Paul Novel: Galatians 5

Paul did not win the day at Antioch. The church at Antioch would struggle with a degree of "segregation" between Jewish and Gentile believer for the next thirty years, although many Gentiles did conform to the new expectations. It largely remained this way until the destruction of Jerusalem prompted some significant reassessment of the issue and the power shifted among believers in the city. Even then, some of the more conservative elements in the city continued separate until they finally disappeared into history without heir.

Barnabas tried to reconcile with Paul, but Paul saw Barnabas' submission to the thinking of Jerusalem as an obstacle to the gospel. The disagreement finally came to a head over John Mark. Both Paul and Barnabas agreed that they should return to the churches they had planted on their previous journey, starting with Cyprus and continuing into Pisidia and Lycaonia as before.

But Paul refused to take John Mark. It was enough that Barnabas disagreed with him on some major issues. But Paul considered Mark a backstabber who had helped catalyze the current crisis. No, it was no Mark or no way. When Barnabas would not concede, they agreed to divide up the area of their previous journey and go their separate ways.

Paul immediately knew who to take with him. Silas had been one of the few who had agreed with Paul over and against the decision of the Jerusalem church. He had already mentioned many times how much he wished he had been with Paul and Barnabas on the first mission. He was a leatherworker like Paul. Paul decided it was clearly God's will, and Silas agreed.

We have already mentioned much of what happened those next five years. They revisited Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, as well as Antioch in Pisidia. Timothy joined the mission in Lystra. Titus would have come with them too from the beginning, but he was not quite old enough yet. He would meet up them several years later when he was old enough.

Paul became sick and spent the better part of a year in northern Galatia, an unplanned year that nevertheless brought the gospel to the environs of Ancyra. Then they founded churches in Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, and Corinth. Paul spent almost two years in Corinth.

Then he shipwrecked off the coast of Crete on his way to Jerusalem and ended up spending the better part of another year here and there--including Galatia again. Finally he settled down in Ephesus for a ministry of several years in that city. He was imprisoned for a short while during his first year, then visited a number of churches in the eastern part of Asia, places like Colossae and Laodicea. He also made an emergency trip to Corinth after he returned to Ephesus.

Despite all these challenges, nothing thus far had been as difficult as the news that he had just received from Galatia. He knew the culprit, a man named Phineas from Antioch. He was a Jewish teacher who not only had stood against Paul in the Antioch argument. He had spoken strongly against James for being too soft on the Gentiles. Unless they were willing to go all the way and get circumcised, they showed that Jesus wasn't really their Lord and master. Unless they were willing to give up everything, they didn't understand what it really meant to serve God as king!

Paul Novel: Galatians 4

... Paul, Barnabas, and Titus returned to Antioch with a sense of triumph. Neither James nor Peter had forced Titus to be circumcised, and by their allowance, they had legitimized Paul's mission and message. Peter, not long thereafter, traveled to Antioch, realizing that the city was quickly becoming a center of the Way as influential as Jerusalem. He honestly rejoiced to see the thriving community of faith, with numerous assemblies meeting all over the city on the Lord's Day.

Paul was very hopeful for Peter's complete support at first. Paul made sure that all the Gentile assemblies invite Peter to their fellowships on the Lord's Day. He was initially somewhat reluctant, given that these were Gentile homes, often with Paul being the only other Jew. But he consented, not only because Paul was persuasive, but because he genuinely wanted to see them grow in faith.

The second or third Sunday Peter met in a Gentile assembly, he began to loosen up. The biggest issue was when he met with them to eat the Lord's meal. If he met in the morning for prayer, there was awkwardness of being in a Gentile home. But when he ate the love feast with them, there was the issue of impurity through the meal.

In general, Peter had not spent too much time in his life worrying about such things. He was a fisherman from Galilee, not a member of some Pharisee dining club or an Essene in a commune on the shores of the Dead Sea. Jesus had hardly worried about such things either, taking them into the homes of toll collectors and occasionally eating in the presence of prostitutes.

But not so with James. Jesus' free wheeling fellowship was one of the reasons he had resisted his ministry while he was on earth. And now he was conscious of a large group of believers in Jerusalem who were very sensitive to these sorts of issues. So when the rumors of Peter's incautious dining with Gentiles got back to Jerusalem, James immediately sent an urgent message back to him. One of those who returned with the messengers was none other than John Mark.

The thrust of the message was that Peter had to set the tone for Jewish believers because he was the apostle, the one who had seen the Lord. Maybe Gentiles could escape God's wrath by their confession of Jesus as Lord, repentance for their sins, and baptism in the name of Jesus' faithful death. But Jewish believers were still a part of the covenant God had made with Israel. God's expectation that they would keep the commandments was as firm as ever. Jesus had not changed that. Many believers in Jerusalem might be lost to the Way if they were to find that Peter was being so careless about his purity.

Here was his suggestion. If the Gentile believers would only adopt a few simple practices, then Jew and Gentile would be able to continue to eat together. For example, if they would make sure that the meat they served had not been sacrificed at a nearby temple, that was very important, given how much of the meat in the marketplace was defiled. Then if they would make sure that the animal was drained of blood, not strangled, then no blood would be among the meat.

