[Oe List ...] 7/08/10, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXVIII: Acts III -The Story of Paul

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Thursday July 08, 2010 

The Origins of the New Testament, Part XXVIII
Acts III: The Story of Paul

When the book of Acts moves beyond the conflict that set Jewish Christians against Greek Christians, it is ready to chronicle the story of how Christianity became a universal human religion. From the capital of Judaism to the capital of the Roman Empire is the story line that the book of Acts follows. The hero of this phase of the Christian movement is Saul of Tarsus, who would come to be known as Paul the Apostle. We have previously examined the content of his epistles, but now in the book of Acts, Luke begins to flesh out the portrait of his life and his personality as others experienced him. How much of this portrait is historical and how much is the product of Luke' fertile imagination is often hard to determine. Luke writes the book of Acts some forty years or two generations after the death of Paul and legends about heroes do tend to grow after they have died. This fate may well have befallen Paul in the book of Acts. My rule for interpreting Paul is to follow the actual writings of Paul wherever they conflict with the much later narrative of Acts. This rule will place all of the details of Paul's conversion story on the road to Damascus into doubt as something that actually happened in history. It is worth noting that Paul never writes about his conversion. He assumes a conversion from the role of the prosecutor of Christians, but he gives us no details, making Acts seem dramatically unhistorical.
Acts does give us, however, the only cohesive picture we have of Paul's adventurous missionary journeys, which correlates well with corroborative details in the Pauline epistles. This sense is strengthened when Acts introduces in Acts 16:10, and then continues through most of the rest of the book, a section of his travel narrative that does not use the descriptive pronoun "they," but rather the autobiographical pronoun "we." It is as if Luke found a diary of the journeys of Paul written by one of Paul's companions and simply incorporated this diary into his larger work. These "we" sections of the book of Acts are accorded by many, but certainly not by all New Testament scholars, a place of greater significance and greater authority than any other part of the book of Acts so I simply call these passages to you for your attention and further study.
When I try to flesh out the portrait of the Paul of history as we have received it from ancient times, I always find the "personal notes" dropped almost accidentally into the text of the book of Acts to be enormously helpful. These notes offer a kind of unplanned access to the person. I think, for example, of that tale in Acts about an event that occurred on his first missionary journey, during which he was the number two person to Barnabas on the missionary team. In this story, the two missionaries were in the city of Lystra (Acts 14:6ff) and it gives us an insight into Paul's physical appearance. Barnabas and Paul were both mistaken for Gods visiting from Mt. Olympus. The people, looking at the two of them, began to refer to Barnabas as Zeus, the king of the Gods, and to Paul as Hermes, the messenger God. In the cultural patterns of that day, the tradition defined Zeus as tall and commanding in stature. We can, properly, I assume, suggest that Barnabas must have himse lf been a person of imposing size to have been mistaken for Zeus. Hermes, the messenger God, was portrayed as small and wiry and as constantly speaking. For Paul to have been thought of as Hermes he must have been similar in stature and above all talkative. Clearly Paul elicited that kind of image in the minds of his hearers. Paul is described in one other 2nd century apocalyptic source as thin, with dark connecting eyebrows stretched across the entirety of his face. There is some similarity in these two descriptions.
In chapter 13:13-15, Barnabas and Paul were in the town of Perga in Pamphylia and the liturgical practice of the 1st century synagogue was described just by chance, giving us the best insight we have of how the synagogue functioned on the Sabbath in the 1st century. There we learn of the priority of the reading of the Torah, which contains the books Genesis through Deuteronomy, which were attributed to Moses. In the more traditional synagogues, the Torah was required to be read in its entirety on the Sabbaths of a single year. In some less traditional synagogues, a three-year cycle was followed, but the centrality of the law, the Torah, in both was crucial. Following the Torah came readings from the prophets. The Jewish tradition meant two things by the phrase "the prophets." First, there were the "early prophets," that is the biblical books of Joshua through II Kings, which told us, as I have previously noted, the history of the Jewish people after the death of their f ounder, Moses. Second, they meant the "latter prophets," that is, those books attributed to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the book the Jews referred to as "the Book of the Twelve." This volume contained on one scroll what we call today the Minor Prophets or the books from Hosea through Malachi. Please note that Daniel was not one of the prophets since Daniel was not written until about 168 BCE and had not yet been incorporated into the sacred text. Readings from either the early or the latter prophets did not have the same gravitas associated with the law, so those lessons were read in much smaller portions over an indeterminate amount of time. Next, the members of the congregation would be invited to speak, relating their own insights gained from these readings. I am now convinced that this is where the disciples of Jesus began the process of attempting to demonstrate that the Jewish Scriptures pointed to Jesus in almost every verse. By the time the gospels are writte n, this interpretative pattern is both assumed and operative. The author of Acts relates Paul's sermon in 13:16-41 and provides us with dramatic insights into the way Christians employed the Jewish Scriptures and the way that Christianity emerged in the synagogue.
The book of Acts also chronicles in some detail the hostility that broke out over Paul and his teaching on the part of the Orthodox Jewish world. On his journeys in whatever city he visited Paul always went to the synagogue first. He never thought of himself as anything but a Jew. In these synagogues, which were always outside of the Jewish homeland, there were three distinct groups gathered for worship: the orthodox, traditional Jews who believed that the entire truth of God was embodied in the Torah and who were not therefore prepared to welcome any deviations from or additions to the traditional text; the liberal-leaning Jews dispersed, from their homeland and more and more interacting with their Gentile neighbors; and finally those people known as "Gentile proselytes," who were people drawn to the synagogue by the ethical monotheism of Judaism, but were unwilling to adopt and, some were even repelled by, the cultic practices of circumcision, kosher dietary laws and Sa bbath day observance.
Paul's message appealed to these Gentile proselytes and significantly to the liberal Jews of the Diaspora, but he drew little more than hostility from those identified as the Orthodox party for whom any change threatened their security. So they were the primary source of the hostility toward Paul, which plagued him everywhere he went. Acts 15 describes a council of church leaders gathered to deal with this tension and, according to this Acts account, a compromise was worked out by James, the Lord's brother, who appears to have headed the Jerusalem community of Jewish believers in Jesus. In this compromise, Paul was given carte blanche to continue his work among the Gentiles and was assured that his converts did not have to comply with Jewish ritual practices. The converts were asked, however, to agree to three things: to abstain from eating meat that had been offered to idols, from unchastity and from blood from any animal that had been strangled and was thus not ceremon ially clean. Whether the details of this council are accurate is hard to say, but it did serve to set the Christian movement free from the constraints of those Jewish practices, and began its separation from Judaism which had birthed Christianity.
When Paul and Barnabas prepared for their second journey, a dispute broke out leading to a split between the two. The issue, according to Acts, was whether to take John Mark with them. Mark appears to have abandoned them on the first journey to return home. Paul then became the senior member of a second missionary team and chose Silas to accompany him. Barnabas took Mark and in this manner the movement spread.
On this second tour we learn that Paul had a dream of a Macedonian imploring him to come to Macedonia. Paul obeyed the vision and Christianity moved into what is now Europe. Paul had adventures in Greece including a debate in Athens that he clearly did not win. Paul's direction was now set and he turned his efforts toward the vast Gentile world, which increasingly aroused the hostility of the Orthodox Jews.
Paul returned to Jerusalem to bring money for the relief of the Jewish followers of Jesus there and his journey back to this holy city. His condemnation by the Orthodox party of Judaism, his appeal to Rome under his privilege as a Roman citizen and his subsequent journey to Rome by ship make up the bulk of the remainder of this book. On both the trip to Jerusalem and the trip to Rome, the book of Acts becomes an exciting adventure story. On one occasion, Paul began a sermon at midnight and preached so long that a young man named Eutychus, who was sitting in a window, went to sleep and fell to the floor as if dead. Paul revived him, but the admonition against long sermons found a scriptural basis. On his trip to Rome, we read of storms, shipwrecks at sea, surviving the bite of a poisonous viper and many other adventures. In verse 16 of the final chapter 28 Paul finally arrives in Rome and there the book of Acts closes rather abruptly saying that Paul lived there at his o wn expense for two years under very loose arrangements, welcoming all who came to him.
While the story of Paul's death is not told, Luke's purpose has been achieved. The Christian message has traveled from Galilee to Jerusalem to Rome and was now planted firmly in the capitol of the known world. As we say, "The rest is history." Is Acts accurate history? We can never be sure. The Church did, however, move with Paul into all the world. 

