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‘God’s Own People’ – Welsh Puritans, The New Model Army & The Commonwealth. Leave a comment

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‘Williams alias Cromwell’ – God’s Welshman?:

Writing recently on the 375th anniversary of the founding of the New Model Army, I was reminded of the fact that its cavalry commander, Oliver Cromwell, given the epithet ‘God’s Englishman’ as the title of his biography, by Christopher Hill (right), was of ‘good Welsh stock’. Indeed, his ancestors’ story is very much synonymous with the union of England and Wales under the Tudors. Oliver himself was born in 1599, one of ten children, in Huntingdon, towards the end of the reign of the last Welsh-speaking monarch of Britain, Elizabeth I.

Oliver Cromwell’s father, Robert Cromwell (alias Williams), was the younger son of Sir Henry Cromwell (alias Williams), the ‘Golden Knight of Hinchingbrooke’. Henry’s father was born Richard Williams, grandson of a Welshman said to have accompanied Henry Tudor when he seized the throne of England from the Plantagenets at the Battle of Bosworth and became Henry VII in 1485. So the family’s estate derived from Oliver’s great-great-grandfather Morgan ap William, the son of William ap Ieuan of Wales. William was a great archer and a kinsman of Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke. Morgan was a brewer from Glamorgan who settled at Putney near London and married Katherine Cromwell (born 1482), the daughter of the local blacksmith, Walter Cromwell. She was also the sister of Thomas Cromwell, the famous chief minister to Henry VIII. The Cromwell family acquired great wealth as occasional beneficiaries of Thomas’s administration of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Of course, he was known as the ‘hammer of the monks’ and was the architect of the English Reformation. The story of his fall and execution in 1540 has just been re-chronicled by historical novelist Hilary Mantel in the final part of her hugely popular ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy, something else that prompted me to write about Oliver Cromwell’s Welsh connections.

Henry VIII believed that the Welsh should adopt surnames in the English style rather than taking their fathers’ names (patronyms) as Morgan ap William and his male ancestors had done. Henry suggested to Sir Richard Williams, one of the king’s most favoured knights, who was the first to use a surname in his family, that he might adopt the surname of his uncle Thomas Cromwell. For several generations, the Williamses added the surname of Cromwell to their own, styling themselves “Williams alias Cromwell” in legal documents (Noble 1784, pp. 11–13). Richard Williams took the name of his famous uncle and acted as his agent in the suppression of the monasteries. He had his reward: three abbeys, two priories and the nunnery of Hinchinbrooke, worth perhaps two-and-a-half thousand pounds a year, came into his possession; and he married the daughter of a Lord Mayor of London. His son, Sir Henry, built the magnificent mansion out of the ruins of Hinchinbrooke, fit to entertain royalty, on the site of Ramsey Abbey. In the year of the Armada, 1588, he ordered all his copyhold tenants in the manor of Ramsey to be ready to attend him at an hour’s notice. He too married the daughter of a Lord Mayor of London, represented his county in the House of Commons and was for times sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. He was one of the two wealthiest landowners in Huntingdonshire.

An integrated Britain becomes visible first in the major migration of the Welsh to the centre of power in the sixteenth century. Dafydd Seisyllt from the Welsh-speaking ‘enclave’ of Ergyng in Herefordshire went up to London as a sergeant of Henry VII’s guard. He bought land and installed his son as a court page. His grandson was William Cecil, Elizabeth’s potent statesman and spy-master. William’s son, Robert Cecil, became chief minister of James I, and in 1605 ‘uncovered’ the Gunpowder Plot. As we have seen above, the family of Morgan ap-William, the brewer who married Thomas Cromwell’s sister, changed its name and its base from Glamorganshire to Huntingdonshire during this time, producing Oliver Cromwell three generations later. A horde of less well-known Welsh people colonised some of the London professional classes, the armed forces and some branches of commerce which in a few sectors became historically significant. The law and education are major examples of this. They also helped to establish Bristol as Britain’s major Atlantic port as trade routes switched from the eastern English coasts to the west. The Welsh moved resolutely into every conceivable avenue of advancement, from the Court, the Great Sessions, the Council of Wales, JP patronage and the academic world, through minerals, commerce and politics, to smuggling and piracy.

Under Elizabeth I, Welsh intellectuals concentrated in force behind the first thrust for naval growth, American colonisation and empire. For the first time in centuries, the Welsh Church ceased to serve as the provider of sinecures for English clerics; thirteen of the sixteen bishops appointed to Wales were crusading Protestant Welshmen. Elizabeth’s coronation oath referred back through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Histories of the Kings of Britain to claim her right to call herself Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church independently of the ‘Bishop of Rome’, tracing the origins of the churches in Britain to the Celtic missionaries. When these claims came under attack from the ‘Italian School’, most Tudor Renaissance humanists came to the defence of what had become official ‘doctrine’.

Among the new scholars were Sir John Price of Brecon and Humphrey Llwyd of Denbigh. In 1571, Jesus College, Oxford was created specifically as a Welsh college. Central to this burst of British imperial energy was the seminal figure of the European Renaissance, Dr John Dee, the London-Welshman, originally from Radnorshire, who is credited with the coinage of the term ‘British Empire’. He was a brilliant mathematician and foundation fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In the 1580s, from the twin Calvinist bases of Bohemia and the Palatinate, he launched a scientific and mystical movement which cultivated a new world view. In 1614, Elizabeth Stuart, James I’s daughter, married Frederick, Elector Palatine, and in 1618 they became the ‘Winter’ King and Queen of Bohemia, an event which led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe.

Court & Country in Stuart Times:

Henry’s son, Sir Oliver, also a knight of the shire and high sheriff, was the uncle of Oliver Cromwell. Despite prudent marriages, Sir Oliver, living to almost a hundred, managed to dissipate the family fortunes. He entertained James I at Hinchinbrooke (above) in the most lavish way when the King was on progress from Scotland in 1603 and on many later occasions. Like other country gentlemen who entertained the impecunious monarch, Sir Oliver got little in return. Like Sir John Harington of Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire, tutor and guardian of James’ daughter Elizabeth, Sir Oliver is a classical example of a man ruined by ‘courtesy’. He had to sell his great house to the Montague family, who were to play a major part in the civil wars.

This may have been the root cause of the family feud which was the background to Oliver’s own quarrel with Sir Edward Montague, the Earl of Manchester, pictured right, which led to the ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’ removing Manchester and his fellow peers from command of the Parliamentary Army, and the establishment of the ‘New Model’ Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Cromwell. The immediate result of the sale was that Robert, as the younger son, inherited little of the patrimony; but he did retain some of his own former church property. Cromwell’s father Robert was of modest means but still, a member of the landed gentry.

As a younger son with many siblings, Robert inherited only a house at Huntingdon and a small amount of land. This land would have generated an income of up to £300 a year, near the bottom of the range of gentry incomes. Oliver’s mother was Elizabeth Steward, the anglicised surname of ‘Stewart’ or ‘Stuart’. On both sides, the fortunes of the family had been founded by the ‘spoliation’ of the Roman Catholic Church. At the Reformation Elizabeth Steward’s great-uncle, Robert had been the last Prior of Ely and its first protestant Dean. Her father William and after him her only brother Sir Thomas farmed the lands of Ely Cathedral. The connection between the two families went back two generations: for the man who persuaded Prior Robert Steward to throw in his lot with Thomas Cromwell was Sir Richard Cromwell, previously known as Richard Williams.

Above. Ely Cathedral from Cromwell’s House.

Oliver was born in a house which had been part of the hospital of St John in Huntingdon since his father had acquired property which had formerly belonged to the Austin friars: from his maternal uncle Sir Thomas Steward, Oliver was later to inherit extensive leases from the Dean and Chapter of Ely. But he must have grown up conscious of the fact that he was a poor relation. He visited the splendours of Hinchinbrooke from time to time, but his father’s three hundred pounds a year was less than Sir Oliver would have spent on a fleeting visit from King James. Young Oliver had many rich and important relations, but his own upbringing was modest. Cromwell himself in 1654 said,

“I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in considerable height, nor yet in obscurity”.

Above: Cromwell’s House and parish church, Ely

Along with his brother Henry, Oliver had kept a smallholding of chickens and sheep, selling eggs and wool to support himself, his lifestyle resembling that of a yeoman farmer. In 1636 Cromwell inherited control of various properties in Ely from his uncle on his mother’s side, and his uncle’s job as tithe collector for Ely Cathedral. As a result, his income is likely to have risen to around £300–400 per year.

Cromwell’s House in Ely is a museum today, as shown above, and below.

By the end of the 1630s, Cromwell had returned to the ranks of acknowledged gentry. He had become a committed Puritan and had established important family links to leading families in London and Essex. In his seminal book The World Turned Upside Down (below), Christopher Hill argued that the familiar civil war division between the ‘Royalist’ North and West and the ‘Parliamentarian’ South and East, was also a division between the ‘relatively backward’ North and West, and the ‘economically advanced South and East’. Yet, with hindsight, these contemporary stereotypes were already changing as the first civil war got underway and by the second the growth in Atlantic trade was already beginning to transform the fortunes of war in the West. Yet, the North and West were regarded by Parliamentarians as the ‘dark corners of the land’, in which preaching was totally inadequate, despite the early attempts made by many Puritans to propagate the Gospel. In 1641, Lord Brooke (Earl of Warwick) observed that there was…

… scarce any minister in some whole shires, as in Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland and especially in Wales.

Eighteen years later, the evangelical minister and Parliamentary chaplain, Richard Baxter, argued that…

… multitudes in England, and more in Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, the Highlands, are scarce able to talk reason about common things. Are these … fit to have the sovereign power, to rule the Commonwealth?

But the radicals puritans’ vision already included a reformed educational system, which would realise something of Comenius’ ideal: universal education in the vernacular for boys and girls up to the age of eighteen, followed by six years at university for the best pupils. On a visit to England in 1641, he wrote that…

… they are eagerly debating on the reformation in the whole kingdom … that all young people should be instructed, none neglected.

Wales in the Civil Wars – Royalists to Roundheads:

In the first civil war, Wales was seen as solidly in support of the King, but by 1645 the royalist coalition in Wales, bludgeoned by repeated levies of men and money, murky deals with the Irish and an inflow of royalist refugees, began to break up. In Glamorgan, ‘peaceable armies’ demonstrated for compromise and throughout Wales, there was wholesale defection. By 1646 the ‘Pembroke party’ was also working for a compromise peace with the Presbyterians in the face of a radical army. From that army came Independent chaplains such as Vavasour Powell, who became itinerant preachers among the Welsh. In response, moderate royalists, Presbyterians and disgruntled parliamentarians shuffled into an alliance in support of the imprisoned king. This led to a rising focused on south Pembrokeshire in the summer of 1648 when there were also revolts in south-east England, followed by an invasion of Northern England by the Scots. The rising in South Wales was led by former Parliamentarian officers, renegades against whom Cromwell was particularly bitter. After their defeat, one of their leaders was shot. In this second civil war, the New Model Army won a victory against the rebels at St Fagans near Cardiff and Cromwell himself brought about the final reduction of Pembroke Castle, the boyhood home of Henry Tudor. Early in 1649, Charles was executed and Wales was exposed to the full force of ‘the British Republic’.

But the ‘transformation’ of Wales from a Royalist ‘fiefdom’ into a Roundhead republic by no means simply an orgy of expulsions and confiscations. Many of the men who gained control in Wales were ‘crusaders’ for the puritan cause. John Jones, a freeholder from of Maes-y-Garnedd in Merioneth and a convert of Morgan Llwyd’s preaching, married Cromwell’s sister, served the Protector in Ireland and died heroically on the scaffold as an unrepentant regicide. Colonel Philip Jones of Llangyfelach, a distinguished soldier, was close to the visionary Hugh Peter, and it was this circle that the notion evolved of evangelising Wales around a ‘commission’ to propagate the gospel. To them, Wales was a dark corner, ripe for a radical experiment in godly government. It was this abused régime with its army men and preaching cobblers which proved to be the only English administration to date to treat Wales as a separate nation. The Rump Parliament at Westminster had disappointed even moderate reformers by its failure to ensure that the word was preached in every parish, for there were still too many lazy, ignorant and absentee parsons who left their flocks hungry in what was a sermon-hungry age. It did set up two local Commissions for the Propagation of the Gospel early in 1650, one for Wales and the other for the northern counties, but it made no progress at all with a bill intended to do the same for England as a whole.

The Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel in Wales of 1650 gave the country a peculiar form of autonomy under Colonel Thomas Harrison and seventy commissioners. There were a few members of the gentry of Independent temper like Sir Erasmus Philipps of Picton in Pembrokeshire, though most, of necessity, were English military missionaries. Philip Jones and John Jones were prominent, but the core around Harrison were men like Powell, Cradock, Llwyd, John Miles (who had created the first Calvinistic Baptist church in Gower), men whom later generations would see as founding fathers of modern Wales. They threw out nearly three hundred clergymen, but the propagating venture got a bad name when the Welsh commission was powerfully infiltrated by Fifth Monarchist firebrands, most notably Vavasour Powell and Morgan Llwyd, who had strong links with Colonel Harrison and his faction in the Army. They were not only seen as perverting the organisation in order to preach socially subversive ideas about the irrelevance of worldly rank and the imminent rule of the saints, but they were unjustly accused of misappropriating the tithes and other revenues of the church in Wales to their own sectarian ends. This was only one symptom of growing polarization between moderate and extreme puritans. The year 1652 saw a spate of radical pamphlets and petitions, tending to the removal of religion from the state’s authority, as well as the rapid expansion of Quakers and other heterodox sects. But it also saw the emergence of a group of moderate Independents led by John Owen who put a set of proposals before the Rump prefiguring the ecclesiastical régime of the Protectorate. They sought to preserve a broad established church, with generous freedom of worship and association outside it.

As a political and religious ‘Independent’, Lord General Cromwell favoured the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in both England and Wales, though he maintained the need for a national Church, supported through tithes, possibly because he himself was a tithe-collector for Ely. Yet Parliament did nothing to achieve this. It was not until February 1653 that the Rump took up the relatively conservative but nonetheless reforming scheme of Owen and his group. But Parliament and the Army remained suspicious of each other, and the Rump showed particular animosity towards Harrison, whom the hostile MPs blamed for the radical actions taken under the auspices of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales. He had lost his place on the Council of State in November 1651, and there was even a move to expel him from parliament. This was not only unjust but also foolish, for though Cromwell did not share Harrison’s fifth monarchist beliefs, there were still strong ties of friendship and mutual trust between the two seasoned soldiers. According to contemporary sources, Cromwell played up to Army radicalism by saying that the Rump intended to support ‘the corrupt interests of the clergy and the lawyers’. So far from reforming the Anglican Church, Parliament aroused resentment by refusing to renew the Commission for Wales, the Army’s favourite instrument for evangelising what had proved to be a politically unreliable country.

Cromwell and the generals also advocated the disappearance of Parliament and the handing of power to a provisional government, in which they themselves would naturally predominate, to supervise and control elections. How otherwise, he asked, could one know …

… whether the next Parliament were not like to consist of all Presbyterians. … Thus, as we apprehended, would have been thrown away the liberties of the nation into the hands of those who had never fought for it.

When a meeting between officers and MPs on 19 April 1653 ended in deadlock, the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between them to engage in further discussions was breached the next day by backbench MPs who started to rush through a bill for dissolution without meeting the officers’ demand for an interim authority under their control, revealing that parliament intended to control the election of its successors itself. Cromwell felt that his hand had been forced, and intervened with the army just in time to stop the new bill from becoming law. He flew into a rage, by all accounts, declaring to the Commons:

You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament …

So ended the Long Parliament, which had sat for twelve and a half years. Despite the repeated attempts by many to ‘paint’ this as an act of tyranny in the form orchestrated ‘coup d’état’, it is quite clear that what Cromwell was seeking to do was to end the dictatorship of an undemocratic ‘élite’ which was clinging to power and trying to ensure the continued predominance of presbyterian rule both in Westminster and the country at large. His ‘righteous indignation’ stemmed from the manner in which they sought to dissolve themselves in order to ensure that they could rig the subsequent election to this effect. Their betrayal of the compromise reached with the Army took him by surprise.

The ‘Coral Growth’ of the Welsh Independents:

Above: The British Republic, 1649-60.

During the civil wars, new universities were proposed for Bristol, Shrewsbury, Ludlow and Aberystwyth. There were also proposals for an increase in the number of schools and in Wales a great number of new schools were actually started. Despite the negative stereotypes quoted above, according to Laurence Stone, there was a substantial increase in lower-class literacy throughout the revolutionary decades. One of the paradoxes of the period was that of the most radical sectarian groups, the Quakers started almost exclusively in the North of England and the Baptists were at their strongest in Wales. William Erbery claimed that the new English Independency had already been overthrown by the Welsh and that…

… baptised churches have the greatest fall (harvest) from the northern saints in both in England and Wales … John’s spirit is in the North of England and the spirit of Jesus rising in North Wales is for the fall of all the churches in the South. The whirlwind comes from the North.

From the early 1650s, there was a rapid expansion of Particular Baptists in Wales and of Quakers all over the North of England. In 1654, one of their enemies, Ephraim Pagitt, said of them in 1654 that they were made up out of the dregs of common people … thickest set in the North Parts. Earlier, in 1649, Hugh Peter and others had noticed that the Welsh border counties, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, were ‘ripe for the gospel’ and emissaries were sent from Glamorgan to London asking for preachers. When the Quakers turned south in 1654 they made great progress among ‘that dark people’ of Cornwall, as well as in Wales, and among weavers generally, notably in Gloucestershire. The paradox was further intensified by the fact that such Puritan ministers as there were in the North had mostly been cleared out in the Laudian persecutions of the 1630s, under Richard Neile, Archbishop of York. Those remaining were further reduced in the North and Wales when they fled from their parishes the civil war to escape the Royalist occupation in those territories. As early as 1646 Thomas Edwards had noted that…

… emissaries out of the sectaries’ churches are sent to infect and poison … Yorkshire and those northern parts, … Bristol and Wales. … Sects begin to grow fast … for want of a settlement in discipline.

Traditional southern middle-class Puritanism of the Presbyterian variety had a hold only in isolated areas of the North, and hardly at all in Wales, except for the area of Harley influence along the borders with Worcestershire and Herefordshire. There, Sir Thomas’ planting of godly ministers … backing them with his authority made religion famous in his little corner of the world. Clarendon testifies to the existence of support for the Parliamentary cause among the common people and popular religious movements in North Wales and in the Forest of Dean at the end of the first civil war. This helps to explain why the New Model Army, …

… having marched up and down the kingdom, to do the work of God and the state … met with many Christians who have much gospel-light … in such places where there hath been no gospel-ministry.

Presbyterian Puritanism took little hold of any depth in Wales. The defeat of the Royalist armies and the bankruptcy of the traditional clergy created an even greater spiritual void than in the more traditional Puritan areas of the South and East. Yet the period was one of much greater prosperity in the pasture farming areas of Wales and the borders. This combined with a growth in ‘cottage’ industries as confirmed by a shift in population to the west midland counties of England and the re-building of peasant houses in stone. Contemporaries explained the ‘whoredoms of the Welsh’ by the mountain air: the modern historian more wisely sees them as the natural product of a society which refused to accept English protestant marriage laws.

In these areas, it was the Particular Baptists who initially filled the spiritual gap, though in some parts they were superseded by Quakers, as in the North of England. The more politically radical Fifth Monarchists had only a superficial influence in Wales, being a mainly urban movement, and they had little connection with the Forest of Dean before the 1670s. It seems to have been mainly in response to this radical challenge that the outlying clergy joined in the movement led by Kidderminster’s Richard Baxter to build up voluntary county associations of ministers, a sort of ‘Presbyterianism from below’. The radical Independents of the Cromwellian period in Wales and along the Welsh border included Vavasour Powell, Morgan Lloyd, Walter Cradock and William Erbery, to which might be added Thomas Harrison and Henry Danvers, the Fifth Monarchists from Staffordshire, and the Leveller William Walwyn of Worcestershire.

There was also a broader cultural impact of Wales and the borders upon the ‘more advanced’ south and east. John Donne, the greatest of the metaphysical poets, is separated by just one generation from the Welsh forbear who sent his younger son to London to be apprenticed, and George Herbert and Henry Vaughan were both Welsh. Thomas Traherne came from the Welsh ‘marches’ and in the second rank of border ‘bards’, we might include Lord Herbert of Cherbury and John Davies of Hereford. Inigo Jones, the great architect who re-built St Paul’s before the Great Fire destroyed it completely, was of Welsh descent. Turning to the field of mathematics and science, Robert Recorde, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Matthew Gwynne, Edmund Gunter, Thomas Vaughan and Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, were all Welsh or, like Cromwell himself, of Welsh descent. The cultural consequences of the union of Great Britain, begun by the Tudors, and extended by James I, were further developed through the creation of the New Model Army and its role in the political and religious matters of the mid-seventeenth century.

The Cromwell Coat of Arms (on Oliver’s ascent to Lord Protector in 1653)

The Bible & Radical Puritanism in the Protectorate:

Late twentieth-century historians re-examined the nature of Cromwell’s faith and of his authoritarian regime. In his extensive 2002 book (see below), Austin Woolrych explored the issue of “dictatorship” in depth, arguing that Cromwell was subject to two conflicting forces: his obligation to the army and his desire to achieve a lasting settlement by winning back the confidence of the nation as a whole. He argued that the dictatorial elements of Cromwell’s rule stemmed less from its military origin or the participation of army officers in civil government than from his constant commitment to the interest of the people of God and his conviction that suppressing vice and encouraging virtue constituted the chief end of government. Historians such as John Morrill, Blair Worden, and J. C. Davis have developed this theme, revealing the extent to which Cromwell’s writing and speeches are suffused with biblical references, and arguing that his radical actions were driven by his zeal for godly reformation.

It is difficult to overemphasise the role of the Bible in the radical Puritanism of the first half of the seventeenth century. By mid-century, eschatological prophecy had become a major part of protestant controversial literature, aided especially by the invention of printing. Scholars, including Newton, approached the Bible authorised by King James in 1612 in a scientific spirit and reached a consensus which indicated the advent of remarkable events in the mid-1650s: the fall of Antichrist, the second coming and the millennium. This underlay the confident energy and utopian enthusiasm of the Puritan preachers of the 1640s and ’50s. In this spirit of optimism, they called upon their fellow commoners to fight the Lord’s battles against the Antichrist. Cromwell was chief among these men to take up that calling.

Ordinary Bible-readers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wanted to democratise the mysteries that lay behind the sacred texts of the Scriptures, previously known only to scholars, for themselves. They believed, on good protestant authority, that anyone could understand God’s word if he studied it carefully enough and if the grace of God was in him. Then the Bible could be made to reveal the significance of the events of his own time. Bibles were no longer expensive as book prices then went, 3s 2d in 1649 and later just two shillings. Soldiers in the New Model Army were issued with The Soldier’s Bible, containing key passages which justified their war with the ‘Antichrist’. The Geneva Bible, on which the Authorised Version was based, was published in pocket-size editions so that men could take it to church or the ale-house, as Henry VIII had observed with alarm, to knock down an argument with a text. Those coming to the Bible with no broad historical sense but with high expectations found in it a message of direct contemporary relevance. A young Welshman delighting in the name of ‘Arise’ Evans (a forename probably derived from ‘Rhys’, ‘ap-Rhys’ or, in its anglicised form, ‘Rice’) who arrived in London in 1629, witnessed as to how his attitude to the Bible changed in the decade before the Revolution:

Afore I looked upon the Scripture as a history of things that passed in other countrie, pertaining to other persons; but now I looked upon it as a mystery to be opened at this time, belonging also to us.