Finally, Gentiles were notorious for their sexual immorality. If they would keep themselves pure in this way, and be careful about the way they acquired and prepared any meat for the Lord's meal, then it would be possible for Jew and Gentile to eat together. Of course in practice it would not be so simple. Peter would need to make sure not only that everyone present for the meal was clean, but that every member of the household in general was.

Peter tried to put on as good a face as he could, but frankly, it was embarrassing the whole way around. He had planned the coming Sunday to meet in one of the Gentile house churches. He tried to bow out as tactfully as possible at the last minute. When Paul heard of it, knowing that certain men had come that week from James, he suspected that something was wrong.

So he went to Peter, who had not planned to announce the new decisions quite so soon. But Paul's doggedness forced the issue, and all the elders of the city were called together the next evening. The church rejoiced that the Gentiles had received the good news of the Messiah and in their salvation. But Israel was the people of God, and God had given Israel the Law, in which he specified rules of purity and impurity. So the Jews could not eat with the Gentile believers unless they were willing to make their homes clean according to the Levitical laws.

Paul was outraged. He had suspected something was up, but requiring the Gentile believers to make their homes kosher? The absurdity of it all. He couldn't contain himself--didn't think God wanted him to.

"So you--you, Peter--are going to make the Gentiles keep the rules of kashrut? What a joke! What hypocrisy! You, keep the Law? You, who already live like a Gentile are going to force the Gentiles to live like a Jew?

"I've kept the Law. I've kept the Law like no one in this room has ever kept the Law. On my most impure day I kept the Law better than James on his most pure day. I've kept it better than anyone in the entire Jerusalem community ever has. But what I needed was the death of Christ. My attention to the minute works of the Law did not bring me God's favor.

"This is insincere. Worse, it is of the Satan. We all stand or fall before God on the basis of Christ's faithfulness and our trust in it, whether Jew or Gentile. To turn to anything else after the Christ has died for us, is to spit on his grace."

It was a tense moment. Barnabas finally tried to make peace. Paul's bluntness had not earned him any sympathy. If anything it had turned some who would have been sympathetic to the other side.

"Brother Paul," Barnabas said. "It seems little to ask for our Gentile brothers to take a little extra caution in preparing their meals. And even you have not approved of the sexual immorality we have encountered on our mission. No one expects you to change the way you fellowship with the Gentile believers. But this feels right to me and especially right for Peter, since he is as you have said yourself, the apostle to the Jews" ...

Paul Novel: Galatians 3

Barnabas and Paul returned to Antioch with a sense of triumph. They had left with the salvation of the Gentiles still somewhat of an experiment, a probability given what they had witnessed thus far. But they returned--Paul especially--with it established beyond reasonable doubt. God was going to save those Gentiles who confessed faith in Jesus as Lord and in God's plan through him, and God was going to do it without them needing to become Jews!

Any second guessing of Paul's calling was now gone. He had not had any appreciable success in Arabia. He had some success in Cilicia, but not nearly what he had hoped.

But Cyprus and Asia Minor had changed all that. It was his first dramatic success in the conversion of the Gentiles, especially Sergius Paulus. He had made inroads into the very household of Caesar! He was convinced that God had appointed him as apostle to the Gentiles, just as Peter was the apostle to the Jews.

All this is not to say, however, that everyone agreed. The very notion that he might be on any par with Peter seemed nothing but arrogant boasting to any who got wind of it. After all, Peter was the first disciple and the first to whom Jesus appeared risen.

John Mark had done Paul's reputation great damage when he returned to Jerusalem. He had shared Paul's Gentile-loving ways in whispered and not so whispered conversation. Paul's chummy behavior with a Roman proconsul was all the evidence anyone needed to know that Paul was simply an unprincipaled, power hungry man more full of ambition than with love for God or Israel. What business did a Jew have with such a Roman, the enemies of Israel and, indeed, those who had crucified the Lord Jesus?

Of course for every one who was genuinely outraged, there were two who were really only jealous of the power and status Paul had acquired. They would never be Roman citizens, only outcasts in the eyes of those in power. But Paul simply preached to the Gentiles more vigorously than ever.

After they returned, Paul began to think about new ways to come in contact with Gentiles, more subtle than the public preaching that almost got him killed in Arabia. It occurred to him that one of the elders at Antioch, a man called Silas, was a leatherworker, just like Paul's family back in Tarsus. Silas had a booth in the marketplace, where he sat in the morning and evening, repairing and selling various goods. Paul decided to join him and use the opportunity to bring the good news to any who might listen.

Within a day, he had his first convert, a young man of about twenty, named Titus. Titus introduced Paul to his family and within a few days his entire household became followers of the Way. They were Gentiles through and through and had never set foot in a synagogue.

Those were great days for Paul, in retrospect some of the most delightful of his life. One morning in prayer, soon after Titus' conversion, Paul understood from the Lord that he must go to Jerusalem with Titus, to show him to Peter and James. He and Barnabas would get their approval for the new phase of the gospel that God was now opening up.

They would see he was right. How could they reject Titus? It was obvious that the Holy Spirit was at work in him. God would show them. They would see that his mission to the Gentiles was simply the outworking of Jesus' ministry to sinners within Israel.

Once he had their approval, it would end once and for all the back-stabbing and grumbling about him as well. The assemblies of God would be united in purpose in a way that they had not since the earliest days. It was all so clear to Paul--to Jerusalem they must go!

