. And sometimes his prose becomes almost musical in itself. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” he asks in the 8^th chapter of Romans and then gets lyrical in listing all the barriers that God can overcome. (Romans 8:35-39) In the first letter to the Corinthians he waxes eloquent on the resurrection: “Listen, I tell you a mystery. We will not all sleep but we will be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52) In Colossians, he sings the praises of Christ, the firstborn of creation. (Colossians 1:15-20) In his second letter to Timothy, facing his death, he says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7) And he left us with his paean to love in 1 Corinthians 13, which I was once startled to hear read at a Jewish wedding!

Paul was imperfect, as he was the first to admit. (Philippians 3:12) But his encounter with the risen Jesus changed his life. And we might not be here as followers of Jesus, had not God used Paul to bring the light of the gospel to those who dwelt in darkness and God's love to those who were not originally his people. (Isaiah 9:2; Romans 9:25-26)

This sermon was first preached on April 25, 2004. It has been revised and updated.