After Alexander killed Cleitus, things got worse: his Macedonians and Greeks were increasingly hostile to the changes he made. It galled them to see barbarians, defeated barbarians, sitting on seats of power and basking in the king's favor. Tension grew when Alexander attempted another innovation in the protocol at court. The new step was to expand the use of the Persian custom of prostration; this decision perhaps reflected Alexander's growing sense of his own nature, mixing the human and the divine. In observing this custom, Persians were not worshipping a king as a god. Their religion saw the Great King as an earthly agent of the god Ahura Mazda, but the agent was not himself divine. Greeks saw this custom differently. For them prostration was a posture of adoration and worship practiced in the temples of the gods, before the statues of divinities; it served as a concrete sign in the human world recognizing the deities’ supernatural existence. If Macedonians or Greeks prostrated themselves before Alexander, they would have been implying, at the very least, that their leader was more than human.

In the months after Cleitus’ murder, Alexander conducted an experiment to see if prostration could be accepted as normal protocol in his court, at least when non-Europeans were present in the audience. He discussed his plan ahead of time with a select group of Macedonians and Greeks in his inner circle. They agreed to observe the custom at a carefully orchestrated occasion. Alexander purposely did not order non-Persians to prostrate themselves before him; they would voluntarily follow the lead of his inner circle. The historian Callisthenes was one of those who promised to set the example, as was the philosopher Anaxarchus.

Writing this book has made me rethink what a historical biography of the apostle Paul should be for students and general readers. That intellectual labor has also gone into teaching the course Paul and His Influence in Early Christianity in its multiple versions to hundreds of undergraduates at Indiana, DePaul, and Creighton Universities for nearly twenty years. The fresh, vigorous dialogue in class with such curious minds, at times astonishingly brilliant, has kept my teaching a challenging and lively experience. Rethinking the historical figure of Paul in his context of the Roman Empire continues to sustain my enthusiasm for New Testament studies.

Let me explain briefly what this book is. I aim to bridge the divide between the findings of professional academics and the expectations of a nonacademic audience. I have written strictly as a historian, drawing conclusions about what we can know from the available evidence rather than accepting the truth claims of a religious faith. When reading this book, I suggest keeping at hand a copy of the New Testament so that you can look up the various biblical passages as they arise in the book's analysis. For nonbiblical writings about Paul, Meeks and Fitzgerald (2007) provides an excellent sourcebook and a potential companion volume.

My aim in this chapter is to delineate the strategies by which Paul's language both participated in Roman culture and created distinct claims to authenticity in response to conflicts and reprisals. This approach shifts the scholarly paradigm from Paul against Roman culture, or Paul and Roman culture, to Paul within Roman culture. Paul's letters show that he was a full participant in his cultural home of the Roman world. This point reflects back on and adds to my opening list of paradoxes in Chapter 1: modern people may imagine that Paul subverted the imperialism of the ancient Romans, but in fact he relied on their rhetoric and ideologies. The so-called paradoxes are creations of modern readings that this book challenges. I do not see contradictions in Paul, but consistencies. The consistencies extend even between Paul and Roman culture.

Chapter 2 focused on Paul's founding and nurturing of Christian communities, and on the various internal and external conflicts to which his letters responded. We saw that Paul's greatest adversaries arose from within the Jesus movement – rival apostles proclaiming to Gentiles a different gospel about the Messiah Jesus. This finding raises a central question for this chapter: How can we understand Paul as a “key figure” not just in early Christianity but also in classical antiquity?

Late ancient Christians, seeking meaning for Paul, developed contrasting ideas about the nature of the apostle as an oracle of God. In this chapter, I discuss their diverse literary discourses (in the second to the fourth centuries), in which Paul was not so much a story character to embrace or argue with, but really a kind of book to quote from. The survey includes a number of different Christian writers; some number among the celebrated “fathers of the church” (patristics is the modern study of these writers), while others have faded into the fog of history as so-called heretics. Yet neither ecclesiastical nor scriptural orthodoxy existed in the pre-Constantinian period, an important point to keep in mind throughout this chapter. All these writers belong to the history of Christianity.