Paul Novel: Galatians 2

... So it wasn't long until Paul convinced Barnabas that they needed to leave Antioch to spread the good news to the Gentiles elsewhere. Since Barnabas was originally from the nearby island of Cyprus, he suggested there. In his mind, Paul had already exhausted his home region of Cilicia, just to the northeast.

To help them on their journey, Barnabas suggested his cousin, John Mark, whose family were some of the first believers in Jerusalem. Indeed, Mark's household had provided the room where Jesus had eaten his last meal with Peter and the other disciples. And it was where the leaders in Jerusalem still met together in assembly, among several other house fellowships in Jerusalem. When Paul and Barnabas had collected enough supplies and had secured a ship, they left for Cyprus.

They saw almost immediate success among the Jews of the island. It helped immensely that Barnabas was so well known and liked among the Jews there. Barnabas and Paul--or Saul, as he was known in those days--were quite different people in many respects. In some ways they were virtual opposites. Paul was outspoken and aggressive, at times almost offensive. Barnabas was quiet, reserved, and assuring. Paul would tell you what you needed to do and what needed to be done. Barnabas was a good listener and was conciliatory. Sometimes it was hard even to know what he thought on an issue.

The confidence of the Jews of Cyprus in Barnabas an his family was so great that virtually the whole island believed, from Salamis in the east to Paphos in the west...

The success of the gospel among Gentiles, indeed, among Roman officials, not only confirmed Paul's sense of calling to non-Jews. It increased his drive to spread the good news to the whole world. If Paul had been driven before, he was now an unstoppable force. Although they had initially planned to return straight to Antioch, Paul now insisted they sail north to Pamphylia in Asia Minor. Paul had not gone any further west than the Cilician gates when he had preached in the region before. He saw this moment as a God-given opportunity to expand the good news to Pamphylia and then to Pisidia in the north.

John Mark was not pleased at all. He had been more than happy to go to Cypress with Barnabas leading the mission. After all, his distant relatives lived there. And he was enthused about spreading the gospel. He had actually met Jesus that fateful week before his crucifixion and had been enamored with the possibility that this might be the Christ.

Jesus had left an indelible impression on him. Just after Jesus was taken from the Garden of Gethsemane, a couple of the disciples came frantically to Mark's house, which was not far from a small prison where the high priest kept those arrested. Mark had run out to see what was happening, wearing only a linen shirt on. Astounded that the messiah could be arrested, he met up with them, coming up the long stairs on the south side of the temple, in the old city of David. When the guards saw him acting suspiciously, they reached for his shirt, and he only escaped by fleeing naked into the darkness.

But Mark was still somewhat unsure about what Paul was doing with the Gentiles. He was okay with them converting to Judaism. He was okay with the God-fearers in the synagogue. But he had serious questions about how agressively Paul was pursuing the Gentiles and proclaiming that the faithful death of Jesus could apply to them with only a baptism in water to show for it.

And Barnabas seemed less and less in charge of the mission. Sometimes it irritated Mark that Barnabas let Paul do so much of the talking. And Barnabas tended to go along with whatever Paul suggested, usually without asking some of the questions Mark thought should be offered.

And Paul was a hard task master. Mark was responsible for the bulk of their stuff and was at Paul's beck and call. Paul could sense Mark's resentment for the work, which made him push even harder. The long and short of it is that when they arrived on the shores of Asia Minor at Attalia, Mark took one look at the immense mountains to the north and grabbed a ship headed back east toward Antioch...

Paul Novel: Galatians 1

Well, my wife Angie has corroborated that I should keep my day job unless I put more gun fights into this thing. But I've committed to finish it, so I will continue! What I've posted here on previous Sundays has been chapter 8, the second chapter on 1 Corinthians.

So today we start chapter 9: Trouble in Galatia.
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The first two years of Paul’s stay in Asia was invigorating to him. Yes, he had been briefly imprisoned and had appeared before the Roman governor. But he had witnessed to Christ before the governor, a grand opportunity as far as he was concerned! And he had seen the gospel expand inland as far as Colossae. He was beginning to feel that itch to move, to entrust Ephesus to the care of others and push further west even beyond Rome into Spain.

The Corinthian church continued to present some difficulty, but Paul hoped that his most recent letter would bring the kind of peace and unity the church needed. Apollos had largely removed himself from the situation, submitting to Paul's authority. The two obviously were having an effect on each other's thinking. Apollos was less flippant about pagan temples, and Paul began to think more seriously about what might happen to the dead before the resurrection.

But Paul's equilibrium was startlingly thrown off balance when news arrived at Ephesus about certain goings on in the northern region of Roman Galatia. Paul and Barnabas had founded churches in the south of that Roman district less than ten years earlier, in the regions of Pisidia and Lacaonia. It was there in the city of Lystra that Timothy had believed in Jesus.

Then on a second trip through the area with Silas, Paul had found himself heading north by a somewhat bizarre route, only to end up in the area of Ancyra, in Galatia proper. This was the area where descendants of the warlike Galatians of old lived. It was while there that Paul became deathly ill. And even after he recovered, he found that he had lost significant sight in his eyes as a result of the fever.

