1. Every once and a while, I'll see something one of my step-daughters does and say to myself, "She is so like her mom!" Then a little bit later, my other step-daughter might do something and I'll think, "She is so like her mom!" The funny thing is, these two daughters are strikingly different from each other!
And so it seems to be with the "deposit" that God has left to us in the Church through the apostles. You hear two different groups of people in the church pointing to quite different aspects of the church today as the modern equivalent of the apostles. As usual, I think they're both right!
2. So the traditional view is this. The apostles were foundational to the church (Eph. 2:20). Who were these apostles? They were, first of all, the twelve, the disciples. These twelve had been with Jesus from the time of John's baptism up through the time of the resurrection (Acts 1:21-22). Then there was another layer of apostles, people like Paul, Barnabas (1 Cor. 9:5-6), Junias, and Andronicus (Rom. 16:7). The risen Jesus had appeared to them and commissioned them to go as witnesses to the resurrection (1 Cor. 9:1).
As the apostles began to die off, they were understood to have left a "deposit" to the next generation (2 Tim. 1:14). This is the way I understand Ephesians 2:20--the apostles and prophets in question were foundational ones. I believe that prophecy remains a gift in the church. But the prophets of Ephesians 2, I believe, were some of the unspoken heroes behind what we now see in Scripture. God used them to guide the earliest church to passages in the Old Testament about Jesus, for example. We may even hear some words in the Gospels from the risen Jesus through them (although that's a sticky wicket I don't want to go into!)
Bottom line, the apostles left us the New Testament as the deposit of their foundational understandings and practices. Thus Scripture is probably the most important heir of the apostles!
3. But the apostles also appointed elders and deacons in the churches. In other words, the apostles left church structures in place so that, after they were gone, there would be authority in the church. Indeed, this is one of the primary ways they functioned in the early church. When the Corinthian church was going up in flames, the apostle came in as authority to settle questions and bring discipline.
It is thus no surprise that bishops and official institutional church structure has traditionally been understood as heir to the apostles. Again, there is certainly some truth to this idea. When the General Superintendent of the Wesleyan Church or the General Board or the District Superintendent or the District Board steps into a thorny situation to try to speak God's authority into it, they are functioning in an apostolic kind of way.
4. But there are a number of voices in the church today who see another function of the apostles, especially the apostle Paul, that sometimes seems gravely missing from the church today. They especially take Ephesians 4:11 as a set of functions for the church for all time and not just for that time. For this group, apostles are outside the box, entrepreneur types who are always on the move and who have a heightened power to their ministry. These apostles have a charisma, an anointing on them that has a power other people immediately see in them.
Paul did not see his ministry as one that stayed still. He did not feel called to minister where ministries were already started (Rom. 15:20). He was always pushing the gospel to places it had never been and bringing in people who had not known it. In Acts 10, God uses Peter to bring the gospel for the first time to Gentiles.
Several corners of the church today are speaking of "apostolic ministry" as something the church today is lacking. Once again, they are seeing a dimension of the apostles and wanting to consolidate the church's recognition of the calling of these types of individuals. They are also heirs of characteristics that we see apostles demonstrating in the New Testament.
Showing posts with label apostle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apostle. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
Thursday, June 20, 2013
The Apostles 4
... continued from Tuesday
_________________
So we come back to the question of who the twelfth apostle should have been. Some Christians believe that the early church got it wrong when they picked Matthias. They take this story in Acts 1 as a description of what happened but not a prescription for what should have happened. They think Paul should have been Judas' replacement.
Obviously the temptation here comes from our love of Paul and the fact that we have thirteen books in the New Testament with his name on them. Meanwhile, we have never heard of Matthias before this point in Acts and we never hear from him again. But we should be cautious. Acts gives us no reason to think that the criteria the early church used was wrong in replacing Judas, that is, picking someone who had been with Jesus since John's baptism.
As we'll see later in the chapter, the purpose of Acts was not merely to tell us what happened. Acts is told with a theology and a point of view. In the thinking of Acts, Paul is not as prominent as we tend to think he is in our circles today. In Acts, Paul is certainly an apostle (e.g., 14:4, 14), along with his missionary partner Barnabas. But he is not one of the apostles. He is not one of the Twelve.
