How this contrarian apostle accidentally founded a world religion
About the tragic life and the miraculous survival of Paulos of Tarsos, the orphaned Jesus community in Jerusalem, the mission in the pagan West and the irrelevance of the Jewish Law.
There they were, the followers of Jesus. The charismatic leader was dead, executed. The kingdom of God could come at any moment, but what does one do in the meantime?
They must have been less than a thousand, the Jewish followers of Jesus. Most of them were in Jerusalem, and presumably some in Galilee. Jesus had twelve assistants around him, including Peter and John. There were more people circling around it: apprentices and followers. Then there was Jesus' family, led by his brother James. And some scattered supporters and interested individuals. Furthermore, sympathisers of the movement had traveled to cities outside Palestine, possibly in consultation with Jesus himself. Think of cities like Damascus and Antioch (present-day Antakya), where large communities of Jews had been living.
Over time, several clumps of followers of Jesus emerged. The circle around Jesus' brothers saw him as what he was: a charismatic Jewish preacher, perhaps a prophet, but certainly not a supernatural being. His death also had no redemptive significance. And later descendants denied to the emperor of Rome that Jesus had political intentions. The kingdom of God had been meant to be transitive.
The first sign that the movement had some resilience was the rumour of a resurrection. Jesus' tomb was said to have been found empty, and several people claimed that Jesus appeared to them after his death. It was another sign that the kingdom of God was at hand: the righteous dead would rise, as foretold by the prophets. Some came to describe Jesus as a divine being. Those who had experienced him themselves were less inclined to do so.
The Jesus movement formed close-knit communities, communes almost, with common ownership. Just as Jesus had been constantly trying to spread his message, the Jesus movement was missionary. Souls had to be won, but that didn't really go smoothly. Jesus' prediction of the end times and his allusions to a Jewish revolt must have evoked curiosity. But his execution was also a reason for many to drop out: what good is a dead prophet and messiah?
The movement was risky and sectarian. An overt embrace of the Jesus movement was dangerous. Authorities were closely monitoring the movement. But gradually the attention of the authorities slackened. Peter and John had been released after interrogation. As professing Jews, members of the movement were admitted to the temple. The high cleric Gamaliel advised that things should be allowed to take place:
If their purpose or endeavour is of human origin, it will fail.
But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop them.— Gamaliel, quoted in Acts 5:38-39
Life in the Jesus communities in Jerusalem must have been simmering. What do you do when the end of time could come at any moment? There was not much growth, and little money. Only with some financial support from the diaspora could they make ends meet.
Fifty Bibles for the emperor
Let’s make a leap in time. Three hundred years later, the emperor of the Roman Empire ordered fifty Bibles from Bishop Eusebios of Caesarea (about thirty kilometers north of present-day Tel Aviv):
… the provision and use of which you know to be most needful for the instruction of the Church, to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers thoroughly practised in their art.
— Eusebios of Caesarea, Bios Megalou Konstantinou (c. 335 AD)
These Bibles were intended for the ecclesiastical congregations in Constantinople (also known as Byzantium or Istanbul). But emperor Constantinus was not merely concerned with those fifty handwritten books. He specifically addressed Eusebios because he would probably be able to make an authoritative compilation of the books of the Bible.
You should know that the New Testament as we know it today did not exist yet. There were dozens or perhaps hundreds of different scrolls circulating, in all kinds of versions. Gospels, chronicles, epistles, prophecies. Each Christian congregation used its own collection.
(How the New Testament came about is well explained in the video below. In any case, this series of 26 lectures on the New Testament by Prof. Dale Martin (Yale) is easily accessible and very enlightening. At the bottom of this newsletter, you will find the link to the entire series.)
Constantinus was the first Christian emperor. He used his position to force unity in the Christian church. It had to be over with this wrangling: a mainstream Christian faith was being forced, sanctioned by imperial power.
It's quite a transition. From an orphaned Jewish community in Jerusalem, less than a thousand souls, to an order of fifty chronicles of that same community by the Roman emperor three hundred years later. How did that community turn into the official religion of an empire in three hundred years, with millions of adherents?