This attitude was, no doubt, shared by many of the victims of economic and political crisis who turned to the Bible for guidance in that perplexing period. The 1640s and ’50s were indeed the great age of ‘mechanic preachers’, laymen like the Quakers George Fox and James Nayler, who led a procession into Bristol in 1656 symbolically riding on an ass, and the ex-soldier and Baptist John Bunyan, interpreting the Bible according to their own untutored ‘inner lights’ with all the excitement and assurance of a new discovery. Many Quaker leaders were also ex-soldiers, like James Nayler, and some had been dismissed from the Army in the 1650s for disciplinary reasons, but others seem not to have found military service compatible with their values. Quakers also continued to serve in the Navy. George Fox was offered a commission in 1651. In his Journal he recorded that he refused it on pacifist grounds, but in 1657 he urged ‘the inferior offices and soldiers’ of the Army on to conquer Rome. After 1658 he was more cautious, but as late as 1660 a leading south Welsh Quaker asked Fox whether Quakers were free to serve in the Army. The first official declaration of absolute pacifism was made by the Society of Friends in January 1661, after a number of Quakers had been arrested in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Fifth Monarchist Revolt. It was intended to protect them against charges of sedition, but also marks the beginning of refusal among them to accept civil or military offices. However, it is more likely that, in the previous decade, the early refusals of Fox and others sprang from political objections to the government of the Commonwealth rather than from pacifist principles. In fact, in 1659, when the political situation was more to their liking, many Quakers re-enlisted in the Army. As late as 1685, Quakers are said to have turned out with their ‘pitchforks’ in the west country to join Monmouth’s rebellion.

The Growth of Quakerism in Wales & the West of England – The Strange Case of Dorcas Erbery:

The coral growth of Quakerism, especially in Wales and the Western Counties of England, from Cumberland to Cornwall, was largely the product of the nurturing of lay-preaching in the radical regiments of the New Model Army. These soldier-preachers, like Nayler, took it for granted that fellow Quakers had supported and, in most cases, fought for Parliament in the civil wars. George Fox made similar assumptions, though by the mid-1650s he was resisting James Nayler’s ‘simple teaching’ and writing to Nayler that his style of mechanic preaching had made him a shelter for the unclean spirits, the beasts of the field; they made thee their refuge. The controversy led to disunity, as elsewhere, while Nayler himself remained silent. Nayler was born in the Yorkshire village of West Ardsley, near Wakefield in 1618, where he followed his father’s occupation of a ‘husbandman’ before moving into the nearby town. In 1643 he had joined the Parliamentary Army and served seven years in a foot regiment before becoming quartermaster in Lambert’s Regiment of Horse, taking part in the third civil war, including the battles of Dunbar and Worcester.

In the summer of 1656, along with a number of other Quakers, Nayler was imprisoned in Exeter Jail. Amongst these were a number of women, including Dorcas Erbery, the daughter of an “honest minister” in Wales, probably William Erbery. One of the women died, and when Dorcas, some days later, fell into a prolonged faint, the excited women about her declared that she was also dead. Nayler was called to see the lifeless body and laid his hands upon it, and at his touch, the girl revived and stood up. That was sufficient to prove to his followers that he was Christ, though he himself never claimed this, contrary to the charges made against him later that year. When the Bristol magistrates quoted from the letters found in his pockets, one of which referred to him, from John’s Gospel, as the Lamb of God, in whom the hope of Israel stands, and asked him whether he was himself that Lamb, he responded:

If I were not his Lamb, I should not be thus sought for to be devoured. The hope of Israel stands in the righteousness of the Father in whomsoever it is.

Such a reply scarcely seemed to merit imprisonment, and it may be that if Nayler’s followers had not shown such an uncompromising spirit in their hero-worship he would have been allowed to go free. Martha Simmonds and Dorcas Erbery both stoutly maintained that he was indeed Jesus. No cross-examination could shake Dorcas from her belief that Nayler had raised her to life after she had been dead two days. Under these circumstances, a seventeenth-century Bench had no alternative but to send them back to jail. The two male Quakers who had played a modest part in the demonstration in the courthouse, which had included continual shouting of ‘hosanna’, were sent home without charge and attended the Friends’ meeting later that day. Nayler and his companions were not completely disowned by the Bristol Quakers, and a local Quaker apothecary brought them supplies and “comforts” before Nayler was sent to Westminster to answer the charge of ‘blasphemy’ before Parliament. But a note from Thomas Simmonds, the printer, to his wife Martha, one of the women involved, concludes with an affectionate but somewhat bantering strain:

Dear heart, my love is to thee and to J.N. and to J.S. and H.S. But this I could not but write to warn you that you stand single to the Lord and not believe every sprit. Your work is soon to come to an end: part of the army that fell at Burford was your figure.

The reference to Burford is to Cromwell’s suppression of the Leveller mutiny in the Army of 1649 when the mutineers were locked in Burford Church and a number of them were shot. This ‘turning point’ in the Revolution was clearly still fresh in many minds, and the reference to it may also point to the quarrel between Nayler and Fox, whose ‘authority’ over the movement he continued to dispute. When one of Fox’s letters to him was used in evidence against Nayler in court, the latter had called his erstwhile leader a liar and firebrand of hell, which must have alarmed the local Quakers who were present and given them a measure of his alienation from Fox’s leadership. Nayler’s ‘excitable women followers’ were also bitterly critical of Fox, but Nayler had refused to restrain them at Fox’s request, made in a letter of September 1656, possibly the letter produced in court. Nayler later justified his refusal by saying that he did not wish to quench whatever was ‘of God’ in what they said and did. The modern-day Quaker writer, John Lampen, has stated (1981) that:

It has been generally assumed that at the time he did not have the emotional strength to withstand their influence, and this is borne out by contemporary descriptions of his passive, exhausted demeanor. However he was still justifying his behaviour by appealing to divine guidance, and so implicitly challenging Fox’s spiritual insight.

Other friends expected Fox to settle the issue by his personal authority. In the unity so often felt at the start of a great venture, they had not yet needed to discover ways of reconciling different perceptions of the Truth, and Nayler was considered by many contemporaries to be their most notable preacher, even if Fox was the chief pastor of their flock. The over-enthusiastic atmosphere which developed around Nayler was created by men as well as women. When one man wrote to him, Thy name shall be no more James Nayler, but Jesus, he put it straight in his pocket, overcome by fear, intending no-one to see it, as he could not own its contents, but he did not, as far as we know, reprove the sender. Fox was not without fault in their quarrel. When the two men eventually met, Nayler went to kiss Fox on the head, but Fox recoiled, instead offering him his foot to kiss. However, Fox refused to publish a statement condemning Nayler, but he did repudiate some of his ‘followers’ including Martha Simmonds, for their lies and slanders. Beneath the inter-personal conflict lay a fundamental issue as to whether the ‘Guidance within’ which was claimed by individual Quakers could be viewed as an infallible spirit. Fox could see in Nayler the possibility of unchecked individualism diverging from the divine illumination in which he believed. Following Nayler’s release from prison, the two were finally reconciled in 1659 shortly before his death. Early Friends believed that one of the ‘offices’ of Christ was judgment and Fox could assert that he did not judge Nayler himself but ‘set the Power of God over him’, while Nayler could claim that he felt this ‘inward judgment’ while in prison and it saved him.

In this context, it is quite clear that whatever interpretation Nayler’s followers might have placed upon their actions, he regarded himself simply as a symbol of the Christ whom they all worshipped, and that the ‘triumphal’ entry into the city on 24 October 1656 was simply a sign of his second coming. Viewed in this light, the episode falls into line with the frequent going naked for a sign and the other revivals of symbolism from the Bible practised by primitive Quakers, Baptists and other sects. The rift between the supporters of George Fox and those of James Nayler that had extended throughout the movement, and far into Wales, was eventually healed, and it showed that it was not as vulnerable as its enemies had hoped. But treachery lurked in the ‘inner light’. In a time of defeat, when the wave of revolution was ebbing, the inner voice became quietest and pacifist. This voice only was recognised by others as God’s. God was no longer served by the extravagant gesture, whether Nayler’s entry into Bristol or the blasphemy of the Ranters. Once the group decided this way, all the pressures were in the direction of accepting modes of expression not too shocking to the society in which men had to live and earn their living. In 1656, John Lewis urged the religious radicals in Wales not to go too fast or too far in inveighing against old customs and against the superstitious Welsh regard for church buildings.

When Nayler was pilloried for his ‘blasphemy’ in London at Christmas (pictured above), the three women prisoners, including Dorcas Erbery, were also present, and in what was (no doubt) intended as another ‘acted parable’, took their seat at the foot of the pillory in imitation of the women at the crucifixion of Christ. Dorcas and the others who had been imprisoned with Nayler in Exeter and Bristol remained in prison until the following May. In February, they attended a service at Westminster Abbey, which was presumably part of their punishment. The following is from a contemporary account in Mercurius Politicus:

This day being the Lord’s day, the persons called Quakers who were brought from Bristol with James Nayler, remaining yet undischarged under the custody of the Sergeant at Arms, but now somewhat altered in their carriage, went to the Abbey morning and afternoon, where they gave ear civilly and attentively to the sermons of Mr. John Rowe, an eminent preacher; whose spritual doctrine so far wrought upon them that they intend to hear him again – which gives hopes that they may be rectified in their judgment.

However, it does not appear that Dorcas Erbery’s judgment was so completely rectified as was supposed, for in two years from this date she was again in prison in Bristol, …

… with many others … for preaching and declaring the truth to the people in the public places of resort and Concourse, a Duty which they esteemed themselves under an indispensable necessity of performing.

The Welsh Prophet, ‘Arise’ Evans:

‘Arise’ (Rhys) Evans spoke of his own humble origins with reference to the apostles:

I am as the Paul of this time. … he was a mechanic, a tent maker. Acts 18:3. I am a tailor.

Evans was born about 1607 in Llangelynnin parish (near Barmouth) and was apprenticed to a tailor at Wrexham. While living in Wales he had seen visions and prophetic dreams which were accentuated when he went to London in 1629. In London, he made vain efforts to warn Charles I of perceived dangers but succeeded in telling the Earl of Essex to his face of his future promotions. Evans also seems to have suffered from mental illness. He hung around Charles I’s court for days on end, in order to deliver his message from God to the King announcing that he and his kingdom were to be destroyed. Meanwhile, bishops ran away at the sight of him, and the royal Secretary of State asked for the prayers of ‘God’s secretary’. In the 1640s, Evans got a brief spell in the Bridewell for telling the City’s Deputy Recorder that he, Arise Evans, was the Lord his God. Later, he called upon Oliver Cromwell and stayed to midnight: he pestered the Council of State to restore the son of the King whom they had executed, and republican officers defended him in long arguments at Whitehall.

But the Commonwealth did not even imprison him as Charles and the Deputy Recorder had done. As long as the ‘imbecile’ had no disciples, he or she was allowed a great deal of latitude. Prophets were often tolerated because they could be used to further the political purposes of powerful men, as Arise Evans may have been. In 1653, indeed, he gave a forecast of the course of events in England following Cromwell’s death that came remarkably near the truth. His Narrations, Voices from Heaven, and Echoes of those Voices contain weird and impossible extravagances, but there are passing references of great interest, notably to John Jones (1597 – 1660) the regicide’s acquaintance with the lake of Tal-y-Llyn, to Christopher Love speaking to him in Welsh, to the Welsh connections of Oliver Cromwell. In the freer circumstances of the 1640s and ’50s, most so-called ‘mad’ people appear to have been political radicals. A mental breakdown could be seen as a form of social protest or at least a reaction to intolerable social conditions: those who break down, like Arise Evans, may, in reality, be truly sane. This is certainly an explanation to bear in mind when considering those radicals often dismissed as ‘the lunatic fringe’.

As William Dell of ‘the Apostles’ claimed, Poor, illiterate, mechanic men, turned the world upside down. The effort to grasp new truths, truths which would turn the world upside down, may have been too much for men like Arise Evans. The Bible was the accepted source of all true knowledge. Men as different as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and Gerard Winstanley, the ‘Digger’ from Wigan, both illustrated from the Bible conclusions at which they had arrived by rational means. Simpler men like Arise Evans believed the Bible to be divinely inspired and applied its texts directly to problems of their own world and time, with no idea of the difficulties of translation, nor of the historical understanding required to do so. So Evans thought that Revelation 8 and 11 gave an account of the civil war, that chapters 8 and 9 of Amos set down all that came to pass since the beginning of the Long Parliament, and that in Amos 9:1, the lintel of the door, which is to be smitten that the posts may shake, must refer to Speaker Lenthall. As Christopher Hill pointed out, unlike the Puritan divines who had cited the Bible against bishops and tithes, …

The Evanses studied it very carefully, if less skilfully, in order to understand and so be able to control what was going to happen.

Evans became interested in the multifarious sects that flourished under the relatively liberty of the late 1640s, opposing most of them, especially the tenets of the Fifth Monarchists. In 1649, he had a vision in which he went through France to Rome, where a voice came to me saying, “So far as thou art come, so far shall Cromwell come”. But Evans made a distinction between the ‘history’ and the ‘mystery’ of the Bible, as did William Erbery, who in his Testimony recalled that a chief one of the Army would … usually say that the flesh of Christ and the letter of scripture were the two great idols of Antichrist.

Propagating the Gospel & Protecting the State – Vavasour Powell & Oliver Cromwell:

According to Welsh historian, A. H. Dodd (1957), the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel became ‘the real government of Wales’. Those who administered Wales could not afford to alienate Baptist or Quaker missionaries, many of whom were ex-New Model Army soldiers and chaplains, who still, in the years 1651-53, continued to support the Parliamentary cause. J.P.s protected the preachers as a lesser evil than papists or pagans. The Committee’s ‘Approvers’, dominated by republican intransigents, created the first state schools, fifty-nine of them, open to both sexes and offering Latin and Greek, but trying to preach regeneration to the Welsh in English, although most sermons had been delivered in Welsh since the publication of Bishop Morgan’s Welsh Bible in 1588, which may help to explain why many Independent English preachers failed to ‘connect’ with their Welsh congregations. They had even more trouble finding replacements for the ministers. In came the itinerants and in came men from the hitherto invisible classes, to battle forward, often in the gales of hostility. Vavasour Powell, travelled a hundred miles a week, preaching in two or three places a day. He was probably the outstanding Welshman of his time, a brilliant and fearless man not afraid to address A Word for God … against Wickedness in High Places to Cromwell himself. Converts sprouted wherever he spoke, especially in the uplands of the south and the border. In north Wales, Morgan Llwyd, a writer of powerful Welsh classics and a man of mystical temper, sent John ap John of Ruabon to contact George Fox to gain his help in starting an often anarchic movement of Welsh Quakers, which may be from where Dorcas Erbery, Nayler’s ‘prophetess’ sprang. George Fox, on his own mission, found God raising up a people around Cader Idris in mid-Wales in 1657. Cromwell himself said that ‘God had kindled a seed’ in Wales. As Presbyterians penetrated Flintshire, Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers multiplied along the eastern border and also began to plant in the west.

As Protector, Cromwell sought to act as the guarantor of an accepted constitution while elected assemblies came and went, to check the evident tendency of an all-powerful single-chamber parliament to veer towards elective dictatorship and to secure for the executive a degree of independence and separation from the legislature. As Protector, he became a strong believer in the separation of powers. But he didn’t find it easy to pursue a moderating course. It brought him into conflict with the influential millenarian preachers in London, including Christopher Feake, Walter Cradock, Vavasour Powell and John Goodwin, who all had a considerable following in the Army. The open hostility of many Rumpers towards army officers did not help the situation. Skippon, clearly a moderate, was dropped from the Council of State at the same time as Harrison, leaving the army almost insultingly under-represented.

The Power & the Glory:

In the Interregnum, the Councils of in the North and in Wales, created by the Tudors, were abolished, the local power of the feudal aristocracy curtailed, and the authority of Whitehall and ‘London’ extended over the whole of the two countries. It seemed obvious to historians like Christopher Hill that the Revolution established a much greater unity among the regions of England, and indeed of the three kingdoms and the principality. But contemporaries worried about centrifugal tendencies. They were no doubt influenced by the examples of the Netherlands, where the republic’s unity derived mainly from the dominance of Holland, while the other provinces clung onto their independence, often with paralysing effects on policy. They were also disturbed by the case of Switzerland, where protestant and Catholic cantons were at war, which Cromwell himself insisted was brought on by external papist intervention. In the early 1650s, England had nearly intervened in the French wars of religion, an intervention which might have created a breakaway republic in the south-west. There were also revolts from Spanish sovereignty of Portugal, Catalonia and Naples, and Cossack risings in Russia and Poland.

John Lilburne (pictured above) became a Quaker after retiring from the Army in the 1650s. The radical ‘Levellers’ proposed a great deal of decentralisation for England, including local courts at York, and greater county autonomy. William Walwyn, one of their leaders, said that the Swiss cantons were nearest to his ideal. In 1647, Cromwell had argued against such constitutional projects:

Would it not make England like Switzerland, one canton of the Swiss against another, and one county against another? And what would that produce but an absolute desolation in the nation?

By the time the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales Act lapsed in 1653, the enterprise had spilt out to produce a myriad of sects and creeds, many like the ranters or Anabaptists, often called ‘Quakers’. Such men, rivalling even the most radical Baptists, offered a serious threat to tithes and all established order. They were appearing in many places, from Dolgellau to the Vale of Glamorgan. As Cromwell made himself Lord Protector, the Welsh Republicans moved into opposition. Vavasour Powell tried to organise insurrection in Wales and Ireland. The Blackfriars’ fulminators were also blasting the parliament, the council, the army, and everyone in power in scurrilous terms, and by late November 1653, they too were concentrating their shafts upon Cromwell himself, calling him the man of sin, the old dragon, and many other scripture ill names. Harrison was reportedly railing against him every day and the Anglo-Dutch peace negotiations, and there were allegations that he and his party were planning to take over the command of the army. He was certainly capable of seriously dividing it, and his favourite preachers were, according to Woolrych, …

… aspersing the loyal majority of its officers as janissaries and pensioners of Babylon, corrupted by wealth and power.

Vavasour Powell, in particular, told the generals that:

… that the Spirit of God had departed from them; that heretofore they had been precious and excellent men, but that their parks, and new houses, and gallant wives had choked them up.

At Sunday service on 18 December, he denounced the ‘Lord Protector’ from the pulpit, calling him a perjured villain, leading to his imprisonment, but the Fifth Monarchist’s excesses were losing them such public sympathy as they still commanded, and they ceased to be a serious danger when they lost their seats of power, both at Westminster and in the Army. Harrison was quietly cashiered when he refused to give any assurance that he would support the Protectorate, but only two or three other officers followed him in resigning their commissions. Not so long ago it was customary to account for this by portraying the Protectorate over-simply as a conservative reaction, but this was at best a half-truth. At least in its earlier years, it showed a stronger impulse to reform than the Rump had done. Although Cromwell was at heart a constitutionalist, with a strong respect for parliament as an institution, he still believed that he had a higher duty to promote what he called the interest of the people of God than to bow to the wishes of an unregenerate majority. And while he was conservative to the extent of preserving a national church and respecting the rights of tithe-holders, he upheld broader religious liberty than any elected parliament did in his lifetime. During the early weeks of the Protectorate, the first concern was to secure it against those, mainly the Fifth Monarchists, who were publicly denying its legality, prophesying its early fall and inciting their flocks to disobey it. Feake and Powell were against it again immediately after their early release and were consequently rearrested, though Powell escaped to Wales.

Restoration, Revolution & Toleration:

As the system started to come apart, there was a revival of the old alliance of royalist moderates and Presbyterians to engineer the restoration of Charles II. Independents and Baptists, far more numerous in Wales than the Presbyterians, caught the first full blast of repression. Nearly a hundred and twenty ministers were thrown out of their livings and subjected to harsh controls. In December 1656, the Fifth Monarchists in south Wales seemed to have followed Morgan Llwyd and Vavasour Powell in renouncing militancy and from current plans for a rising. The Quakers were pursued like mad dogs and Vavasour Powell died in jail. Whole communities braved the horrible Atlantic crossings to create pioneer settlements in ‘the New World’. In the 1670s, as Charles ‘flirted’ with the Dissenters in order to secure toleration for Catholics, moderates in Wales tended to drift back towards the old Parliamentarians and away from the radical puritans. The Welsh Trust, an educational enterprise of Puritan temper which allied moderate Dissenters and Anglicans in 1672 when Charles issued his Indulgence, came to serve as an opposition to the court. When the indulgence ended within a year, to be replaced by the Test Act excluding non-Anglicans from office. At the time of the ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678-79, there was a violent incident in southern Wales when the Catholic seminary Cwm was raided and sacked, priests were thrown into jail and there was heavy confiscation. Four Welsh priests, two of whom were Jesuits, were hanged in savage persecution.

In 1679, eleven of the twenty-seven Welsh MPs voted for the Exclusion of James II. In these circumstances, many of the old Roundheads came bubbling back to the surface and there was a return of the Quakers and Vavasour Powell’s radicals. In consequence, there was a sharp reaction in the 1680s, a massive renewal of persecution of Dissenters, and major further emigrations to Holland and America. In ‘matters of religion’, therefore, the monopoly of the national church had been broken, and while the House of Commons remained hostile to the idea of religious toleration, nonconformity shook off its revolutionary political associations and, despite continuing persecution, proved that it had come to stay. Those who remained survived through the indulgences offered by Charles II and James II until at the Glorious Revolution of 1688, they won a limited but essential measure of toleration in the Toleration Act of 1689 recognised these facts. Presbyterianism and Congregationalism were not included in the Anglican church, but that church was subjected to Parliament and government. The Puritan Revolution within the state church may have been defeated by 1660, but the Great Britain of the succeeding two centuries was unique among the great powers of Europe for the strength of its evangelical tradition and its toleration of diverse traditions.

Not until 1685 was some degree of calm restored to Welsh politics with a restoration of Toryism among the gentry classes. It was only after 1688 that governments came to assume that ‘trade must be the principal interest of England’, and that warfare should be confined to supporting this objective through its Navy. Even Charles II in 1680 could not be persuaded of this. By then, Parliament controlled foreign policy, and used the newly mobilised financial resources of the country, through aggressive use of sea power, to protect and expand the trade of a unified empire. The anti-Dutch policy which had continued to be pursued by the pro-Hapsburg Stuart Kings was replaced by the policy of colonial expansion into the western hemisphere, first against Spain and then against the French. It enjoyed more support among the gentry and gradually won over a majority in the House of Commons as Dutch power declined and French power increased.