So if we want Paul to be the true twelfth apostle, we have to disagree with the thinking of Acts. You could of course argue that God has hinted at this idea by putting thirteen of Paul's letters in the New Testament while none from Matthias. In fact we only have two from Peter and one from James. You could argue that by putting Paul's letters in the New Testament, God has shown us who truly won Paul's debates with Jerusalem in the early church. At the time, Paul may have seemed to be on the edges, someone on the periphery of Christianity. But we see him today as he was--at the center of what God was doing.
Paul himself has a broader understanding of what an apostle is. We've already quoted him in 1 Corinthians 9:1 where he implicitly defines an apostle as someone who has witnessed Jesus' resurrection. When he recounts the resurrection appearances of Jesus to various people in 1 Corinthians 15, he starts his list with the Twelve but then proceeds to mention James (the Lord's brother) and "all the apostles" (15:7). He includes himself among this latter group of apostles.
So for Paul, the apostles were a group of individuals to whom Jesus appeared after he rose from the dead and whom Jesus sent (commissioned) to go out as witnesses of the resurrection. He includes Jesus' own brother James in this category. He included Barnabas in this category (cf. 1 Cor. 9:6). Presumably he included the husband-wife pair Andronicus and Junia in this category, whom he mentions in Romans 16:7. It doesn't even seem controversial to him that a woman could be a prominent apostle.
Paul considers himself to be the last of this sort of apostle. We do find some in the church today who are given the title apostle by others. It is a great honor and recognizes in someone high gifts of charisma and anointed leadership of the highest caliber. The idea probably also draws from passages like 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul says that God has placed apostles in the church.
But Paul was not writing 1 Corinthians to us today. He was writing people who lived in Corinth two thousand years ago, back when there still were some of these apostles around, including himself. Both by the criteria of Paul and of Acts, there are no longer any apostles of this sort living. Paul was the last (1 Cor. 15:8).
That is not to say that there could not be individuals who are sent to witness to the living Christ on an entirely different level than your average missionary. Billy Graham comes to mind. And God certainly does raise up individuals from time to time whose spiritual authority is so astounding that it rivals that of whole denominations and church structures. But no matter how great, such individuals will never be an apostle of the sort Peter and Paul were.
_________________
So we come back to the question of who the twelfth apostle should have been. Some Christians believe that the early church got it wrong when they picked Matthias. They take this story in Acts 1 as a description of what happened but not a prescription for what should have happened. They think Paul should have been Judas' replacement.
Obviously the temptation here comes from our love of Paul and the fact that we have thirteen books in the New Testament with his name on them. Meanwhile, we have never heard of Matthias before this point in Acts and we never hear from him again. But we should be cautious. Acts gives us no reason to think that the criteria the early church used was wrong in replacing Judas, that is, picking someone who had been with Jesus since John's baptism.
As we'll see later in the chapter, the purpose of Acts was not merely to tell us what happened. Acts is told with a theology and a point of view. In the thinking of Acts, Paul is not as prominent as we tend to think he is in our circles today. In Acts, Paul is certainly an apostle (e.g., 14:4, 14), along with his missionary partner Barnabas. But he is not one of the apostles. He is not one of the Twelve.
So if we want Paul to be the true twelfth apostle, we have to disagree with the thinking of Acts. You could of course argue that God has hinted at this idea by putting thirteen of Paul's letters in the New Testament while none from Matthias. In fact we only have two from Peter and one from James. You could argue that by putting Paul's letters in the New Testament, God has shown us who truly won Paul's debates with Jerusalem in the early church. At the time, Paul may have seemed to be on the edges, someone on the periphery of Christianity. But we see him today as he was--at the center of what God was doing.
Paul himself has a broader understanding of what an apostle is. We've already quoted him in 1 Corinthians 9:1 where he implicitly defines an apostle as someone who has witnessed Jesus' resurrection. When he recounts the resurrection appearances of Jesus to various people in 1 Corinthians 15, he starts his list with the Twelve but then proceeds to mention James (the Lord's brother) and "all the apostles" (15:7). He includes himself among this latter group of apostles.