He would not normally have spent so much time in an area where there was no great city, but he took the situation as a sign of God's will. For the next few months he brought the good news to the Galatians of the region, and many received the message with joy. Indeed, they treated Paul like he was an angel from heaven. Then when Paul decided his sight had returned as much as it would, he, Silas, and Timothy pressed on. He would struggle with his eyes the rest of his life.

Paul made a second trip through the region of north Galatia after he left Corinth the first time. It was during that trip that he urged them to set aside money on the Lord's Day for an offering he hoped to bring to the churches of Jerusalem. He hoped to bring it there by Pentecost the next year. Little did he know at the time that he would have to put off that trip and that, by the time he did take it, he would have lost the loyalty of the Galatians.

To understand the situation at Galatia, you have to go back almost ten years. Back then, Paul was preaching the good news everywhere he could in his home region, where Tarsus was. Remember, he spent three years in Palestine after he believed. That was in the area around Damascus and in Nabatean Arabia just east of it.

But after those first three years, Paul had returned to his home town of Tarsus, in Asia Minor. For almost ten years thereafter, Paul had used Tarsus as a base from which to preach the gospel in the surrounding region, the region of Cilicia. At the time he was still sorting out his calling. He worked mostly in whatever Jewish synagogues he could find, with mixed results. He also tried to reach out to any Gentiles who would listen to him.

Near the end of a decade there, he received an invitation to come to Antioch, a city in the northernmost part of Palestine, in Syria. It was only about a week's journey from Tarsus, to the east. There, he found a vibrant group of believers. Most of them were Greek-speaking Jews, but Gentile God-fearers had become an important part of the community too.

It was exactly the collection of God's people that Paul had pictured as part of the end of the age. There were not only Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but also many Gentiles flocking to Israel's God. Paul's only complaint was that Antioch was not actively seeking out the Gentiles. They were only receiving them as God drew them to their synagogues.

Still, the Christian synagogues there were awash with signs of the Holy Spirit. When they met together at dawn on Sunday morning, there was always a prophetic word that all acknowledged as authentic. People in their fellowship regularly experienced healings, and whenever they came across evil spirits, they were caused to flee. Paul almost felt that God's rule might break through at any time.

The believers were a glorious mixture of Jew, Gentile, rich, poor, not to mention Jews from all over the Diaspora. Barnabas was there, and it was he who had invited Paul to join the assemblies at Antioch. There was Simeon the black and Lucius of Cyrene, both of whom were from North Africa. One of the patrons of the community was a man named Manaen, who had actually grown up with Herod Antipas, the one who beheaded John the baptizer.

Perhaps the best known instance of the Spirit's working there was when the prophet Agabus foresaw that a famine was coming over the world. When it happened, the community of Antioch shared its abundance with the churches of Jerusalem. They sent a delegation with support from Antioch down to Jerusalem.

But despite the success of the gospel at Antioch, Paul could not forget his sense that the good news was for the Gentiles as well as the Jews. He could not get the prophesy of Isaiah out of his mind, that the Gentiles would rally to the Messiah. He could not forget the mandate of Isaiah to proclaim God's glory among the nations...

Paul Novel Excerpt: Priscilla Expulsion from Rome

I've committed to finishing this novel, but is anyone out there actually liking the snippets I've posted?
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Priscilla and Aquila had brought the gospel to the Corinthian synagogue less than a year before Paul arrived in the city. They and other believing Jews had been forced to leave Rome by the Roman emperor Claudius.

The good news that the Christ had arrived had made its way to Rome even before Jesus appeared to Paul. But the crisis with the emperor before Claudius, Caligula, had made Jews in the city--and around the world--pay more attention to the message than they might have otherwise.

A little more than ten years earlier, the Jews of Alexandria had undergone a major crisis. The Roman prefect of Egypt, Flaccus, had allowed those who hated the Jews to riot against them. He would eventually lose his life for his great incompetence in the matter and, indeed, his borderline complicity.

Several were killed by mobs in the center of Alexandria, and those Jews who lived throughout the city huddled for safety into the part where most Jews lived. About a fifth part of the city was made up of Jews. Indeed, there were more Jews in part of the city of Alexandria than there was in the entire city of Jerusalem!

One of the things at issue was whether some Jews were truly citizens of the city or whether they were simply a group unofficially tolerated. Up to that point, the wealthier Jews of the city, people like the writer Philo, participated in much of Alexandria’s civic and political life. Philo himself had enjoyed a gymnasium education alongside non-Jews, although he eventually helped found a gymnasium of sorts just for Jews. He was an armchair philosopher who followed a long tradition in the city of respectable Jews who engaged non-Jewish literature and thought.

But now suddenly, the question of whether Jews like him really belonged or not was being brought to a decision. Jews around the world—including Christian Jews—were certainly curious about what Caligula would decide. Most Diaspora Jews, Jews scattered around the world outside Palestine, no doubt felt like any other ethnic group. They did their own thing and, as long as they didn’t cause trouble, the Romans didn’t have a problem with them.