England itself had by then had been united under the dominance of the London market; separate courts no longer governed Wales and the North. Therefore, ‘cantonisation’ was no longer a danger. William III’s political and economic subjugation of Ireland was thoroughly Cromwellian and complete: the Union with Scotland in 1707 was on the same lines as that of 1652-60. A union of crowns became a union of peoples, a significant punctuation point in the process which made the new and far more real Great Britain into the greatest merchant empire in the world. England, Wales and Scotland emerged from the seventeenth-century crisis geared to the new world of mercantilism and colonialism. Bristol, pictured above in the early eighteenth century, quickly grew as Britain’s most important port, with its ‘Welsh Backs’ for traders from across the Severn estuary. The Atlantic trade was becoming more important than the trade of the East Anglian ports with the continent and Wales, though still controlled by squires, was becoming an important sector of an Atlantic empire and a British nation.

Sources:

Austin Woolrich (2002), Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gwyn A. Williams (1985), When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Christopher Hill (1970), God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.

Christopher Hill (1984), The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books.

John Lampen (1981), Wait in the Light: The Spirituality of George Fox. London: Quaker Home Service.

Posted March 7, 2020 by AngloMagyarMedia in Anabaptism, Anglican Reformation, Anglicanism, Apocalypse, baptism, Baptists, Bible, Britain, British history, Britons, Castles, Christian Faith, Christian Socialism, Christianity, Church, Colonisation, Commons, Commonwealth, Compromise, Conquest, Covenant, Crucifixion, democracy, Dissolution of the Monasteries, Early Modern English, East Anglia, Education, Egalitarianism, English Civil War(s), eschatology, Ethnicity, Europe, Family, Fertility, gentry, Henry VIII, History, Humanism, Imperialism, Integration, Ireland, John's Gospel, literacy, Marriage, Maternal mortality, Midlands, Militancy, Millenarianism, Monarchy, Monuments, morality, Mysticism, Mythology, Narrative, nationalism, Nationality, Navy, New Testament, Nonconformist Chapels, Old Testament, Pacifism, Parliament, Paul (Saint), Plantagenets, Poland, Population, Poverty, Quakers (Religious Society of Friends), Racism, Reconciliation, Reformation, Renaissance, Respectability, Revolution, Russia, Scotland, Security, south Wales, Statehood, Stuart times, Switzerland, Tudor England, Tudor times, tyranny, Uncategorized, United Kingdom, Wales, Welsh language, William III, Women's History

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Three ‘Great’ Hymns of the Twentieth Century, commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Lunar Landing. 1 comment

Below: The picture of earth from the Moon, July 1969.

On 20 July 1969 human beings stepped onto the surface of the moon, in one giant leap for mankind.

A Giant Leap of Imagination:

I was just twelve years old when the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the moon. I remember the event very clearly, being allowed to stay up to watch on our small, black and white television. The whole event was in black and white for everyone on earth, as colour television transmissions did not begin until the following year when we went round to a friend’s house to watch the Football World Cup via satellite from Mexico.

Looking back over those fifty years, it’s interesting to see how much of popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic has been influenced by that event, and the subsequent two Apollo landings of the seventies. Before 1969, most classical compositions and popular song lyrics referenced the moon and the stars in the romantic terms of ‘moonlight’ and ‘Stardust’, even Sinatra’s ‘Fly me to the Moon’. These metaphors continued afterwards, but they were joined by a growing genre of songs about ‘rocketmen’ and space and time exploration which had begun in the early sixties with TV series like ‘Fireball XL-5’, ‘Dr Who’ and ‘Star Trek’.

Gradually, Science Fiction literature and films took us beyond cartoonish ‘superhero’ representations of space and HG Wells’ early novels until, by the time I went to University, ‘Star Wars’ had literally exploded onto the big screens and was taking us truly into a new dimension, at least in our imaginations.

The Dawning of a New Age?

The ‘Age of Aquarius’ had begun on earth as well, with rock musicals, themed albums and concerts, and ‘mushrooming’ festivals under the stars providing the soundtrack and backdrop to the broadening of minds and horizons. Those ‘in authority’ were not at all tolerant of the means used by some to help broaden these horizons and, in those days, these mass encampments were not always seen as welcome additions to the rural landscape and soundscape. Many evangelical Christians were suspicious of the ‘New Age’ mysticism embraced by the Beatles, the outrageous costumes and make-up of David Bowie and Elton John, and the heavy rock music of a series of bands who made use of provocative satanic titles and emblems, like ‘Black Sabbath’. But some, like Larry Norman and ‘The Sheep’, decided to produce their own parallel ‘Christian Rock’ culture. The first Christian ‘Arts’ Greenbelt Festival was held on a pig farm just outside the village of Charsfield near Woodbridge, Suffolk over the August 1974 bank holiday weekend.

My Christian friends and I, having already seen the musical Lonesome Stone in Birmingham, made the trek across the country to discover more of this genre. Local fears concerning the festival in the weeks running up to it proved to be unfounded, but the festival didn’t return to the venue. We, on the other hand, were excited and enthused by what we saw and heard.

The ‘mantra’ we repeated when we got home to our churches was William Booth’s question, voiced by Larry, Why should the devil get all the best tunes? We wrote and performed our own rock musical, James (a dramatisation of the Book of James) touring it around the Baptist churches in west Birmingham, a different form of evangelism from that of Mary Whitehouse and her ‘Festival of Light’. One of our favourite songs was Alpha and Omega:

He’s the Alpha and Omega,

The Beginning and the End,

The first and last,

Our eternal friend.

Another of their ‘millenarian’ songs, Multitudes, also emphasised the importance of the Day of the Lord, which seemed to chime in well with the ‘nuclear age’ and the Eve of Destruction songs of Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire, among others.

Sun, Moon and Stars in their Courses Above:

But though we began to sing new songs, much of this revivalist spirit still owed its origins and source of inspiration to the 1954 North London crusade of Billy Graham, and the hymns associated with it. Great is Thy Faithfulness, written in the USA in the early 1920s, really owes its popularity in Britain to its use by the Billy Graham Crusade (pictured right).

It took some time to for it to find its way into the hymnbooks in Britain, but it now stands high in the ‘hit parade’, ranking fourth in the 2002 BBC Songs of Praise poll. It has much in common with our other hymn, How Great Thou Art, which was the most popular and probably still is, thanks to recent recordings. Both hail from the early part of the twentieth century and both display a strong emphasis on creation and nature, which have become dominating discourses by the early part of the twenty-first century.

Great is Thy Faithfulness is the work of Thomas Chisholm (1866-1960), a devout Methodist from Kentucky who worked successively as a journalist, a school teacher and a life-insurance agent before becoming ordained. He wrote the verses in 1923 and later reflected that there were no special circumstances surrounding their writing and that he was simply expressing his impressions of God’s faithfulness as recounted in the Bible. Yet, as Tom White has written recently in his book on Paul, our ‘justification’ as Christians is not the result of our own ‘little faith’ so much as the great faithfulness of God as revealed in his son, Jesus Christ. Chisholm sent his poem, along with several other poems, to his friend and collaborator William Runyan (1870-1957), a fellow Methodist who achieved considerable fame in the USA as a composer of sacred music and gospel songs.

Its early popularity in the USA was partly the result of its promotion by Dr Will Houghton, president of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago (pictured right), who used it frequently both in the services he took and on his radio broadcasts on WMBI. George Beverly Shea, first as a singer on the station’s early morning programme, Hymns from the Chapel, and then as the lead singer at Graham’s rallies, also helped to popularise the hymn across America.

The opening verse is based directly on scriptural affirmations about God. Lamentations 3.22 and 33 proclaim that His compassions fail not; they are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness, and James 1.17 declares that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning:

Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

there is no shadow of turning with thee;

thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not,

as thou hast been, thou for ever wilt be!

Great is thy faithfulness!

Great is thy faithfulness!

Morning by morning new mercies I see;

all I have needed thy hand hath provided –

great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me!

Summer and winter, and spring-time and harvest,

sun, moon and stars in their courses above,

join with all nature in manifold witness

to thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.

Inspired by a Summer Evening in Sweden:

The second verse places the individual Christian in the context of the wider creation and emphasises the interdependence of the whole created order under its creator. This is the theme which is taken up in How Great Thou Art.

According to the 2002 Songs of Praise poll, this is Britain’s favourite hymn, and readers of the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, voted it third in their list of top ten hymns in 2004. Like Great is Thy Faithfulness, it owes much of its popularity to its extensive use in the Billy Graham crusades of the 1950s. But prior to that, the hymn owes its origins to a trail leading from Sweden to Britain via central-eastern Europe. The words in English are a translation of a Swedish poem, O store Gud, by Carl Boberg (1859-1940), an evangelist, journalist and for fifteen years a member of Sweden’s parliament. He was born the son of a shipyard worker on the south-east coast of Sweden. He came to faith at the age of nineteen and went to Bible School Kristinehamn. He returned to his native town of Monsteras as a preacher and it was there in 1886 that he wrote his nine-verse poem, inspired to praise God’s greatness one summer evening while looking across the calm waters of the inlet. A rainbow had formed, following a storm in the afternoon, and a church bell was tolling in the distance. Translated literally into English, the first verse of his poem reads:

O Thou great God! When I the world consider

Which Thou hast made by Thine almighty Word;

And how the web of life Thy wisdom guideth,

And all creation feedeth at Thy board:

Then doth my soul burst forth in song of praise:

O Thou great God! O Thou great God!

Boberg’s verses were set to music in 1891 and appeared in several Swedish hymnbooks around the turn of the century. An English translation was published in 1925 under the title O Mighty God, but never really caught on. Earlier, in 1912, a Russian version by Ivan Prokhanoff had appeared. This was almost certainly made from a German translation of the original Swedish hymn. The English translation was the work of British missionary and evangelist, Stuart K Hine (1899-1989), who heard it being sung in Russian in western Ukraine, where he had gone in 1923. After singing the hymn in Russian for many years, Hine translated the first three verses while continuing his missionary work in the Carpathian mountains in the 1930s. The scenery there inspired his second verse which draws little from Boberg’s original poem while remaining true to its general spirit of wonder at God’s creation:

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder

Consider all the works Thy hand hath made,

I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed:

Then sings my soul, my saviour God, to Thee,

How great Thou art! How great Thou art!

(x 2)

When through the woods and forest glades I wander

And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees:

When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur,

And hear the brook, and feel the gentle breeze;

When are we Going to go Home?

Stuart Hine wrote the fourth verse of his hymn when he was back in Britain in 1948. In that year more than a hundred thousand refugees from Eastern Europe streamed into the United Kingdom. The question uppermost in their minds was When are we going home? In an essay on the history of the hymn, Hine wrote:

What better message for the homeless than that of the One who went to prepare a place for the ‘displaced’, of the God who invites into his own home those who will come to him through Christ.

Contrasting with a third verse which is about Christ’s ‘bearing’ of our individual burdens of sin on the cross, the final verse is about our places among the multitudes on the ‘last day’, just like the mass of homeless refugees finding a temporary home in Britain:

When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation

And take me home – what joy shall fill my heart!

Then shall I bow in humble adoration

And there proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!

Seventy years ago, Stuart Hine published both the Russian and the English versions of the hymn in his gospel magazine Grace and Peace in 1949. O Lord My God rapidly caught on in evangelical circles both in Britain and the UK, as well as in Eastern Europe, despite the oppression of the churches by the Soviet-style communist régimes which were taking control of the states where the hymn was first heard. The Hungarian Baptist Hymnbook contains a translation by Balázs Déri (born in 1954):

The hymn has been regularly sung in Hungarian Baptist Churches in recent decades, but it’s popularity probably stems, not so much to its sub-Carpathian origins, but to George Beverly Shea (below), the leading vocalist in Billy Graham’s evangelistic team, who was given a copy of it during the London crusade at the Haringey Arena in 1954. It became a favourite of Shea, the team’s choir director, Cliff Barrows and Graham himself, who wrote of it:

The reason I liked “How Great Thou Art!” was because it glorified God: it turned a Christian’s eyes toward God rather than upon himself, as so many songs do.

The hymn is still sung, universally, to the beautiful Swedish folk-melody to which Boberg’s original verses were set in 1891. It was the tune that I first fell in love with as a boy soprano when my Baptist minister father introduced my contralto sister and me to the hymn as our entry as a duet into the west Birmingham Baptists’ Eisteddfod (Festival of Arts), which was held during the same year as the lunar landing, my first year of secondary school (1968-69). Looking back, I’m convinced that it was my father’s involvement in the Billy Graham campaign as a young minister in Coventry which encouraged his love of the hymn. When it was sung by the congregation at his second church in Birmingham, he would always provide his own accompaniment on the piano, ensuring that the organist and the congregation did not ‘drag’ the tune and that it kept to a ‘Moody’ style, as in the days of the Graham Crusade.

Its reference to ‘the stars’ as evidence of the works thy hand hath made, inserted by Hine, anticipated the sense of awe and wonder experienced by the astronauts onboard the Apollo missions. Both the words and the music have continued to captivate soloists and congregations alike. Elvis Presley released his version of it, and more recently my favourite Welsh singers, Bryn Terfel, Katherine Jenkins and Aled Jones have also recorded their renditions. It was certainly a favourite of the Baptist congregations I regularly joined during my days as a student in Wales in the seventies, though they had many wonderful tunes of their own, including Hyfrydol, meaning just that. Most recently, the Mormon group, The Piano Guys recorded their ‘crossover’ instrumental version of it on their Wonders album, appropriately combining it with Ennio Morricone’s haunting composition for the film, The Mission, with Jon Schmidt at the piano and Steven Sharp Nelson on cello.

Alpha & Omega – In the Beginning and At the End:

For the astronauts on the Apollo 11 Mission, the landing was a profoundly spiritual event, according to their own testimony. They read from the gospel and even celebrated communion (see below). On Sunday (14th July 2019), a service from Leicester Cathedral to mark the 50th anniversary of the Moon landings was broadcast on the BBC under the title The Heavens are telling the glory of God. The service celebrated the achievement of the Apollo 11 Mission and asked whether the ‘giant leap’ has made us more, or less aware of our own human limitations and of our longing for God. It was led by the Dean of Leicester, the Very Reverend David Monteith, with contributions from staff at the National Space Centre and Christians involved in Astrophysics and Space Science. The Cathedral Choir led the congregation in hymns including Great Is Thy Faithfulness and The Servant King.

The Servant King is one of many worship songs written by Graham Kendrick (born 1950), the son of a Baptist pastor, M. D. Kendrick. Graham Kendrick (pictured right, performing in 2019) began his songwriting career in the late 1960s when he underwent a profound religious experience at teacher-training college. This set him off on his itinerant ministry as a musician, hymn-writer and worship-leader. After working in full-time evangelism for Youth for Christ, with which I had been involved in Birmingham, in 1984 he decided to focus all his energies on congregational worship music. He has also become closely associated with the Ichthus Fellowship, one of the largest and most dynamic of the new house churches to emerge from the charismatic revival.

His most successful musical accomplishment is his authorship of the song, Shine, Jesus, Shine, which is among the most widely heard songs in contemporary Christian worship worldwide. His other songs, like Meekness and Majesty, have been primarily used by worshippers in Britain. Although now best known as a worship leader and writer of worship songs, Graham Kendrick began his career as a member of the Christian beat group Whispers of Truth (formerly the Forerunners). Later, he began working as a solo concert performer and recording artist in the singer/songwriter tradition. He was closely associated with the organisation Musical Gospel Outreach and recorded several albums for their record labels. On the first, Footsteps on the Sea, released in 1972, he worked with the virtuoso guitarist Gordon Giltrap. In 1975 and 1976, he was one of the contributing artists at the second and third Greenbelt Arts Festival at Odell Castle in Bedfordshire. I was present at both of these, and also attended the fortieth, a much bigger event, at Cheltenham (see below) in 2013 where I watched him perform again.

Until the advent of Shine Jesus Shine, The Servant King was Graham Kendrick’s most popular song and is still one of the top 10 songs in the CCL (Church Copyright Licence). It was also voted 37th in the 2002 Songs of Praise poll. Written to reflect the theme for the 1984 Spring Harvest Bible teaching event and the Greenbelt Festival later that year, it illustrates Graham’s willingness to research a theme using concordances, commentaries and other biblical research tools. He found the theme very inspiring:

It was a challenge to explore the vision of Christ as the servant who would wash the disciples’ feet but who was also the Creator of the universe.

He wrote both the words and the tune, as with virtually all of his songs, first picking out the tune on the piano at home. It is a short and simple hymn which yet has a wonderful theological sweep and depth. The song is based on an incarnational root and is one of the few songs I know that can be used in worship at Christmas and Easter, and at any time between the two as a call to renewed commitment and discipleship. Its opening line is very reminiscent of Martin Luther’s Christmas hymn, From Heaven Above to Earth I Come, and it goes on to cover the agony of Jesus in the garden of tears and his crucifixion and calls on us to serve him as he did his disciples. I remember a Good Friday ‘service of nails’ in which it featured. It begins with the incarnation – From heaven you came, helpless babe – and progresses to one of Graham’s most poignant lines: Hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered:

From heaven you came helpless babe
Entered our world, your glory veiled
Not to be served but to serve
And give Your life that we might live

This is our God, the Servant King,

He calls us now to follow him,

To bring our lives as a daily offering

Of Worship to the Servant King.

Come see His hands and His feet
The scars that speak of sacrifice
Hands that flung stars into space
To cruel nails surrendered

It reminds us of the timeless nature of the acts of creation, incarnation and reconciliation, and of the inextricable link between them. Jesus is Alpha and Omega, his hands flinging stars into space, but then enters human time as a helpless babe, with the same hands being used to pin him to the cruel Roman gibbet in a once and for all act of atonement of the whole created order, fallen and the restored. For me, the final lines are among the most poignant and poetic of any hymn or worship song. It is also worthy to stand alongside the great classics of evangelical hymnody by Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. It is more of a contemporary hymn in this classical tradition than a worship-song. It is addressed to Christ, and both its verses and chorus are cast in strophic, metrical form. Kendrick’s tune is also an unmistakably modern idiom and the resulting hymn does not ‘dumb down’ in terms of its theological subtlety and profundity. Neither does it suffer from the excessive individualism of so many contemporary worship songs. Like Great is Thy Faithfulness and O Lord My God, When I in Awesome Wonder, The Servant King places the paradox of greatness and sacrifice at the centre of the Christian religion as a truly universal faith and practice. Like his Meekness and Majesty, this hymn effectively points up the central paradox that Jesus is both king and servant, priest and victim: the one whose weakness is strength and who conquers through love.

Sources:

Ian Bradley (2005), The Daily Telegraph Book of Hymns. London: Continuum.

Wikipedia articles and pictures (Apollo 11).

Greenbelt memorabilia & DVD.

The Piano Guys, Wonders, album artwork, 2014. THEPIANOGUYS.COM.

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Paul of Tarsus: Endnotes & Evaluations on his Legacy to the Early Church. Leave a comment

Archaeological Insights:

The first missions to the Gentiles, as presented in the Acts of the Apostles offers a fruitful field for archaeological study. Different kinds of detail interlock. For example, Paul met the Christian couple Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth, after Emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from Rome (Acts 18: 2). This expulsion is mentioned in pagan literature and dated to AD 49 by a later writer. During Paul’s long stay in Corinth, Gallio became governor (Acts 18: 12); he is known elsewhere from the writings of his more famous brother Seneca, and his governorship can be dated to AD 51-2 by an inscription found in Delphi. This evidence helps build a consistent and fairly precise outline for this part of Paul’s life and helps relate Acts to Paul’s letters.

Many details of the names of people and officials, places and customs in the book can be exactly illustrated from inscriptions. This does not prove its account to be historically accurate, but it does rule out any view which holds that the writer, probably Luke (Paul’s early travelling companion and author of the synoptic gospel which bears his name), was careless about such details. It also makes it hard to believe that the book was written long after the events it describes. A test case of the relationship between Acts, the Epistles and the archaeology is Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Sir William Ramsay used the evidence of inscriptions to clearly establish clearly the extent of Galatia and then argued that the letter was sent to the southern cities such as Pisidian Antioch, in Phrygia (above), which Paul had visited on his first journey (Acts 13-14). This, in turn, fits the very early dating of the letter. Thus the details of Paul’s life contained in the letter may be linked directly to those in Acts.

The Greek Writer and Theologian:

Paul’s surviving letters are found in the New Testament. Galatians was probably written before the Council of Jerusalem in about AD 50. The two letters to the Thessalonians date from his first journey to into Greece; Romans and I & II Corinthians come from his last spell in Greece before his arrest at Jerusalem. Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians were probably written from Rome during Paul’s first imprisonment there, and Philemon may have been written during his earlier house arrest in Ephesus. The two letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus were probably written after Paul’s first stay in Rome. In them, Paul showed his mastery of Greek, and these two ‘pastoral’ letters can be counted among the classics of Greek literature. The letters were highly valued during Paul’s lifetime and were collected together soon after his death. By AD 95 they were accepted on an equal basis with other Scripture and were in their present form by AD 140. Paul’s theology was not well understood in the period immediately after his death. This was partly because the heretic Marcion rejected the Old Testament and much that was Jewish in the emerging canon of the New Testament. He considered that Matthew, Mark, Acts and Hebrews favoured Jewish readers exclusively. He also cut out the pastoral letters to Timothy and Titus, which left him with only a mutilated version of Luke’s Gospel and ten of Paul’s letters. He believed that Paul was the only apostle who did not corrupt the gospel of Jesus. As long as Marcion’s heresy was a threat, mainstream Christian teachers did not stress many of Paul’s more distinctive doctrines, such as that regarding the law of Christ and God’s grace. It was not until the time of Augustine that full weight was given to Paul’s theology.

The Missionary’s Achievements:

Paul’s achievements as a missionary were immense. The years between his Damascene conversion in AD 35 and his Antiochene preparations and initial discussions with the church in Jerusalem from AD 45 remain somewhat obscure, but during the next ten or twelve years, his activity was astounding. Between AD 47/48, when he set sail with Barnabas on his first missionary journey, and AD 57, when he returned to Jerusalem for the last time, he established flourishing churches in the major cities of the Roman provinces of Galatia, Asia, Macedonia and Achaia. His decisive role in the early Christian mission to the Gentiles was due principally to his championing of it to the first churches in Jerusalem and Antioch in Syria.

He then developed the theological defence of the Gentile mission which is clearly set out in Romans 1-11, while working hard to hold together and reconcile Jewish and Gentile Christians in the Diaspora. With this purpose in view, he kept in constant touch with the ‘mother church’ in Jerusalem, collecting a considerable sum of money among the Gentile converts for the needs of the Christians in Judea, and regularly underlined the importance of Christian unity in his letters. Finally, Paul’s principle of being ‘all things to all people’ helped him to move with relative ease between the synagogues, halls and house-churches of Graeco-Roman society, where ultimately the gospel received its greatest response. Moreover, his personal example as a self-supporting travelling missionary and his ‘settlements’ in significant cities provided a pattern of ministry for others to follow. His preference for the single life was based not on the kind of celibacy which Jesus advocated for some in Matthew 19, but on his initial sense that Christ’s return might come very soon. He certainly recognised the practical advantages for missionaries of remaining unmarried. However, like Jesus, he did not advocate a life of asceticism and self-denial as the norm for ministry and attacked the teaching that it was wrong to marry.