So for Paul, the apostles were a group of individuals to whom Jesus appeared after he rose from the dead and whom Jesus sent (commissioned) to go out as witnesses of the resurrection. He includes Jesus' own brother James in this category. He included Barnabas in this category (cf. 1 Cor. 9:6). Presumably he included the husband-wife pair Andronicus and Junia in this category, whom he mentions in Romans 16:7. It doesn't even seem controversial to him that a woman could be a prominent apostle.
Paul considers himself to be the last of this sort of apostle. We do find some in the church today who are given the title apostle by others. It is a great honor and recognizes in someone high gifts of charisma and anointed leadership of the highest caliber. The idea probably also draws from passages like 1 Corinthians 12 where Paul says that God has placed apostles in the church.
But Paul was not writing 1 Corinthians to us today. He was writing people who lived in Corinth two thousand years ago, back when there still were some of these apostles around, including himself. Both by the criteria of Paul and of Acts, there are no longer any apostles of this sort living. Paul was the last (1 Cor. 15:8).
That is not to say that there could not be individuals who are sent to witness to the living Christ on an entirely different level than your average missionary. Billy Graham comes to mind. And God certainly does raise up individuals from time to time whose spiritual authority is so astounding that it rivals that of whole denominations and church structures. But no matter how great, such individuals will never be an apostle of the sort Peter and Paul were.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
The Apostles 2
... continued from two months ago
____________
The Apostles
The story of Acts begins with Jesus' ascension. Jesus has risen from the dead. He has appeared to his "apostles" for forty days and spoken about the kingdom of God. Then he gives them some final words before ascending to heaven.
There are many interesting things about these verses at the beginning of Acts (Acts 1:3-11). One of the first is that the disciples are called "apostles." To be sure, Luke calls the twelve disciples "apostles" several times in the Gospel of Luke. In that sense, it is not a new title for them in Luke-Acts, the name we give this two volume series of books in the New Testament. Jesus sends his disciples out even before his death and resurrection (e.g., Luke 9:10), so we can call them apostles even in Luke.
But there is also a sense in which we can say they do not fully become apostles until after Jesus' death and resurrection. An apostle is someone who is sent out as a messenger to represent some greater authority. In Acts, the apostles are especially witnesses to the fact that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead (e.g., Acts 1:8; 3:15). Paul confirms this understanding of an apostle when he says, "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" (1 Cor. 9:1).
So we might say that the disciples--followers and apprentices of Jesus--technically only become "the apostles" after they witness Jesus' resurrection and are commissioned by him to go and proclaim that message throughout the world. In most of Acts, the apostles are twelve specific people, eleven of whom were key followers of Jesus while he was ministering in Galilee. There were Peter, James, John, and Andrew--perhaps apostles the earliest Christians considered to be pillars (cf. Gal. 2:9). [1] Then there were Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot. If these are pairings by twos (cf. Luke 10:1), then Judas son of James was left without a mission partner. [2]
Judas of course betrays Jesus and the twelfth spot becomes vacant. One thing that takes place in the first chapter of Acts is Judas' replacement. They "cast lots" to decided between two candidates. While we do not know exactly what a "lot" was, the practice was something like drawing straws or rolling dice. While we would consider this sort of practice to be leaving things to chance, there was often a sense that God was directing the outcome (e.g., Prov. 16:33).
Someone named Matthias is chosen (Acts 1:26). You sometimes hear the suggestion that the replacement apostle should have really been the apostle Paul. After all, did not God apparently use him to spread the gospel more than any of the first eleven? Are there not thirteen books in the New Testament with his name on them?
Paul was sent by Jesus to witness the resurrection, but he did not fit the job description for a replacement of the Twelve, at least not the one that Peter gives in Acts 1:21-22. Judas' replacement needed to be someone who had followed Jesus from the baptism of John to the time of the ascension. Paul probably did not know Jesus until three years after he ascended to heaven.
This entire line of questioning brings up a very important question. To what extent are the biblical narratives description and to what extent are they prescription? ...
