Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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MISSION

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19: G

ALATIA

Five years after the death of Augustus, the dignitaries of the Koinon Galaton – the ‘Galatian Commonwealth’ – met in solemn convocation. Loyal to the memory of the Caesar who now, alongside his divine father, reigned in heaven, they looked to honour him as their Saviour and Lord. As elsewhere in the empire, so in Galatia: there was peace and order where before there had always been war. The Galatians, for most of their existence, had been a people largely defined by their aptitude for violence. Three centuries before the death of Augustus, twenty thousand of them, migrants from distant Gaul, had swarmed across the straits from Europe into Asia Minor, a land celebrated for the wealth of its cities, the softness of its citizens, and the talents of its celebrity chefs. Here, in the central highlands of what is now Turkey, the Galatians had quickly carved out a new home for themselves. What the mountains lacked in resources they had more than made up for in location. Barren though Galatia was, it was ideally placed for launching raids on neighbouring kingdoms. Tall, red-haired and prone to fighting in the nude, the Galatians had made their living out of ‘their talent for inspiring terror’.¹ Not for nothing was one of the three tribes that together constituted their kingdom named the Tectosages: the ‘Searchers after Loot’.

But then the legions had appeared on the scene. Rome briskly put an end to the Galatians’ roistering tradition of banditry. In due course, after a century and more of clientage, they were deprived by Augustus of even the figleaf of independence. The borders of the new province were extended far beyond those of the original kingdom; colonies filled with retired soldiers planted across its southern reaches; roads scored through the mountains and desert plains. Engineers, taming the savagery of the landscape, had set the seal on a great of pacification. The Via Sebaste, a mighty gash of stone and compacted gravel that snaked for four hundred miles across the length of southern Galatia, served the province as both guarantor and symbol of Roman might. The road was worthily named: for Sebastos, in Greek, meant ‘Augustus’. Merely to travel it was to pay homage to the Divi Filius: the Son of a God who, by his exertions and his wisdom, had ushered humanity into a golden age.

And even now, despite his death, he had not abandoned the world. In this conviction, the cities of Galatia could find a shared sense of identity and purpose. The need for this was great. The order that Augustus had brought to the region served to dizzy as well as to settle. Once, back in the swaggering days of their independence, chieftains had gathered in oak glades and feasted beneath the stars, and offered up garlanded prisoners in sacrifice to their gods; but no longer. Now the Galatians lived in marble cities of the kind that their ancestors had delighted in raiding, in a province dotted with Roman colonies, where the common language was Greek. No longer could the Koinon Galaton define itself exclusively in terms of its past. Instead, the three Galatian tribes had come by a new marker of identity. The title of Sebastenos – ‘favoured by Augustus’ – had been bestowed on them by Caesar himself. To pay honour to their divine patron was, then, for the Galatian elite, no matter of mere expediency, but a deeply felt obligation. This was why, five years after his ascension into heaven, it was decreed that Augustus’ own account of his career, which in the year of his death had been inscribed on bronze tablets and attached to his mausoleum in Rome, should be reproduced across Galatia.² One transcript was carved into the wall of a newly consecrated temple to Rome; another etched in red down the piers of a triple-arched gateway; another adorned with statues of the Divi Filius and assorted members of his family on horseback. To visit the cities of Galatia was constantly to be reminded of the sheer scale of Augustus’ achievements. His birth had set the order of things on a new course. War was over. The world stood as one. Here, so inscriptions proclaimed to a grateful people, was Euangelion – ‘Good News’.*

Certainly the renown of a god had never before spread so fast, so far. ‘Across islands and entire continents, all humanity pays him reverence with temples and sacrifices.’³ In Galatia, as the decades passed, so the cult of Augustus, and of the Caesars who succeeded him on the throne of the world, put down ever stronger roots. It served as the vital sap that sustained civic life. Cities, amid the bleak steppes and jagged mountains, were hardly natural grafts. Out in the wilds of Galatia, where the pagani – the country people – lived, the squares and fountains of the cities founded by Augustus might well seem a world away. Long before the coming of the Galatians, the region had been notorious for the savagery of its inhabitants, the potency of its witches, and the vengefulness of its gods. One was dreaded for rendering liars blind, or else rotting their genitals; another for punching women who offended him in the breasts. Fearsome deities such as these were perfectly at home amid the wilds. Bands of itinerant priests, dancing as they travelled, and playing flutes and kettle-drums, were a common sight on Galatian roads. Some were famed for working themselves up into a lather of prophecy by indulging in spectacular orgiastic rites; but there could be no copulation for the most celebrated of them all. The Galli, men dressed as women, were servants of Cybele, the Mother Goddess who sat enthroned amid the highest peaks of Galatia; and the mark of their submission to this most powerful and venerable of all the region’s gods was the severing with a knife or a sharp stone of their testicles. The same feat of pacification that had fostered the cult of Caesar across the Mediterranean had also encouraged the Galli to broaden their horizons, and take to the freshly laid roads. Increasingly, they were even to be seen in Rome itself – to the natural dismay of conservatives in the capital. ‘If a god desires worship of this kind,’ so one of them sternly opined, ‘then she does not deserve to be worshipped in the first place.’⁴