The late ancient writers are, in order of their appearance in our survey, Marcion and Valentinus (mid second century), Irenaeus (late second century), Origen (third century), and John Chrysostom (fourth century). These teachers formulated many different “scriptural Pauls.” I begin with a consideration of how Paul's letters, when they became collected into a “book” (Greek codex), shaped the content of ancient Christian literary culture.

The traditional history of Western culture celebrates Paul as the prototypical religious convert. This famous narrative holds that Paul turned his life away from his guilt-filled life as a miserable (read, “Jewish”) sinner by examining his conscience introspectively. In a proverbial dark night of the soul, Paul looked deeply into his conscience and discovered that the shortcomings and incapacities for good within his inner self arose from a general condition of evil present in all human nature. His encounter with the risen Jesus brought him the relief of forgiveness of sins and the freedom of divine grace.

I argue that Paul became this key figure most familiar today not for who he was but for who he came to be in the eyes of his later interpreters. The most important interpreter for this legacy in Western culture is Aurelius Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa (354–430). Augustine developed from Paul's letter to the Romans, among other sources, a theory of Original Sin. According to Augustine, all humanity participated in the sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden (cf. Gen. 3); this sin and its punishment are transmitted to subsequent people through sexual intercourse. The invention of Original Sin in the West brought also the idea of the introspective conscience, influencing a host of modern thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Sigmund Freud. To understand the origins of this Pauline master narrative in Western culture, we need to begin with a Christian prophet named Mani in Persian Mesopotamia and his sect known as the Manichaeans.

Preface and Introduction

Biography: Jopling 1992; O’Brien 1991 (also antibiography); Weitzman 2011, ix–xxvi. Doing history: Tosh 2010, 88–146. Ancient letters as historical sources: White 2010, 63–64. Excellent introductions to Paul's life and letters, the Pauline pseudepigrapha, and the problem of using the Acts of the Apostles as history: Collins 1988; Ehrman 2012, 306–434; Knox 1987; Meeks and Fitzgerald 2007, xiv–xix; Roetzel 1998 and 2009. Ancient forgery: Ehrman 2011 and forthcoming. Paul and Gentile Christianity: Mitchell 2006.

Chapter 1

Paul's birth and education: Baumgarten 2000; Donfried 2006; Engberg-Pedersen 2001; Hays 1989; Hock 2003; Jaffee 2001, 39–64; Mason 2009, 185–215; Saldarini 1992; Stowers 1994. The event at Damascus and Paul's apocalyptic hope for Gentiles: Betz 1992; Eisenbaum 2009; Fredriksen 2002 and 2008, 20–39; Fredriksen 2012, 22–49; Riesner 1998, 14–15; Stendahl 1976, 7–23. Diaspora synagogues: Rajak 2006. From persecutor to apostle: Gager 1981; Hultgren 1976. Epiphanies and confessors: Lane Fox 1986, 376–81; Winkler 1985, 233–34, 238–41. Flight from Damascus: Campbell 2002; Welborn 1999. Jerusalem and Antioch: Fredriksen 2008, 16–40; Murphy-O’Connor 1996, 130–57; Sanders 1990.

1. The Acts of the Apostles, in the New Testament (8–28), ca. 95–115. From the same author of the Gospel of Luke, this highly theological narrative presents Paul as the greatest hero of a “unified” Church, who brings the gospel from its origins in Jerusalem to the imperial capital of Rome, with powerful orations, great miracles, and dramatic travels as God's “chosen instrument” (Acts 9:15), the historical reliability of which is disputed among modern scholars. Historical claims about Paul (and Christian origins) should, therefore, be drawn from Acts only with great caution.

2. The Epistle of James (2:14–26), in the New Testament, ca. late first century. The pseudonymous letter's particular contrast of faith and works, which echoes Paul's own terminology, points to a literary relationship with a corpus of Paul's letters. Discussed in Mitchell 2007.