Then Caligula took a matter of curiosity and made it into a serious question. The maniac decided to put a statue of himself in the temple in Jerusalem, an all around bad idea. He commanded the Roman governor of Syria, Petronius, to take two legions of soldiers with him to Jerusalem to make sure it happened. When Petronius told Caligula he would not be able to comply without annihilating the entire Jewish populace, Caligula ordered him to commit suicide. But fortunately for Petronius, the order didn’t get there until about a month after a follow up order from Caligula, one telling him not to do anything further on the matter. The Jewish king, Agrippa I, had talked him out of it. Caligula was assassinated within a year.

Diaspora Jews who before had not taken their identity or the temple back in Jerusalem very seriously, now found their nationalistic fervor stirred. The idea that the messiah was about to come to earth instantly became a message of great interest. Many groups now began to take a strong interest in the book of Daniel, as Caligula had surely just tried to set up an “abomination that causes desolation” in the temple!

Claudius was at least a little saner than Caligula had been. But he did not rule in favor of the Jews. The Jews of Alexandria, he decided, were not citizens of the city. They were officially tolerated and could go on doing things in their own peculiar way. But they shouldn’t think themselves more than they had been before.

It was an immense shock to Philo and those who had gone with him earlier to Rome to see Caligula. From that point on his writings took on a more nationalistic flavor, whereas his earliest writings had drawn fuzzier lines between his Jewish ideas and those of the Greeks. His nephew, Tiberius Alexander, could see that Jews like himself would have to make a choice, so he renounced his Judaism and fully entered the Roman political system and arena.

Less than ten years later, the idea that Jesus was the Christ had the Roman synagogues in a great uproar. Many, many Jews in the city believed in the good news and were boldly proclaiming that the messiah was about to return to earth and establish his kingdom. But the other side just as vehemently opposed the message. After all, what kind of a messiah ended up naked on a Roman cross—and from Galilee, no less!

The controversy was so severe that eventually Claudius became involved. He didn't really know the details of what was going on, but he had lost all patience with these Jews and their problems. He closed down the key synagogues at the center of the controversy and banished their members from the city, not a small number of Jews. Among this number were believers like Priscilla and Aquila. And thus it was that they had made their way to Corinth.

Sunday Paul: Ephesus 4

Here are the earlier installments of this particular chapter of the novel:

Ephesus 1
Ephesus 2
Ephesus 3

And now today:
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The last big question in their letter had to do with dispensations of God’s Spirit to individual believers. The whole problem made Paul sick to his stomach. Here were all these people turning gifts from the Holy Spirit, meant to build up the whole assembly, into a competition for who was the greatest in the church.

The problem especially centered on the use of angelic tongues in worship. Several in Crispus' household--and now Erastus and several other of Apollos' converts--were turning the Corinthian assembly into chaos. This was a group of people in great need of clear instruction, of a prophetic word. But Sosthenes and even Crispus himself could hardly get a word in for all the chaos. Their assembly often became a wild, disorderly free for all.

The experience of tongues was not foreign to Paul. On several occasions, including one in particular when he ascended in spirit to the highest sky where Christ is, he had felt the heavenly language pour out of him. This language must be the language the Spirit uses to intercede for us to God, he thought.

But he did not speak much of these experiences. They were very special and private moments in Paul's life. Not everyone experienced them.

And they were controversial among the Jews. There was a whole movement on the rise called Merkabah, named for the chariots of Ezekiel's visions. Jews who followed the movement, including many Essenes, aimed to ascend in spirit to heaven and worship with the angels. In the Testament of Job, a fairly recent Jewish writing, Job's daughters themselves had this special gift.

Indeed, several of Crispus' daughters had latched on to this writing and aimed to emulate Job's daughters. Paul didn't mind. He rejoiced in their gift. But he could see that it was puffing them up, along with the others who were having the experience. It was dividing the body of Christ.

Apollos had not helped matters. These mystical experiences were highly prized in Alexandria. He had grown up around intellectuals like Philo who saw these experiences as a higher kind of knowledge, the highest philosophy. It was knowing God in the parts of him that cannot be known with our reason. He had taken a highly controversial experience among Jews and put it center stage.

So Erastus and many of Apollos' converts had sought these experiences, and many had spoken in angelic tongues in the process. They were turning worship into an attempt to worship with the angels, and instead of everyone coming together, the assembly ended up with a host of individuals enjoying their own individual experiences.

Beyond the extreme narcissism of what was going on, Paul saw a bigger problem with any Gentiles who might come to the assembly. Although what was going on was thoroughly Jewish in one respect, an outsider would immediately have made a connection to the Eleusinian mysteries and the kinds of Bacchanalian experiences that were associated with Greek mystery religions.

In fact, Paul believed that Apollos had completely missed what was going on with Erastus and others. They were simply mimicing the kinds of experiences they had had at Eleusis before they became a Christian. It was yet another spot where Paul felt that Erastus had not made a clean enough break with his former pagan life.

His solution was to set down guidelines. He didn't want to tell the Corinthians not to speak in tongues in the assembly, didn't want to quench the Spirit. But he wanted to bring order to it as well. And he wanted them to see the bigger picture, instead of the very selfish and self-centered one they were currently painting.

He began tactfully, using a well known Stoic image of how each part of the body has a different role to play, but that all the parts function for the good of the whole body. It was his subtle and indirect way of telling the tongues speakers that they should not think themselves to be more important to God than the others in the assembly.