The origin and meaning of the word ‘apostle’ are hard to establish, and it obviously means very different things to different New Testament writers. For Luke, an apostle is one who accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us (Acts 1: 21), thus excluding Paul. But for Paul himself, apostleship was something to be proud of, and he is very anxious to defend his own (I Cor. 9: 1). For him, the apostles are those who have been commissioned by an appearance of the risen Lord, as he had been on the road to Damascus. Later, in his Pastoral letters, Paul is the Apostle, the guardian of the faith. The one point of agreement is that apostleship is not something that can be passed on. A famous passage, I Cor. 12: 28, mentions in succession apostles, prophets and teachers, and Eph. 4: 11 has a similar list. It is doubtful, however, whether these can be regarded as different classes of ministry. Rather, they are different activities, more than one of which might be practised by a single individual:

Deacon is usually a general term, describing any form of ministry or service. In two passages, the deacon seems to be a particular minister, subordinate to the bishop (Phil. 1: 1; I Tim. 3: 8-13). If the two terms are used technically in Phil 1: 1, this is the only evidence we have of such a formal ministry from the Pauline letters so the terms may be general even there.
Elders are not mentioned at all by Paul but are to be found as ministers throughout Acts, appointed by Paul and Barnabas in every church (Acts 14: 23; cf. 15: 12 ff.; 16: 4; 20: 17; 21: 18). Here Jewish practice is followed. Villages and towns had their groups of Jewish elders, seven in each village, twenty-three in each town and seventy in Jerusalem. When a place fell vacant, it was filled by the laying on of hands, the pattern found in Acts.
Bishop is a term which occurs in a technical sense in Acts 20: 28., but as in Phil 1: 1 the word may be used generally as ‘overseer’. Bishop is a definite office in I Tim. 3: 1-7; Titus 1: 7-9. The relationship between elders and bishops is a classic problem, as at times the two terms could be synonyms. At the end of the second century, each bishop was in charge of a particular area. All bishops were elders, but not all elders were bishops.

We have even less evidence about the ministry at this time than about other important matters, and what is said in the ‘Apostolic Fathers’ does little to help. Clearly, the pattern varied from place to place, and development was by no means uniform.

How would Paul have assessed the significance of his work?

From differing angles, more can be said about the reasons for the surprising long-term success of Paul’s work. Tom Wright tells us that Paul’s particular vocation was to found and maintain Jew-plus-Gentile churches on Gentile soil. He realised early on that it was his job not just to teach people what to think and believe, but to teach them how; how to think clearly, scripturally, prayerfully. The One God had already built his new Temple, his new microcosmos; the Jew-plus-Gentile church was the place where the divine spirit already revealed his glory as a sign of what would happen one day throughout the whole world. Of course, Paul would not have expected all this to happen smoothly or easily. He was a realist and would never have assumed that the transformation of small and often confused communities into a much larger body, forming a majority in the Roman world, would come about without terrible suffering and horrible pitfalls. He would also have been saddened by the mistakes and heresies of the following centuries and the battles that would have to be fought. But he would also have pointed out that something had happened in Jesus which was of cosmic significance. The success of the ‘Jesus Movement’ wasn’t simply the accidental product of energetic work meeting historical opportunity. God was at work in the midst of his people to produce both the will and the energy for it to succeed. This divine design and Spirit-led motivation were bound to have their larger effect, sooner or later, and by whatever means they could find.

Paul was also very much alive to all the factors that the historian, as opposed to the theologian, might want to study. He would have been very much aware of the need for historians to demythologise scriptural narratives. In his own day, Greek scholars were doing the same kind of thing with the stories of Homer. Paul would not, himself, have wanted to ascribe the whole happening of Jesus to divine or angelic power operating without human agency, since he believed that when grace was at work, human agents were themselves were regularly called upon to work hard as a result, not least in prayer. He said this of himself (I Cor. 15: 10; Col. 1: 29). The Creator may work in a thousand ways, but one central way is, for Paul, through people who think freely, pray, make difficult decisions and work hard, especially in prayer. Since heaven and earth had come together in the persons of Jesus and his Spirit, we should expect different layers of explanation to reside together and reinforce each other. Paul was one of the most successful public intellectuals of all time precisely because he was able to take advantage of the human circumstances of his time – a common language, freedom of travel and citizenship of the Roman Empire – to establish an international movement not only for the course of his own lifetime but for an indeterminate historical future.

Paul’s Personal Attributes:

Tom Wright highlights a number of personal attributes which enabled Paul to develop the early Christian church throughout the Empire of the Eastern Mediterranean and in Rome itself. First of all, he points to the sheer energy of the missionary, which can be found not only in the narratives of Acts but also pulsing through his letters. He responds to violence in one city by going straight on to the next, saying and doing the same things there. He worked all hours, making tents when not preaching, teaching or dictating letters to a scribe. He was also ready every moment for the visitor with a question or local official worried about his status. He was ready to put down his tools and leave his workbench for an hour or two in order to go from house to house making pastoral visits to encourage the faithful, to comfort the bereaved, downhearted and distressed, to warn and pray. In between his house calls, he was thinking about what he would say in his afternoon address in the house of Titus Justus in Corinth or the hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus. In the evening, he would pause to say prayers with his close friends and travelling companions, before working long into the night, praying for those he had met that day, for the city officials and for the Christians in other cities, for the next day’s work and the next phase of his mission.

His second attribute was his direct, up-front habit of telling it as he saw it, no matter who was confronting him. From his early days in Damascus, getting into trouble, to his arguments with the apostles in Jerusalem and his confrontation with Peter in Antioch, he didn’t hold back from controversy or seek to avoid conflict if he thought it would advance the church’s mission by confronting and seeking to resolve it. Wright suggests that the only reason he didn’t say more at the Jerusalem Conference was that Barnabas was there to act as a moderating influence. His debating style might have proved effective, but it might also have alienated many more sensitive souls. He also confronted the magistrates at Philippi and relished speaking truth to the vast crowd in Ephesus; he is fearless in trying to explain himself to the lynching mob in Jerusalem and is not afraid to rebuke the High Priest. He was an astute politician who knew how to turn the various factions of the Sanhedrin against each other. He also lectured the Roman governor himself about justice, self-control, and the coming judgement. As a travelling companion, he must have been exhilarating and exasperating in equal measure, depending on whether things were going well or badly. He must have been a formidable an opponent since he seems to have driven some people to contemplate murder as their only means of ridding themselves of this troublesome missionary.

Yet there must have been something quite disarming about Paul’s vulnerable side, which helps to explain why people wanted to work alongside. He was the sort of person for whom there were no limitations in affection for his fellow Christians. His honesty shines through in the pages of his letters. He would do anything he could for the churches since God had done everything for him through the Messiah. Neither would he have asked anyone to face anything he himself had not faced, including terrible suffering and hardship. The Corinthians would have immediately recognised a self-portrait in his poem about divine love, and when he told the Philippians to rejoice and celebrate, they knew that, given half a chance, Paul would have been at the party in spirit, the life and soul of it. He modelled what he taught, and what he taught was the utter, exuberant, self-giving love of the Messiah and the joy that accompanied it. His associates were fiercely loyal to him, and there was mutual love between them. He was the sort of person who enabled others to change and grow so that they themselves would take forward the same missionary work with as much of the same energy as they themselves could muster.

Paul’s Writing:

But within two or three generations the memory of this personal relationship had faded so that it was his letters which kept his influence alive. The flow of words from his daily teaching, arguing, praying and pastoral work was captured for future generations in these short, challenging epistles. It isn’t just their content, strikingly original and authentic as it is. He wasn’t synthesising the worlds of Israel, Greece and Rome; his was a firmly Jewish picture, rooted in Israel’s ancient narrative, with its Messiah occupying centre stage and the nations of the world and their best ideas brought into new coherence around him. Nor was he simply teaching a ‘religion’ or ‘theology’, but drawing together wisdom learnt from many different ancient disciplines, which we would class under economics, history and philosophy. Yet within a generation people were grumbling that Paul was sometimes too difficult to understand and that some were misinterpreting him. But it is no accident that many of the great moments of church history and Christian thought, involving Augustine, Luther and Barth, have come about through fresh engagement with Paul’s work. Paul had insisted that what mattered was not just what you thought but how you thought. He modelled what he advocated, and generation after generation has since learned to think in this new way. In this way, his legacy has continued to generate fresh dividends.

Culture, Politics & Society:

Paul himself would claim that all this was the doing of the One God and his Messiah, whereas ‘sceptics’ might retort that the movement owed much to the spread of the Greek language and culture combined with the increasing ease of travel throughout the Roman Empire. This meant that conditions were ripe for the spread of new ideas and movements throughout the known world and even into South Asia. Paul would perhaps have rejoindered that if the Messiah was sent when the fullness of time arrived (Gal. 4: 4), then perhaps Greece and Rome were part of the plan and the preparation, as well as part of the problem. Tom Wright does not agree, however, with those who have claimed that people were getting tired of the old philosophies and pagan religions and were ready for something new. The problem in Ephesus, for example, was not that people had stopped worshipping Artemis, and so were ready for Paul’s message, but that Paul’s message about the One God had burst on the scene and stopped the worship of Artemis. Social and cultural conditions can help to explain the way things worked out, but they cannot explain it away. Paul emphasised, in letter after letter, the family life of believers; what he begins to call ‘the church’, the ekklesia. He continually emphasises the unity and the holiness of the church, as well as highlighting and ‘celebrating’ the suffering that he and others would and did endure as a result of their loyalty to Jesus. This was not about pagans experimenting with new ideas, but about a new kind of spiritual community and even a new kind of ‘politics’.

Politics is concerned with the polis – the city, the community – and how it works and runs. Sophisticated theories had been advanced in Paul’s day, often by theoreticians like Cicero and Seneca, who were also members of the ruling élite. The main feature of Paul’s political landscape was Rome, which had united the world, or so it claimed. But that top-down uniformity in which diversity was tolerated as long as it didn’t threaten the absolute sovereignty of Caesar, was often ugly. ‘Diversity’ was still seen in strictly hierarchical terms: men over women, free over slaves, Romans over everyone else. Rebels were ruthlessly suppressed. They make a wilderness, sighed the Briton Calgacus, and they call it ‘peace’ (Tacitus, Agricola 30.6). What Paul had been doing was undoubtedly building a different kind of community offering a different vision of unity, hosting a different kind of diversity based on churches of Gentiles and Jews. He was founding and maintaining an interrelated network of communities for which the only analogies were synagogue communities, on the one hand, and the Roman army and civil service on the other. But Paul’s communities were very different from either. They had the deepest roots and were not simply a freestanding innovation. Rome traced its story back nearly a thousand years, while the synagogue told the still longer story which went back to Abraham. Paul told that story too and regularly explained to his communities that they had been grafted into that great tradition. In Paul’s work, this was as much a social and communal strength as it was a theological one.

Morality & Marriage:

When the new communities spoke of a different kind of kyrios, one whose sovereignty was gained through humility and suffering, rather than wealth and conquest, many must have found that attractive, not simply for what we would call ‘religious’ reasons, but precisely because for what they might call ‘political’ ones. Paul did not, of course, have time to develop his picture of the differentiated unity of the body of Christ into a larger exposition of the church as a whole. He had not articulated a political authority to match that of Aristotle or his successors. But it was that kind of social experiment, of developing a new way of living together, that the churches of the second and third centuries sought to develop. Their inspiration for this went back to Paul’s theological vision and was not pure pragmatism. It had the power to generate an alternative social and cultural reality, to announce to the world that Jesus was Lord and Caesar wasn’t. What Paul had articulated in his letters, often in haste and to meet particular crises, was reused to encourage Christians to develop a refreshingly new kind of human society. In particular, the Christian message provided a much better prospect for women than the pagan religions, which routinely practised infanticide for unwanted children in general and girls in particular. The Christians followed the Jews in renouncing such behaviour. The consequent shortage of marriageable girls among pagans and the surplus among Christians led to an increase in inter-cultural marriages, with many of the offspring being brought up as Christians. The fresh evaluation of the role of women, begun by Jesus himself, was developed by Paul, who listed several women among his colleagues and fellow workers. For example, Phoebe was entrusted with the responsibility of delivering and expounding his letter to the Romans.

With sexual excesses all around them, it is likely that some Christians reacted against sexual indulgence from a fairly early period. However, this was not formally set out or made a matter of special praise. In fact, special vows by younger women to abstain from marriage were discouraged by Paul. During the period which followed, abstinence from marriage was left as a matter of personal choice, although in most ‘Gnostic’ sects marriage was actively discouraged on the grounds that it entangled the spiritual soul with the evil physical world. Some Jewish and Christian traditions blamed sexual differences on ‘the fall’ and believed that salvation included a return to a ‘unisex’ or asexual life. In the mainstream churches, leaders such as Melito of Sardis became known for their austere personal lives; abstinence from marriage was part of this. In many churches, too, Christian women had difficulty in finding suitable husbands. Those who remained unmarried had more time for prayer and devotion. In the same way, men who were free from family ties had more time to devote to church affairs and were often obvious choices as leaders. By the third century, celibacy was beginning to be valued as a mark of holiness. Even so, extremes were frowned upon, and Origen earned considerable disapproval because he made himself a eunuch, believing that this was commended in the Gospels. As martyrdom declined, asceticism began to become the measure of spirituality; the leaders regarded as more spiritual in the churches tended to be those who practised an ascetic way of life, though the clergy was not generally obliged to be celibate.

Poverty & Social Action:

Within a few generations, the early Christian communities set up hospitals, caring for all those within reach, and they were also enthusiastic about education, teaching their converts to read the scriptures of ancient Israel, and thereby giving them the literacy skills that previously only a maximum of thirty per cent of the populations had acquired, almost exclusively male. Some of the older Greek cities and islands had a tradition of elementary education for citizens, but for many people, this would have been minimal, and women and slaves were excluded. Converts to Christianity, therefore, gained basic reading skills that they had hitherto lacked. Christians were also technological pioneers in making books, abandoning scrolls with their natural limitations and developing the ‘codex’, the ancestor of the modern bound book. The earliest Christian congregations quickly appreciated the value of the letters written by the apostles. Some of them were obviously intended for public reading, perhaps in place of, or alongside, a sermon on the Old Testament, and for circulating among the churches. But they clearly wanted more and more people to be able to read the books the community was producing. This insistence on education and especially reading can be traced back directly to Paul, who told his churches to be ‘grown-up’ in their thinking, to be transformed by the renewal of their minds as well as their hearts. He wanted the early Christians not only to think the right things but also to think in the right way. Though he did not himself found what we would today call ‘schools’ when such things did come about, they had him to thank for the underlying impetus.

Paul’s collection for the poor of Jerusalem was followed up in each local Jesus community in its work among the poor around it. Paul congratulated the Thessalonians on their practical ‘loving-kindness’ or agape and urged them to work at it more and more. “Do good to everyone,” he wrote to the Galatians, “and particularly to the household of the faith.” He encouraged them to… Celebrate with those who are celebrating, mourn with the mourners… Shine like lights in the world. The gospel itself was designed to generate a new kind of people, a people who would be eager for good works; in fact, the new kind of humanity that was brought to birth through the gospel was created for the specific purpose of ‘good works’ (Gal. 2: 10; I Thess. 4: 9-10; Gal. 6: 10; Rom. 12: 15; Phil. 2: 15; Titus 2: 14; Eph. 2: 10). This phrase means more than ‘the performance of moral rules’, especially when played off against Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. Morals matter, faith matters, but that isn’t the point here. Paul’s emphasis is all about communities through whose regular practice the surrounding world is made a better place. Through Christ’s faithfulness and their own loving-kindness, these communities would find the right way to live. Good morals and good works would follow. In Corinth, there was a tendency to divide into factions centred on the personalities of human leaders, rather than just over doctrines. A prominent member of the community was living in immorality and individual Christians were taking each other to the law-courts over minor disputes. There were also misunderstandings about the meaning of Christian liberty. Paul’s letters, as well as those of John, reveal controversies and power-struggles in the midst of encouragement and growth.

The Spread of Christian Communities:

But the church history of the second and third centuries is enough to confirm that all these things, taken together, offer good explanations for the spread of the Christian communities. These early Christians, strange though their views and lives might have seemed to those around, antisocial though some might have supposed them to be, were doing things that really do transform the wider society. By the end of the second century, Roman officials were not particularly aware of the nuances of Christian teaching, but they did know what the term ‘bishop’ meant – someone who agitated about the needs of the poor. This too was the result of a seed that Paul had planted, and when all of these began to sprout, a community came into being that challenged the ancient world with a fresh vision of a society in which each worked for all and all for each. This enabled that world to escape from the older paganism and its social, cultural and political practices and to find refuge in the new kind of community, the koinonia, the ‘fellowship’, the extended family of the One God. On the cross, Jesus had won the victory over all the other powers, or gods. This was the basic belief of these communities, which existed because all the old gods had been overthrown. Mammon, Mars and Aphrodite had been shown to be imposters, and Caesar was no longer the ultimate Lord. This was a theological, historical and political reality which the followers of Jesus demonstrated on the streets and in the market places, as well as in their homes.

The breaking through of Paul’s thinking in Graeco-Roman society was not because the other philosophies of the ancient world had ‘run out of steam’. The Stoics, Epicureans, and Platonists had serious, articulate and even ‘charismatic’ spokespeople. They were all, in the final analysis, ways of understanding the world and of finding a coherent path for humanity within it. When later generations of Christians wanted to articulate the gospel version of the same thing, they turned to Paul for help, though other sources remained vital. The prologue to the Gospel of John is an obvious example of these, but it was Paul’s engagement with the triple traditions of Israel, Greece and Rome and his transformation of them by the person and Spirit of Jesus that offered a platform for the great Christian thinkers of subsequent generations and centuries. Without this firm theological foundation, the church would not have survived the persecutions it was forced to endure in these centuries. Paul knew only too well what learning how to think would cost those who were ‘to follow’, but he believed that this new way was the only way for them to follow, a way that would win out over the other ways because of its genuine humanity.

The Wright Verdict:

Tom Wright completes his answer to his own question by summarising the several paths of explanation which converged on Paul himself in his mapping out of this ‘new Way’:

His was the vision of the united, holy, and outward-facing church. He pioneered the idea of a suffering apostleship through which the message of the crucified Jesus would not only be displayed, but be effective in the world. He could not have foreseen the ways in which these communities would develop. He might well not have approved of all that was done. But the historian and biographer can look back and discern, in Paul’s hasty and often contested work, the deep roots of a movement that changed the world…

… Paul’s vision of a united and holy community, prayerful, rooted in the scriptural story of ancient Israel, facing social and political hostility but insisting on doing good to all people, especially the poor, would always be central. His relentless personal energy, his clarity and vulnerability, and his way with words provided the motor to drive this vision, and each generation will need a few who can imitate him. His towering intellectual achievement, a theological vision of the One God reshaped around Jesus and the spirit and taking on the wider world of philosophy, would provide the robust, necessary framework for it all. When the church abandons the theological task… we should not be surprised if unity, holiness, and the care for the poor are sidelined as well.

Paul’s contribution to the Nature & Worship of the Early Church:

The church brought together ideas and people from many backgrounds. It had to cope with people who had become Christians in such disreputable seaports as Corinth, notorious for its immorality. It had to resolve the pressures to revert to pagan or Judaic practices, to sort out its attitudes towards contemporary customs and cultures, and to thrash out beliefs and opinions about issues on which there were no precedents to guide its thinking. Many Christians in the third century were willing to suffer as martyrs rather than betray their Lord by acknowledging false gods. Some, however, renounced their faith under torture or the pressure of imprisonment. Others got pagan neighbours to make the required sacrifice on their behalf, or obtained false certificates from sympathetic officials. At the opposite extreme, some Christians eagerly sought out martyrdom, even when it was not forced upon them, though this was strongly discouraged by Christian leaders. Following each wave of persecution, the church was faced with the problem of what to do with those who repented after lapsing under pressure. Some Christian leaders claimed that offences such as idolatry after baptism were unpardonable on earth, but others allowed one such occasion of forgiveness subsequent to baptism. Callistus, bishop of Rome (217-22), was among the more moderate and appealed to Paul’s letters and the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son for proof that no sin is unforgivable if the sinner truly turns from their sins. His referral back to Paul reveals the continuing influence of the apostle.

In Paul’s time, and for at least a century afterwards, Christianity was largely an urban movement; Paul tended to preach in big cities, and small Christian groups could more easily spring up in the anonymity of large towns. Deep penetration of the countryside only began in the third century, though the methods used in that ‘outreach’ are unclear. Nearly every known Christian congregation started by meeting in someone’s house. One example of this was Philemon’s house-church, perhaps at Laodicea. The home formed an important starting-point, although by the mid-third century congregations were beginning to have their own special buildings because congregations were too large to meet even in the courtyard of a large Roman house. Most Christian writers were increasingly rationalistic, and Eusebius mentions only a very few miracles in his history of the church during this period. They also tried to discredit contemporary pagan superstition, focusing on ‘good living’ rather than supernatural ‘signs’. In the late third centre came the first deliberate attempts to follow Paul’s earlier examples of absorbing features of pagan religions into Christianity. Churches took over from temples, martyrs replaced the old gods in popular devotion, and the festivals of the Christian year took the place of high-days and holy days of paganism.

When Irenaeus succeeded as a third-generation ‘bishop’ of the church in Rome, he described it as the very great, very ancient and universally known church, founded and organised at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul. Because Christians from all parts were found there, it was a microcosm of the whole Christian world. His statement hints at some of the reasons why Rome acquired a leading position among the churches. All roads led to Rome, the capital of the Empire, not least the well-engineered roads on which the Christian missionaries travelled. A remarkable number of prominent Christians made their way to the Imperial City: Ignatius, Polycarp, Marcion, Valentinus, Tatian, Justin, Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Praxeas, and Origen, all followed Peter and Paul’s journeys in the sixties. Rome was the only Western church to receive a letter from an apostle, and Luke’s long account of Paul’s miraculous journey to the city reflects the importance attached to his reaching the capital. Nothing boosted the prestige of Christian Rome so much as the fact that the two chief apostles were martyred there under Nero. By the mid-second century, memorial shrines to Paul and Peter had been erected in Rome, on the Appian Way and the Vatican Hill respectively. Remains of the latter have been uncovered in modern excavations.

The Fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 enhanced the standing of the Roman church in the long-term since it became almost impossible to evangelise the Jewish settlements on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Christianity’s centre of gravity shifted west, where Rome was well-placed to play a central role. However, the letter to the Corinthian church known as I Clement did not imply any claim to superiority by the church of Rome. Second-century Christianity there appears to have been very varied. It included independent schools like Justin’s and immigrant groups such as the Asians who followed their traditional observance of the Pascha (Passover). Not until the last decade of the century did a strong bishop emerge – Victor, an African and the first Latin speaker. Meanwhile, the shrines of Peter and Paul bolstered a growing self-confidence.