Yet the Galli, though certainly offensive to Roman values, presented no conceivable threat to the cult of Augustus. Cybele herself had already been worshipped in Rome for over two centuries; and Virgil, describing the world’s new ‘age of gold’,⁵ had imagined her gazing on it with a fond and benignant eye. Only the Jews, with their stiff-necked insistence that there existed just a single god, refused as a matter of principle to join in acknowledging the divinity of Augustus; and so perhaps it was no surprise, in the decades that followed the building to him of temples across Galatia, that the visitor there most subversive of his cult should have been a Jew. ‘Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.’⁶ So wrote Paul, a traveller to Galatia who, some four decades after the death of Augustus, fell ill in the province – where, precisely, we do not know – and was offered shelter by attentive well-wishers. The visitor, a man as indomitable as he was charismatic, was not the kind to stay silent, even on his sickbed. That his carers, far from merely tolerating his contemptuous dismissal of the Caesars, should have listened to him as though he were ‘an angel of God’,⁷ suggests that he had found refuge with theosebeis. Paul, as fluent in Greek as he was well-versed in Torah, was a man ideally qualified to school his hosts in the glory of the Jewish deity. ‘You would have torn out your eyes,’ so he fondly recalled later, ‘and given them to me.’⁸ Clearly, even in Galatia, a province where the achievements of Augustus had been publicly transcribed in city after city, and where the honours due to Caesar hallowed the rhythms of the months, the seasons and the years, there were those keen to learn what they might from a Jew.

Jews, though, came in many forms, and what Paul had to say was no less subversive of Torah than it was of Caesar. A decade, perhaps, before his arrival in Galatia, his life had been up-ended. As a young man he had been a Pharisee, ferociously committed to his studies; it was as a scholar ‘zealous in the extreme for the traditions of my fathers’⁹ that he had sought to patrol the boundaries of what a Jew might acceptably believe. Inevitably, then, the followers of an itinerant teacher named Jesus, who insisted, despite the wretched man’s crucifixion, that he had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, there to reign as the Son of God, could not help but arouse in Paul profound emotions of shock and revulsion. Such a claim was not to be endured. It was a repellent folly. It had to be silenced. Paul had duly set himself to the destruction of the cult. But then, unexpectedly, traumatically, rapturously, came the tipping point of his entire existence. Some decades later, a version of what had happened would be reported by one of Paul’s followers, a historian to whom tradition would give the name of Luke: how it had occurred on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus, words uttered from a blinding light. ‘Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?’¹⁰ So Paul himself, when challenged, might demand of his critics. The vision that had been granted him, of a new understanding of God, and of divine love, and of how time itself, like the tucking-in of a bird’s wings, or the furling of a ship’s sails, had folded in on itself, and of how everything was changed, had over-whelmed him. Paul, in his correspondence with those who shared his new conviction – that Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Anointed One of God – could never leave the wonder of it alone. That he had been called in person to spread the Good News, to serve as an apostle of Christ, was at once the proudest and the most humbling confession of his life. ‘For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.’¹¹

If the strangeness of it all was something that Paul himself found overwhelming, then so too was it bound to raise eyebrows in Galatia. His scorn for the the pretensions of Divi Filius was total. The Son of God proclaimed by Paul did not share his sovereignty with other deities. There were no other deities. ‘For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.’¹² This conviction, that a crucified criminal might somehow be a part of the identity of the one God of Israel – a conviction that Paul, in all his correspondence, took absolutely for granted – was shocking to Galatians as well as to Jews. Command and swagger were the very essence of the cult of the Caesars. To rule as an emperor – an imperator – was to rule as a victorious general. In every town in Galatia, in every square, statues of Caesar served as a reminder to his subjects that to rank as the son of a god was, by definition, to embody earthly greatness. No wonder, then, that Paul, proclaiming to the Galatians that there was only the one Son of God, and that he had suffered the death of a slave, not struggling against it but submitting willingly to the lash, should have described the cross as a ‘scandal’.¹³ The offensiveness of it was not something that Paul ever sought to palliate. That it was ‘a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to everyone else’¹⁴ did not inhibit him in the slightest. Quite the opposite. Paul embraced the mockery that his gospel brought him – and the dangers. Recuperating from his illness, he would not have concealed from his hosts the trellis-work of scars across his back: the marks of the beatings that he had suffered for the sake of Christ. ‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.’¹⁵