But he and Sosthenes wrestled for several days over how to approach the question of the tongues speaking itself. One afternoon Paul felt particularly inspired. He had inserted into the middle of his discussion of meat sacrificed to idols his own example of how he had personally surrendered his freedom and rights to better. Now he felt he should do the same here.

"Even if I speak in the languages of mortals and of angels, if I do not have love, I have become clanging metal." It was the solution to all the problems of the Corinthians, love. Indeed, even as Jesus had said, all the commandments hanged on love.

Then he felt ready to get more direct. Tongues was a very edifying to the person speaking them, but unless you could interpret them to the rest of the assembly, they were of no use to anyone else and, indeed, could do potential harm to unbelievers. Paul had never known anyone to interpret angelic tongues. It seemed safe for him to tell the Corinthians only to allow tonuges in the assembly if someone could interpret them.

But what the Corinthians really needed was a prophetic word, a voice from God's Spirit to lead them in the right path. God had been trying to speak through Sosthenes and Crispus now for a long time, but the church was too preoccupied with their "knowledge" and their connection to the world of spirit to hear the Spirit genuinely.

Two or at the most three prophecies when they met together, one at a time. They shouldn't simply believe them but should test them. Two or at the most three instances of tongues, one at a time. But only if God graced them with an interpretation.

Sunday Paul 2: Excerpt from the first chapter

I didn't intend to share the first chapter of the Paul novel here, but I wanted to know what people might think of this excerpt. The setting is Paul about to appear before the Areopagus in Athens:
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Paul relished the opportunity to speak to them. To be sure, Athens was not the impressive city Paul had imagined it to be. It may have been a great city in the past, back in the days of Pericles and the philosophers. But to Paul it was nothing compared to a city like Tarsus, where he grew up. Paul grew up in the third largest city of the empire, and he was most at ease in big cities like Corinth and Ephesus.

Paul had read some Stoic philosophy way back, when for a short time his parents put him in a Greek gymnasium in Tarsus. That was before his parents sent him off to live with his sister in Jerusalem in his late-teens. He found some of the Stoic philosophy attractive, although he had no time at all for the Epicureans.

For example, the Stoics believed God had a will for your life and that it was pointless to fight against it. You should love your fate and in all things be content, no matter your circumstances. Later when he studied in Jerusalem, he found very similar teaching in some of the Essene writings. God had divided up humanity into the sons of light and the sons of darkness. You had no real choice in the matter as to which one you were.

Of course he was a Pharisee at the time, not an Essene. He found the Pharisaic approach a bit more balanced. God had a will to be sure, but we needed to work our way through life making the best choices we could, toward what we understood to be God’s goals. He would make sure his way was accomplished, and you would know where you stood in that plan by how it all turned out.

Even as a Pharisee, he leaned more toward the School of Shammai rather than that of Hillel. The School of Shammai was more about action. God would accomplish his will while you were working to accomplish his will. The school of Hillel was more passive. Let God do what God will do.

He kept some of his views along these lines to himself, especially when he began pursuing the daughter of the famous Hillelite Pharisee, Gamaliel. Gamaliel very much took the passive view of God’s will, much more than Paul did. He was famous for saying that God would work out his plan even if we did nothing.

That was not Paul’s way. Paul was a man of action. He was a doer. He did give the issue a second look when Jesus revealed himself to him. So many followers of the Way were Essenes. Paul could agree with them that God decided who was chosen and who was true Israel. Yes, surely God was in control of all that happened in the world ultimately.

But it was his job to find out who those chosen ones were. He scarcely took the time to connect the dots. The things he affirmed about God’s control over the world played almost no role at all in how he went about his mission. He proclaimed the good news as if anyone could be saved. He urged his converts to remain faithful, believing that those who were right with God today could end up not being right with God in the end. And those who seemed chosen for destruction might actually turn out to be saved in the end.

Yes, somewhere behind the scenes God was mysteriously directing the whole process. But getting there was full of human choices and Paul ruled out no possibility because of this or that theory. His part was to do whatever he could to see as many saved as possible. God would sort out the details.

Sunday Paul: Ephesus 3

I decided to continue with the sequence I started a week ago. I've been trying to back fill the story a little this week too, but I think I'll do that on the side.

Ephesus 1
Ephesus 2

...
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The second question in the letter had to do with eating food that had come from one of the surrounding temples. Paul knew well enough what stood behind the question. He had warned Erastus during his last visit that he would have to make a choice at some point between his ambitions in the politics of Corinth and his loyalty to Christ's kingdom.

It was not enough in Roman politics simply to fund public projects. You had to see and be seen, and many of the city's functions revolved around the local temples. For example, the temple of Asclepius had side rooms where you could eat the meat from your sacrifice. One room had become a common meeting place for leaders in the city. They would sacrifice in the evening and then eat the meat and drink wine long into the night with great revelry.

Erastus knew he needed to be at those meetings to get anywhere higher in the city's administration, even though they weren't official meetings. It wasn't that Erastus was from some noble family or something. Indeed, almost no one in Corinth was. The city had only been refounded by Julius Caesar less than a hundred years previous, settled by former soldiers. Someone like Erastus couldn't have gone anywhere in politics at Rome. But Corinth was one of those unusual places in the world where you could actually move up the social ladder. There was little inherited wealth.