The first bishop to claim a special authority derived from Peter by appealing to Matthew 16: 18-19, was Stephen, in his dispute with Cyprian. Paul’s position alongside Peter in the earliest church now began to be lost sight of. Cyprian regarded every bishop’s seat as ‘the see of Peter’, although he agreed that the Roman church had special importance because it had been founded so early. The Roman church already possessed considerable wealth, including the underground burial-chambers (catacombs) outside the city and several large houses whose upper floors were adapted for use as churches (tituli).

Centuries later, the Roman church criticised the British for their great lack of martyrs as compared with their own record. The leaders of the British church informed them that the leaders of the British church lived to preach and teach the Gospel and not die for it unnecessarily. As noted already, there were many in the Roman church who viewed martyrdom as a noble, worthwhile gesture to such an extent that some became fanatics. They sought martyrdom before they had achieved anything else worthwhile. The most popular claimant to the honour of being the first Christian martyr in Britain, identified with the church of St. Alban’s, was the Christianised Roman soldier, named Alban. During the Diocletian persecution in Britain, he aided a hunted British priest to escape by wearing his robe, drawing pursuit to himself. On being recognised, the Roman officer ordered a soldier standing nearby to execute the culprit. The soldier refused, admitting that he too was a Christian, with the result that both soldiers were immediately beheaded. Tradition claims they were buried together on the spot where they were killed and a church erected on the site was named St. Alban’s. However, the early British historian, Bishop Alford wrote of an earlier martyr who was apparently known to both Peter, Barnabas and Paul, Aristobulus, who was absent in Britain before Paul arrived in Rome. In the Martyrologies of the Greek church, we read:

Aristobulus was one of the seventy disciples and a follower of St. Paul the Apostle, along with whom he preached the Gospel to the whole world, and ministered to them. He was chosen by St. Paul to be the missionary bishop to the land of Britain. He was chosen by St. Paul to be the missionary to the land of Britain. He was there martyred after he had built churches and ordained deacons and priests on the island.

Dorotheus, Bishop of Tyre, recorded in AD 303 that Aristobulus who is mentioned by the Apostle in his Epistle to the Romans, was made Bishop in Britain. Haleca, Bishop of Augusta, confirms that he was one of many martyrs whose memory was celebrated by the Britons and the Adonis Martyrologia also contains a record which confirms his mission to Britain, where he founded a church before his martyrdom in circa AD 59 or 60, on 15 March. There is a legend suggesting that Paul himself may have paid a brief visit to Britain during his time in Rome, but though we know that he intended to travel to Spain, there is little evidence to suggest that he did so, or that he went further north. Apparently, in Merton College, Oxford, there is an ancient manuscript known as the ‘Paulian MS’ which purports to contain a series of letters between Paul and Seneca, which make allusions to the former’s residence in Siluria. Clement of Rome, who died in about AD 100 wrote of the martyrdoms of both Peter and Paul, whom he probably knew personally. He sums up the magnitude of Paul’s achievement in the following terms:

Paul, also, having seven times worn chains, and been hunted and stoned, received the prize of such endurance. For he was the herald of the Gospel in the West as well as in the East, and enjoyed the illustrious reputation of the faith in teaching the whole world to be righteous. And after he had been in the extremity of the West, he suffered martyrdom before the sovereigns of mankind; and thus delivered from this world, he went to his holy place, the most brilliant example of steadfastness that we possess.

In referring to ‘the extremity of the West’, Clement could be referring to Gaul or Britain, but he is more likely to be referring, in this context, to the western Mediterranean. I Clement is an open letter from one of the early bishops or presbyters of the Rome to the church at Corinth, probably written at the very end of the first century, shortly after the persecution of Emperor Domitian. It is probably the earliest surviving Christian writing outside of the New Testament. It was written to counter the disruption and disturbance of in the church at Corinth, where some of the older leaders had been deposed by a younger clique. It sheds interesting light on the nature and conduct of church life soon after the age of the apostles. It puts great stress on good order, and on Christian faith being accompanied by good works, claiming that Abraham was saved by faith and hospitality. The book quotes extensively from the Old Testament, Jewish books outside the canon and writings of the apostles. Like Paul’s own letter to the Corinthians, written earlier, Clement exhorts his readers to Christian humility and love, and it was probably read out in Corinth and other churches.

In I Corinthians, which gives the earliest description of worship in the Christian church, Paul constantly draws on the Old Testament. This letter, written in about AD 55 pictures the church as the new Israel, living a pattern of the Christian life that is based on the new exodus. Paul uses ideas drawn from the Jewish Passover, which celebrated God’s saving favour and strength in calling Israel to be his people, and rescuing them from tyranny in Egypt. According to Paul, the church succeeded the old Jewish community and combined both Jews and Greeks within God’s one family of converted men and women. This fellowship of believers in Jesus stood at the dawn of a new age of grace and power. Al this was possible through the gift of the Holy Spirit, which followed the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. This one fact of experience stamps New Testament worship as unique, however much the church owed to its Jewish inheritance. Paul used the framework of the Passover meal to interpret the Lord’s Supper. But other elements were intertwined, such as the fellowship meal, called the agape or love-feast which had its counterpart in Jewish table-customs. This had become an occasion for an ‘orgy’ of gluttony and drunkenness in Corinth, and Paul pointed out that this was a breakdown in the fellowship which both the Lord’s Supper and the agape were designed to promote. Paul believed that the Lord’s Supper served both to unite Christians with the Lord in his death and risen life, and to join believers in a bond of union as ‘one body’ in Christ, receiving him by faith and in love.

The setting for worship was ‘the first day of the week’, referring to the day of Christ’s resurrection, as in the Gospels, and is distinct from the Jewish Sabbath. The Christian Sunday was not made a ‘day of rest’ until Constantine decreed it in AD 321. Paul also wrote about baptism, a rite of initiation with its roots in the Jewish washings for ceremonial purposes, and especially in the service of tebilah, the ‘bath’ necessary for all converts to Judaism. The practice of baptism was also being misused at Corinth, and Paul objected to their misunderstanding or abuse. Baptism, he told them, should be in the name of Jesus, not in the name of leaders in the fellowship, as if these were apostolic cult figures. ‘In the name of Jesus’ meant that new converts passed under his authority, and confessed him as Lord. The enthusiasm of the Corinthian Christians also led them to misuse ‘ecstatic tongues’ and other gifts of the Spirit. Paul tried to curb this by insisting that worship must promote the healthy growth of the entire community of Christians. Personal indulgence in the gifts of the Spirit was to be brought firmly under control. Not all the features of early Christian worship at Corinth are clear. It is not known what ‘baptism for the dead’ implied. Paul did not attach great importance to it but used it simply to illustrate another matter. He also mentioned the ‘kiss of peace’ without explanation.

Prayers also played an important part in worship at Corinth. At public prayer, the response of amen (a Hebrew word of confirmation) was the natural way to show agreement. Problems arose over women who attempted to pray with uncovered heads. Paul resisted this practice, though he freely granted the right of women believers to act as prophets and leaders of prayer in the assembled church. Both prophesying and praying were seen as gifts of the Spirit. The freedom that the Corinthians were exercising to the full was to be held in check. Paul crisply summed up: Let all things be done decently and in order. ‘Singing’ with the mind and the Spirit indicates a musical side to the meeting, but references to musical instruments do not make it clear whether they were used in worship. Exactly what these hymns were, and whether snatches of them have survived, is unclear. Passages in Philippians 2: 6-11; Colossians 1: 15-20 and 1 Timothy 3: 16 contain what may be early hymns, offered, as later among Christians in Bithynia about AD 112, to Christ as God. Ephesians 5: 14 is the most likely example of a hymn from the churches instructed by Paul. The setting of that three-line invocation is clearly a service of baptism.

Evidence about Christian worship from writers who lived between the time of Paul and the middle of the second is scarce and difficult to piece together. In his letters, Pliny gives an outsider’s view of Christian worship from this time:

They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang an anthem to Christ as God, and bound themselves by a solemn oath (‘sacramentum’) not to commit any wicked deed, but to abstain from all fraud, theft and adultery, never to break their word, or deny a trust when called upon to honour it; after which it was their custom to separate, and then meet again to partake of food, but food of the ordinary and innocent kind.

(Pliny, Letters x. 96; AD 112).

Pliny’s correspondence with Emperor Trajan reveals that the early Christians shared ‘holy meals’ and that by this time the agape had been separated from the Lord’s Supper. In fact, continuing abuse of the ‘love-feast’ led to its gradual disappearance in its original form. The solemn meal of ‘holy communion’ was given more and more prominence as a sacrament. Ignatius describes it as a medicine of immortality, the antidote that we should not die, but live forever in Jesus Christ. Worship gradually became more standardised, formal and stereotyped in the period following Paul’s death, with the ‘Lord’s Supper’ becoming the focal point of the liturgy. Bishops and deacons possibly helped in this trend. New converts (catechumens) were given instruction in preparation for baptism. Worship forms connected with this are referred to in the letters of I Peter and I John. Short snatches of an elementary creed are found in such verses as Jesus is Lord (Romans 10: 9), lengthened and developed in I Timothy 3: 16 and I Peter 3: 18-22.

At first, when a person was baptised they affirmed a creed which was concerned mainly with statements about Christ’s person, as in the addition to the text in Acts 8: 37. Examples of more formal creeds, stating the belief in the three persons of the Godhead, the Trinity, occur in descriptions of baptismal services reported by Irenaeus and Hippolytus of Rome. The Apostles’ Creed, shown below, derives from the late second-century baptismal creed used in Rome, which in turn derives from Paul’s theology. Perhaps the most lasting and visible legacy of the self-proclaimed apostle is, therefore, to be found in the liturgy of the sacraments, which is still shared in most Christian churches, more than nineteen hundred and fifty years after his death.

Sources:

Tom Wright (2018), Paul: A Biography. London: SPCK.

Robert C Walton (ed.) (1970), A Source Book of the Bible for Teachers. London: SCM Press.

Tim Dowley (ed.) (1977), The History of Christianity. Berkhamsted: Lion Publishing.

George F Jowett (1961), The Drama of the Lost Disciples. London: Covenant Publishing.

Posted March 18, 2019 by AngloMagyarMedia in Archaeology, Asia Minor, Assimilation, baptism, Bible, Britain, British history, Britons, Celtic, Celts, Christian Faith, Christianity, Church, Civilization, Colonisation, Commemoration, Compromise, Conquest, Crucifixion, Education, eschatology, Ethnicity, Europe, Family, Fertility, Gentiles, Graeco-Roman, History, Imperialism, India, Israel, Jerusalem, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Jews, John's Gospel, Josephus, Literature, Marriage, Mediterranean, Memorial, Messiah, Middle East, Midlands, morality, multiculturalism, Music, Narrative, Nationality, New Testament, Old Testament, Palestine, Paul (Saint), Poverty, Reconciliation, Remembrance, Romans, Sacraments, Simon Peter, Synoptic Gospels, Syria, The Law, theology, tyranny, Women in the Bible

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Paul of Tarsus: Jew, Roman & Christian Missionary to the Gentiles – Part Four. Leave a comment

The Challenge – What was Paul thinking?

The Sources – The Great Pastoral ‘Epistles’:

To understand the thought of Paul, we naturally turn to his letters. Although Luke’s Acts of the Apostles gives a fair account of his life and work, and a general idea of what he stood for, it is in his letters that his mind is fully revealed. In the New Testament, there are thirteen letters that name Paul as their ‘author’. A fourteenth, the Letter to the Hebrews is often included with them it is, in fact, an anonymous work, since in the early church itself it was admitted that no one knew who wrote it. Of the thirteen, it is by no means certain that all were written by Paul’s hand or even at his dictation. This was not unusual for the period in which he was writing since it was not unusual for disciples of an outstanding teacher to compose books to propagate his teaching as they understood it, and to publish them under his name; we only have to remind ourselves how ‘loosely’ the gospels are connected with the disciples whose names they bear.

There are strong reasons for thinking that the Letters to Timothy and Titus might have originated in a similar way. On the other hand, the four great pastoral Epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians and the Romans, to which we might add the short note to Philemon, carry the style of the apostle’s style and personality on every page and in every verse. There is no question that Paul composed them and most scholars have claimed the same about Philippians and the two Letters to the Thessalonians. There is more doubt about Colossians, but the balance of probability falls in favour of Paul’s authorship, possibly with some collaboration. The inclusion of the Letter to the Ephesians is more debatable, because of the difference in style. Yet if it was written by a disciple, it must have been written by one with great insight into the mind of the apostle, and whether or not it comes from his own hand, it can be included in the canon in gaining a full picture of his thought in its fullest and most mature form.

The letters were almost all the result of some particular event, and none of them, except perhaps the Letter to the Romans, makes any attempt to present the author’s thinking in any systematic way. They were clearly written at intervals in the midst of an extremely busy life, but are also the product of a prodigious intellect responding to the challenge of practical problems of Christian living in a pagan environment, as in the correspondence with the church in Corinth, or of a subtle propaganda which seemed to be subversive of the truth, as in Galatians and Colossians. We have to interpret his teaching by gathering and combining what he wrote in different geographical contexts, to different people and at different times. His thought was formed both by his background and the environments he was writing in and for, as well as by his personal experiences. We have to take particular account of his strict Jewish upbringing and of what he owed to the primitive Christian community which he had joined at an early, formative stage in its history. What assessment can we then make of his brilliant mind and passionate heart? Tom Wright has the following answer:

For Paul, there was no question about the starting point. It was always Jesus: Jesus as the shocking fulfilment of Israel’s hopes; Jesus as the genuinely human being, the true ‘image’; Jesus the embodiment of Israel’s God – so that, without leaving Jewish monotheism, one would worship and invoke Jesus as Lord within, not alongside, the service of the ‘living and true God’. Jesus, the one for whose sake one would abandon all idols, all rival ‘lords’. Jesus, above all, who had come to his kingdom, the true lordship of the world, in the way that Paul’s friends who were starting to write the Jesus story at that time had emphasised: by dying under the weight of the world’s sin in order to break the power of the dark forces that had enslaved all humans, Israel included… Jesus was the starting point. And the goal.

Jewish Heritage, Judaism & the Nations:

God’s plan had always been to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Jesus, which meant, from the Jewish point of view, that Jesus was the ultimate Temple, the heaven-and-earth place. This, already accomplished in his person, was now being implemented through his spirit. Paul always believed that God’s new creation was coming, perhaps soon. By the time of his later letters he realised that he might himself die before it happened. But that the present corrupt and decaying world would one day be rescued from its state of slavery and death, emerging into a new life under the glorious rule of God’s people, God’s new humanity – this was something he never doubted. Insofar as there was an ‘apocalyptic’ view in Paul’s day, he shared it. He believed that Israel’s God, having abandoned the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile, had revealed himself in Jesus, breaking in upon an unready world and an unready people. There was a certain contradiction deeply embedded in the monotheistic Judaism of the first century. The One God, it taught, was the God of the whole world, maker and ruler of all mankind. Yet in a special sense, he was the God of Israel, the nation bound to him in an ‘everlasting covenant’. The ‘charter’ of this covenant was the Law, which was held to be the perfect embodiment of the righteousness He required of men. As such it was absolute and universal, but it was also, primarily, Israel’s law. Paul himself gave eloquent expression to the pride which the Jew felt in this unique privilege:

You rely upon the Lord and are proud of your God; you know his will; instructed by the Law you know right from wrong; you are confident that … in the Law you see the very shape of knowledge and truth.

(Rom. 2: 17-20).

The possession of the Law marked Israel out as God’s chosen people, and it was to his people that God had revealed himself in ‘mighty acts’, through which his purpose was fulfilled. This was the central motive of its history and the key to its destiny. In this way, the highest moral idealism became wedded to an assertive nationalism. What then was the status and the destiny of the nations that did not know the Hebrew God? The answers to this question were various and uncertain. Some of them show a finely humane spirit which went as far as possible – without prejudice to Israel’s prior claim – in generosity to the Gentiles. Others seem to us today to approach the limits of chauvinistic nationalism. But there was in first-century Judaism a strong ‘missionary’ movement towards the pagan world. On one level, it was content to propagate the monotheistic idea and certain fundamental moral principles, but its ulterior aim was to bring Gentiles within the scope of the divine mercy by incorporation in the chosen people. The ‘proselyte’ submitted himself to the Law of God – that is, to the Jewish Law; he became a Jew.

On the other side, the question arose, what was the status and the destiny of the Jews who, knowing the Law, do not in practice observe its precepts? Here again, the answers were uncertain and various. The Law itself proclaimed a curse on all who do not persevere in doing everything that is written in the Book of Law (Gal. 3:10), and prophets and Rabbis alike use the language of the utmost integrity in castigating offenders. Yet there is a notable reluctance to admit that in the last resort any ‘son of Abraham’ could be rejected by God; for the sake of the fathers, he would come through in the end. For Paul, who looked at the matter with his broader view of the world outside Palestine, this was simply not realistic; moreover, it was inconsistent with the principle of monotheism. The One God could not be the exclusive God of the Jews; he also had to be the God of the Gentiles. The conclusion was therefore unavoidable, that…

God has no favourites; those who have sinned outside the pale of the Law of Moses will perish outside its pale, and all who have sinned under that Law will be judged by the Law.

(Rom 2: 11 f.)

Yet while this clears the ground by setting aside any notion of preferential treatment, it is a negative assessment of the human condition. There is no distinction in that all have sinned (Rom. 3: 22), so that while there may be some ‘good’ Jews who keep God’s Law (Rom. 2: 29), and some ‘good’ Gentiles who live by ‘the light of nature’ (Rom. 2: 14), Paul held that, fundamentally, human society is in breach of the Law of God and is therefore headed for ultimate disaster, subject, as he put it, to the law of sin and death (Rom. 8: 2). This universal human condition enters the experience of every individual in the desperate moral struggle which Paul has depicted with deep psychological insight in the seventh chapter of Romans: When I want to do the right, only the wrong is within my reach (Rom. 7: 21). The problem which began as a domestic concern within Judaism turned out to be a broader enquiry into the human condition. That is why Paul’s controversy with his Judaic opponents which looks, at first sights, like an antiquated, parochial dispute, turns out to have permanent significance. The only possible solution to this quandary that Paul could contemplate was a fresh divine initiative such as the one taken when he had established the covenant with Israel at Sinai. He now saw that this new initiative had actually taken place when Christ entered history:

What the law could not do because our lower nature robbed it of all potency, God has done – by sending us his Son.

(Rom. 8: 3).

The Divine Initiative – Doctrines & Metaphors:

This divine initiative is an entirely free and authentic, original act of God, conditioned only by his love for mankind while we were yet sinners (Rom. 5: 8). This is what Paul describes as the ‘grace’ of God. The response that is asked for from the people is ‘faith’, or ‘trust’ in God. In writing about this divine initiative in human experience, Paul uses a variety of expressions. The most frequently used was ‘salvation’. In common Greek usage, this word had a wide range of meanings. It could simply mean safety and security, deliverance from disaster, or good health and well-being. In effect, it conveyed the concept of a condition in which ‘all is well’, and the particular way in which that was the case depended on the context in which it was used. In Paul’s writings, as in those of the New Testament authors in general, salvation stands for a condition in which ‘all is well’ in the absolute sense; a condition in which we are secure from all evils that afflict, or menace, the human spirit, here or hereafter. Thus the expression, while strongly emotive, is hardly capable of telling us what precisely, as Paul sees it, God has done for us in Christ.

More illuminating are some of the metaphorical expressions he uses. Three of these have played a major part in the development of Christian doctrine, and need to be looked at more carefully. First, there is the legal, or forensic metaphor of ‘justification’, which we have previously encountered with Tom Wright in the context of the letter to the Galatians (Gal. 2: 15 f), but it is also a major theme in the later letter to the Romans (Rom. 3: 24, 26). Sin is conceived in this context as an offence, or offences, against the Law. The sinner stands at the bar and no-one but a judge with competent authority can condemn or acquit. Before the divine tribunal, the defendant is unquestionably guilty, but God acquits the guilty (Rom. 4: 5). Here Paul is setting out in the most challenging terms his conviction that God takes man as he is, with all his imperfections on his head, and gives him a fresh start so that he can then take on his moral task relieved of the crippling sense of guilt.

Secondly, there is the metaphor of ‘redemption’ (Rom 3: 24; 1 Cor. 1: 30; Eph. 1: 7; Col. 1: 14). The Greek word was used of the process by which a slave acquired his freedom; it means ‘release’, ’emancipation’, or ‘liberation’ (and is translated as such in the NEB). For Paul, the condition of a man caught in the moral dilemma he has described is a state of slavery, since he is unable to do what he wishes to do. But God, exercising all his supreme authority, declares the slave free, and free he is. All that Christ did – his entry into the human condition, his life of service, his suffering and death – may be regarded as the price God pays for the emancipation of the slave. The exultant note of liberation sounds all through the letters as Paul’s own experience as well as that of those he was writing to:

Christ set us free, to be free men.

(Gal. 5: 1)

Thirdly, there is the ritual metaphor of sacrifice. Sin can be regarded not only as a crime against the law, bringing a sense of guilt, or a state of slavery, bringing a sense of impotence, but also as ‘defilement’, which makes a man feel ashamed and disgusted with himself. In ancient religious defilement could be incurred in all sorts of ways, many of them having nothing to do with morals. It was assumed that the defilement could be removed by the performance of the proper ritual, most commonly, and perhaps most efficaciously, by the sacrifice of a victim. This was called ‘expiation’ or, less accurately, ‘atonement’. The metaphor of expiation, drawn from a world of thought quite alien to us, was ready to hand for anyone, like Paul, who was familiar with the elaborate ritual of sacrifice laid down in the Law of Moses, and in his time still practised in the temple at Jerusalem – or indeed for anyone acquainted with the religious rituals of the Greek states. This is the background of what he says about the work of Christ: God designed him to be the means of expiating sin by his sacrificial death (Rom. 3: 25). There is no suggestion, here or elsewhere, that Christ offered himself as a sacrifice to ‘propitiate’ an offended deity. In using the metaphor of sacrifice Paul is declaring his conviction that the self-sacrifice of Christ meant the release of moral power which penetrates to the deepest recesses of the human spirit, acting as a kind of ‘moral disinfectant’.

These are the metaphors which have most captured the imagination of Paul’s readers. His thought has sometimes been obscured through taking one of or another of them by itself, and then forgetting that it is, after all, a metaphor. What he was writing, all the time, was that in Christ God has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. The criminal could not pronounce his own acquittal, nor the slave set himself, nor could the slave set himself free, and God alone could ‘expiate’ the defilement we have brought upon ourselves. In the course of the following passage, perhaps the clearest and most succinct statement of his teaching on this theme:

From first to last this is the work of God. He has reconciled us men to himself through Christ … What I mean is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, no longer holding their misdeeds against them.