3. Clement of Rome, First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians (5.1–7; 47), ca. 96. Written by Clement, a Christian leader in Rome, to the church at Corinth, this letter is the earliest attestation of Paul's epistles outside of the New Testament writings. It rebukes certain youthful factions for refusing to give respect to church elders (bishops and deacons), suggesting that conflicts within the Corinthian congregation continued well after Paul's death. It venerates the apostle as a “herald of both East and West,” a reference to Paul's plan in Romans for a Spanish mission. Translated in Ehrman 2003, vol. 2, 43–45, 119–20. . . .

If Paul was controversial in life, he was even more so after his death (ca. 62). We saw in the first part of this book, on the life of Paul, that his mission to Gentiles provoked conflicts with other Christians. As he defended himself, Paul advanced a particularly Roman discourse of “clout” (auctoritas) that asserted his personal authority over potential rivals. In this cultural sense, I argued, we may call Paul Roman. We now turn to the legendary Paul. Over time, the figure of Paul became Roman in a different way – in legal and political senses that imperial officials and other members of the aristocratic elite would have more likely acknowledged as one of their own. To support my thesis in this chapter and the next, I shall discuss quite different texts, from works attributed to Paul to arguments against his teaching, to uses of his writings in discourses and doctrines advanced by powerful ancient church figures (a full list appears in Appendixes 1 and 3). Despite their diversity, the texts represent Paul's growing influence on and significance in vastly different kinds of early Christianity.

We meet, first, Paul the Roman hero and model imperial citizen; in death, the apostle became a martyr venerated as the new Romulus and “second” founder of Rome. Next comes Paul the sexual role model, with whom early Christians debated the value of family, asceticism, and patriarchy. The third Paul in our survey is the Deceiver – Satan's apostle and the mad magician – whose details reflect late ancient anxieties about the figure's emergent fame.

Because Paul must have written more than just two letters to Corinth (see 1 Cor. 5:9), biblical scholars have proposed various theories to reconstruct the complex history of the Corinthian correspondence. Although a few scholars still maintain the literary unity of 2 Corinthians (which is also a hypothesis), a current consensus agrees that 2 Corinthians 10–13 comes originally from a different letter. The identification of the other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle is an open question, however. Indeed, some scholars prefer to remain agnostic on the rest of the pieces rather than presume that we know what Paul wrote. To be sure, all the scholarly proposals are tenuous.

In order to provide readers with some kind of guide through the quagmire, I have decided to adopt as a working hypothesis a recent proposal (Mitchell 2005), which I and other scholars (Roetzel 2007 and 2009) find suggestive. Admittedly, it is little more than a series of hypotheses laden with guesses, without any more independent verification than any other theory. Yet it at least attempts to explain all the evidence. I outline this hypothesis next.

1. Letter 1 (not extant), mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5:9, ca. 52. Paul writes concerning some ethical matters.

2. Letter 2 (entire), our 1 Corinthians, ca. 53/54. Dealing with escalating internal conflicts over status in the congregation, Paul urges his believers to reconcile with each other as one body in Christ.

3. Letter 3 (extant only as a fragment), preserved in 2 Corinthians 8, ca. 54/55. Paul writes to raise funds for the Jerusalem churches.

4. Letter 4 (extant only as a fragment), preserved in 2 Corinthians 2:14–7:4 (excluding 6:14–7:1), ca. 55. Paul defends himself against charges of religious fraud. The excluded fragment likely comes from a separate letter, by rival missionaries to Corinth, attacking Paul (see Betz 1994).

5. Letter 5 (extant only as a fragment), the “letter of tears,” preserved in 2 Corinthians 10:1–13:10, ca. 55. Paul rebukes his congregation angrily for accepting the leadership of rival Christian missionaries (the “super apostles”).

6. Letter 6 (extant only as a fragment), preserved in 2 Corinthians 1:1–2:13; 7:5–16; and 13:11–13. The congregation has apparently turned to accept Paul's leadership, and so Paul writes for reconciliation while also underscoring his honesty and goodwill, ca. 55/56.

7. Letter 7 (extant only as a fragment), preserved in 2 Corinthians 9. His fight with the congregation now in the past, Paul administers the final stages of the collection for Jerusalem, ca. 56.