According to calculations by a sociologist of religion, the following of the Christian church must have grown by an average of forty percent per decade. That's a formidable but plausible percentage, on par with other hard-growing missionary religions of the more recent past.
A great deal must have happened to transform that rather hopeless bunch of Jewish followers of an executed prophet into a religion that has gripped the world to this day. In addition to the conversion by the Roman emperor, the opening of the community to non-Jews was undoubtedly the most important step. And that step didn’t go swimmingly.
The kingdom of God would come anyway. In the spirit of Jesus, as many Jews as possible were to join his community. But the Jews of Jerusalem would not be dragged to the Jesus movement.
The movement was considerably more successful among Hellenised Jews. These were mainly Jews who lived in areas in cities around the Mediterranean that were traditionally part of the Greco-Roman Empire. In Jerusalem there was also such a community, consisting mainly of Jews who had returned from Hellenic-Roman cities.
The Jesus movement also caught on with the so-called God-fearers. God-fearers were non-Jews, attracted to the rigid and monotheistic nature of Judaism, but who had no appetite to join ethnic Judaism. Adult circumcision was required, which was a painful and risky operation. The chance of an infection was high, as high as the chance that you might die from it.
In the diaspora in and around the Jewish communities, there was considerably more interest in the Jesus movement than in Jerusalem. Hellenic influences on Jesus' views (especially stoicism and cynicism) will have contributed to this, as well as a somewhat more relativistic approach to Jewish law among some prominent adherents.
A Hellenic Pharisee joins the movement
Paulos of Tarsos was in many ways an outsider. Although he was ethnically and religiously Jewish, he had grown up in the Jewish diaspora, in Tarsos, now on the southeastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Tarsos was then a wealthy Hellenic trading city; His father was a successful businessman. Paulos' family had the Roman nationality, he spoke Greek and Aramaic and he was well educated in the Hellenic tradition. His ambition was not in business but in the clergy. At his family's expense, he went to Jerusalem to study with the Pharisees, a prominent Jewish movement known for its extensive interpretation of Jewish law. In the Gospels it is often noted that Jesus had a hard time with the Pharisees; after Jesus' death, relations had become downright hostile.
Paulos had been apprenticed to the Pharisees for four years and had already gained some position when he decided to join the Jesus movement. By his own account, Jesus had appeared to him in a vision. But in the Jesus movement in Jerusalem, he was distrusted because of his Pharisaic and Hellenic background. He also developed dissenting views on the applicability of Jewish law to converts. More on that later.
Paulos the convert was sent to Nabatea , the arid region south of the Dead Sea. Nabatea is now best known for its capital Petra, the magisterial ruins in the desert of Jordan. The Nabataeans were eclectic polytheists: the ancient local god Baal was worshipped there, but also the Egyptian Isis and the Greek Dionysos. The advantage was that the Nabataeans had already been circumcised, so that hurdle no longer had to be taken to join the Jesus movement. The three years of Paulos saving souls in the sparsely populated area were not successful. Interest was lukewarm, and the local ruler had no taste at all for the expansion of a Jewish religious movement.
After being chased out of the country, he tried again in Damascus, but that too was not successful. The large Jewish community there was downright hostile to Paulos' religious innovations. With the tail between his legs, he returned to Jerusalem. After a probing conversation with Jesus' disciple Peter, who initially did not even want to receive him, Paulos drifted off. Back to Tarsos, his hometown, where he could always tend to the family business. He continued to work there for seven years.
The Gentiles and the Law
The major divisive issue in Jerusalem was the role of non-Jews in the Jesus movement. The group around Jesus' family rejected it categorically. Again, a strong indication that Jesus had no interest in gentile followers at all. According to Jesus, Jewish law applied from cover to cover anyway:
Don't suppose I came to do away with the Law and the Prophets. I did not come to do away with them, but to give them their full meaning.
Heaven and earth may disappear. But I promise you not even a period or comma will ever disappear from the Law. Everything written in it must happen. If you reject even the least important command in the Law and teach others to do the same, you will be the least important person in the kingdom of heaven.
— Jesus of Nazareth, quoted in Matthew 5:17-19
The incident described in Matthew 15:21-28 speaks volumes about his interest in non-Jews.
