St Paul, Apostle to The Heathen
The television programme ‘History of the World’ by Andrew Marr recently
presented ‘The spiritual revolutions between 300 BC and AD 700. A large
part of this was devoted to the development of Christianity and the part
which St Paul played within it. It introduced this man, by trade a tent maker,
but with a large part of his life devoted to his work as a Pharisee and Jewish
thinker, as he was persecuting the little sect of Christians, ‘breathing
murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples’ .We have been told that he
was present at the stoning of Stephen, even if he did not pick up any stones
himself. He must have thought that he had done a work pleasing to God by
agreeing to the execution
You can’t imagine St Paul as a quiet person, just like his conversion was the
most dramatic imaginable, which shook him to the core and at the same time
enlightened him and blinded him: “suddenly a light from heaven flashed
around him” (Acts 9). His life afterwards was restless travel in the service of
his new-found task, and so is the style of his letters a continuous
admonishing, and so impressive that it is working across the millennia.
We know very little about his looks, he is often portrayed with a balding head
and rather slim, whereas the television programme showed him as rather
stout with wild hair, possibly as a younger man. The findings in 2009 of
some bones, which Pope Benedict declared to be Paul’s, do not give us
more to see him. Yet it is known that he had a quite intensive gaze which
went right to the heart. We were told that he found a lame man in Lystra
who had listened to Paul preaching and whom he cured by just looking and
calling on him to get up. Even the writers of early Christian history knew that
he was very special.. Eusebius of Cesarea, the first historian who described
the inner and outer fights which the young Church went through, regrets that
we only have been left with Paul’s letters while he probably would have been
able to tell us so much more.
The television programme emphasised, by showing Paul on his travels far
and wide through the then known world, that it was him who was essential
for the spreading of Christianity through the world. He was the apostle of the
heathen, this task meant preserving the Old Testament as a whole, while
rejecting the upholding of Jewish traditions like the circumcision, and
emphasising salvation by Grace alone.
There are within Christianity, still controversies which date back to Paul,
Christianity became more difficult, more ‘dialectic’ .The conflict with Peter
and his reconciliation with him, the removal of the Church from the
Synagogue, belong to this work, it is surprising that the young Church did
not break up over this.
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