Paul

from The Evolution of God:
Anyone who wanted to set up a far-flung organization in the ancient world faced two big problems: transportation technology and information technology. In those days information couldn’t travel faster than the person carrying it, who in turn couldn’t travel faster than the animal carrying the person. Once Paul had founded a congregation and left to found another one in a distant city, he was in another world; he couldn’t return often to check on the operation, and he couldn’t tire off e-mails to keep church leaders in line. 

Faced with what strike us today as such glaring technological deficiencies, Paul made the most of what information technology there was: epistles. He sent letters to distant congregations in an attempt to keep them consonant with his overall mission. The results are with us today in the form of the New Testament’s Pauline Epistles (or, at least, the seven, out of thirteen, that most scholars consider authentic). These letters aren’t just inspiring spiritual reflections-though they are often that-but tools for solving administrative problems. 

Consider that famous ode to love in I Corinthians. This letter was written in response to a crisis. Since his departure from Corinth, the church had been split by factionalism, and Paul faced rivals for authority. Early in the letter he laments the fact that some congregants say, “I belong to Paul,” whereas others say, “I belong to Cephas.” 

There is a second and possibly related problem. Many in the church-“enthusiasts,” some scholars call them-believed themselves to have direct access to divine knowledge and to be near spiritual perfection. Some thought they needn’t accept the church’s guidance in moral matters. Some showed off their spiritual gifts by spontaneously speaking in tongues during worship services, something that might annoy the humbler worshippers and that, in large enough doses, could derail a service. As the scholar Gunther Bornkamm has put it, “The mark of the ‘enthusiasts’ was that they disavowed responsible obligation toward the rest.”  In other words: they lacked brotherly love. Hence Paul’s harping on that theme in I Corinthians and, especially, in chapter 13 (the “love chapter,” which has figured in so many weddings). In light of this context, the language in that Chapter makes a new kind of sense. It 'is in reference to disrupting worship by speaking in tongues that Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” And when he says that “love is not envious or boastful or arrogant,” he is chastising Corinthians who deploy their spiritual gifts-whether speaking in tongues, or prophesying, or even generosity-in a competitive, showy way. 

Paul didn’t go so far as to ban speaking in tongues. But he did stress that speaking to your brothers in a language they can’t understand isn’t a loving act, whereas to speak intelligibly is to “speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.” Accordingly, he laid down some guidelines. As a rule, no one should speak in tongues unless there is someone present who can validly interpret, and even then the speakers should be few and orderly: “If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn.” Prophecy, on the other hand, is fine, because it is intelligible and hence can serve others. (But mightn’t people use their claimed prophetic powers to question Paul’s authority? Don’t worry-Paul is way ahead of you; “Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have spiritual powers, must acknowledge that What I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. Anyone who does not recognize this is not to be recognized.”)

The beauty of “brotherly love” wasn’t just that it produced cohesion in Christian congregations. Invoking familial feelings also allowed Paul to assert his authority at the expense of rivals. After all, wasn’t it he, not they, who had founded the family of Corinthian Christians? He tells the Corinthians that he is writing “to admonish you as my beloved children. . . .Indeed. in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. I appeal to you, then be imitators of me. Had Paul stayed among the Corinthians, he might have kept the congregation united by the mere force of his presence, with less preaching about the need for unity-the need for all brothers to be one in “the body of Christ.” But because he felt compelled to move on and cultivate churches across the empire, he had to implant brotherly love as a governing value and nurture it assiduously In the case of I Corinthians, chapter 13, the result was some of western civilization’s most beautiful literature-if, perhaps, more beautiful out of context than in. 

Thus, for the ambitious preacher of early Christianity, the doctrine of brotherly love had at least two Virtues. First, fraternal bonding made churches attractive places to be, providing a familial warmth that was otherwise lacking, for many, in a time of urbanization and flux. As the scholar Elaine Pagels has written, “From the beginning, what attracted outsiders who walked into a gathering of Christians . . . was the presence of a group joined by spiritual power into an extended family.” ‘9 (And there is no doubt that Paul wanted his Churches to project an appealing image. In I Corinthians he asks: If “the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind?”) Second, the doctrine of brotherly love became a form of remote control, a tool Paul could use at a distance to induce congregational cohesion. 

Strictly speaking, this emphasis on brotherhood didn’t always mean an emphasis on interethnic brotherhood. For all we know, some of these early congregations weren’t ethnically diverse-in which case cohesion within individual churches didn’t need to involve bonding across ethnic bounds. So where does this connotation of Christian brotherly love come from? 

Part of the answer is that transcending ethnicity was built into Paul’s conception of his divinely imparted mission. He was to be the Apostle to the Gentiles; he was to carry the saving grace of the Jewish messiah-~Jesus Christ-beyond the Jewish world. Here, at the origin of Paul’s aspirations, he is crossing the bridge he famously crossed in saying there is no longer “Jew or Greek,” for all are now eligible for God’s salvation. 