Why should this have persuaded anyone in Galatia to accept the truth of Paul’s message? To abandon the cult of the Caesars was not merely to court danger, but to risk the very stitching that held together the patchwork society of the province’s cities. Yet some, for all this, did find in the new identity proclaimed by Paul not a menace, but a liberation. The love felt by the Jewish god for his chosen people – so unlike anything displayed by the heedless gods of Galatia – had long aroused in Gentiles emotions of envy as well as suspicion. Now, by touring cities across the entire span of the Roman world, Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such guardianship was past. No longer were the Jews alone ‘the children of God’.¹⁶ The exclusive character of their covenant was abrogated. The venerable distinctions between them and everyone else – of which male circumcision had always been the pre-eminent symbol – were transcended. Jews and Greeks, Galatians and Scythians: all alike, so long as they opened themselves to belief in Jesus Christ, were henceforward God’s holy people. This, so Paul informed his hosts, was the epochal message that Christ had charged him to proclaim to the limits of the world. ‘The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.’¹⁷

The appeal of such a sentiment to those already sympathetic to the teachings of Jewish scripture was evident. Once, in a town called Gordium, before the coming there of the Galatians, who had adorned it with the severed heads and twisted corpses of their foes, Alexander the Great had been confronted by a celebrated wonder: a cart that for generations had been knotted to a post. ‘Whoever succeeds in untying it,’ so a prophecy ran, ‘is destined to conquer the world.’¹⁸ Alexander, rather than waste time trying to pick at the knot with his fingers, had severed it with his sword. Now, with his preaching that Jesus was the fulfilment of God’s plans for the world, long foretold by the prophets, Paul had achieved a similar feat. A single deft stroke, and the tension that had always been manifest within Jewish scripture, between the claims of the Jews upon the Lord of all the Earth and those of everyone else, between a God who favoured one people and a God who cared for all humanity, between Israel and the world, appeared resolved. To an age which – in the shadow first of Alexander’s empire, and then of Rome’s – had become habituated to yearnings of a universal order, Paul was preaching a deity who recognised no borders, no divisions. Paul had not ceased to reckon himself a Jew; but he had come to view the marks of his distinctiveness as a Jew, circumcision, avoidance of pork and all, as so much ‘rubbish’.¹⁹ It was trust in God, not a line of descent, that was to distinguish the children of Abraham. The Galatians had no less right to the title than the Jews. The malign powers that previously had kept them enslaved had been routed by Christ’s victory on the cross. The fabric of things was rent, a new order of time had come into existence, and all that previously had served to separate people was now, as a consequence, dissolved. ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’²⁰

Only the world turned upside down could ever have sanctioned such an unprecedented, such a revolutionary, announcement. If Paul did not stint, in a province adorned with monuments to Caesar, in hammering home the full horror and humiliation of Jesus’ death, then it was because, without the crucifixion, he would have had no gospel to proclaim. Christ, by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave, had plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined. If Paul could not leave the sheer wonder of this alone, if he risked everything to proclaim it to strangers likely to find it disgusting, or lunatic, or both, then that was because he had been brought by his vision of the risen Jesus to gaze directly into what it meant for him, and for all the world. That Christ – whose participation in the divine sovereignty over space and time he seems never to have doubted – had become human, and suffered death on the ultimate instrument of torture, was precisely the measure of Paul’s understanding of God: that He was love. The world stood transformed as a result. Such was the gospel. Paul, in proclaiming it, offered himself as the surest measure of its truth. He was nothing, worse than nothing, a man who had persecuted Christ’s followers, foolish and despised; and yet he had been forgiven and saved. ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’²¹

And if Paul, then why not everybody else?