[1] Paul calls James, the brother of Jesus, a pillar in Acts 12:2. Perhaps he replaced James, the brother of John, after Herod Agrippa I put him to death (Acts 12:2).
[2] The lists differ slightly from gospel to gospel. Christian tradition has often dealt with this issue by saying, for example, that Thaddeus (Matt. 10:3) was the same as Judas son of James here. It is also possible, however, that the edges of Jesus' central circle were a little fuzzy.
____________
The Apostles
The story of Acts begins with Jesus' ascension. Jesus has risen from the dead. He has appeared to his "apostles" for forty days and spoken about the kingdom of God. Then he gives them some final words before ascending to heaven.
There are many interesting things about these verses at the beginning of Acts (Acts 1:3-11). One of the first is that the disciples are called "apostles." To be sure, Luke calls the twelve disciples "apostles" several times in the Gospel of Luke. In that sense, it is not a new title for them in Luke-Acts, the name we give this two volume series of books in the New Testament. Jesus sends his disciples out even before his death and resurrection (e.g., Luke 9:10), so we can call them apostles even in Luke.
But there is also a sense in which we can say they do not fully become apostles until after Jesus' death and resurrection. An apostle is someone who is sent out as a messenger to represent some greater authority. In Acts, the apostles are especially witnesses to the fact that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead (e.g., Acts 1:8; 3:15). Paul confirms this understanding of an apostle when he says, "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" (1 Cor. 9:1).
So we might say that the disciples--followers and apprentices of Jesus--technically only become "the apostles" after they witness Jesus' resurrection and are commissioned by him to go and proclaim that message throughout the world. In most of Acts, the apostles are twelve specific people, eleven of whom were key followers of Jesus while he was ministering in Galilee. There were Peter, James, John, and Andrew--perhaps apostles the earliest Christians considered to be pillars (cf. Gal. 2:9). [1] Then there were Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot. If these are pairings by twos (cf. Luke 10:1), then Judas son of James was left without a mission partner. [2]
Judas of course betrays Jesus and the twelfth spot becomes vacant. One thing that takes place in the first chapter of Acts is Judas' replacement. They "cast lots" to decided between two candidates. While we do not know exactly what a "lot" was, the practice was something like drawing straws or rolling dice. While we would consider this sort of practice to be leaving things to chance, there was often a sense that God was directing the outcome (e.g., Prov. 16:33).
Someone named Matthias is chosen (Acts 1:26). You sometimes hear the suggestion that the replacement apostle should have really been the apostle Paul. After all, did not God apparently use him to spread the gospel more than any of the first eleven? Are there not thirteen books in the New Testament with his name on them?
Paul was sent by Jesus to witness the resurrection, but he did not fit the job description for a replacement of the Twelve, at least not the one that Peter gives in Acts 1:21-22. Judas' replacement needed to be someone who had followed Jesus from the baptism of John to the time of the ascension. Paul probably did not know Jesus until three years after he ascended to heaven.
This entire line of questioning brings up a very important question. To what extent are the biblical narratives description and to what extent are they prescription? ...
[1] Paul calls James, the brother of Jesus, a pillar in Acts 12:2. Perhaps he replaced James, the brother of John, after Herod Agrippa I put him to death (Acts 12:2).
[2] The lists differ slightly from gospel to gospel. Christian tradition has often dealt with this issue by saying, for example, that Thaddeus (Matt. 10:3) was the same as Judas son of James here. It is also possible, however, that the edges of Jesus' central circle were a little fuzzy.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Resurrection Appearances 4
continued from yesterday.
____________
The gospels give us several traditions about Jesus' appearances to various individuals after he rose from the dead. Because we do not likely have the original ending of Mark, Mark as we have it does not go on to tell us about any of the resurrection appearances. However, like Matthew, Mark implies that the eleven remaining disciples saw Jesus in Galilee (Mark 16:7; Matt. 28:16-17).