In putting Jew and Greek on an equal basis, Paul was, in a sense, placing pragmatism above scriptural principle. By Paul’s own account, the scriptural basis for his mission to the Gentiles lay in the prophetic writings, notably in the apocalyptic expectations of Second Isaiah, who envisioned a coming messiah and a long overdue burst of worldwide reverence for Yahweh. And, as we saw in chapter 7, these passages aren’t exactly an ode to ethnic egalitarianism. The basic idea is that the Gentile nations will abjectly submit to the rule of Israel’s god and hence to Israel. God promises the Israelites that after salvation arrives, Egyptians and Ethiopians alike “shall come over to you and be yours, they shall come over in chains and bow down to you. They will make supplication to you.” Indeed, “every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” Thus, “In the LORD all the offspring of Israel shall triumph and glory.” 

Of course, Christians like to look back and stress the less nationalistic passages of Second Isaiah- such as Yahweh’s promise to bring salvation “to the end of the earth,” with Israel ultimately serving a selfless role of illumination, as a “light unto the nations.” But these aren’t the passages Paul himself emphasized. Explaining his mission to the Gentiles in a letter to the Romans, he quotes the Verse about every knee bowing and every tongue swearing without mentioning anything about a light unto the nations. He declares that his job is to help “win obedience from the Gentiles.” In line with past apocalyptic prophets, he seems to think that the point of the exercise is for the world to submit to Israel’s messiah; Jesus, Paul Says in quoting First Isaiah, is “the one who rises to rule the Gen tiles.” And Paul seems to accept the idea that ethnic bloodlines can guarantee divine favor, even salvation, for those who wouldn’t otherwise merit it; though many Jews don’t see that Jesus is the Messiah, “as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors.” But ultimately these and other theoretical dispositions mattered little compared to the facts on the ground. Any residual scriptural overtones of Jewish superiority to Gentiles that Paul may have carried into his work were diluted by a key strategic decision he made early on.

There were other Jewish followers of Jesus who, like Paul, wanted to carry the gospel to the Gentiles. But many of them insisted that in order to qualify for Jesus’s saving grace, Gentiles had to abide by the Jewish Law, the Torah, which meant following strict dietary rules and, moreover, undergoing circumcision. In the days before modern anesthesia, requiring grown men to have penis surgery in order to join a religion fell under the rubric “disincentive.” 

Paul grasped the importance of such barriers to entry. So far as Gentiles were concerned, he jettisoned most of the Jewish dietary code and, with special emphasis, the circumcision mandate: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” Paul was so intent on dropping the circumcision barrier that, when he argued with fellow Jesus followers over this issue, his sense of brotherly love sometimes deserted him. In his letter to the Galatians he expressed the wish that those who preached mandatory circumcision would “castrate themselves!” (And some scholars say that “castrate” is a euphemistic rendering of a Greek passage signifying more dramatic surgery. “Cut the whole thing off!” is an alternative translation.) 

There is little doubt about Paul’s strategic wisdom. Many religions of the day, including some of the “mystery religions,” were open to people of varied ethnicities. But these movements tended to have hurdles to membership, including financial ones, such as priests who charged initiation fees. Christian churches enjoyed a competitive edge by having no such financial barriers, and Paul kept the edge sharp by making sure these weren’t replaced by other kinds of barriers. 

This decision to leave recruiting unshackled by the Jewish Law not only mitigated the drift of Paul’s letter to the Romans-the idea that his mission was to subjugate Gentiles on behalf of Israel’s messiah. It also got Paul accused of “rejecting” the Torah. But this “rejection” was meant to apply to Gentile recruits to the Jesus movement. Indeed, Paul may have considered himself a good, Torah-abiding Jew, albeit one who, in contrast to most other Jews, was convinced that the Jewish messiah had finally arrived. (In none of his letters does Paul use the word “Christian.”) 

Whether or not Paul thought of his identity as now severed from Judaism, he couldn’t afford to sever Judaism’s ties to the Jesus movement, because he needed to use the infrastructure of Jewish worship. According to the book of Acts, when he came to a city and set out to recruit people to the movement, he sometimes started his preaching at the local synagogue. Indeed, according to Acts, some of Paul’s most important early recruits were Jews. So, even as practical considerations distanced Paul’s variant of the Jesus movement from Jewish ritual, they encouraged ongoing contact with the Jewish world. And, even as Paul chafed at the rejection of his doctrines by some Jews within the Jesus movement (to say nothing of Jews outside it), he continued to seek rapprochement, trying to preserve a broad base. 

In short, the kind of bridge Paul built to the Gentile world wound up alienating a lot of Jews, and maybe even alienating Paul from them, but it was a bridge he couldn’t afford to burn. So an inter~ ethnic symbiosis persisted and colored Paul’s writing. Thus did the phrase “neither Greek nor Jew” enter the scripture, with its enduring connotations of ethnic egalitarianism. 

There were aspects of Paul’s business model that pushed even more powerfully toward interethnic bonding. To see them, begin with the reference above to some “important early recruits” being Jews. Now leave aside the part about some of them being Jews and focus on "important" recruits.
Though Christianity is famous for welcoming the poor and powerless, to actually "run" the congregation paul needed people who could provide a meeting place. And many of the early associates of Paul were like him travelers. These businessmen tolerated ethnic differences for their own financial interests. Also travelers were hosted by their brethren in the church. It might sound cynical to explain the growth of a religion in crass commercial terms, but such practical functions play a role even today.