– John Shelby Spong
 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Dr. Larry L. Ligo, Professor of Art History at Davidson College, writes:
Thank you so much for your clear, informative, exciting, liberating insights into the meaning of Christ for Christians living in the twenty-first century. I first heard of you and your ministry in a Charlotte Observer article when you were lecturing in the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte last fall. I missed your presentation there, but was intrigued by the article and have since read five or six of your books. Thank you.
I also wish to express my condolences to you concerning the recent death of your friend Michael Goulder. I have gained much from your treatment of his work in Liberating the Gospels. I have been trying to find copies of his out of print books, but have not, as of yet, been successful.
Will you be speaking in the North Carolina area in the near future? Do you have a schedule of your up-coming speaking engagements?
Dr. Larry L. Ligo, Professor of Art History at Davidson College, writes:
Thank you so much for your clear, informative, exciting, liberating insights into the meaning of Christ for Christians living in the twenty-first century. I first heard of you and your ministry in a Charlotte Observer article when you were lecturing in the Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte last fall. I missed your presentation there, but was intrigued by the article and have since read five or six of your books. Thank you.
I also wish to express my condolences to you concerning the recent death of your friend Michael Goulder. I have gained much from your treatment of his work in Liberating the Gospels. I have been trying to find copies of his out of print books, but have not, as of yet, been successful.
Will you be speaking in the North Carolina area in the near future? Do you have a schedule of your up-coming speaking engagements?



Dear Professor Ligo,
Thank you for your letter. When I was growing up in Charlotte, N. C., Davidson College was the crown jewel of nearby educational opportunities. I always admired its commitment to academic excellence. What was then a very small town had a mayor named Tom Griffith, who was a dairy farmer and who was, in fact, my mother's brother and thus my uncle. Your letter brought back many memories to me.
Thank you also for your condolences on the death of one of my three major mentors in life, Michael Goulder. I hope you saw the column I wrote as my tribute to him. It came out earlier this year and can be accessed by subscribers to this column as can all of the previous columns published at this site. Michael's books are indeed hard to find. I hired a rare books firm in the UK to locate them for me. It was a fairly expensive way to build a library, but I treasure them. I suggest that you look at a major theological library to find them. I would bet that they are in the library of the divinity school of Wake Forest University.
My speaking schedule is available on my column's website at all times, giving information on events three months out. I was recently in North Carolina at the First Congregational Church-UCC in Hendersonville in late May and early June. I will be in North Carolina next, lecturing on the Monday and Tuesday nights of the first three weeks of August in Highlands, sponsored by the Highlands Institute of Theology and Religion. I realize that Highlands is about a three hour drive from Davidson, but it is a beautiful drive and I would love to see you.


– John Shelby Spong






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