A gentile woman asks Jesus to help her daughter. Jesus' response is downright rude: "It isn't right to take food away from children and feed it to dogs." By the children he meant the Jews; non-Jews were the dog.
But the woman insisted: "but even puppies get the crumbs that fall from their owner's table." Then Jesus took pity.
But a Roman officer encountered another Jesus in Matthew 8. He asked for his son's healing. Jesus did not hesitate for a moment and immediately offered to come over.
Many people will come from everywhere to enjoy the feast in the kingdom of heaven with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
— Jesus of Nazareth, quoted in Matthew 8:5-13
Jesus was presumably referring to a text in the Tanakh:
Foreigners who worship me must not say, “The Lord won't let us be part of his people.”
Foreigners will follow me. They will love me and worship in my name; they will respect the Sabbath and keep our agreement. I will bring them to my holy mountain, where they will celebrate in my house of worship. Their sacrifices and offerings will always be welcome on my altar.
Then my house will be known as a house of worship for all nations.
— Isaiah 56:3-7
Did Isaiah and Jesus mean that all Gentiles were welcome in God's new world? Paulos thought so, but the family didn't. Exotic interest was welcome. But for full membership you had to fully comply with Jewish law, and you had to be circumcised.
But bystanders were welcome. They came in shapes and sizes. There were neighbouring peoples, circumcised and all, but who had drifted away from Jewish law. Samaritans, for example. Or, even worse, polytheists like the Nabataeans. They were generally believed to be the lost tribes of Israel. Descendants of the same people, but drifted. Presumably Jesus and Isaiah had them in mind. They were very welcome, provided they adhered to Jewish law.
Then there were Hellenised Jews who had stripped the law of its edges. Today we would speak of reform Judaism. They mainly saw support in Jesus's view that all these rules were not the core. Love for God and for those around you was the most important message of the law, wasn't it? Jesus himself had said that. And hadn't Rabbi Hillel, the patriarch of the Pharisees, himself said that the golden rule was at the heart of Jewish law? The rest was just a derivative, wasn't it? So why bother with side issues?
And then there were those God-fearers. They were not Jews. Most of them were Gentiles of Greek or Roman origin who for one reason or another were fascinated by the Jewish rite. The Jesus movement also counted God-fearers among its ranks. They were happy to participate, but had no interest in circumcision or compliance with the complicated Jewish law. They were welcome in many Jewish synagogues, provided they adhered to a few basic rules. Those basic rules were later known as the Noahide covenant: a ban on blasphemy and idolatry, a ban on murder and theft, immorality, that sort of thing. I will discuss this Noahide covenant in detail in the next newsletter.
The discussion in Jerusalem was about the position of these outsiders in the Jesus community. Should they be baptised? And what significance did that baptism have? And could they partake of the sacrament? The circles around Jesus' family were the hardliners. They had the same position as other Jewish communities: bystanders were welcome, provided they acted modestly and adhered to the basic rules.
But Paulos attached far less importance to the distinction between Jew and non-Jew. For him it was about the new Israel, in which all Christians professed their faith in Jesus. Not circumcision but baptism (in faith, with the Holy Spirit) was the entrance ticket. No sacrifices in the temple, but the sacrament. Jews still had a special covenant with God, Jewish law continued to apply, including circumcision, but in the Christian community, according to Paulos, that special covenant did not matter.
A loose canon on a mission
I don't know about you, but I occasionally change course. A few times I have changed my life quite radically. In religion, love life, political affinity, and in my career. Such a decision slowly builds up until you finally change course. In early church history, things were different: there was usually a vision involved. Paulos converted to Jesus after a vision.
Peter als had a vision. In his case, a rather hallucinatory vision in which Jesus addressed him with an incomprehensible message. Peter interpreted it as an assignment to throw the Jewish food laws overboard. Peter was the leader of a Jesus commune in Jerusalem. In those circles he was highly regarded as a prominent disciple of Jesus. At some point, Peter must have been fed up with the squabbling. As that kingdom of God wasn’t happening yet, maybe things had to change. Perhaps his conversation with Paulos had lingered somewhere. That the kingdom of God would be nothing if the Gentiles did not also join the new Israel.
