PAUL This page intentionally left blank Paul His Story Jerome Murphy-O’Connor OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD • Great Clarendon Street,Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department ofthe University ofOxford. 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You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library ofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–926653–0 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd,King’s Lynn,Norfolk For DAVID and CATHERINE MANNING Who Asked for the Story and DECLAN and EMER MEAGHER Who Ensured that I Survived to Write It This page intentionally left blank Preface THEwriting of this book was a wonderful adventure in attempting to transform a life into a story.There are many lives of Paul of Tarsus, but all of them are content to highlight the points that can be estab- lished with a degree of probability. The focus is on the arguments that sustain the conclusions, and the ‘facts’ that come to light are presented as trophies in splendid isolation. The very nature of the process ensures that Paul can never emerge as a vital personality. Certain things are discovered about him, but he is not seen as a dis- tinctive individual. In most instances he comes across essentially as a disembodied mind from which pour theological ideas. In Paul:A Critical Life(Oxford:Clarendon Press,1996),I wrote just such a book. What made it different from the others was the weight Igave to the letters as the prime source of biographical material.The result was the outline of a life, which not only differed at crucial points from that elaborated by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles,but was much more detailed.All the points established there are taken for granted here without further documentation:namely,the chronology of Paul’s life,his relations with his foundations,the problems he faced in various situations,the composite character of certain letters,etc. I now see these ‘facts’ as the parts of a skeleton. It is well pre- served.The skull and all the bones are there.They have been meas- ured and defined. They are strong and weight-bearing. But they do not move. In this book I want to make these bones live by clothing them with flesh, and infusing them with the breath of life. Paul has to become the hero of a story. Thus I reconstruct his life in sufficient detail to give it consistency and colour, and recount the events in chronological order. A strong narrative line is the only way to give a sense of Paul as a person. Inevitably, much is hypothetical and imaginative. In every case, however,the underlying hypothesis is the most probable one,and my imagination is controlled by contemporary sources and monuments, and by my own experiences in the places that Paul visited. Preface Unlike Luke,I put no speeches in Paul’s mouth,but I do concern myself with what Paul might have thought and felt.The control here is simple common sense.He must have worked things out before he made decisions. Thus I have him sift possibilities, often in the con- text of a journey towards a new situation. He could be impetuous and rush into disastrous errors in strategy or tactics. In such cases Itry to explain why things went wrong,and how he worked to avoid the same mistakes in the future. I assume also that Paul was normal in his response to external stimuli. Thus, since I was moved by the extraordinary beauty of Mount Casius at dawn,I presume that Paul’s heart also lifted at the sight as he tramped south out of Antioch-on-the-Orontes. I would have been astounded at the main street in Pessinus,which was built in a river bed and by design filled with water in heavy rain,so I ima- gine that Paul often scratched his head in amazement during the winter he spent with the Galatians.It was not the way they did things back home in Antioch! The Celts were really very odd. One feature of this book is the emphasis I give to times and dis- tances. These are scaled from the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World(Princeton:Princeton University Press,2000),to which I give references wherever possible.Its scale is so large,and the maps so beautifully drawn and coloured,that one can virtually see the ter- rain through which Paul is travelling. My purpose is to remind the reader that everything took a lot longer in Paul’s day. We need to slow down radically if we are to appreciate the rhythm of his life.We tend to imagine that travel and communications were just somewhat slower than today. In fact, there was a huge quantitative difference, which had a great impact on the quality of communication. Only when we realize that Paul, or one of his letter-carriers, was lucky to average 20 miles (32km) a day—a figure which takes into account sickness, injury, bad weather, rumours of bandits or wolves on the road, or the need to wait for a caravan that would provide some measure of security—can we understand ‘the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches’ (2 Cor. 11: 28). Letters took weeks, if not months, to reach their destination. Paul was out of touch with his converts most of the time, even when they were in viii Preface greatest need of him.To say that frustration and apprehension ate at his soul is legitimate interpretation, not gratuitous imagining. And when information did arrive, his feelings inevitably coloured his response. This is but one illustration of how I exploit details in his letters in order to reveal what was going on inside Paul. His emotions were very close to the surface. The swiftness of the mood swings in chapter 4 of 1 Corinthians is extraordinary.Reasonable moderation (vv. 1–6) gives way to savage sarcasm (vv. 7–10), which is replaced by brave self-pity (vv. 11–13), which becomes anxious affection (vv. 14–17), and explodes into heated warnings (vv. 18–21). There are many such clues to Paul’s feelings.Yet they have never been sys- tematically followed up. We get to know Paul’s character, however, by discovering what made him exhilarated or depressed, concerned or indifferent,carefree or frightened.His emotions were as much part of his personality as his intelligence,and the two were in continuous interaction. He was anything but the passionless thinker that main- stream scholarship has made him out to be. In order to avoid slipping into the genre of the historical novel, Ihave not created highly specificsituations or imagined dialogue.I do not have Paul start up,his face alight with anticipation,at the knock on the door that might herald the long-delayed arrival of Timothy from Thessalonica. Nor do I put words in the mouths of Peter and Paul when they talked about Jesus in Jerusalem, or when they viol- ently debated the rights and wrongs of eating with Gentiles at Antioch.To go into such specific detail,I feel,would be illegitimate use of historical imagination in this sort of book,because no control is possible. The typicalis another matter entirely.One first-century boat,road or inn was very much like another, and we have a mass of contem- porary data on which to base a vivid picture of a voyage, a journey or a night at an inn.In such instances,the imagination is under tight control. It is inventive only to the extent that it generalizes and colours individual historical experiences. There are a number of reasons for the complete absence of foot- notes.The most obvious one is that I am telling a story,not writing ix