Vision of St Paul

The Foundation of Christianity as a World Religion

The world-wide practice of Christianity in the twentieth century makes it difficult to appreciate that at the founding of the Church of Christ, its leading teachers and preachers interpreted the mission which had been entrusted to them in a sense so restricted that had they continued their activities on the basis of this interpretation it is quite possible that the Christian Church would have ceased to exist within a comparatively short time. That Christianity has become the widespread faith it has, embracing all peoples of all nations, a universal religion proclaimed by a universal Church, is due to the vision of one man who realized that if the restrictive conditions of membership laid down by his colleagues were insisted upon, many who might otherwise have joined the Church would have remained aloof, because of their inability to accept these conditions, since joining would have brought them into too sharp a conflict of conscience, as patriotic members of their own country and nation. In order to understand the great role which Paul of Tarsus played in the spread of Christianity throughout the world it is necessary to consider briefly the background against which the very earliest Church operated.

Galilee, ca. AD 50

What has been called “the special seed-plot of Christianity” consisted of what appears to be a small section of the people living mostly in Galilee who, more than any people anywhere else, had for many years been waiting for “the consolation of Israel”, focusing all their hopes on the promised Messiah.

Galilee was part of the Roman province of Syria. The Romans governed the province in much the same way as the British ruled in India before Indian independence; a Governor exercised the power through the native princes.

Syria was the type of Roman province called “Imperial”, which meant that it was one of those under the direct rule of the Emperor, as opposed to those subject to the authority of the Senate. The Emperor governed through an official on the spot called a Legate, under whom was a Procurator for each native department.

It was not a satisfactory form of government, nevertheless the Romans regarded it as the best way in which to organize this area of their Empire, which was of special importance because it stood as a buffer between their western territories and the Parthians, who were ever threatening invasion. Palestine, therefore, the cradle of the Church as well as its birthplace, stood on the boundary between East and West.

The United Kingdom of Solomon breaks up, with Jeroboam ruling over the Northern Kingdom of Israel (in green) and Rehoboam ruling over the Southern Kingdom of Judah (in red).

Now, for many centuries before the Romans had seized the country, the Jews had had an almost continuous history of being in subjection to foreign overlords. Israel as a kingdom ceased to exist with the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians in 721 B.C., while the fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. to the Babylonians put an end to the kingdom of Judah. As a result of these two events, the Jews were scattered. They started off on their wanderings throughout the world, and the Jewish communities in practically every country to-day stem from this movement begun two and a half millennia ago.

At the beginning of the Christian era there were no fewer than five million Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire. The significance of this becomes apparent when it is known that this number represented seven per cent of the total population of the Empire.

The Dispersion, as it is called by historians, had a very emphatic influence on the spread of Christianity, for when the early preachers went abroad, wherever they went in almost every town they found a religious community with the same background as their own. It may be that it was the presence of these Jewish colonies in all nations that led simple men whom Jesus had selected as His apostles and charged “to carry the Word to all peoples” to misinterpret this command.

Peter, James and Barnabas and several others of their associates all maintained, in the early period of their ministry, that Jesus had laid upon them the duty to bring the new faith to their fellow coreligionists. This was not to the exclusion of anyone of non-Jewish nationality; all were welcome. But if a non-Jew did wish to embrace Christianity then, they held, he must at the same time agree to become subject to Jewish religious law, even to the extent of undergoing circumcision, the badge of Judaism.

Underlying their arguments in support of this point of view were the characteristics of Judaism. Alone among the peoples of the West the Jews worshipped a single God. Christianity was also monotheistic, and though the Christian conception of God as the God of Love was in direct contrast to the Jewish conception of Jehovah, the Avenger God, the Christian God and Jehovah were one and the same.

That this was so had been brought about by the fact that the historical Jesus was a Jew whose heredity could be traced back on His mother’s side to David, the great King of ancient Israel, and who, if He were to be accepted as the Messiah, the deliverer whose coming all Jews since the Assyrian occupation had been taught to hope for, had been the subject of all important prophecy for seven centuries.