However, in Luke and John, we also hear of an appearance to the disciples in Jerusalem. In Luke, Jesus appears to the eleven the evening of his resurrection (Luke 24:36). In John similarly, Jesus appears to most of the disciples on the evening of his resurrection (John 20:19). Then he appears again a week later, when Thomas is with them (20:26). Then later in John 21 Jesus appears to Peter and several key disciples--including the mysterious "Beloved Disciple"--around the Sea of Galilee.
In Matthew and John, we also hear of Jesus appearing to some of the women who came to the tomb. John 20 tells us of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene by herself (John 20:11-18). Meanwhile, Matthew 28:8-10 tells of Jesus appearing to all the women who came to his tomb before they tell the disciples to go to Galilee.
Any attempt to fit these accounts together is inevitably speculative and creates a narrative that gives a different impression from the gospels themselves in some respect. For whatever reason, Luke seems to compress the time after the resurrection, and he omits any appearances in Galilee. Matthew and Mark tell of no appearances to the disciples in Jerusalem, while John has a little of both.
Two general scenarios emerge. The one is that Jesus made an initial appearance to the disciples, women, and the men on the way to Emmaus in and around Jerusalem. Then the disciples would have gone to Galilee, received the Great Commission, seen Jesus around the Sea of Galilee, and then returned to Jerusalem before Jesus finally ascended to heaven. This scenario harmonizes all the accounts but is a little strange as a sequence of events. What was the point of going to Galilee if Jesus was already in Jerusalem? Was not Jerusalem where they expected Jesus to become king and thus where they expected the kingdom of God to arrive in full force (e.g., Acts 1:6; cf. Luke 2:25, 36-38)? [1]
The alternative is that the initial resurrection appearances were in Galilee and that the disciples then rushed back to Jerusalem in expectation of the full arrival of the kingdom of God and Jesus' full return as king. Jesus would then have appeared to them further before finally ascending to heaven. While this scenario makes more sense as a sequence of events, it does not fit nearly as well with the way Luke and John present the chronology. And of course the more one deviates from the chronology in the gospels, the more speculative any reconstruction becomes.
So we return to the bedrock of the tradition, what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul does not mention the appearances to the women explicitly but mentions Peter as the first crucial appearance, as Luke 24:34 implies. Then Paul says Jesus appeared to the Twelve, whether this refers to an appearance the night of Easter in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36; John 20:19) or to an appearance in Galilee (Matt. 28:16-17).
He appears to a group of over five hundred at once and to James, the brother of Jesus. James would become the leader of the Jerusalem church. We unfortunately do not know how Jesus appeared to James, but it must have been a very convincing appearance, for Jesus' brothers apparently did not believe in him while he was on earth (e.g., John 7:3-5). It is tempting to think that the appearance to over five hundred was the Great Commission of Matthew 28 or the ascension of Acts 1, but those appearances seem restricted to the eleven. Any further attempt to connect it with the gospels or Acts is quite speculative. [2]
Jesus then appeared to the apostles and lastly to Paul. We do not know many of the names of these apostles but we do likely know a few. Barnabas is one (e.g., Acts 14:14). Romans 16:7 may give us the names of two more, perhaps a husband and a wife: Andronicus and Junia. An apostle was someone to whom Jesus appeared and whom Jesus commissioned to go as a witness to the resurrection (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1). We thus have evidence of at least one woman who was an apostle.
[1] Of course the most obvious answer is that Jesus and the angels told them to go to Galilee.
[2] E.g., to try to connect it with the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2.
____________
The gospels give us several traditions about Jesus' appearances to various individuals after he rose from the dead. Because we do not likely have the original ending of Mark, Mark as we have it does not go on to tell us about any of the resurrection appearances. However, like Matthew, Mark implies that the eleven remaining disciples saw Jesus in Galilee (Mark 16:7; Matt. 28:16-17).
However, in Luke and John, we also hear of an appearance to the disciples in Jerusalem. In Luke, Jesus appears to the eleven the evening of his resurrection (Luke 24:36). In John similarly, Jesus appears to most of the disciples on the evening of his resurrection (John 20:19). Then he appears again a week later, when Thomas is with them (20:26). Then later in John 21 Jesus appears to Peter and several key disciples--including the mysterious "Beloved Disciple"--around the Sea of Galilee.
