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By W. Ward Gasque
POPE Benedict XVI has proclaimed 28 June 2008 through
29 June 2009 as a special jubilee year dedicated to Saint Paul. The Pauline
year commemorates the 2,000th anniversary of the Apostle’s birth.
Catholic Christians are encouraged to: organize group
Bible studies to read and discuss the letters of Paul; make a pilgrimage to
a church or Christian institution dedicated to Saint Paul; give thanks for
the apostolic mission of Paul and pray for the countries to which Paul
traveled (Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Italy); share
the gospel locally; and support the spread of the gospel abroad.
You don’t have to be Catholic in order to join in
this celebration! As an evangelical Protestant and life-long student of the
Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Paul, I tend to think of every year as a year to
celebrate the accomplishments of Paul.
My wife and I first visited the lands of the Levant on
our extended honeymoon many years ago, and we have visited Turkey, Greece,
Palestine and Italy on numerous occasions since – using the Book of
the Acts and the Letters of Paul as our guides.
Next to our Lord himself, he is the most influential
person in shaping the way the Christian faith was understood by the
earliest Christians – and the missionary pioneer who founded churches
all around the eastern Roman Empire, and set a pattern for global mission
down to our day.
Paul of Tarsus was certainly one of the most important
people in history. We don’t know the exact date of his birth, but it
was approximately 2,000 years ago. Benedict XVI is a distinguished New
Testament scholar and is basing his appeal on firm historical grounds
rather than vague tradition.
‘Bridge apostle’
In the New Testament, Paul is the ‘bridge
apostle’ – able to move with ease between the cultures of
Jerusalem and Judea on the eastern edge of the Roman empire, and those of
the influential Greek cities of the eastern Roman provinces.
Thus, when Barnabas was sent by the leaders of the
Jerusalem church to check out things in the metropolis of Antioch in Syria,
he found there was now a church in which the majority of its members
were Gentiles. Barnabas decided quickly that this radically new situation
required a man with unique gifts – namely, Saul of Tarsus (Acts 11:
22-26).
So Paul, Barnabas and three other prominent teachers
laid the foundation in Antioch for what was to come in the decades that lay
ahead.
When he is first mentioned in Acts, Paul’s name
is ‘Saul.’ This was his Jewish family name (in Aramaic or
Hebrew).
As a member of the tribe of Benjamin, his parents named
him for the most prominent member of this tribe historically: the first
king of Israel.
But from the time of his first missionary journey in
Cyprus on his way to the mainland of what is today Turkey, the author of
Acts uses his Roman cognomen, Paul (Paulus). This is the name he uses
in his letters, which are, of course, written in Greek. He would have had
two additional Roman names, but we do not know what they were.
Multicultural
Paul was born in Tarsus (Acts 21:39). but he was
educated in Jerusalem (Acts 22:3), where he had family (Acts 23:16).
So he was both multilingual and multicultural from his early years.
In his maturity, he was a master of four languages and cultures.
As a Roman citizen, he would be expected to speak
Latin. There is not a lot of evidence in his writings that this
influenced the way he spoke or wrote Greek, but he clearly looked at the
world through Roman eyes.
His vision was never provincial; rather, he thought in
terms of the whole world. He saw the world united under the Lord
Jesus, rather than the Lord Caesar. And his Roman citizenship afforded him
the special protection of the Roman magistrates – though he
eventually was to be executed for treason against the State.
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As a devout Jew, he had been sent to study the faith
with one of the most distinguished Jewish scholars of the day, Rabbi
Gamaliel. Aramaic, the language that the Jews brought back to
Palestine from the Babylonian captivity, was his mother tongue. It was also
the primary language of Palestinian Jewish religious instruction and
tradition.
But he was also a scholar, proficient in the Hebrew
scriptures, which he normally quotes from the Greek translation prevalent
in his day. However, Paul is able to make his own, fresh translation
from the Hebrew – and also to translate from the Aramaic paraphrases
of the Bible used in the Aramaic speaking synagogues.
Paul was also an heir of Greek language and culture.
Greek had been dominant in the Levant since the days of Alexander the
Great (4th Century BC). It was the language of education and commerce, very
similar to the role played by international English today.
Greek is the language that Paul used to carry the
gospel westward across Cyprus, Galatia, and Asia on into Europe (Greece
proper) – establishing many of the churches to whom he wrote, and
also others.
Man of mystery
People ask many questions about Paul. For
example, did Paul know Jesus? He was a younger contemporary of our
Lord. However, Jesus spent most of his life in Galilee, and Paul
would have been in Jerusalem (Judea) – and, one would suppose,
in and around his home, Tarsus. Some have suggested that
2 Corinthians 5:16 indicates he did know the
earthly Jesus; but that is not the best interpretation of this text.
Was Paul married? When he wrote
1 Corinthians 7:7, he clearly was
not. But that does not mean that he was never married. Life expectancy was
not long in antiquity, and his wife may have died in childbirth, or as a
result of some illness.
So he may have been a widower. Or perhaps his
wife rejected him when he confessed Jesus to be the Messiah.
In Philippians 3:8, Paul speaks of having lost all
things for the sake of Christ. This may have included the loss of
family (as is the case of some Jews who confess Jesus as Messiah today).
We don’t really know, but some scholars find it
hard to believe that the writer who dealt with the psychology of human
sexuality as Paul did would have been able to do so without the first-hand
experience of sexual relations.
Finally, what did Paul look like? We have a
possibly reliable description in a 2nd Century document entitled Acts of Paul and Thecla.
Here he is portrayed as “a man small of stature,
with a bald head and crooked legs, in a good state of body, with eyebrows
meeting and nose somewhat hooked, full of grace [or friendliness]; for now
he appeared like a man, and now he had a face of an angel” (quoted in
F. F. Bruce, Paul, Apostle of the Heart Set Free, p. 468).
Bruce’s book on Paul, published by Eerdmans,
would be a good place to begin reading, alongside the New Testament, as you
seek to remember the life and ministry of ‘the Apostle to the
Gentiles’ in this Year of Saint Paul.
W. Ward Gasque is a veteran biblical scholar, and a
co-founder of Regent College. Currently, he is English ministries pastor of
Richmond Chinese Alliance Church. He and his wife Laurel, an art
historian, will be leading a tour through the cities of Paul in Cyprus,
Greece, Malta and Rome this spring, to celebrate the Year of Paul.
He can be contacted at wardgasque@gmail.com.
October 2008
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