The Messiah longed for by the Jews was conceived as a great warrior who would rally them and miraculously relieve them of the physical bondage of foreign overlords and restore them once more to greatness as a nation. In His role of Messiah, Jesus, while He preached deliverance, preached a deliverance that was spiritual, not physical; and it was this conception of deliverance which the orthodox Jews could not understand, but which they had to be taught to accept by the founders of the Church. It was this and the Christian interpretation of God which had to be put across; but apart from this, the remainder of the Jewish religious faith stayed unchanged. The old religion, therefore, served as a basis upon which the new faith could be built; the Jewish ritual served as the foundation of Christian ritual; the Jewish habit of regular worship was a ready-made peg upon which the Christian insistence upon regular worship could be hung.

When all this was taken into account, therefore, to insist upon non-Jewish converts becoming submissive to Jewish law was a natural and logical step, for by doing so they strengthened their ties with the new religion which relied so greatly upon the orthodox Jewish religion, its morality and its demands.

This interpretation of their charge by the early Church fathers is summed up in a speech made by Peter in the Temple at Jerusalem, the centre of Orthodox Judaism, which is to be found in chapter three of The Acts of the Apostles, and in which the following significant passage is to be found:

For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people. Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days.

Ye are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, And in thy seed shall all the kindred’s of the earth be blessed. Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you…

It was not surprising that from the earliest days of their proselytizing activity that the Apostles should find themselves in conflict with the leaders of Orthodox Judaism, but it came as something of a shock to them to find one of their own numbers, Stephen, preaching a more liberal concept of Christianity than the official version. But the influence of Stephen was to be short-lived, for he came into conflict with the authorities and was stoned to death, the first Christian martyr.

The first of the Apostles to be converted to the wider concept of the Church’s missionary role was Peter, but it needed direct Divine intervention to bring this about. He was summoned by a Roman Centurion called Cornelius, who had been prompted to do so by an angel in a vision, to tell him about the new faith. Peter was at Joppa, and Cornelius lived in Caesarea. Shortly before Cornelius’s messengers arrived, Peter also had a vision, in which it was revealed to him that nothing cleansed by God should be regarded as unclean even by a Jew.

The full significance of this vision only struck home when the messengers arrived. Then without hesitation Peter agreed to go with them, and on arrival said to the Centurion: “Ye know that it is unlawful for a man who is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath showed me that I should not call any man common or unclean.”

After explaining Christianity to Cornelius and his household, at their request he baptized them, but on his return to Jerusalem “they that were of the circumcision contended with him saying, Thou wentest in to men who were uncircumcized and didst eat with them”. However, when Peter had explained all that had happened, “they held their peace and glorified God, saying, then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life”.

Nevertheless, the fact that the leaders in Jerusalem had accepted the divine command that non-Jews were to be accepted into the new faith only led to a violent schism between them and their supporters and the strictly orthodox Jewish Christians. The martyrdom of Stephen had been followed by a fierce persecution of the Christians in Jerusalem, and to escape it, many had fled to other cities, where some of them preached “to none but unto the Jews only”, while others who went to Antioch, “spake unto the Graecians”. Because of the success of the latter, the leaders sent one of their numbers, Barnabas, to direct the work there.

But still the schism continued to divide the adherents of the faith. The non-liberals were particularly strong among the Christians of Judaea, who decided to combat the efforts of the liberals by sending representatives to other centres to declare, “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses ye cannot be saved”. Eventually a compromise was reached, which will be described presently; but even this was to be rejected by one man, who by this time had become one of the most vigorous of the Church’s leaders.

Foremost among the men who had persecuted and killed Stephen was a certain Saul of Tarsus, who had been born in that city at about the same time as Jesus had been born in Judaea. Though a Jew, because Tarsus was in the imperial province, he could also claim Roman citizenship.