The Ministry of Reconciliation:

In the idea of ‘reconciliation’, his thought passed out of mere metaphor and adopted the language of actual personal relations. Many people know something of what it means to be ‘alienated’ or ‘estranged’ – perhaps from their environment or their fellow-men, perhaps from the standards of their society, perhaps, indeed, from themselves. The deepest alienation is from the true end of our being, and that means estrangement from our Maker, out of which comes a distortion of all relationships. The great thing that God, from his side of the gulf that has opened, has put an end to the estrangement; he has reconciled us to himself. Nowhere does he suggest that God needed to be reconciled to us. His attitude towards his creatures is, and always was, one of unqualified goodwill; as Jesus himself said, he is kind to the unthankful and wicked. Out of that goodwill, he has provided the way to reconciliation.

It was entirely in harmony with the prophetic valuation of history as the field of the ‘mighty acts’ of God that Paul saw in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as one more ‘mighty act’, the ‘fulfilment’ of all that God had promised in the whole history of Israel. In common Jewish belief, the symbol of that fulfilment was the expected ‘Messiah’. After his conversion, Paul accepted what the followers of Jesus were saying, that in him the Messiah had come. But what Paul meant by ‘Messiah’ was something different from any of the various forms of Jewish messianic expectation. The messianic idea had to be re-thought in the light of a new set of facts. One invariable trait of the Messiah in Jewish expectation was that he would be the agent of God’s final victory over his enemies. On the popular level, this meant victory over the pagan empires which had oppressed the chosen people from time to time. In Paul’s thinking, the idea of the messianic victory is completely ‘sublimated’. It is the cosmic powers and authorities that Christ led as captives in his triumphal procession (Col. 2: 15). Here, Paul was drawing on mythology which belonged to the mentality of most men of his time (Rom. 8: 38; Gal. 4: 3; Eph. 6: 12; Col. 2: 8, 15, etc.) The mythology stood for something real in human experience: the sense that there are unexplained factors working behind the scenes, whether in the world or in our own ‘unconscious’, frustrating our best intentions and turning our good to evil.

As Paul saw it, Jesus was, in his lifetime, in conflict not only with his ostensible opponents but with dark forces lurking in the background. It was, Paul says, the powers that rule the world that crucified him (I Cor. 2: 8), perverting the intended good to evil ends, for neither Pilate nor the chief priests and Pharisees meant ill. But in the outcome, Jesus was not defeated, and unclouded goodness prevailed. His resurrection was the pledge of victory over all enemies of the human spirit, for it was the final victory over death, which Paul personifies as ‘the last enemy’ (I Cor. 15: 26). So, God gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (I Cor. 15: 57). It is for Paul highly significant that Jesus lived a truly human life, that he was a man and a Jew. But that does not mean that he is just one more individual thrown up by the historical process. On the contrary, his coming into the world can be seen as a fresh incursion of the Creator into his creation. God has now given the light of the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (II Cor. 4: 6). In the act of creation, according to an influential school of Jewish thought, it was divine ‘wisdom’ that was at work, and Christ himself, Paul wrote, was ‘the wisdom of God’ visibly in action among men (I Cor. 1: 24). According to these Jewish thinkers, this wisdom was the flawless mirror of the active power of God and the image of his goodness (Wisdom of Solomon 7: 26). So Christ, Paul says, is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1: 19).

This was a new historical phenomenon, to be brought into relation with the history of Israel as the field within which the purpose of God was working itself out. The formative motive of that history was the calling into existence of a ‘people of God’ – a divine commonwealth – in and through which the will of God might be done on earth, an ‘Israel’ worth the name. The distinguishing mark of such an ‘Israel’, Paul wrote, was to be found in the promise made to Abraham, the founder of the Hebrew people, that in his posterity all nations shall find blessing (Gal. 3: 8). This ideal had never yet been realised, though in successive periods there had been some who had it in them to become such people, the ‘remnant’ of which prophets spoke (Rom. 9: 27; 11: 5). In the emergent church of Christ, Paul saw the divine commonwealth coming into active existence. If you belong to Christ, he writes, you are the issue of Abraham (Gal 3: 29), i.e. you are the true Israel in whom all nations shall find blessing.

Church & Sacraments:

Here we have a pointer to one reason, at least, why Paul set such store by his mission to the Gentiles. The church was the consummation of a long, divinely directed, history. It is a theme to which he returns in the long and intricate discourse in Romans (9-11). The new, supra-national Israel was constituted solely on the basis of ‘belonging to Christ’, and no longer on racial descent or attachment to a particular legal system. Paul wrote: you are all one person in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3: 28). The expression ‘in Christ’ is one which recurs with remarkable frequency throughout Paul’s letters. The reality of the doctrine for which it stands was present in the church from the beginning in the two rites of baptism and the ‘breaking of bread’. It was through baptism that a person was incorporated into the community of Christ’s followers. In its suggestive ritual, in which the convert was ‘buried’ by immersion in water, and came out cleansed and renewed, Paul saw a symbolic re-enactment of the death and resurrection of Christ:

… by baptism we were buried with him and lay dead, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead in the splendour of the Father, so also we might set our feet on the new path of life (Rom. 6: 4).

Baptism affirmed the solidarity of all members of the church with Christ. So, even more clearly and emphatically, did the other primitive sacrament of the church. From the first, its fellowship had been centred in the solemn ‘breaking of bread’ at a communal meal. As the bread was broken, they recalled the mysterious words which Jesus had spoken when he broke bread for his disciples at his last supper: ‘This is my body’ (I Cor. 11: 23 f.). Reflecting on these words, Paul observed, first, that in sharing bread the company established a corporate unity among themselves: We, many as we are, are one body, for it is one loaf of which we all partake (I Cor. 10: 17). Also, Christ himself had said, This is my body. Consequently, when we break the bread, it is a means of sharing the body of Christ (I Cor. 10: 16). The church, therefore, is itself the body of Christ; he is the head, and on him, the whole body depends (Eph. 4: 16). It is in this way that the new people of God is constituted, ‘in Christ’.

In all forms of Jewish messianic belief, it was common ground that the Messiah was, in some sense, representative of Israel in its divine calling and destiny. Paul presses this idea of representation further by stating that those who adhere to Christ in sincere faith are identified with him in a peculiarly intimate way as if they were being included in him in his own being. He was the inclusive representative of the emergent people of God. Another way of putting it is to say that Christ is the second ‘Adam’, symbolic of the new humanity of which the church was the head. In the Jewish schools of thought where Paul had his training, there was much speculation about the ‘First Adam’ and about the way in which all men, as ‘sons of Adam’, are involved in his fortunes as depicted mythologically in Genesis. Paul takes up this idea: mankind is incorporate ‘in Adam’; emergent new humanity is incorporate ‘in Christ’: As in Adam all men die, so in Christ, all will be brought to life (I Cor. 15: 22; Rom. 5: 12-14). Once again, we see here a fresh expansion of the messianic idea.

The church, as the new ‘Israel of God’, in its essential nature was a united entity and this unity, he argued, should be reflected in the life of every local congregation; he was dismayed to see it being disrupted. In particular, there were persisting influences, both pagan and Jewish, in the minds of those so recently converted. Paul discusses, for example, divergences among Christians about the continued observance of Jewish holy days and food regulations (Rom. 14), and, on the other side, about the extent to which they might share in the social life of their pagan neighbours without sacrificing their principles (I Cor. 8: 1-13; 10: 18-33). But apart from such special discussions, Paul insisted on the idea of the church as a body, analogous to a living organism, in which the parts, while endlessly various, are interdependent and subordinate to one another, and each makes its indispensable contribution to the well-being of the whole. There is a passage in his First Letter to the Corinthians (12: 14-27) which is the classical statement of the idea of the social organism. He develops this idea in relation to his governing conception of the church as the body of Christ. In all its members, it is Christ who is at work, and God in Christ, through his Spirit:

There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are varieties of service, but the same Lord. There are many forms of work, but all of them, in all men, are the work of the same God.

(I Cor. 12: 4-11).

We can see from the lists of ‘services’ in other letters (Rom. 12: 6-8; Eph. 4: 11 f.) just how complex and sophisticated the activities of the ‘primitive’ church had already become in Paul’s time. It is in this context that Paul develops his doctrine of the Spirit, which is another of his most original contributions to Christian thought. It was an innovation rooted in what he had taken from his own Jewish background as well as from the first Judaic Christians. In some forms of Jewish messianic expectation, it was held that in the days of the Messiah, or in the age to come, the divine Spirit, which was believed to have animated the prophets and heroes of Israel’s remoter past, would be poured out afresh, and in a larger measure (Acts 2: 16-18). The early followers of Jesus, when the realisation had broken upon them that he had risen from the dead, had experienced an almost intoxicating sense of new life and power. It was accompanied, as often happens in times of religious ‘revival’, by abnormal psychic phenomena, including visions, the hearing of voices, and ecstatic utterance or ‘speaking with tongues’. The early Christians valued these as evident signs that God was at work among them through his Spirit. These abnormal phenomena reproduced themselves in the new Christian communities which sprang from Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, and here they created an exciting atmosphere which he also saw to be full of danger.

Liberty & the Gifts of the Spirit:

The situation needed careful handling since Paul did not want to be seen as damping down the enthusiasm of which these strange powers were one expression (I Thess. 5: 19-21). Nor did he wish to deny that they could be the outcome of genuine inspiration. He knew from his own personal experience what it was to have visions and to hear voices (II Cor. 12: 1-4), and he could himself ‘speak with tongues’ (I Cor. 14: 18). But there were other ‘gifts of the Spirit’, less showy, but in the end far more important to the community, such as wisdom, insight, powers of leadership, the gifts of teaching, administration, and the meeting of needs of those in states of deprivation and/or distress (Rom. 12: 6-8; I Cor. 12: 28). These were gifts which helped ‘build up’ the community (I Cor. 14:12) and in emphasising them Paul diverted attention away from the abnormal and exceptional to such moral and intellectual endowments as any society would wish to find among its members. It was their devotion to such endowments to the common good that gave them real value.

It was this original concept of the Spirit as the mode of Christ’s own presence in his church opens up a new approach to ethics. Paul found himself obliged to meet a formidable challenge to his message that the Christian is free from the ‘bondage’ of the law since Christ annulled the law with its rules and regulations (Eph. 2: 15). This kind of language ran the risk of being misunderstood. His Jewish critics, both inside and outside the church, suspected that in sweeping away the discipline of the Mosaic Law he was leaving his Gentile converts without moral anchorage in a licentious environment. Paul scarcely realised at first how open to misconstruction his language was. He soon discovered that he was widely understood to be advocating a purely ‘permissive’ morality, which was in fact far from his intention. People were claiming, We are free to do anything (I Cor. 6: 12; 10: 23), in the belief that they were echoing his own views. He did point out that there were some obvious limits on freedom and that Christian morality was not conformity to an external code but sprang from an inward source. The transformation which this involved was made effective by the work of the Spirit within as the true source of Christian character and action:

“We are free to do anything,” you say; but does everything help to build up the community?

(I Cor. 10: 23)

You were called to be free men, only do not turn your liberty to license for your lower nature.

(Gal. 5: 13)

Let your minds be remade, and your whole nature transformed; then you will be able to discern the will of God, and to know what is good, acceptable and perfect.

(Rom. 12: 2)

The harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, and self-control. There is no law dealing with such things as those.

(Gal. 5: 22 f.).

The church was under a ‘new covenant’, which was not, like the ‘old covenant’, guaranteed by a single code of commands and prohibitions engraved letter by letter upon a stone (II Cor. 3: 7), but by the Spirit animating the whole body of the church. But that Spirit was not simply an ‘inner light’, but the Holy Spirit, the Spirit in the church which is the Spirit of Christ working in the members of his body. This was the historical Christ who had lived and taught, died and rose again. Christians who had received the Gospel and teaching that went with it were in a position to know what it was like to be ‘Christlike’ in character and conduct, and this was an objective standard by which all inner promptings could be brought to the test. It might even be described as the law of Christ (Gal. 6: 2; I Cor. 9: 21), but Paul was obviously cautious of using such quasi-legal language; he did not wish to be introducing a kind of new Christian legalism. The ‘law of Christ’ and the ‘life-giving law of the Spirit’ are, for Paul, one and the same thing (Ro. 8: 2). Sometimes Paul wrote as if the ‘reshaping’ of the mind of the Christian took place almost immediately upon their becoming believers, but there are sufficient passages in his letters which reveal that he was aware that the process might be gradual, perhaps lengthy (Gal. 4: 19; Eph. 4: 13; I Cor. 9: 26) and possibly never completed in this life (Phil. 3: 12-14). But once the process was genuinely underway, a believer was ‘under the law of Christ’, and Christ himself – not the Christian’s own ideas, not even in the end, his conscience – is the judge to whom he defers in all his actions (I Cor. 4: 3 f.).

Loving-kindness – The Law of Christ & Social Ethics:

The ‘law of Christ’ is, therefore, Christ himself working through his Spirit in the church to give ethical direction. And it is all that we know of Christ that comes into it – his teaching, the example of his actions, and the impact of his death and resurrection. These acted as influences on Paul’s thought, not as from outside, but creatively from within. His ethical judgements are informed by the Spirit of Christ and yet are intimately his own. That is why the law of Christ, while it commands him absolutely, can never be thought of as a ‘bondage’, as the old law with its rules and regulations; where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (II Cor. 3: 17). Paul’s ethical teaching, therefore, is the application of what it means to be ‘Christlike’. His death is the commanding example of self-sacrifice for the sake of others (Gal. 2:20; Eph. 5: 2, 25), and it was his expression of his limitless love for mankind (Rom. 8: 34 f.; Eph. 3: 18 f.).

It is this quality of love, above all, that Paul holds up as the essence of what it means to be ‘Christlike’, and as the basic and all-inclusive principle of Christian living (Rom. 13: 8-10; Gal. 5: 14; Col. 3: 14; Eph. 1: 4). The word he uses is the almost untranslatable agape, a word first brought into common use in a Christian setting. It can be rendered by the older use of the word charity, from the Latin Caritas. ‘Agape’ includes feelings of affection (Rom. 12. 9 f.), but it evokes, more fully and fundamentally, the energy of goodwill or ‘loving kindness’ emanating unconditionally towards others, regardless of their merit, worthiness or attractiveness. The eloquent passage in I Corinthians 13, which has the feeling of a hymn to agape, contains pointers to the kind of attitude and behaviour it inspires, and in this context, it is presented as the highest of all ‘gifts of the Spirit’ (I Cor. 12: 31; 14: 1). It is in this ‘hymn’ that the ‘law of the Spirit’ and the ‘law of Christ’ become intertwined and thereby completely indistinguishable.

Agape, then, is the source of the distinctively Christian virtues and graces of character. It is also the most constructive principle in society; it is love that builds (I Cor. 8: 1). Thus the ideas of the building of the body and the centrality of love imply one another and form the effective basis for Paul’s teaching on social ethics. The whole of Christian behaviour can be summed up in the maxim, Love one another as Christ loved you (Eph. 5: 1; Gal. 5: 13 f.; I Thess. 4: 9; Col. 3: 14). This does not mean, however, that Paul is content to say, Love and do as you please. Nor, on the other hand, does he undertake to show how detailed rules of behaviour could be derived deductively from a single master-principle. Ethical behaviour is essentially an individual’s response to actual situations in which he finds himself in day-to-day living as a member of society. Paul envisages his readers not just in any society, but in the particular society in which their daily lives must be lived, namely the Graeco-Roman world, which he knew so well, with its political, legal and economic institutions, and within that world, the young Christian communities with their distinctive ethos and unique problems. He indicates, always in practical terms, how this whole network of relations may be permeated with the Christian quality of living.

How close these immature Christians stood to the corruptions of paganism, and how easily they could relapse into them can be gathered by some of the startling remarks which he lets fall about his converts (I Cor. 5: 1 f.; 6: 8-10; Col. 3: 5-7; I Thess. 4: 3-8), as well as from the passion with which he insists that there must be a complete break with the past (Col. 3: 5-10). So alarmed was he at the possibility of the infection of immorality that he sometimes writes as if the only safe way of avoiding this was for the church to withdraw from pagan society altogether (II Cor. 6: 14-18); but he had to explain that this was not his real intention: the idea that Christians should avoid dangerous contacts by getting right out of the world he dismisses as absurd (I Cor. 5: 9-13). In fact, it is clear that he envisaged Christians living on good terms and in normal social intercourse with their pagan neighbours (I Cor. 10: 27 f.). Their task was the more difficult one of living as full members of the society in which their lot was cast, while firmly renouncing its corruptions; to be in it, but not of it. But although deeply corrupted, Graeco-Roman civilisation was not without moral ideals. A certain standard of what was ‘fitting’ was widely accepted, at least in public. The Stoics spoke of it as the general feeling of mankind (communis sensus hominum), and there was a genuine desire to see this standard observed in corporate life. Paul was well aware of this, as he shows when he enjoins his readers: Let your aims be such as all men count honourable (Rom. 12: 17). Even after his fierce castigation of pagan vices at the beginning of his Letter to the Romans he goes on to write that the good pagan may do God’s will by the light of nature; his conscience bears true witness (Rom. 2: 14 f.). There is a broad universality about what he writes to the Philippians:

All that is true, all that is noble, all that is just and pure, all that is lovable and gracious, whatever is excellent and admirable – fill all your thoughts with these things.

(Phil. 4: 8)

It is therefore not surprising that Paul was concerned to work out his sketch of Christian behaviour within the framework of Graeco-Roman society as it actually existed, rather than as Christians might have wanted it to be. The empire was, for him, part of the divinely given setting for a Christian’s life in the world, and he made it clear that he would be following the law of Christ in obeying the Roman law, respecting the magistrates, and paying his taxes. This was an obligation imposed not merely by fear of retribution but by conscience. In fact, the fulfilment of such obligations is an application of the maxim, Love your neighbour as yourself (Rom. 13: 1-10). Similarly, in dealing with family life he took over a general scheme current among Stoics and moralists at the time which assumed the existing structure of the Graeco-Roman household, with the paterfamilias as the responsible head, and the other members, including the slaves, having their respective obligations (Eph. 5: 21 – 6: 9; Col. 3: 18 – 4: 1), and indicated how within this general structure Christian principles and values could be applied.

As far as Paul is concerned, marriage is indissoluble for Christians because there is a saying of the Lord to that effect (I Cor. 7: 10 f.; Mark 10: 2-9). Beyond that, because in Christ there is no distinction between man and woman (Gal. 3: 28), although the husband is usually the head of the household, the marriage relation itself must be completely mutual as between husband and wife. Neither can claim their own body ‘as their own’ (I Cor. 7: 4). This bond is so sacred that in a mixed marriage the ‘heathen’ spouse is ‘holy’ to God, as are the children of such a marriage (I Cor. 7: 14). So the natural ties of family relationships are valid within the Christian fellowship which is ‘the body of Christ’. However, in I Cor. 7: 26-29, Paul apparently ‘entertained’ the belief that family obligations were of limited relevance since the time we live in will not last long. It was only by the time he wrote to the Colossians that he had fully accepted the principle that family life should be part of life ‘in Christ’, though even then he only gave some brief hints about what its character should be (Col. 3: 18-21).

The Graeco-Roman household also included slaves, and here again, Christian principles and values began to make inroads into this practice. It was a fundamental principle that in Christ there was neither slave nor free man (Gal. 3: 28, Col. 3: 11). Accordingly, there is a level on which their status is equal:

The man who as a slave received the call to be a Christian is the Lord’s freedman, and, equally, the free man who received the call is a slave in the service of Christ.

(I Cor. 7: 22)

In writing to the Colossians he urges slaves to give their service…

… as if you were doing it for the Lord and not for men… Christ is the Master whose slaves you must be; … Masters, be fair and just to your slaves, knowing that you too have a master in heaven.

(Col. 3: 23 f.; 4: 1)

The Christian ideal of free mutual service transcended the legal relations of master and slave. The letter to Philemon is a short ‘note’ in which Paul deals with the particular case of the recipient’s runaway slave, Onesimus, who had also helped himself to his master’s cashbox. Somehow or other Paul came across him, and converted him. Under Roman law, anyone harbouring a fugitive slave was liable to severe penalties, and a runaway recovered by his master could expect no mercy. Paul decided to send Onesimus back to his, trusting that the ‘law of Christ’ would transform their relationship from within, without disrupting the civil order, and in Philemon’s readiness to take a fully Christian view of the matter:

Perhaps this is why you lost him for a time, that you might have him back for good, no longer as a slave, but as more than a slave, as a dear brother.

(Philemon 12-16)

Paul’s Eschatology – Christ, the Church & the Future:

The permeation of the church, and ultimately of society, with the Christian quality of life gives actuality to Paul’s doctrine of the indwelling of Christ, through his Spirit, in the body of his followers, the church. It is not simply the experience of an individual, but a force working in history. But if Christ is thus present in the church, then he has to be known not only through his historical life, supremely important as that is, but also in what he is doing in and through the church in the present and in the future into which the present dissolves at every moment. His brief career on earth had ended, so far as the world, in general, could see, in failure. His disciples may have known better, but how was the world to know? For many early Christians, the very short answer to this question that, very shortly, he would ‘come again’, and then ‘every eye shall see him’ (Rev. 1: 7). Paul began by sharing this belief. At the time when he wrote his earliest surviving letters (as they probably are), to the Thessalonians, he seems to have had no doubt that he and most Christians would live to see the ‘second advent’ (II Thess. 2: 1-3; 4: 15). Even when he wrote his first letter to the Corinthians he was still assured that ‘we shall not all die’ (I Cor. 15: 51). Before he wrote the second letter there was an occasion when his life was despaired of (II Cor. 1: 9), and it may be that for the first time he faced the likelihood that he would die before the Day, and in that way ‘go to live with the Lord’ (II Cor. 5: 8). At any rate, from this time we hear little more of the expectation of earlier years.

Tom Wright suggests that when writing II Thessalonians, Paul had perhaps foreseen the fall of Jerusalem of AD 70, quite possibly through a Roman emperor doing what Caligula had so nearly done. The ultimate monster from the sea, Rome itself, would draw itself up to its full height, demolishing the heaven-and-earth structure that had (according to Jesus) come to embody Jeremiah’s “den of robbers.” Jesus would then set up his kingdom of a different sort, one that could not be shaken. But if Jerusalem were to fall to the Romans, Paul had to get busy, because he knew what reactions such a terrible event would produce. Gentile Christians would claim that God had finally cut off the Jews, leaving ‘the church’ as a non-Jewish body. Christianity would become ‘a religion’ to be contrasted (favourably, of course) with something called ‘Judaism’. Conversely, Jewish Jesus-followers would accuse their Gentile brethren – and particularly the followers of Paul – of having precipitated this disaster by imagining that one could worship the true God without getting circumcised and following the whole Torah. And Jews who had rejected the message of Jesus as Messiah would be in no doubt at all that all this had happened because of this ‘false prophet’ and the renegade Saul, who had led Israel astray. Wright’s supposition leads him to believe that Paul was therefore determined…

… to establish and maintain Jew-plus-Gentile communities, worshipping the One God in and through Jesus his son and in the power of the spirit, ahead of the catastrophe.