True, Erastus no longer had any real allegiance to the gods of the Greeks and Romans. Apollos had thoroughly convinced him that these gods didn't exist. But Paul approached the issue a little differently than Apollos did. It was strange for Paul to be pegged as the conservative on the issue, when the Jerusalem church considered him a lawless antinomian, someone who had abandoned the Law altogether.

The Jerusalem church was unbending on the issue of anything that had been sacrificed or offered to an idol. Many of their surrogates outside Palestine went so far as to suggest that Jews, including Gentile believers in Christ, should become vegetarians rather than chance eating meat that had come from a nearby pagan temple. So many animals were slaughtered every day--and especially after a feast day--that the local temples and their priests could sell the excess in the marketplace to bolster their intake. The most scrupulous of Jews simply didn't buy meat at such places. He had heard that some in the Roman churches advocated this position.

But Paul saw no reason to abandon meat altogether. He respected those who did, but he was content to give the Corinthians a "don't ask" policy on the issue. He did not flagrantly ignore the purity rules of Leviticus. But he had stood his ground at Antioch on the issue six years ago, and he wasn't about to change his mind now. The unity of the church took precedence over almost all of the purity rules, that is, except the sexual ones.

For Paul, questions about these sorts of works of the Law had a tendency to divide Jew from Gentile believer in a way that undermined the very heart of the gospel message and the Gentile mission. And didn't all the animals belong to God anyway? As the Corinthians said in their letter, "We know that an idol is nothing in the world." And they reminded Paul of the Shema, the cornerstone of biblical faith, "There is no God but one."

Paul knew he was hearing Apollos' teaching being read back to him. Indeed, Apollos and Paul had debated these things in the school. Apollos still had Philo ringing in his ear from his days growing up in Alexandria. "There are no evil angels," he argued. "All the angels are ministering servants, sent to minister to those about to inherit salvation. These temples are empty and those who worry about them worry about empty space."

Paul, on the other hand, was more in tune with the thinking of Jesus and the Jerusalem church on this one. "The Satan and demons fill those temples," he would fire back. "Why would a believer in Jesus want to eat at the table of demons?" These were some of the issues they were working through at the school in the Hall of Tyrannus. And they were far from academic in a world where the temples of the Geniles and their impact were everywhere! Paul would eventually convince him that the Devil--as Apollos preferred to call the Satan--was at work in the temples.

On the other hand, most believers couldn't afford meat regularly anyway. In that sense, the question of whether or not to eat meat was primarily at issue for the few in the Corinthian church who were well off, people like Erastus and Gaius.

Paul decided to steer a middle course in his response. Yes, they are right; an idol is nothing. Yes, they are right, for us there is only one God despite all the other so-called gods, and Christ is our only Lord. Everything belongs to God. So they shouldn't worry about food in the marketplace. Food is neither clean nor unclean. It's rather a question of how you think about the food. If it is truly God's food for you, then it is clean for you. That was his concession to Apollos and the wealthy in the church.

On the other hand, demonic forces did exist in the world, and they filled the Gentile temples more than any other place. Eating at one of these temples was like eating at the table of a demon. Why would anyone want to be associated with such a thing? At a person's home, if they served meat, just don't ask where it came from and eat it with thankgiving. If a fellow believer tells you it came from a temple, don't eat it for their sake.

What Paul tried to bring out that following Christ was not just a matter of you as an individual. We followed Christ together, as a collective body of Christ. The Spirit of Christ was in us as a whole even more than in each one of us as an individual. We were God's possession, not our own to do as we saw fit. So when our knowledge and our freedom as an individual became harmful to others in the body, we needed to surrender them.

Paul truly believed that he had lived out this principle in his mission. Back in Tarsus he had it easy. His father had servants to do all the manual labor of leather working and tent making. And in Jerusalem he had run with the highest leaders of the Pharisees. Twenty years ago it would have been an insult for him to work with his hands, but he did it willingly for the good of the gospel.

Meanwhile, apostles like Peter and James travelled around with their wives and enjoyed the best meals and lodging that their hosts could afford. It was good enough for them, Paul thought. They didn't stay in one place long enough for the strings of patronage to become a major problem.

Not so for him. If he received patronage from wealthy Gentiles, they would have expectations of him. It might hinder him from being forthright with them. And he was now staying in urban centers for years on end. He might receive support from a church after he left, like Philippi, but it was his policy to support himself while he was situtated at a place. Barnabas felt exactly the same.

In the end, Paul felt very sure of what needed to happen at Corinth, indeed, he almost had an immediate sense of what needed to be done in any situation. It was his savant. Working out the reasons, the theory, on the other hand, was more difficult. To be sure, his years in Jerusalem had helped him immensely, listening to scribes and Pharisees debate the works of the Law back and forth. It was work, but Paul thanked God for his help in argument.

The Jerusalem church would not have been completely satisfied with his advice to the Corinthian church. They had made it clear in no uncertain terms that Christ followers must make sure that they do not eat meat that has been sacrificed to an idol. They must be very careful not to eat things with the blood still in it or the meat of an animal that was strangled, with the blood left in the meat.