Tarsus specialized in the making of haircloth, and Paul had learned the trade of tentmaker. He was, however, a highly intelligent young man, and in consequence had been sent to Jerusalem to train as a Rabbi. There “he sat at the feet of” Gamaliel, one of the greatest of Jewish teachers, but he did not absorb the eminent scholar’s tolerant spirit.

After the Resurrection he became one of the leading opponents of the followers of Christ. Immediately thereafter, he set out for Damascus to carry the persecution there, but on the way was converted by a vision of Christ to the faith he was attempting to destroy.

After three years of meditation in Arabia, Paul, as he was now called, went to Jerusalem where he hoped to join the Church and undertake a mission. Because of his past record he was received with a good deal of misgiving, but chiefly through the intervention of Barnabas, the leaders eventually accepted him and he began to preach with great power. Though formerly a Pharisee, one of the strictest sects of orthodox Judaism, he had, from the beginning of his conversion, been strongly attracted by the liberalism of Stephen, and during his meditative period he had gone much further than Stephen in his views on the conversion of the Gentiles who he maintained, should be accepted into the faith without condition or restriction of any kind, beyond baptism.

The opposition of the non-liberal faction in Jerusalem was too strong to allow him to remain there, and he returned to Tarsus where he spent a number of years evangelizing his native province. He was still working there when Barnabas decided that he must have help in Antioch, and sent for him.

When men of the non-liberal faction arrived in Antioch with their message “Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses ye cannot be saved”, Paul, supported by Barnabas, opposed them with all his power, and it was as a result of the heightening of the conflict to which this led, that it was decided to seek a decision from the leaders in Jerusalem.

The outcome of this, as we have mentioned, was a compromise of which, though he did not agree with it, Paul was commissioned with Barnabas to acquaint the Gentile Christians in Antioch. “It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us”, ran the leaders’ message, “to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication, from which, if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well.” That is to say, the Gentile convert was not to be required to submit to circumcision, but he must adhere to the next strictest of Jewish rules—not to eat meat sacrificed to pagan gods, to observe the law of kosher, by which animals killed for meat had to be slaughtered in a certain way by registered slaughterers, and to observe sexual chastity.

Paul was to become the first great missionary of the early Church. Before the decision taken in Jerusalem he and Barnabas had set out on a proselytizing journey on which they had visited the chief centres in Asia Minor and Cyprus. Shortly after the return to Antioch from Jerusalem they decided to repeat the journey, but a quarrel over whom they should take with them caused them to split up, Barnabas taking Mark and going to Cyprus, while Paul took Silas and journeyed through Syria and Cilicia and on through Asia Minor.

While they were in Troas, a city near the entrance to the Dardanelles, and thought to be the site of ancient Troy, Paul had a vision in which a “man of Macedonia appeared saying, Come over into Macedonia and help us”. Accepting this as a divine command, Paul crossed into Greece, through which he gradually made his way until he came to Athens, and though he first sought out the Jewish settlements wherever he came, his main work was among the Gentile Greeks. From this “crossing into Macedonia” he devoted the greater part of his energy to the evangelizing of the Gentiles, eventually carrying his message to Rome, where after some time he was imprisoned, and finally, during one of the recurrent persecutions of the Christians, beheaded.

None of the other early Christian leaders devoted themselves so wholeheartedly to spreading the faith among non-Jews as Paul, so that the title often given him, The Apostle of the Gentiles, is fully justified. But his work among the Gentiles had a far greater significance than merely the conversion of men and women to Christianity. By it he laid the foundation of Christianity as a world religion; and it is safe to say that, but for his favouring of the Gentiles and his great missionary zeal, Christianity could well have developed into a sect of Judaism, like the Pharisees and Sadducees and others, and remained confined to a small section of the Jews. It is for this reason that he is often referred to as The Second Founder of Christianity.

Outside Christianity, Paul holds a lofty position among both thinkers and men of action. Through faith and love he felt himself at one with Christ, and his teaching of justification by faith, union with Christ and the universality of the Gospel became the watchwords of his life, which he proclaimed in phrases that have become part of the everyday consciousness of the Christian world.