Only in this way, he believed, could this potential split, the destruction of the ‘new Temple’ of I Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2, be averted. This is why Paul insisted, in letter after letter, on the unity of the church across all traditional boundaries. This was not about the establishment of a new ‘religion’ and had nothing to do with Paul being a “self-hating Jew”. This anti-Semitic slur is still found in ill-informed ‘studies’ of his work, but Paul affirmed what he took to be the central features of the Jewish hope: One God, Israel’s Messiah, and resurrection itself. For him, what mattered was messianic eschatology and the community that embodied it. The One God had fulfilled, in a way so unexpected that most of the guardians of the promises had failed to recognise it, the entire narrative of the people of God. That was what Paul had been preaching in one synagogue after another. It was because of that fulfilment that the Gentiles were now being brought into the single family. The apostle came to be less preoccupied with a supposedly imminent ‘second advent’ as he explored the range of Christ’s present activity in the church. He saw the church expanding its influence abroad, and developing internally the complexity that marks the evolution of a living organism. If all this raised some problems, it was all part of the growth of the body – of Christ’s body – and it was Christ’s own work:

It is from the Head that the whole body, with all its joints and ligaments, receives its supplies and thus knit together grows according to God’s design.

(Col. 2: 19)

This, as Paul saw it, was the way in which Christ is revealed to the whole universe (Eph. 3: 10). Nor is there any limit to this growth, until we all, at last, attain the unity inherent in our faith (Eph. 4: 13). In the church, Paul saw men actually being drawn into unity across the barriers erected by differences of ethnicity, nationality, language, culture or social status. He was powerfully impressed by the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the fellowship of the church (Eph. 2: 11-22). In this, as his horizons widened, he saw the promise of a larger unity, embracing all mankind (Rom. 11: 25-32). In this unity of mankind, moreover, he finds he finds the sign and pledge of God’s purpose for his whole creation. In a passage which has much of the visionary quality of poetry or prophecy, he pictures the whole universe waiting in eager expectation for the day when it shall enter upon the liberty and splendour of the children of God (Rom. 8: 19-21). In the church, therefore, can be discerned God’s ultimate design to reconcile the whole universe to himself… to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, through Christ alone (Col. 1: 20). Such was the vision of the future which Paul bequeathed to the church for its inspiration. In a sense then, he continued to believe that he was living in the last days. For him, God had, in sending the Messiah, had brought the old world of chaos, idolatry, wickedness, and death to an end. Jesus had taken its horror onto himself and had launched something else in its place. But, as Tom Wright puts it…

… that meant that, equally, Paul was conscious of living in the first days, the opening scenes of the new drama of world history, with heaven and earth now held together not by Torah and Temple, but by Jesus and the Spirit, pointing forward to the time when the divine glory would fill the whole world and transform it from top to bottom.

This vision was not to be found in the non-Jewish world of Paul’s day. It was a thoroughly Jewish eschatology, shaped around the one believed to be Israel’s Messiah. Paul believed, not least because he saw it so clearly in the scriptures, that Israel too had its own brand of idolatry. But the point of Jesus’s ‘new Passover’ was that the powerful ‘gods’ and ‘lords’ to which mankind had given away their authority, had been defeated. The resurrection proved it and had thereby launched a new world with a new people to reflect the true God into that new world. That is why Paul’s Gentile mission was not a different idea from the idea of forgiveness of sins or the cleansing of the heart. It was because of the powerful gospel announced and made effective those realities that the old barriers between Jew and Greek were abolished in the Messiah. That is why Paul’s work just as much as ‘social’ and ‘political’ as it is ‘theological’ or ‘religious’. Every time Paul expounded ‘justification’, it formed part of his argument that in the Messiah there was a single family consisting of believing Jews and Gentiles, a family that demonstrated to the world that there was a new way of being human. Paul saw himself as a working model of exactly this:

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.

Sources:

C. H. Dodd (1970), Paul and His World; The Thought of Paul, in Robert C Walton (1970), A Source Book of the Bible for Teachers. London: SCM.

N. T. Wright (2018), Paul: A Biography. London: SPCK.

Alan T. Dale (1979), Portrait of Jesus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Posted March 12, 2019 by AngloMagyarMedia in anti-Semitism, Apocalypse, baptism, Bible, Christian Faith, Christianity, Church, Civilization, cleanliness, Commemoration, Compromise, Covenant, Crucifixion, Economics, Egalitarianism, eschatology, Ethnicity, Europe, Family, Genesis, Gentiles, Gospel of Mark, Graeco-Roman, Humanism, Israel, Jerusalem, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Jews, Marriage, Mediterranean, Messiah, Middle East, monotheism, morality, Mythology, Narrative, Nationality, New Testament, Old Testament, Palestine, Paul (Saint), Reconciliation, Remembrance, Respectability, Resurrection, Romans, Sacraments, The Law, theology, Women in the Bible

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Paul of Tarsus: Jew, Roman & Christian Missionary to the Gentiles – Part Two. Leave a comment

Antioch & Jerusalem:

We know about the conflict between Antioch and Jerusalem through the detailed colourful accounts of Josephus, a younger contemporary of Paul’s. He was anything but a neutral observer, however, but a wealthy Jewish aristocrat who claimed to have tried out the various Jewish ‘schools of thought’ and who had served as a general in the army at the start of the war against Rome (AD 66-70) before switching sides and ending his days on an imperial pension in Rome. In the middle of the first century, Jerusalem was a highly complex world of different parties, groups, messianic and prophetic movements, preachers and teachers. When the Romans closed in on Jerusalem in the last months of the war, crucifying so many Jews that they ran out of timber for crosses, Josephus recorded sorrowfully that more Jews were in fact killed by other Jews than by the Romans. Matters were not helped by the sequence of inept Roman governors sent to keep the peace during the period. There were times under the two kings named Herod Agrippa, both of whom were friendly with the Roman imperial family when many hoped for a live-and-let-live settlement. That would never have been sufficient for the young Saul of Tarsus, however, who longed for the ultimate kingdom of God. The Jerusalem of the middle decades of the first century was home to an entire generation who took a hard-line view, hating the thought of compromise and looking for something more like Hezekiah’s heaven-sent victory over Sennacherib or the overthrow of the Egyptians in the ‘Red Sea’.

The scriptures were quite clear that utter loyalty to the One God meant refusing all compromise with the pagan world. The social and cultural pressure to affirm that ancient loyalty and to be seen to abide by it was intense. To be a follower of Jesus in that world would have been a very different challenge from those faced by Jesus-followers in Syria or Turkey. Although the Jerusalem church had by this time established itself as something of a counter-cultural movement to the Temple authorities, this did not mean that its members were being ‘anti-Jewish.’ If anything, they were putting themselves on a par with other groups who regarded the Temple hierarchy (the wealthy, aristocratic Sadducees, including the high-priests’ families) as a corrupt and compromised class, out for their own ends and too eager to do deals with the Romans. The early Jerusalem church seems to have lived like other groups who believed that God was ushering in the ‘last days’. In the excitement of the early stages, they had shared their property communally, an eager social experiment which may have led to their later poverty. They lived a life of prayer, fasting, community, and care for the poor and widows. So far as we can tell they conformed faithfully to the Jewish Law. They must have seemed to many like a strange messianic variation on the Pharisees’ movement, coupling a fierce loyalty to Israel’s One God with their own belief that the One God had revealed himself in the crucified and risen bringer of the kingdom, Jesus of Nazareth.

According to Acts, it was Peter who first broke the taboo of sharing table-fellowship with non-Jews; he received strong divine validation for this radical move and persuaded his sceptical colleagues in Jerusalem that this was the right thing to do. But this move seems not to have been thought through with regard to what they believed about Jesus himself. It was a pragmatic decision on their part, led by the spirit, which meant that it must be what God wanted. It remained easy, therefore, for most of the Jerusalem-based Jesus followers to see their movement as a variation on the Jewish loyalist groupings. God might bring in some non-Jews, as had always happened in Israel’s history, as the book of Ruth and various other pages had made clear. But it could hardly be imagined that the God whose scriptures warned constantly against disloyalty to the covenant would suddenly declare the Torah redundant. But that was what many in Jerusalem, including many Jesus-followers, believed that Paul had been teaching. The word got out that Paul and Barnabas, not content with belonging to a hybrid community in Syrian Antioch, had been going around the Graeco-Roman world telling Jews that they no longer needed to obey the Law of Moses! If the Torah itself could now be set aside, who could tell what results might then follow?

All this focused on the covenant sign of circumcision, and while it is true that the prophets and Moses himself had spoken of the circumcision of the heart as the deep reality to which physical circumcision was meant to point, that reality was associated with the promise of ultimate covenant renewal. Nobody in the first century imagined that, if the One God really did renew the covenant, physical circumcision might be dispensed with for the non-Jews who would be included. On the contrary, circumcision became a symbol of ‘loyalty’. Many of the Jesus-followers had dispersed following the early persecution, but there was still a tight core, focused particularly on James himself. From the time of Stephen’s stoning, they had been regarded as potentially subversive, disloyal to the Temple and its traditions. Now, this disloyalty was showing itself in a new way: they were allied with a supposedly Jesus-related movement, out in the Diaspora, teaching Jews that they didn’t have to obey the Torah! That would introduce one compromise after another until Jews would Find themselves indistinguishable from pagans. In Jerusalem, all Jews believed that pagans were the enemy that God would one day overthrow, but out there in the Diaspora this new movement was, it seemed, treating pagans as equal partners. The Temple hierarchy was concerned that this Jesus movement in the wider world, led by ‘that wild man Paul’ would not land them in any deeper trouble, guilt by association. From all that they had heard, the signs were not encouraging.

Four things happened in quick succession. First, Peter came to Antioch and shared in the life of the church there for a while. This and the following incidents, including the writing of Paul’s first letter to the Galatians, are dated around AD 48. Second, some other followers of ‘The Way’ came to Antioch from Jerusalem, claiming to have been sent by James. This precipitated a small earthquake in the Antiochene church and a controversy denounced by Paul himself in devastating terms. Third, perhaps some weeks or months later, Paul received bad news from the little communities of non-Jewish believers in southern Anatolia, recently ‘planted’ by Barnabas and himself. The fourth event was the writing of the letter to the churches in Galatia, as mentioned above. He then set off for Jerusalem in the hopes of sorting all this out with those who seemed to be causing the trouble who naturally thought that it was he who was causing all the trouble. As Tom Wright remarks,

Controversies are always like that. Generations of Christians who have read Galatians as part of holy scripture have to remind themselves that, if Galatians is part of the Bible, it is Galatians as we have it that is part of the Bible – warts and all, sharp edges and sarcastic remarks included. Perhaps, indeed, that is what “holy scripture” really is – not a calm, serene list of truths to be learned or commands to be obeyed, but a jagged book that forces you to grow up in your thinking as you grapple with it.

Paul believed that Jesus’ own spirit was at work through him as his chosen apostle to the Gentiles to establish and maintain the life-changing communities of people whose lives had themselves been changed by the power of the gospel. And now he believed that he had a responsibility to state clearly what was at stake in the controversy in Antioch, in Jerusalem, in Galatia itself. His own obvious vulnerability was part of this process too, as he later stressed in another letter. His ‘epistles’, just like the gospel itself, were part of a radical redefinition of what ‘authority’ might look like in the new world that the One God had launched through Jesus. So Peter came to Antioch, it seems, in early 48. His arrival is unexplained, like all his movements after his remarkable escape from prison in Acts 12:17; all we know is that he had initially been happy go along with the practice of the local Jesus-followers in Antioch, having Jewish and non-Jewish believers living together as “family,” sharing the same table. This was the practice that Peter himself had embraced in Acts 10-11 when he visited Cornelius, justifying his actions to critics in Jerusalem on the basis of what he had been told in a divine commandment:

What God made clean, you must not regard as common.

Peter had acted on that principle, believing that the power of the gospel had ‘cleansed’ the Gentiles of the ritual or moral defilement that they possessed in Jewish eyes, defilement that would normally be seen as a barrier to the intimacy of table fellowship. What the new experience of God had made clear to most of the friends of Jesus, but not to all of them, was that God’s love, which Jesus made real to them, was for the whole world – everybody, everywhere. But many came slowly to these great convictions, and there was much heart-searching debate among the early Christians in Antioch: did Jesus come, essentially, to reform the Jewish religion, or did he come to call everybody everywhere to become God’s family, each in his own way? Peter now hesitated to go the whole way; when he arrived in the city of Antioch Paul confronted him on this issue. He described this confrontation in his letter to the Galatians:

Barnabas and I … were back in Antioch, and Peter Joined us there. But I had to stand up to him and tell him that he was plainly in the wrong – on this same question.

When he first came there, he ate his meals with all of us; foreigner and Jew sat down together at the same table. Then some men came from Jerusalem (they said that James had sent them), and everything changed. He started to stay away from our common meals. He was frightened of these Jewish Christians who said that you couldn’t become a Christian if you hadn’t first become a proper Jew. Other friends of Jesus in Antioch started to do the same – even Barnabas was deceived.

(Galatians 2: 11-13)

Clearly, as Paul reports these events, what changed the terms of the discourse was the arrival in Antioch of the ‘envoys’ from Jerusalem who insisted that if the Gentiles wanted to be part of the true family, sharing in the great rescue operation which God had now set in motion, they would have to be circumcised. Paul, in Galatians, wrote that this was what made Peter change his mind. Up to that point, he had been content to eat with the Jesus-believing Gentiles, but now he drew back in line with the newcomers, and, given the status that Peter had within the wider movement, it is perhaps not surprising that the other Jewish Jesus believers followed him in this. Paul tells us that even Barnabas was carried along by their sham (Galatians, 2: 13). This was not simply a disagreement about theological principles, but about an original practice of the church in Antioch which reflected the belief that all believers in Jesus, whether circumcised or not, belonged at the same table. The Judaean guests were clearly saying that this was wrong and that the loyal Jews among the believers should withdraw. Barnabas had been with Paul through all the joys and trials of the mission to Galatia and together they had welcomed many non-Jews into fellowship. They had shared everything; they had prayed and worked and celebrated and suffered side by side. Now they were on opposite sides of this debate, and that hurt Paul.

Paul was careful not to claim that the visitors from Jerusalem were sent by James personally, though it is difficult to see how they could have been there except on his authority. Certainly, the focus of their concern was the maintenance of covenant loyalty. Circumcision was, as far as they were concerned, non-negotiable, since the purity of God’s chosen people was essential. If God was indeed bringing in his kingdom, then a clean break with the Gentiles’ pagan past was vital. If they were to be allowed into the covenant, the former pagans would have to demonstrate their loyalty as well, and that meant circumcision. From the point of view of the zealous kingdom-minded Jews of Jerusalem, this made perfect sense, but from Paul’s perspective, it made no sense at all. He had already thought through what it meant that God was bringing in his kingdom through the crucified Messiah, the shocking and unexpected events of Jesus’ death and resurrection, coupled with the dramatic sense of personal redemption for which the only explanation was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, meant that everything had changed. A new world had begun and those trying to live in it while clinging to the old one had not yet realised just how radical the transformation was. They were simply “putting on a face,” or “playacting,” for which the Greek word was hypokrisis, giving us the English word ‘hypocrisy’. Paul was similarly direct in his narrative to the Galatians, as this modern paraphrase reveals:

This was cheating – and cheating about the very thing that makes the Good News really good news. It was as plain as plain could be to me.

(Galatians 2: 14, New World)

The problem was both personal and theological for Paul. As one of the recognised ‘pillars’ of the whole movement, Peter had been followed from the common table by many of the Jewish followers of Jesus. That made it even more difficult for Paul to confront Peter, but that is exactly what he did:

When I saw that they weren’t walking straight down the line of gospel truth, I said to Cephas in front of them all: “Look here: you’re a Jew, but you’ve been living like a Gentile. How can you force Gentiles to become Jews?”

(Galatians 2: 14).

Peter had already been “living like a Gentile” – not in the sense that he had been worshipping idols or indulging in sexual immorality, but in the sense that he had been in the habit of eating with people without any regard for the distinction between Jews and Gentiles. He was therefore “in the wrong.” Either his present behaviour meant that his previous stance had been wrong, or his previous stance, being right, proved that his present behaviour was wrong. Paul himself was in no doubt which of these was the correct analysis and he went on to put the Good News plainly. He himself was a Jew by ‘race’ and not a foreigner. But he knew that a man did not become a Christian by carrying out all the details of the Jewish religion, but simply by trusting Jesus himself. That was the heart of the matter:

We are Jews by birth, not “Gentile sinners.” But we know that a person is not declared “righteous” by works of the Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah.

(Galatians 2: 15-16).

Paul knew what the secret of his own life was. True, he went on living his ordinary life in exactly the same way as before, but he didn’t feel that he was living it – Jesus had taken charge of him so that he lived by trusting God’s son, who loved him and gave his life for him. In Western theological discourse, this has been traditionally interpreted as Paul developing his doctrine of ‘justification’, of how someone who was previously a ‘sinner’ comes to be ‘righteous’ in the eyes of God. Paul clearly believed in the importance of ‘sin’ and of being rescued from it. But that was not what was at stake at the time in Jerusalem, Antioch or Galatia. What mattered then was the individual believer’s status within the covenant family. The word ‘righteous’, like the Greek and Hebrew words from which it is often translated, refers to someone being in a right relationship with God, the ‘relationship’ in question being the collective relationship of the covenant that God made with Abraham. The question that Paul was addressing was: How can you tell who are the true children of Abraham? His answer was focused firmly on Jesus. So Paul’s point to Peter was a simple one, that what mattered to Jesus was being part of the covenant family, and that is not defined by Jewish law, but through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah. The word for ‘faithfulness’ is pistis in Greek, also means simply ‘faith’, ‘loyalty’ or ‘reliability’. In a world where the key value for a zealous Jew was ‘loyalty’ to God and his law, Paul believed, according to Wright:

(1) that Jesus the Messiah had been utterly faithful to the divine purpose, “obedient even to the death of the cross”… ;

(2) that following Jesus, whatever it took, had to be seen as itself a central expression of loyalty to Israel’s God;

(3) that the followers of Jesus were themselves marked out by their belief in him, confessing him as ‘Lord’ and believing that he was raised from the dead; …

(4) if this Jesus-shaped loyalty was the vital thing, “then nothing that the law could say was to come between one Jesus-follower and another.”

In other words, continuing Paul’s description of what he said to Peter:

That is why we too believed in the Messiah, Jesus: so that we might be declared ‘righteous’ on the basis of the Messiah’s faithfulness, and not on the basis of works of the Jewish law. On that basis, you see, no creature will be declared ‘righteous’.

(Galatians 2: 16).

Paul urges Peter and all the others who hear his letter when it is read out loud, to think out the new position they find themselves in:

Well then: if in seeking to be declared ‘righteous’ in the Messiah, we ourselves are found to be ‘sinners’, does that make the Messiah an agent of ‘sin’? Certainly not! If I build up once more the things which I tore down, I demonstrate that I am a law-breaker.

(Galatians 2: 17-18).

Following Paul’s definition of himself and others as Jews by birth, not ‘Gentile sinners’ in which Gentiles are automatically ‘sinners’ because they do not have the law. Therefore, if Peter found himself called to live on equal terms with ‘Gentile sinners’ did that mean that the Messiah was colluding with ‘sin’? That was exactly what the Jerusalem church and the Judaeans, in general, were concerned about, seeing it, potentially, as fraternising with the enemy. They might see, in Paul’s claim to be following the Messiah, a false Messiah who was leading the people astray. Paul countered by arguing that since Peter had started by pulling down the wall between Jews and Gentiles if he now wished to re-erect it, he was admitting that he had been wrong to ‘live like a Gentile’. Paul believed that there was only one way forward, and that is to go where the Messiah had led, through death to new life, a journey which was the same for all the Messiah’s followers, Jew and Gentile alike. Paul describes this journey in individual terms by using the first person singular because, as a zealous Jew, he was making it clear that even he had to tread his own path:

Let me explain it like this. Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive – but it isn’t me any longer, it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

(Galatians 2: 17-18)

In making this statement, Paul shows us that he regarded himself as a loyal Jew, loyal to God and the law but that he had come to see the law itself as pointing forward to a kind of ‘death’, something beyond itself that could only be attained by coming out of the law’s own sphere and emerging into a new world. The law itself had envisaged a moment when it would be transcended by a messianic reality. Though Paul does not mention baptism in this passage, this is exactly what, in his view, baptism is all about (as in Romans 6), which is leaving the old life behind and coming through ‘death’ into a new life entirely. The believer then finds his own identity not in his human genealogy or status, but in the Messiah’s faithfulness and loyalty, defined and demonstrated for all time in His death and resurrection. When the believer becomes part of that messianic reality, it is this, rather than his previous standing as a ‘Jew’ or ‘Gentile’, which really matters. The idea of ‘love’ coming from the God of Israel goes all the way back to the covenant with Israel and the act of rescue of Exodus. Paul’s conclusion to this summary of what he said to Peter and James’ ‘envoys’ follows on from this theme:

I don’t set aside God’s grace. If ‘righteousness’ comes through the law, then the Messiah died for nothing.

In other words, if Peter and the envoys from Jerusalem to try to reestablish a two-tier church, with Jews at one table and Gentiles at another, all they were doing was declaring that God’s sovereign love, reaching out to the utterly undeserving – ‘grace’ – was an irrelevance. God need not have bothered with sending his son. If the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, or ‘Pentateuch’ was sufficient for all time to define the people of God, then there was no need for a crucified Messiah. On the other hand, if God had declared in the resurrection that the crucified Jesus really was the Messiah, then He was also declaring that Moses could only take the people so far. He had pointed to a promised land, an ‘inheritance’ which he himself could not enter. Paul insisted that the ‘heirs’ to this ‘inheritance’ could not be defined by the Torah, but only by the Messiah himself, the ultimate ‘heir’. It has been commonplace among New Testament scholars to give the interpretation that Paul lost this disputation and so had to set off on his later missionary journeys without the support of the church in Antioch. But the distance between Syria and Galatia was not that great and people could and did travel quickly between the two regions. The fact that he referred to the dispute at such length in his letter to the Galatians, and that he later returned to Antioch without any hint of trouble, does not suggest that he lost the argument and was ‘run out of town’.

The Galatian Background:

It was out in the world beyond Palestine, and even Syria, that what Jesus meant, why he lived as he did, how he died, and how he was ‘raised to life’ became clearer. It meant nothing less than the vision of a new world, God’s world, and a call to be God’s ‘fellow-workers’ in its making. Nothing could have made this vision sharper than the sight of men and women, of different ‘races’, classes and nations becoming Christians. Their old fears vanished; a new joy marked their lives. When Paul tried to describe what a difference Jesus had made to him personally he went back to the opening words of the book of Genesis and the story of the making of the world as the only kind of language he could use:

God, who made this bright world, filled my heart with light, the light which shines when we know him as he is, the light shining from the face of Jesus.

(II Corinthians 4: 6, New World).