The Spirit of the Law

Naturally, he could not stay to instruct the Galatians in the gospel for ever. The whole world had to hear it. Paul’s ambition was one bred of the age. Never before had a single power controlled all the shipping lanes of the Mediterranean; never before had there been such a network of roads along its shores. Paul, born in the port-city of Tarsus, on the coast to the south of Galatia, had always known that horizons were there to be crossed. Now, shaking off the dust of Galatia from his sandals, he headed westwards, towards the gleaming cities that circled the Aegean: Ephesus, Thessalonica, Philippi. Admittedly, it was not always easy. ‘We have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world.’²² Paul spoke as a man forever on the road, one who had suffered beatings and imprisonments, shipwrecks and the extortions of bandits. Nevertheless, despite the manifold dangers of travel, he had no intention of gathering moss. How could he complain of hardship, when for his sake his Saviour had been tortured to death? So on he went.

By the end of Paul’s life, it has been estimated, he had travelled some ten thousand miles.²³ Always there were new churches to be established, fresh peoples to be won for Christ. But Paul was not merely a visionary. He also understood the value of strategy. Like any good general, he knew better than to neglect his rear. Daily, along the roads built with such effort and proficiency by Caesar’s engineers, missives were borne in the service of the Roman state. Paul too, in the service of his own Lord, dispatched a steady stream of letters. Sufficiently tutored in the art of rhetoric to deny that he had ever learnt it, he was a brilliant, expressive, highly emotional correspondent. One letter might be marked by his tears; another with expostulations of rage; another with heartfelt declarations of love for its recipients; many with all three. At times of particular stress, Paul might even seize the pen from the scribe and start scratching with it himself, his writing large and bold. To read his correspondence was not just to track the pattern of his thoughts, but almost to hear his voice.

When brought disturbing news from Galatia, his immediate response was to write a frantic and impassioned letter. ‘You foolish Galatians, who has put a spell on you?’²⁴ Paul knew full well the sinister aura of sorcery that clung to their homeland; but it was not the local witches who had provoked him to outrage. Instead, by a bitter irony, it was men claiming, like him, to be preaching the gospel of Christ who now threatened his mission with ruin. To accept Jesus as Lord, they had been instructing the churches of Galatia, was to accept the Law of Moses – and in full. This, as a flat contradiction of everything that Paul had been telling them, struck at the very heart of his understanding of Christ’s death on the cross. Unsurprisingly, then, in his determination to combat the ‘false brothers’²⁵ and their teachings, he did not pull his punches. ‘I wish they would go the whole way, and castrate themselves!’²⁶ Scabrous and bitter, the joke dramatised for the Galatians the twin perils that Paul dreaded now threatened them. Circumcision was little better than castration. To submit to the Law of Moses would be as sure a betrayal of Christ as to take to the roads in praise of Cybele. This was not because Paul himself ever doubted that Torah had come from God, but because – in the wake of the great rupture in the affairs of heaven and earth that he believed himself commanded to proclaim – ‘neither circumcision nor the lack of it has any value’.²⁷ To demand of the Galatians that they submit to the knife would be to assume that Christ had been inadequate to save them. It would be to reinstate precisely the division between the Jews and the other peoples of the world that Paul believed to have been ended by his Lord’s crucifixion. It would be to geld any sense of his mission as universal. No wonder, then, in his letter to the Galatians, that Paul should alternately have cajoled and implored them to stay true to his teaching. ‘You, my brothers, were called to be free.’²⁸

Such a slogan, though, might cut both ways. Perhaps it was not surprising, in the wake of Paul’s departure from Galatia, that some of those he had won for Christ should have come to feel a lack of moorings. To repudiate a city’s gods was to repudiate as well the rhythms of its civic life. It was to imperil relations with family and friends. It was to show disrespect to Caesar himself. The crisis in Galatia had taught Paul a sobering lesson: that so extreme might be the sense of dislocation experienced by his converts that some of them, groping after a way to reorient themselves, could seriously contemplate circumcision. The Jews, after all, were an ancient people, and their laws famously strict. The appeal of an identity that was simultaneously venerable and exclusive was stronger, perhaps, than Paul had appreciated. Yet he refused to compromise. Instead, he doubled down. By urging his converts to consider themselves neither Galatian nor Jewish, but solely as the people of Christ, as citizens of heaven, he was urging them to adopt an identity that was as globalist as it was innovative. This, in an age that took for granted local loyalties, and tended to look upon novelty with suspicion, was a bold strategy – but one for which Paul refused to apologise. If he was willing to grant the Law of Moses any authority at all, then it was only to insist that what God most truly wanted was a universal amity. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’²⁹ All you need is love.