In Matthew and John, we also hear of Jesus appearing to some of the women who came to the tomb. John 20 tells us of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene by herself (John 20:11-18). Meanwhile, Matthew 28:8-10 tells of Jesus appearing to all the women who came to his tomb before they tell the disciples to go to Galilee.
Any attempt to fit these accounts together is inevitably speculative and creates a narrative that gives a different impression from the gospels themselves in some respect. For whatever reason, Luke seems to compress the time after the resurrection, and he omits any appearances in Galilee. Matthew and Mark tell of no appearances to the disciples in Jerusalem, while John has a little of both.
Two general scenarios emerge. The one is that Jesus made an initial appearance to the disciples, women, and the men on the way to Emmaus in and around Jerusalem. Then the disciples would have gone to Galilee, received the Great Commission, seen Jesus around the Sea of Galilee, and then returned to Jerusalem before Jesus finally ascended to heaven. This scenario harmonizes all the accounts but is a little strange as a sequence of events. What was the point of going to Galilee if Jesus was already in Jerusalem? Was not Jerusalem where they expected Jesus to become king and thus where they expected the kingdom of God to arrive in full force (e.g., Acts 1:6; cf. Luke 2:25, 36-38)? [1]
The alternative is that the initial resurrection appearances were in Galilee and that the disciples then rushed back to Jerusalem in expectation of the full arrival of the kingdom of God and Jesus' full return as king. Jesus would then have appeared to them further before finally ascending to heaven. While this scenario makes more sense as a sequence of events, it does not fit nearly as well with the way Luke and John present the chronology. And of course the more one deviates from the chronology in the gospels, the more speculative any reconstruction becomes.
So we return to the bedrock of the tradition, what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul does not mention the appearances to the women explicitly but mentions Peter as the first crucial appearance, as Luke 24:34 implies. Then Paul says Jesus appeared to the Twelve, whether this refers to an appearance the night of Easter in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36; John 20:19) or to an appearance in Galilee (Matt. 28:16-17).
He appears to a group of over five hundred at once and to James, the brother of Jesus. James would become the leader of the Jerusalem church. We unfortunately do not know how Jesus appeared to James, but it must have been a very convincing appearance, for Jesus' brothers apparently did not believe in him while he was on earth (e.g., John 7:3-5). It is tempting to think that the appearance to over five hundred was the Great Commission of Matthew 28 or the ascension of Acts 1, but those appearances seem restricted to the eleven. Any further attempt to connect it with the gospels or Acts is quite speculative. [2]
Jesus then appeared to the apostles and lastly to Paul. We do not know many of the names of these apostles but we do likely know a few. Barnabas is one (e.g., Acts 14:14). Romans 16:7 may give us the names of two more, perhaps a husband and a wife: Andronicus and Junia. An apostle was someone to whom Jesus appeared and whom Jesus commissioned to go as a witness to the resurrection (cf. 1 Cor. 9:1). We thus have evidence of at least one woman who was an apostle.
[1] Of course the most obvious answer is that Jesus and the angels told them to go to Galilee.
[2] E.g., to try to connect it with the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Paul the Apostle 1
Paul may have described himself as a "Hebrew of Hebrews" and a Pharisee before he believed (e.g., Phil. 3:5; 2 Cor. 11:22), probably meaning that he spoke Aramaic as a first language. But we learn from Acts that he was born in Tarsus (Acts 22:3), in the Diaspora, among those Jews scattered throughout the world. Accordingly, Greek was also a first language for him.
We also learn from Acts that he was a Roman citizen (e.g., Acts 16:37), which probably meant that he came from a family of some wealth. He speaks of working with his hands as a step down for the sake of the gospel (e.g., 1 Cor. 4:12). He might have worked with leather and tent making in the mission field, but back home in Tarsus he more likely was the boss.
These elements in his background no doubt helped equip him to be the formidable apostle that he turned out to be. Paul was not one of the twelve apostles. For example, he did not fit the list of qualifications for Judas Iscariot's replacement in Acts 1:21-22. He had not followed Jesus from the time of John the Baptist.