Peter contacted Barnabas, a wealthy member of the Jesus movement in Antioch. Antioch is now called Antakya and is located in Turkey, north of Lebanon. At the time, it was the third largest city in the Roman Empire, prosperous, and with a large Jewish community. Barnabas picked up Paulos in Tarsos and took him to Antioch.
The mission in Antioch was a resounding success, but whether that was due to Paulos is doubtful. Physically, he was unimpressive: short, balding, ruddy, possibly cross-eyed, and crooked. Jesus had appeared to him in a vision, which must have given him some street cred . He was also adept at faith healings and exorcisms. It is speculated by historians that the success of the Christian mission was largely due to this: many Christian missionaries achieved spectacular results with healings and exorcism.
But Paulos also had the unique talent to make himself impossible everywhere. He could talk the green off a leaf. People will have sighed: keep your lid, Paul. Especially his order to gentile converts not to observe Jewish law caused bad blood. The Christian communities were still closely linked to the Jewish community on the ground. Usually, they met in the local synagogue; most of the members were Hellenised Jews. The Jesus movement was barely tolerated in Jewish circles, provided you didn't go overboard. Paulos in fact went overboard all the time, which regularly earned him a beating, if not worse.
In Antioch, Paulos left with a quarrel. Together with Barnabas, he was tossed out of the synagogue. Barnabas had now had it with Paulos and left him behind. Paulos moved on, into the interior of Turkey. There, too, he soon cut his own throat. He was dragged out of his home by the local Jewish community and knocked off a cliff. From that cliff a big boulder followed after him. He was left for dead. Sympathisers picked him up and nursed him. His recovery took more than a year.
Back in Jerusalem, Paulos attended an important meeting. All the leaders of the Jesus movement were together, under the chairmanship of James. It was once again about the position of the non-Jews in the community. The position remained: Jewish members were bound by Jewish law. Non-Jews could join, did not have to undergo circumcision, provided they adhered to the basic rules. But they remained second-class members. Paulos kept quiet. Not a word about his ideas about the new, multi-ethnic Israel. But of course he had a reputation. He was carefully kept away from the circumcised regions. Go west, was the order. And he got a chaperone, Silas, who would keep an eye on him, on James’ behalf.
He was sent to the Greco-Roman west. Mind you, the expansion from Jerusalem was not only driven by missionary ambitions. It was also a revenue model. Communities of converts overseas were also expected to pay some kind of royalties to the primordial community in Jerusalem. It was called "for the poor", or for temple sacrifices. Where the money ended up is not clear.
Paulos and Silas visited Philippi and Thessaloniki in Macedonia and then Athens. Usually with little success. It was only in Corinth that he finally managed to establish a stable Christian community, thanks to a wealthy Jewish local couple, who helped him establish the necessary contacts. But he also left Corinth after a while with a quarrel. Those who disagreed with him could not be part of the new Israel, Paulos proclaimed.
Silas had had enough and returned to Jerusalem to report. James now made an explicit statement: whoever has been baptised as a Christian, but has not been circumcised, is not bound by Jewish law and is not part of Israel. Fine if they are inspired by Jesus, but they serve primarily to support the Jewish Jesus movement. Eat your heart out, Paulos!
Practically excommunicated by the Jerusalem community, Paulos settled in Ephesus, on the west coast of present-day Turkey. Finally, finally, he managed to form a community there that didn't spit him out over time. This was mainly because Paulos no longer depended on the Jewish community on the ground. With the help of wealthy supporters, he rented a room for meetings, roughly opposite the local synagogue. They also gathered at people's homes. This is how the first Christian churches came into being. They hung on his every word, there in Ephesus. Meals were shared, there was singing, baptising, blessing, speaking in tongues, there were the usual exorcisms and, of course, there was preaching about the new Israel. Paulos didn't really know much about Jesus, but that didn't stop him from working toward the kingdom of God in his name. Recognition at last, finally on par with the saviour.
In Ephesus, success eventually rose to his head. It had to be done with that horrible pagan religion. He ordered a book burning. All the pagan scrolls on a pile, torched. Well, he had built up quite a considerable community, but his success depended on the religious toleration in the city. The majority (and the city government) was still in the hands of the polytheistic Romans and Greeks. They didn't befriend you by attacking their religion head-on.