That Paul, in the same letter, had openly fantasised about his opponents castrating themselves, did not for a moment give him pause. After all, the truth of his message had been vouchsafed for him by Christ himself: not only on the road to Damascus, but on a subsequent occasion as well, in a vision of heaven, where he had heard ‘inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell’.³⁰ Then, in Galatia, further wonders. The Spirit of God, which, in the beginning, before the creation of things, had hovered over the face of the primordial waters, had descended upon Paul’s converts. Miracles had been performed: the infallible sign of a new covenant between heaven and earth. It was here, in Paul’s utter conviction that the breath of God had descended upon the Galatian church, that the explanation for his inner certitude was to be found, and his scorn for his opponents. ‘The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.’³¹ What need, then, for Gentiles touched by the divine to obey the Law of Moses? ‘For the Lord is the Spirit – and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.’³²

So Paul wrote to a second church, preaching the redemption from old identities that lay at the heart of his message. Corinth, unlike Galatia, enjoyed an international reputation for glamour. Dominating the narrow isthmus linking southern Greece to the north, and with a history that reached back to before the Trojan War, it was wealthy as only a city with two crowded harbours, the headquarters of the provincial governor, and a wide array of banks could be. Even in Rome, the excellence of its bronzes and the proficiency of its prostitutes were spoken of with awe. ‘Not everyone has the good fortune to visit Corinth.’³³ Yet the city, despite the antiquity of its name, was in truth barely much older than those planted by Augustus in Galatia. Like them, it was a colony, founded on the site of the original settlement, which a Roman army, in a brutal display of strength, had wiped out some two centuries before. As much as anywhere in Greece, then, Corinth was a melting pot. The descendants of Roman freedmen settled there by Julius Caesar mingled with Greek plutocrats; shipping magnates with cobblers; itinerant philosophers with Jewish scholars. Identity, in such a city, might easily lack deep roots. Unlike in Athens, where even Paul’s greatest admirers found it hard to pretend that he had enjoyed much of an audience, in Corinth he had won a hearing. His stay in the city, where he had supported himself by working on awnings and tents, and sleeping among the tools of his trade, had garnered various converts. The church that he had founded there – peopled by Jews and non-Jews, rich and poor, some with Roman names and some with Greek – served as a monument to his vision of a new people: citizens of heaven.

To many in Corinth, it was true, there would not have appeared anything particularly startling about such a sect. The city had a long tradition of hosting eccentrics. Back in the time of Alexander, the philosopher Diogenes had notoriously proclaimed his contempt for the norms of society by living in a large jar and masturbating in public. Paul, though, demanded of the Corinthians a far more total recalibration of their most basic assumptions. To commit to Christ was to be plunged into water: to be baptised. Old identities were washed away. Converts were born anew. In a city famed for its wealth, Paul proclaimed that it was the ‘low and despised in the world, mere nothings’,³⁴ who ranked first. Among a people who had always celebrated the agon, the contest to be the best, he announced that God had chosen the foolish to shame the wise, and the weak to shame the strong. In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew. ‘For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord’s freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ’s slave.’³⁵ Even Corinth itself, seen through Paul’s eyes, appeared transfigured. Its theatres and stadia served as monuments, not to the honouring of the city’s ancient festivals, but to the radical novelty of his message. To preach the gospel of Christ was to stand like an actor before the gaze of an entire people; it was to train for the great games staged on the Isthmus, as a runner, as a boxer. Once, back in the darkest year of the city’s history, it had been a Roman general who led the Corinthians in long lines as the mark of his triumph; but now it was God. There was no shame in joining such a procession. Just the opposite. To walk incense-perfumed in the divine train was not to be a captive, but truly to be free.

Freedom, though, as Paul was discovering, might easily bring its own stresses. If in Galatia it had left some of his converts so dizzied that the Law of Moses had come to seem to them a welcome crutch, then in Corinth it inspired a giddy sense that anything might be permitted. Some years after Paul had left the city, news was brought to him of a shocking development: one of his converts had gone to bed with his father’s wife. Paul, unsurprisingly, was horrified. Yet when he wrote to the church in Corinth, warning it against incest and prostitution, against greed, and drunkenness, and back-biting, he could not ignore the charge that he himself might have sanctioned them. What was freedom, after all, if not a licence to do as one pleased? Paul, never one to duck a challenge, met the question head on. ‘Everything is permissible,’ he wrote to the Corinthians, ‘but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible – but not everything is constructive.’³⁶ Here, plucked from the seeming implosion of the church in Corinth, was a momentous argument: that law was most properly ‘the law of Christ’³⁷ when it served the good of those who obeyed it. Commandments were just, not because God had decreed that they were, not because he had uttered them to a prophet, not because he had issued them amid fire and thunder from some distant mountain in a desert, but because they worked for the common good.