Meanwhile Paul found himself in a nebulous middle ground. He was happy to conform to the Jerusalem expectations when he was only around Jews. And he continued to see himself entirely as an Israelite, indeed, as the truest kind of Israelite. But the unity of the gospel required him to fudge some of the edges of the purity rules so that he could have full table fellowship with Gentile believers. Indeed, most Jews themselves--including the Jerusalem apostles--did not keep the kind of purity standards he knew you had to if you really wanted to keep the Law.

So he was not under the Law, even if he lived under the Law in its key respects, especially around Jews. To the Jew he became a Jew that he might win the Jews. But to the Gentiles, those without the Law, he became lawless, so that he might see them saved from the coming wrath of God too. To be sure, he was still under Christ's Law, the heart of the Law. It was all a fine line he was trying to walk so that he could bring as many people to confess Jesus as Lord as he could.

Paul: Ephesus 2

I've decided to write a real novel on Paul, and to give excerpts on Sundays. My plan is that it will start with Paul arriving at Corinth, give flashbacks as we encounter them in his writings, and probably end with Paul underway to Rome as at the end of Acts, with a sense of foreboding. It thus will thus leave Ephesians, Colossians, and the Pastorals for the reader's imagination (with occasional allusions and hints), and will cover Philippians and Philemon at Ephesus.

No excuses will be made for wildly novelistic features (such as a shipwreck after Paul leaves Corinth the first time). It's a novel. If you are interested, you can either egg me on or tell me to keep my day job (which of course I intend to do anyway). When I'm done, you can suggest whether to self-publish it or send it off to the publisher's mafia.

My wife insists I only post excerpts (don't tell her I don't think she's completely caught on to the internet age, even though she may be right).

So here's today's excerpt, continuing on from the other day.
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The first question in the letter from Gaius had to do with sex. Should believers in Christ stop having sex with their wives?

It was a serious question for Paul. While most of the apostles like Peter and James were married, Paul had chosen to remain celibate after his wife left him. He did not disparage marriage, but you could tell that he thought it the second best option, especially with the Lord returning in the near future. He made no secret of the fact that he prided himself on being able to control such desires and that he was able to serve God better because he could devote all his energies to the Lord with a single mind.

He also made it clear that Jesus and, in his opinion, the more spiritual Jews in Jerusalem also remained celibate. He never failed to mention at some point during his stay at a given city that Jesus had chosen to sacrifice his desires to marry in order to preach the kingdom of God and die on the cross. And while neither Paul nor Jesus had been an Essene, John the Baptist had been, and Paul clearly admired those of the Essenes that chose to give up sex out of devotion to God.

However, he knew the situation at Corinth. True, there were some men there he believed could give up sex with their wives for God, especially those who had practiced homosexual sex before they had converted. But if they stopped having relations with their wives, he worried that their wives would burn with passion toward other men.

Then there were women like Gaius' wife, who saw in the gospel an opportunity to free themselves from the normal constraints of a woman. The first draft of the letter had already addressed the problems she was causing by refusing to veil herself during worship. The question about sex now enabled him to address in an indirect way some of the other problems she was causing.

For example, both Sosthenes and Stephanas told Paul that on more than one occasion she had suggested that perhaps husbands and wives should separate from each other, since in the kingdom of God there would be no marriage. Everyone knew it was only an excuse, because she did not like her husband and thought she might legitimize a divorce from him.

The question of social conflict created by the gospel was becoming more and more clear to Paul. On the one hand, he simply didn't have quibbles about the role that women were playing in the Christ movement. But others did. Even Timothy was off put by how much authority Paul was willing to let women have in the churches.

Paul would more and more conceed traditional roles to men and women as the days went by. To do otherwise, to live out the trajectory of the kingdom, caused all kinds of hindrances to the gospel. The message that Jesus had atoned for sin on the cross and was soon coming back to earth again as Lord was too important to encumber with such passing things. Slaves would be free soon enough. Women would be equal to men soon enough. What was important now was that as many as possible be saved.

Of course for some at Corinth, the question was sincere. Should we stop having sex, since there will be none in the kingdom? They even wondered whether they should follow through with arrangements they had made for their daughters to marry. Paul took a very practical position on the issue. If these men did not have sex with their wives, they would become very tempted at some point, not just to have sex with other women, but perhaps with other women in the assembly. He made clear instructions that husbands and wives should have regular sex, so that neither party would be tempted to have sex elsewhere.

He also took the opportunity to address the matter of divorce directly, since he knew this was the underlying issue for Gaius' wife and her close friends. Jesus of course had primarily addressed the matter of husbands leaving their wives. It was not possible for a Galilean woman to divorce her husband legally, although she could separate herself and return to her father's house.

In the case of Paul's own wife, she had made it very clear that she would not be married to someone from the Way. After a year of waiting for him to come to his senses, she sent a letter to the believers at Damascus to pass on word to him that she was leaving him to return to her father, Gamaliel's, house. Then some two years after that, in the brief time he was in Jerusalem, she convinced him to divorce her, since she could not legally do it herself. He reluctantly consented.

Since women could divorce their husbands in Greece, Paul applied the basic thrust of Jesus' teaching directly to wives. Women like Gaius' wife must not divorce their husbands. If they have problems, they might separate from them for a time, but the goal was for them to be reconciled. He was a little more allowing with the men. If they found themselves divorced, it was better for them to remain unmarried, but if they remarried, they were not sinning...