Paulos realised he had gone too far, and he planned his departure. He toured the Hellenic communities he had founded and corresponded with. The goal was to raise money "for the poor" in Jerusalem. He knew that Jerusalem didn't like him anymore, but with a large suitcase of coins he would probably be fine. Then he would travel to Rome, and then perhaps to Spain.
The whip-round was not a success. He was no longer particularly popular with the municipalities where he had previously made himself impossible. And the primordial Christians in Jerusalem were an abstraction for an average christianised pagan from, say, Corinth. Paulos had to beg, sneer and threaten for months. Those who did not want to contribute could count on an enraged Paulos. In the year 57 he had finally collected enough and he set sail for Jerusalem.
The reception in Jerusalem was tense. Paulos' arrival was bad news for the Jesus community. There were tensions between the Jews and the Romans. The Jesus movement had not made itself popular in Jerusalem, especially with the temple administration. There were wild rumours about Paulos: that he ordered Jews not to circumcise their children anymore. It wasn't true, but it did set the tone.
To calm things down, James offered Paulos to go to the temple together. It was not a success. When Paulos entered the temple grounds, a riot ensued. He was accused of taking non-Jews from his entourage to the temple. In Jerusalem, this was considered a mortal sin; it carried the death penalty. The temple police intervened, gave the old Paulos a beating and removed him from the grounds. There was fighting in the city, as Paulos' entourage struck back. Paulos was arrested by the Roman soldiers to be tried. It could have ended with a hiss if he had defended himself in the Jewish court, but he refused to be tried by them. Instead, he provoked and insulted them. He invoked his right to a Roman court. In Rome, that is, under the supervision of the emperor.
Long story short: it took a few years but eventually he went to Rome. Once there, he had to wait a few more years for his trial. But in Rome, emperor Nero had come to power, a psychopath, and he had found in the Christian community a scapegoat for everything that went wrong under his rule. Christians were killed with horrific violence. With Paulos (and Peter, who also happened to be there) Nero had won a big fish. Peter was crucified upside-down. As a Roman citizen, Paulos avoided that fate; he was simply beheaded.
The influence of Paulos
It is a miracle that Paulos exerted such an overwhelming influence on Christianity. The charismatic firebrand who couldn't keep his mouth shut, who couldn't knock the skin off a rice pudding, the troublemaker who was spat out everywhere over time. But the oldest books in the New Testament are Paulos' letters. Half of the New Testament consists of letters from him and his disciples. Large parts of the four Gospels are written with a Paulian lens. In the fifth book, the Acts, Paulos is the hero.
At the beginning of my career, I was involved in complicated negotiations with far-reaching, long-term effects on the labour market. As a rookie, I sat at the table. Not as a negotiator, but as a secretary. The big shots played the game, I listened, observed and wrote. There I learned the subtleties of the written word. How to influence the game with small taps. "Whoever writes, stays," my boss told me. And so it was.
Paulos was many things. His philosophical knowledge was not very advanced, but he emerged as an excellent theologian. Where Jesus performed miracles while scattering wisdom, Paulos placed them in a theological system. And Paulos had the gift of the word. He wasn't just a motormouth. As a writer, he also put up a good show. I wouldn't call it world literature, but certain passages are certainly impressive. I imagine a community opening a letter from Paulos, grumbling, "there he is again." And that, reading that letter, people were impressed again. "He said that nicely." Those letters from Paulos must have been a phenomenon. The receiving community then had the letter copied and forwarded to friendly, surrounding Christian communities. Thus, Paulos' epistles became chain letters circulating throughout the western Roman Empire. He may have been a jerk with limited missionary success, but Paulos became especially famous for his letters.
But there are more reasons why Paulos made such a mark on Christianity. First, he focused on Greco-Roman civilisation, on citizens of important cities such as Thessaloniki, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens and Rome. That's where the power was, and it would stay there for a few centuries. Had he been successful in Nabatea or Damascus, a rustic, regional Christianity would have emerged there with little impact on the rest of the world. Earlier, I mentioned the first Christian emperor Constantinus. He came into contact with a Christianity that was profoundly influenced by Paulos, especially through his letters. A less than impressive player alive, despite everything he died in the center of power.