However, he considered himself an apostle of equal status to the other apostles (cf. 2 Cor. 12:11). "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" he told the Corinthians (1 Cor. 9:1). An apostle is someone sent on an official mission representing a greater authority. Paul received this commission, this role as ambassador, from Jesus himself. Jesus appeared to him and sent him to be a witness of the good news that Jesus is king (cf. 1 Cor. 15:1-8).
Paul would eventually understand his specific mission as apostle to the Gentiles, to non-Jews (e.g., Gal. 2:7). Acts regularly shows Paul going first to the Jewish synagogue when he entered a new city, but we know from Paul's own writings that the Jews in these synagogues were never his primary target (Rom. 15:16). He also felt led to places where the good news about Jesus' kingdom had not yet taken hold. For this reason, he never planned to spend long in Rome, because faith in Jesus was already well established there (Rom. 15:20).
It is hard to know exactly when Paul fully understood the nature of his calling, even though in hindsight Paul clearly understood this to be God's purpose for him from the start (cf. Acts 22:21; 26:17). It is possible it was very early indeed. He says that after Christ revealed himself to him, he went to the Nabatean kingdom of Arabia even before he returned to Jerusalem (cf. Gal. 1:17). Since he apparently stirred up controversy while he was there (cf. 2 Cor. 11:32-33), it seems likely that he was preaching to Gentiles from the very beginning.
Paul tells us it was about three years after he believed that he finally went back to Jerusalem (Gal. 1:18). Both Paul and Acts tell us he then spent about ten years thereafter back around his home city of Tarsus (Gal. 1:21; Acts 9:30). We can presume that he was preaching the good news during these years, even though we know very little about them. At some point, he became part of the exciting developments at the church of Antioch in Syria (cf. Acts 11:19-30)...
We also learn from Acts that he was a Roman citizen (e.g., Acts 16:37), which probably meant that he came from a family of some wealth. He speaks of working with his hands as a step down for the sake of the gospel (e.g., 1 Cor. 4:12). He might have worked with leather and tent making in the mission field, but back home in Tarsus he more likely was the boss.
These elements in his background no doubt helped equip him to be the formidable apostle that he turned out to be. Paul was not one of the twelve apostles. For example, he did not fit the list of qualifications for Judas Iscariot's replacement in Acts 1:21-22. He had not followed Jesus from the time of John the Baptist.
However, he considered himself an apostle of equal status to the other apostles (cf. 2 Cor. 12:11). "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" he told the Corinthians (1 Cor. 9:1). An apostle is someone sent on an official mission representing a greater authority. Paul received this commission, this role as ambassador, from Jesus himself. Jesus appeared to him and sent him to be a witness of the good news that Jesus is king (cf. 1 Cor. 15:1-8).
Paul would eventually understand his specific mission as apostle to the Gentiles, to non-Jews (e.g., Gal. 2:7). Acts regularly shows Paul going first to the Jewish synagogue when he entered a new city, but we know from Paul's own writings that the Jews in these synagogues were never his primary target (Rom. 15:16). He also felt led to places where the good news about Jesus' kingdom had not yet taken hold. For this reason, he never planned to spend long in Rome, because faith in Jesus was already well established there (Rom. 15:20).
It is hard to know exactly when Paul fully understood the nature of his calling, even though in hindsight Paul clearly understood this to be God's purpose for him from the start (cf. Acts 22:21; 26:17). It is possible it was very early indeed. He says that after Christ revealed himself to him, he went to the Nabatean kingdom of Arabia even before he returned to Jerusalem (cf. Gal. 1:17). Since he apparently stirred up controversy while he was there (cf. 2 Cor. 11:32-33), it seems likely that he was preaching to Gentiles from the very beginning.
Paul tells us it was about three years after he believed that he finally went back to Jerusalem (Gal. 1:18). Both Paul and Acts tell us he then spent about ten years thereafter back around his home city of Tarsus (Gal. 1:21; Acts 9:30). We can presume that he was preaching the good news during these years, even though we know very little about them. At some point, he became part of the exciting developments at the church of Antioch in Syria (cf. Acts 11:19-30)...
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