This is Paul’s later account of his own experience; but it was, as he was constantly repeating, a simple experience which everyone everywhere could share. However, the background to Paul’s earlier letter to the Galatians was undoubtedly complex. Around the same time that James’ envoys arrived in Syrian Antioch, it appears that similar persons from the Jerusalem church arrived in Galatia. Their message seems to have been similar, that all fraternising with Gentiles was to stop and that any Gentiles who wanted to be identified with the true people of Israel would have to be circumcised. God’s kingdom would come, rescuing His people from the wicked ways of the world, but only those circumcised would inherit that kingdom. This sharp message also involved a personal attack on Paul himself who was only, they claimed, in Tom Wright’s phrase, a second-order representative of the Jesus message. He had picked up his ‘gospel’ in Jerusalem but had failed to grasp one of the central elements, or perhaps was unwilling to pass it on. Moreover, Jerusalem was, at that time, awash with zealous speculation about the coming kingdom, in which the Gentiles were usually portrayed as the wicked villains who would, at last, receive their punishment. People disagreed about what it meant to keep the Torah, but everyone agreed that the Torah mattered. Any Jews who were willing to treat uncircumcised Gentiles as ‘family’ were compromising the integrity of God’s people and were placing the promised inheritance itself in jeopardy.

Just as Saul of Tarsus had set off a decade earlier to round up the blaspheming followers of ‘The Way’, someone else – a shadowy, unnamed figure – set off with a few friends to bring the new movement into line. At the same time, the pressure was mounting on the Jewish communities in South Galatia. As long as everyone in the thoroughly Romanised province knew who all the Jews were within a particular town or city, they would also know that they had permission to forego participation in the local cults, as well as the exciting new cults of Caesar and Rome. One of the first and most important things that happened whenever non-Jews were grasped by the gospel of Jesus was that, once they had heard that there was a true and living God and that He loved them personally, they would turn away from the idols they had previously worshipped. Suddenly, therefore, new groups of Jesus-followers were emerging, which were obviously not Jewish, but which were staying away from pagan rituals, celebrations and ceremonies. So while the nascent Christian groups in Jerusalem were suspected of disloyalty due to their attitude towards the Torah and the Temple, those in the Diaspora were suspected of disloyalty toward their own communities and towards Rome itself because of their attitude toward the local and imperial cults.

The Jewish communities in cities like Pisidian Antioch, Iconium and Lystra – all Roman colonies – would then find themselves caught in the middle. Local synagogue congregations might well be divided in their response, but the social pressure would grow on them. In turn, local Jewish leaders would put pressure on local Jewish Jesus-followers to persuade their new ‘friends’, the Gentile believers, to come into line and get themselves circumcised. Paul, therefore, had a complex and challenging task, and he was shocked that the communities he had founded had not grasped the full meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the fact that through him a new world, a new creation, had already come into being. They were in serious danger of stepping back into the old world, as though the cross and the empty tomb had never happened, as though the true and living God had not revealed his covenant love once and for all not only to Israel but through the Messiah, to the world. In his letter, he interrupts his opening greeting to insist that his ‘apostleship’ was a direct divine gift, not a secondhand or second-rate appointment from “human sources.” It derives from God himself, and from Jesus the Messiah, our Kyrios,

… who gave himself for our sins, to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of God our father, to whom be glory to the ages of ages. Amen.

(Galatians 1: 4-5).

The gospel Paul announced may have seemed to Jews in Jerusalem or Galatia as though it was a strange, peculiar eccentricity. But, in truth, it was the harbinger of the long-awaited new creation. This would remain central to Paul’s mission, delineating “the present evil age” from the new day which had dawned. Here, Paul affirms the widespread Jewish belief that world history was divided into two ‘ages’, the “present age” of sorrow, shame, exile, and death and the “age to come,” when all things will be put right. This was a common belief for centuries before Paul, and it remained the norm all the way through the much later rabbinic period. For Paul, the living God had acted in the person of Jesus to rescue people from the ‘present age’ and to launch ‘the age to come’. The new age had burst upon the scene while the ‘present age’ was still rumbling on. This was the divine plan by which Jesus “gave himself for our sins”; the power of the ‘present age’ was thereby broken, and the new world could begin.

Paul would later characterise his vocation as a “ministry of reconciliation,” God’s reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles into a single messianic family, as he set out clearly in his writing to those who had become Christians during and after his first visit to the highlands of Anatolia:

Your trust in God your Father has made you members of his Family; Jesus has made this possible. For when you were baptised and became Christians, you began, with his help, to live in his way, as he lived in his Father’s Way.

Living in God’s Way means that you can’t talk about one another as being ‘white’ or ‘coloured’, ‘working-class’ or ‘upper-class’, ‘men’ or ‘women’, as though that was the only thing about them that matters. The most important thing is that as Christians you are one company of friends. And if you are friends of Jesus, you are members of God’s Family as God meant you to be and promised to make you.

That is why, when the time was ripe, God sent his Son to live among us as one of us, to help us live as his sons and daughters, grown-up members of his Family. Because this is what we now are, he has given us the Spirit of his Son in our hearts. When we pray to him, we pray as Jesus did; we say ‘Father!’

You aren’t God’s slaves; God has made you, as I have said, his sons and daughters. And, as sons and daughters inherit their father’s wealth, so all the wealth of God, your Father, is yours.

(Galatians 3: 26-29; 4: 4-7, New World).

When describing this new experience, it is noticeable how Paul goes back to the story of Jesus, recalling how he lived and how he died. For him, it was the way Jesus died which made real what God’s love was like; a love which, in his own words, was broad and long and high and deep; and it was the way God had raised him from the dead that showed us how great the power of God’s love is. The very word ‘cross’ sounded differently in the Graeco-Roman ‘age’. To any Roman citizen, it could only have sounded like a savage word, like our ‘gibbet’ or ‘gallows’. It was the way Romans executed foreign criminals or rebels or slaves. But now it was transformed for Paul into the symbol of God’s ‘amazing love’ – he even wrote once to some friends that he could ‘boast’ about it. What Jesus had made plain for Paul was that God was someone we could trust and to whom we could pray as ‘Father’ (here Paul used the word ‘Abba’, the very same child-like word that Jesus used in his own prayers). There is nothing we need to fear, he tells us, not even death itself, for death ‘has been totally defeated’. The whole world and whatever may lie beyond it is God our Father’s world.

But Paul must also have carried a deep sense of shame and personal failure in his mission of reconciliation, due to his falling-out with Barnabas. This was probably the long-term result of that shocking moment in Antioch when Peter had separated himself from the non-Jewish believers and “even Barnabas” had been led astray by their “hypocrisy”. Although they had, initially, reconciled, and had gone together to Jerusalem, arguing side-by-side the case for Gentile inclusion. But Paul’s trust in his colleague had received a heavy blow and he questioned how reliable might be on further missions to the Gentiles. The specific flashpoint concerned John Mark, the probable Gospel-writer who, as a young man, had been present at the Last Supper and in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night when Jesus was betrayed. It was natural that Paul would suggest revisiting the churches of southern Anatolia, eager to see how they had turned out and able to use a different tone of voice (Galatians 4: 20). It was equally natural that Barnabas would want to take Mark and predictable that Paul would refuse. But Mark had abandoned them on the earlier journey as soon as they had on the south ‘Turkish’ mainland. Added to the question over his reliability for another mission, Mark was not only related to Barnabas but also to Peter. Although Peter had supported Paul’s mission at the Jerusalem Conference, Paul was concerned that Mark might be inclined to take the same line that Peter and Barnabas had taken in Antioch in favour of a two-table meal-time.

For Barnabas, it would have been intolerable that Paul would question his judgement, having himself stood up for Paul a decade earlier when others had doubted him. Now he wanted to do the same for his nephew and give him a second chance to prove himself. The solution that emerged was that Barnabas and John Mark would go back to Cyprus, while Paul would go to Galatia and beyond, but only after a blazing row, what Luke refers to by the Greek word, a paroxysm. It left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth, and a sorrowful memory in their souls. So Barnabas and Mark sailed away, not only to Cyprus but right out of the narrative of Acts, though Mark later re-emerges as a trusted and valued colleague of Paul’s (Col. 4: 10; Philemon 23; 2 Tim. 4: 11). Paul chose Silas (or ‘Silvanus’) as his new travel companion, like Paul a Roman citizen and a member of the church in Jerusalem who had been entrusted with the epistle that the elders had sent to the wider churches. The church in Antioch sent them on their way, commending them to God’s grace.

The Second Missionary Journey:

The ‘Second Missionary Journey’ was to be marked by a momentous new departure, but it was not premeditated as such. It began, unadventurously, as a return visit to the young churches founded on the previous tour. Following this, the missionaries pursued a curiously devious and uncertain course, without finding any opening for fresh work, until they reached the shore of the Aegean at Troas, not far south of the Dardanelles (Acts 16: 6-8). It is at this point that we come upon the first extract from the ‘travel diary’ incorporated in Acts:

We at once set about getting a passage to Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to bring them the good news.

(Acts 16: 10).

The decision to cross from Asia into Europe proved a turning point, opening a new period in Paul’s missionary career, during which he really found himself. It is also a period which is richly illuminated for us by the letters he wrote during it. A comparatively short sea passage brought the party to the nearest port on the European side, and they made their way through Macedonia towards the province of Achaia or ‘Greece’. Several churches were founded, though the tour was chequered by the usual opposition. At Philippi, it came from pagans, not without tones of anti-Semitism (Acts 16: 19-24). One of the big differences between Philippi and the earlier cities of Paul’s mission was that there was no synagogue. That became significant when the locals identified Paul as a Jew; it looks as though the city knew just enough about Jews to be prejudiced against them. Paul had grown familiar with the usual Gentile jibes and sneers against his people, and now he heard them again. There was, however, a proseuche, a ‘place of prayer’ where a small number of Jews and ‘God-fearers’ (non-Jews who wanted to join in synagogue worship) would meet regularly. This was where, after a few days settling in, Paul and the others made a start. Their first convert was a businesswoman from Thyatira, Lydia by name, described as “a seller of purple.” Her story of response to the gospel appears the most straightforward of any in Acts: The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying. She was the head of her household, suggesting that she may have been widowed, and was baptised with all her household, inviting the whole Christian party; Paul, Silas, Timothy and Luke to stay at her home. The announcement of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah seems to have caused little difficulty in the small Jewish meeting place, but pagans grabbed hold of Paul and Silas, dragged them into the public square and presented them to the magistrates, declaring:

“These men are throwing our city into an uproar! They are Jews, and they are teaching customs which it is illegal for us Romans to accept or practice!”

(I Cor. 4: 3-4).

The irony cannot have been lost on Paul. The anger and violence he had faced in Galatia and the opposition to his missionary strategy in Jerusalem and Antioch had been instigated by ethnic Jewish groups furious at his ‘disloyalty’ to the ancestral traditions. Now he was accused of being a subversive Jew, in common with those who had rebelled against Rome before, teaching people to be disloyal to Rome! It all ended with a public apology and with the magistrates, clearly at a loss to know what to do next, imploring Paul and Silas to go away. They took their time in complying, visiting Lydia’s house and conversing with the group of believers there, and Timothy caught up with the two of them in Berea, but not Luke. Philippi was an important city in its own right, but Thessalonica, Paul’s next ‘port of call’ was even more so. It was on the main crossroads and its role as a port at the head of the Thermaic Gulf to the west of the Chalcidice Peninsula guaranteed its prosperity. It was the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia, and the Roman general Pompey had used it as his base in the civil war. In Paul’s day, it was not an official Roman colony, however: that was to come two centuries later, but it was already a major centre of Roman influence.

Unlike Philippi, Thessalonica had a sufficiently large Jewish population to sustain a synagogue. Luke’s summary of what Paul said on the three Sabbaths he spoke there conforms both to the earlier summaries and to Paul’s own repeated statements in his letters. The message was accepted by some of the Jews, several of the God-fearing Greeks, and quite a number of the leading women. It also appears from Paul’s letter to Thessalonica, written not long after this initial visit, that many in the young church there had been polytheistic pagans and had turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God (I Thess. 1: 9). Clearly, this was a significant group of both Jews and Gentiles. One member in particular, Jason, gave hospitality to Paul and Silas, facing the brunt of the anger aroused for doing so. Some of the synagogue community turned against the missionaries and stirred up a mob, bent on violence, but they could not find them. What mattered, however, was the political nature of the charges that were thrown around as all this was going on:

“These are the people who are turning the world upside down!” they yelled. “Now they’ve come here! Jason has them in his house! They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar – and they’re saying that there is another king, Jesus!”

(Acts 17: 6-7).

It was true, of course, that if non-Jews were abandoning idols and worshipping the God of Israel, without formally becoming Jews, then they were indeed disobeying Caesar’s decrees. Only genuine Jews had that permission. So this meant that broadly speaking, Paul and his group were turning the world upside down. Paul and his friends were announcing and modelling in their own lives a different way of being human, a different kind of community, and all because there was a different kind of ‘king’. In any case, Jason and his friends were bound over to keep the peace, while Paul and Silas were smuggled out-of-town by night and sent on to Berea, about fifty miles to the west, but off the main route. They leave in a hurry, with a sense that the little body of believers is under threat. At Thessalonica and Beroea the old pattern reasserted itself: the Jewish opposition made mischief with the civil authorities, and Paul was obliged to move on, leaving his companions behind (Acts 17: 1-14). He arrived at Athens by boat alone (Acts 17: 15), in great disquiet (as he tells us in letters to Thessalonica written about this time) about the new converts whom he had been compelled by the local authorities to leave prematurely (I Thess. 2: 13-35; II Thess. 3: 6-16). Nevertheless, he bravely continued his ministry while waiting there for Silas and Timothy:

He wandered through the streets; everywhere there were temples and images of Greek gods. This made Paul very unhappy. He had to talk to somebody about it. He went to the Jewish Meeting House and argued there; he went to the market place and argued with anybody who happened to be there. There were many lecturers in the city, for its university was very famous; some of them met Paul, and he argued with them.

“What’s this chatterer talking about?” sneered some.

“It’s some foreign fellow talking about his gods, it seems,” said others.

The City Council was called ‘Mars Hill’, after the name of the hill where it used to meet in earlier times. This Council was specially interested in all new speakers who came to teach in Athens. The citizens of Athens and their foreign visitors always had time to talk about or listen to anything strange and new; they seemed to do nothing else.

The lecturers got hold of Paul and took him before the Council.

“Tell us, if you please, something more about this ‘news’ of yours,” they said. “What you’ve been talking about seems very strange to us. We’d like to know what it’s all about.”

Paul stood before the Council.

“Citizens of Athens,” he said, “by just wandering around your streets, I can see that religion matters very much to you. I had a good look at your temples and the images of your gods. And I noticed one altar that had these words on it: “To an Unknown God”. You do not know him; I will tell you about him.

“The God who made the world and all that’s in it by that very fact is the Master of the whole world. His home can’t be a in a street that you can build with your own hands. … We may belong to different nations now, but at the beginning God made us all one people and gave us the whole world for our home. All things are in his hands – the rise and fall of nations and the boundaries of their territories. He did all this for one purpose only – the men and women might look for him and find him.

“Yet he is very near every one of us. Your own poets have said this very thing –

‘In God we live and move and exist’,

“and…

‘We, too, belong to his family.’

“If, therefore, we belong to God, we can’t possibly think that gold and silver and stone are good enough to show us what he is like. No artist can paint God’s picture, however clever or thoughtful he may be.

“What then, has God done? He takes no notice of the past, when we didn’t know what he was like. But today, in our own time, he calls all people to change their ways. We can no longer say we do not know; Jesus has made him plain. The day is fixed when everybody everywhere will be judged by this man he has chosen – and truly judged. The proof of this he has given to all men – he has raised him from the dead.”

Some of them laughed out loud at Paul when they heard him talk like this – about God ‘raising Jesus from the dead’. But there were others.

“We will hear you again about all this,” they said.

For this, and for other reasons, he was in low spirits (as he tells us in retrospect in I Cor. 2: 3) as he left Athens for Corinth which became, as it turned out, the scene of his greatest success to date. Corinth had been one of the most important of the old Greek city-states. After its destruction by the Romans, it had been re-founded by Julius Caesar and had become capital of the province of Achaia. Situated on the isthmus which separates the Aegean from the Adriatic, and the eastern part of the empire from the western, it had become an immensely busy and prosperous centre of trade, with a multi-cultural population. It also had the unsavoury reputation which cosmopolitan seaport towns seem to attract.

It was in Corinth that Paul, reunited with his companions, spent nearly two years, maintaining himself by working at his trade of tent-making (Acts 18: 3, 11, 18). It was his longest sojourn anywhere since he had started on his journeys. His breach with the orthodox Jews set him free for independent action. He left the synagogue, taking with him one of its office-holders, and (perhaps in an act of deliberate defiance) set up his headquarters in a nearby house belonging to a Gentile believer (Acts 18: 5-8). The opposition once more tried to embroil him with the civil authorities, but the proconsul refused to enter the charges they brought, as being no more than some bickering about words and names and your Jewish law. The case was dismissed, which must have considerably strengthened Paul’s position (Acts 18: 12-17). He succeeded in building up a numerous and active if somewhat turbulent, Christian community, predominantly Gentile in membership before he left to return to Jerusalem and Antioch via Ephesus (Acts 18: 18-22), which he had already marked out as his next centre of work. It was in Ephesus that he was to meet a darker level of opposition which helps us to understand why he wrote as he did in II Corinthians of reaching the point where he was giving up on life itself.

(to be continued…)

Posted February 27, 2019 by AngloMagyarMedia in anti-Semitism, Asia Minor, Christian Faith, Christianity, Church, Civilization, Colonisation, Compromise, Crucifixion, Discourse Analysis, Europe, Genesis, Gentiles, Humanities, Integration, Israel, Jerusalem, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Jews, Josephus, Marriage, Mediterranean, Memorial, Messiah, Middle East, Migration, multiculturalism, multilingualism, Mysticism, Narrative, New Testament, Palestine, Paul (Saint), Reconciliation, Remembrance, Respectability, Resurrection, Romans, Simon Peter, Statehood, Syria, Turkey, Uncategorized, xenophobia

Tagged with Achaia, Acts of the Apostles, Adriatic, Aegean, Anatolia, Antioch, Athens, Barnabas, Business, Caesar, Cephas (Peter), Chalcidice, Christianity, circumcision, Corinth, Covenant, culture, Dardanelles, Diaspora, Ephesus, Exodus, Faith, faithfulness, Galatia, Gethsemane, Graeco-Roman, Greece, health, Hezekiah, History, Holy Spirit, housing, hypocrisy, Iconium, inheritance, James, Jewish Law, John Mark, Kyrios, Last Supper, Lystra, Macedonia, Mission, Moses, pagans, paroxysm, Pentateuch, Philemon, Philippi, Pisidia, Poetry, politics, Pompey, Prayer, Red Sea, religion, Rome, Silas, society, Tarsus, Temple, Thermaic Gulf, Thessalonica, Timothy, Torah, Trade, Turkey

Andrew James The whole of human life is here!

Archive for the ‘Paul (Saint)’ Category

‘God’s Own People’ – Welsh Puritans, The New Model Army & The Commonwealth. Leave a comment

‘Williams alias Cromwell’ – God’s Welshman?:

Court & Country in Stuart Times:

“I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in considerable height, nor yet in obscurity”.

Cromwell’s House in Ely is a museum today, as shown above, and below.

… scarce any minister in some whole shires, as in Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland and especially in Wales.

Eighteen years later, the evangelical minister and Parliamentary chaplain, Richard Baxter, argued that…

… multitudes in England, and more in Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, the Highlands, are scarce able to talk reason about common things. Are these … fit to have the sovereign power, to rule the Commonwealth?

… they are eagerly debating on the reformation in the whole kingdom … that all young people should be instructed, none neglected.

Wales in the Civil Wars – Royalists to Roundheads:

Cromwell and the generals also advocated the disappearance of Parliament and the handing of power to a provisional government, in which they themselves would naturally predominate, to supervise and control elections. How otherwise, he asked, could one know …

… whether the next Parliament were not like to consist of all Presbyterians. … Thus, as we apprehended, would have been thrown away the liberties of the nation into the hands of those who had never fought for it.

You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament …

The ‘Coral Growth’ of the Welsh Independents:

… baptised churches have the greatest fall (harvest) from the northern saints in both in England and Wales … John’s spirit is in the North of England and the spirit of Jesus rising in North Wales is for the fall of all the churches in the South. The whirlwind comes from the North.

… emissaries out of the sectaries’ churches are sent to infect and poison … Yorkshire and those northern parts, … Bristol and Wales. … Sects begin to grow fast … for want of a settlement in discipline.

… having marched up and down the kingdom, to do the work of God and the state … met with many Christians who have much gospel-light … in such places where there hath been no gospel-ministry.

The Bible & Radical Puritanism in the Protectorate:

Afore I looked upon the Scripture as a history of things that passed in other countrie, pertaining to other persons; but now I looked upon it as a mystery to be opened at this time, belonging also to us.

The Growth of Quakerism in Wales & the West of England – The Strange Case of Dorcas Erbery:

If I were not his Lamb, I should not be thus sought for to be devoured. The hope of Israel stands in the righteousness of the Father in whomsoever it is.

Dear heart, my love is to thee and to J.N. and to J.S. and H.S. But this I could not but write to warn you that you stand single to the Lord and not believe every sprit. Your work is soon to come to an end: part of the army that fell at Burford was your figure.

However, it does not appear that Dorcas Erbery’s judgment was so completely rectified as was supposed, for in two years from this date she was again in prison in Bristol, …

… with many others … for preaching and declaring the truth to the people in the public places of resort and Concourse, a Duty which they esteemed themselves under an indispensable necessity of performing.

The Welsh Prophet, ‘Arise’ Evans:

‘Arise’ (Rhys) Evans spoke of his own humble origins with reference to the apostles:

I am as the Paul of this time. … he was a mechanic, a tent maker. Acts 18:3. I am a tailor.

The Evanses studied it very carefully, if less skilfully, in order to understand and so be able to control what was going to happen.

Propagating the Gospel & Protecting the State – Vavasour Powell & Oliver Cromwell:

The Power & the Glory:

Would it not make England like Switzerland, one canton of the Swiss against another, and one county against another? And what would that produce but an absolute desolation in the nation?

… aspersing the loyal majority of its officers as janissaries and pensioners of Babylon, corrupted by wealth and power.

Vavasour Powell, in particular, told the generals that:

… that the Spirit of God had departed from them; that heretofore they had been precious and excellent men, but that their parks, and new houses, and gallant wives had choked them up.

Restoration, Revolution & Toleration:

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Three ‘Great’ Hymns of the Twentieth Century, commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Lunar Landing. 1 comment

On 20 July 1969 human beings stepped onto the surface of the moon, in one giant leap for mankind.

A Giant Leap of Imagination:

The Dawning of a New Age?

He’s the Alpha and Omega,

The Beginning and the End,

The first and last,

Our eternal friend.

Another of their ‘millenarian’ songs, Multitudes, also emphasised the importance of the Day of the Lord, which seemed to chime in well with the ‘nuclear age’ and the Eve of Destruction songs of Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire, among others.

Sun, Moon and Stars in their Courses Above:

Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

there is no shadow of turning with thee;

thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not,