Many people today, if they are familiar with the figure, believe that Paul lived a life full of paradoxes. Born and raised Jewish, and proud of it, he traveled in a “pagan” world with its different sensibilities. He felt compelled to adopt and then proselytize a faith he had formerly persecuted. He claimed to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, yet had neither met the Galilean peasant Jesus nor been one of his chosen Twelve Disciples. He did not think of himself as “Christian,” but he later became known as the key figure that established Christianity. He bore a Roman name (Greek Paulos, from the Latin Paulus) and apparently also a Jewish one (Saul, but it is only mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles). Attempts to heighten these paradoxes shape the most popular theme in Paul's biography; as scholars tell his story, they often try to resolve these paradoxes by saying that the Jewish “Saul” converted to become the Christian “Paul” and also repudiated his past life in Judaism. A closer examination of the evidence, however, shows a cultural continuity between Saul's early life in Judaism and Paul's later Christian mission. Paul and Saul cannot be bifurcated or divorced. Instead of underscoring the paradoxes between Paul's Jewish past and his later Gentile mission, I argue for continuity.

The sections in this chapter show this continuity in Paul's birth and education, his “conversion” at the city of Damascus in Roman Syria, and his contentiousness with Jesus’ original apostles.

Authentic

1. The First Epistle to the Thessalonians, in the New Testament, ca. 51.

2. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, in the New Testament, ca. 53/54.

3. The Epistle to the Galatians, in the New Testament, ca. 54.

4. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians (a collection of letter fragments), in the New Testament, ca. 54–56.

5. The Epistle to the Philippians, in the New Testament, ca. 56.

6. The Epistle to Philemon, in the New Testament, ca. 56.

7. The Epistle to the Romans, in the New Testament, ca. 57.

Pseudonymous

1. 8. The Epistle to the Colossians, in the New Testament, ca. 65–75.

2. 9. The Epistle to the Ephesians, in the New Testament, ca. 80. The letter was originally addressed to all Christians generally (“to the saints”), but later scribes inserted the phrase “who are in Ephesus” to make the address more specific. The earliest and best Greek manuscripts lack any references to the Ephesians.

3. 10. The Epistle to the Hebrews, in the New Testament, ca. 60–90. Although frequently cited in late antiquity as a letter of Paul, and admitted into the New Testament canon on that basis, the work does not bear Paul's name and important patristic authors denied that Paul wrote it. Yet hints at the end (Heb. 13:22–25) seem to suggest that the anonymous author does want the reader to think that he is Paul.

4. 11. The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, in the New Testament, ca. 70–95.

5. 12. The First Epistle to Timothy, in the New Testament, ca. 95–125.

6. 13. The Second Epistle to Timothy, in the New Testament, ca. 95–125.

7. 14. The Epistle to Titus, in the New Testament, ca. 95–125.

Socrates, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Augustus – no one would deny that these are key figures of classical antiquity. But does Saint Paul belong in this company? This book shows that Paul may not have been famous during his lifetime, but that Roman culture shaped his writings and, in the centuries following his death, he was just as transformative as Alexander. Situating Paul in his ancient Roman context finds continuity between the Jewish “Saul” and the Christian “Paul.” Rather than providing a traditional biography of the West's prototypical religious convert, this book reassesses the apostle's life by focusing on his particularly Roman discourse of authority, which provoked the challenge of rivals. Included here as part of the figure's “life story” are the often hilarious legends that remade the figure into many different Pauls. In the thinking and sensibilities of his later interpreters, Paul became the imperial hero, the sexual role model, and the object of derision, as well as a book to quote from. Paul is, therefore, a key figure of classical antiquity because of the legend he became in the eyes of his later interpreters.

This book thus covers Paul's life and his legend (literary afterlife). I start with a survey of the available primary sources, an introduction to what counts as historical evidence. Important to understand will be the commonplace usage of a pseudonym in ancient writing, which will show that not every work bearing Paul's name is authentic. After this introduction, the procedure is first to situate Paul's life in its ancient context (Chapters 1–3), then to trace the development of his legacy ultimately to the prototypical religious convert and the alleged discoverer of a human being's introspective conscience (Chapters 4–6).