Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Paul 1.5

It was not long before Gamaliel recognized God's hand on me, and I began to rise in prominence among the other youths in Jerusalem. I married the daughter of a prominent Pharisee and began to perform more and more important tasks for the Sanhedrin. I tried to suppress my Greek-speaking past in the Diaspora, although my competitors were always quick to bring it up. In the days when I persecuted the church, I took out my frustrations on the Greek-speaking believers in and around Jerusalem.

But you can imagine that Jerusalem became a much less friendly place when God chose to reveal His Son in me. It was almost three years after I saw the risen Lord before I returned to the city, and then I did so very cautiously. I wanted to talk to Cephas and hear about the Lord Jesus Christ. I also spent a little time with James, the Lord's brother, and heard about the startling change in his life after Jesus appeared to him.

Then some two years ago I had returned to Jerusalem with Barnabas as an official representative of the churches in Antioch. Those were the days of the famine that gripped the world during the reign of Claudius. The prophet Agabus had come up to Antioch from Jerusalem and foretold the hard times that were coming. As they always did, the Christians of Antioch (that's what they called the believers there) graced the church of Jerusalem with their own material blessings.

So now it was almost fourteen years since I had first gone up to visit Peter, and I was headed to Jerusalem again. I was confident that the three remaining pillars of the assembly there (Herod Agrippa had beheaded James) would agree that the Gentiles could be saved from God's coming wrath without submitting to circumcision.
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3 comments:

Keith Drury said...

1. Up here in the 21st century we’ve always wondered about your wife. They say up here that you must have been married but there isn’t much evidence left behind by you about who she is or even if she even was still alive by now. Some even say she was a “thorn in the flesh” to keep you humble—a role some spouses continue to this day. I hope you tell us more about her—we’re really into reality shows now and this sort of info is more important to our generation than doctrine etc.

2. Up here we wonder about Christ’s appearance to you sometimes. The risen Christ appeared to Cephas and James, but the Ascended Christ appeared to you. This intrigues us. I suppose your “denomination” in Judaism (Pharisee) made you more open to this experience?

3. You didn’t mention your time in Arabia here—I suppose you’ll tell us about that sometime later? Many of us think you went away to study Scriptures on your own for several years. Others think you went to some sort of desert monastery of sorts to study—maybe even with the Essenes. We wonder what you were up to between Damascus and Jerusalem after Christ appeared to you.

4. So two years ago you took an offering to Jerusalem already. This fund raising project must be important to you. We still raise offerings for the “poor at headquarters” even to this day, though we suppose they are less poor than the pillars were.

5. We’re also intrigued by the circumcision thing. How many years is it since Jesus rose? 16? 18? And there is still debate about the gentiles having to follow Jewish practices?

6. I suspect we’ll be hearing more about this phrase you use, “saved from God's coming wrath” – we still use “saved” now, but not in the same way as you are using it I suspect.

12:38 PM
Angie Van De Merwe said...

I wish the two of you (Ken and Keith) would converse more on how Paul used his "Greek education" to write his apologetics to the churches in his letters...I understand that he used it in Acts (the unknown "god")...was Paul commending Jesus as the "moral model" for the Gentile? What about the Jew and Jesus? What about "Christian culture"....And has "Christian culture" itself become just as hardened as the Jewish tradition before Jesus appeared to bring "good news" to the outsider? If so, what are the implications of this? Who are the "outsiders" to "Christian culture" and how do we maintain a "Christian distinction" without dissolving identity altogether? Or is dissolution neccessary so that we will not be making distinctions between the "saved and unsaved"( which is based on a judgment), but pursue the character of Christ.

And I think it's interesting that Keith calls the Pharisees a "denomination" (good point). Why would the Pharisees be more open to Paul's experience, because they believed in the resurrection, unlike the Sadducees????

If Paul studied Scripture during his time in Arabia, what was Paul studying, the Torah? Was he the first Christin "theologian"? As Ken has pointed out that Scripture has been dissolved into traditon in postmodernity. And "tradition" is the cultural "norm" for education of the young....

This is fascinating.

2:13 PM
Ken Schenck said...

1. Up here in the 21st century we’ve always wondered about your wife. They say up here that you must have been married but there isn’t much evidence left behind by you about who she is or even if she even was still alive by now. Some even say she was a “thorn in the flesh” to keep you humble—a role some spouses continue to this day. I hope you tell us more about her—we’re really into reality shows now and this sort of info is more important to our generation than doctrine etc.

I would only have had to be married if I was officially on the Sanhedrin. I may have "cast my vote" with them in my own mind many times, but I feel predestined by the implied evangelical author to say I wasn't actually a member of the Sanhedrin. When I write 1 Corinthians 7, I'll have my wife in mind.

2. Up here we wonder about Christ’s appearance to you sometimes. The risen Christ appeared to Cephas and James, but the Ascended Christ appeared to you. This intrigues us. I suppose your “denomination” in Judaism (Pharisee) made you more open to this experience?

Certainly the dark-minded Sadducees were not nearly as open to the idea of resurrection as the Pharisees were.

3. You didn’t mention your time in Arabia here—I suppose you’ll tell us about that sometime later? Many of us think you went away to study Scriptures on your own for several years. Others think you went to some sort of desert monastery of sorts to study—maybe even with the Essenes. We wonder what you were up to between Damascus and Jerusalem after Christ appeared to you.

Perhaps I'll reflect on this as I pass Damascus on my way to Jerusalem ;-)

4. So two years ago you took an offering to Jerusalem already. This fund raising project must be important to you. We still raise offerings for the “poor at headquarters” even to this day, though we suppose they are less poor than the pillars were.

I'm thinking one day of bringing a huge offering to Jerusalem from Gentile converts all around the world as a symbol of the end of the age.

5. We’re also intrigued by the circumcision thing. How many years is it since Jesus rose? 16? 18? And there is still debate about the gentiles having to follow Jewish practices?

It's been almost twenty years now since the resurrection. This is a really revolutionary idea for my world.

3:12 PM

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