We tend to approach the course of history teleologically. We look at the current situation, and then draw the line back, to see how it came about. But of course, that's not how history works. There is usually no plan, and if there is one, it will fail. Paulos never came up with the idea that he would become the founder of a world church. In his day, he was a fairly insignificant outsider, at most in the wings of power in the Jesus community. Until the return of Jesus, he wanted to make the movement bigger, by making his message known to gentiles as well. That was his mission.
If you look at Christianity around the beginning of the second century, you are far from seeing a marked victory for Paulos. The Christian community was a mishmash. In Jerusalem, the old community languished, gradually growing tired of waiting for the end of time. The rest of the Jews looked down upon them. In his old age, James had been dumped off the temple by order of the high priest and pelted with stones. In 132 AD, the Jews again revolted against the Romans, led by Shimon bar Kochba. He was widely seen as the messiah who would finally redeem the Jews. The Jesus community did not participate in that rebellion: Shimon could not possibly be the messiah. In doing so, the Jesus community lost its last bit of respect among the Jews. Nothing has been heard from the Jesus community in Jerusalem since.
Have you ever heard of the ebionites? The elcesaites? The encratites? Neither did I, until recently. But they were all Christian communities. For all sorts of reasons, they've all disappeared from history. Because they didn't do missions. Because they didn't build an effective organisation. Because they lived in an arid and remote area. Because they isolated themselves. Because they didn't reproduce.
Paulos took a different approach. Yes, that kingdom of God that Jesus was talking about, that was coming, sooner than you thought. But Paulos had other things on his mind. The end of time was usually only discussed in passing. He was building the New Israel, a house for all nations. In Jesus' name, although he had never met him and did not know exactly what Jesus actually stood for. In fact, Jewish law, for Jesus the beginning and the end of everything, was for Paulos but an afterthought, a barren branch on the tree.
Paulos put his own spin on Jesus' insights. If Jesus had attended a church meeting of Paulos in, say, Ephesus, he would probably have wondered where on earth he had ended up.
Now is the time to reflect Paulos' views. What views of Paulos would influence the Christian view of tolerance? But this newsletter then becomes too long. I have to cut it up. In a few days, therefore, part two will follow: Paulos' moral views and his instructions to the Christian communities.
Further reading
Rodney Stark, The rise of Christianity (1996)
Henry Chadwick, The church in ancient society from Galilee to Gregory the Great (2001)
Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Paul (2004)
Dale Martin, New Testament history and literature, 26 video lectures, Open Yale Courses (2009)
Jonah Lendering, Israel verdeeld (2014)
Daniël de Waele, Ontluikend christendom (2021)
This was the third newsletter in a long series on toleration and Christianity. The other episodes are:
Before Christ
Jesus of Nazareth had some exceptionally tolerant ideas. In order to understand them, we need to know more about Jesus's Jewish background: the history of the Jewish people, their god and their law.Where Jesus' tolerant ideas came from
In some ways, Jesus was a tolerant thinker. But he didn't have all his views of his own. About Jesus' simple origins, the halakhic tradition and Hellenic influences.How this contrarian apostle accidentally founded a world religion
About the tragic life and the miraculous survival of Paulos of Tarsos, the orphaned Jesus community in Jerusalem, the mission in the pagan West and the irrelevance of the Jewish Law.No Jewish law for Christians, but what then?
Why Christian law is not in the Bible. About Paulos's selective application of Jesus' instructions, and his remarkable views on sex, women, and men with long hair.With blood on their hands and tears in their eyes
In the 4th century, the Church of Rome gained power and lost its innocence. The unity of the church became the main thing, and heresy a sin. After Augustinus’ struggle, the church got a killer instinct.Christianity, slavery and the conversion of pagans
On conversion of pagans without compulsion. And Christian approval of slavery. About sex slaves, the conversion of a tourist paradise, and exploitation by the village priest.The clean hands of the Church, the dirty hands of the State
How the popes let the Christian monarchs do the dirty work. But separation of church and state later came to mean something else: a secular government.The just war against Islam
A clash between Christianity and Islam was inevitable. Not only because they got into each other's way, but also because they used different justifications for warfare.