But how were Paul’s followers to judge what ranked as mutually beneficial? As with the Galatians, so with the Corinthians: the apostle sought to answer this question by preaching the primacy of love. Without it, so he stirringly proclaimed, a knowledge of right and wrong was as nothing. ‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.’³⁸ Consistent though Paul was in preaching this message, he nevertheless remained haunted by a dilemma that he struggled to resolve. He had travelled widely enough to know how various were the customs of different peoples. Like the great salesman that he was, he always made sure to pitch his message to his audience. ‘I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some.’³⁹ Despite this claim, and despite the convulsive transformation in his understanding of what it meant to be a Jew, in his instincts and prejudices he remained recognisably the product of his schooling. Confronted by Greek traditions about what love might mean, the disgust he felt was recognisably that of a Pharisee. Paul, brought up to regard monogamous marriage as the only acceptable form of sexual relationship, and sex between two men as utterly beyond the pale, did not hesitate to identify these teachings as the will of God. That he could no longer draw on the Law of Moses to back up these convictions did not inhibit him in the slightest. Indeed, if anything, it seems only to have rendered him the more assertive. Paul, in the final reckoning, did not trust his converts to recognise for themselves what was beneficial and constructive.

The result, lurking at the very heart of his teachings, was a paradox with seismic implications. Between the rupture in the fabric of things preached by Paul and the interminable challenges of daily life, between the volcano-blast of revolution and the shelter from it provided by tradition, a tension existed that he could never entirely resolve. Why, for instance, if male and female were indeed ‘all one in Christ Jesus’,⁴⁰ should women not take on the full prerogatives of men? Paul, wrestling with this question, found himself torn. Revelation and upbringing pulled him in opposite directions. His faith in the transformative impact of Christ’s gospel was everywhere manifest among his converts: for whenever the Spirit was believed to have descended upon a woman, her standing among them would be no less than that of a man. Paul himself took for granted that this should be so. Women risked their lives for him; helped to fund his missions; served as leaders in his churches. Yet the notion of equivalence between the two sexes – liable to be as startling to a Jew as it was to a Greek – could not help but give Paul pause. That men might become indistinguishable from women was, after all, the very curse that he had pronounced upon his opponents in Galatia. Understandably, then, the possibility that the church in Corinth might be serving to incubate the mirror image of the Galli, women who looked like men, was one that he refused to countenance. Short hair on a woman, so Paul sternly informed the Corinthians, was as repellent as long hair on a man; a woman praying without a veil was unacceptable, because – among other horrors – it would offend any visiting angels. So might a man who had just scuttled a ship clutch on the swelling of a wave after its wreckage. ‘The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man.’⁴¹

Paul himself, even as he delivered these rulings, never for a moment forgot his own limitations. He was not such a hypocrite as to set himself up as a second Moses. If asked for counsel, he would give it; but this was not to be mistaken for commandments from God. His correspondence was no second Torah. Rather than lay down the law of Christ, his role as an apostle was altogether more modest: to help his converts recognise it within themselves. ‘You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.’⁴² Paul, in struggling to articulate what he meant by this, naturally looked to the scriptures: for there, in the writings of the prophets, assurances were indeed to be found of a time when God, making a new covenant with his chosen people, would put his law ‘upon their hearts’.⁴³ These haunting promises, though, did not provide Paul with the only precedent for what he was trying to express – and he knew it. Writing from Corinth to the churches of Rome, he freely acknowledged that Jews were not alone in having a sense of right and wrong. Other peoples too, however dimly, possessed one. How had they come by it? Since God had never given them a Law, it could only have derived ‘from nature’.⁴⁴ This, for a Jew, was an astonishing acknowledgement to make. The concept of natural law had no place in Torah. Yet Paul – as he struggled to define the law that he believed, in the wake of the crucifixion and the resurrection, to be written on the heart of all who acknowledged Christ as Lord – did not hesitate to adapt the teachings of the Greeks. The word he used for it – syneidesis – clearly signalled which philosophers in particular he had in mind. Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.

Here, in the great struggle to define what the coming of Christ had meant for the world, was a decisive moment. The opponents so forthrightly dismissed by Paul in his letter to the Galatians, the missionaries who preached that to be baptised meant submitting to circumcision as well, were not yet defeated; but they were in retreat. In the churches that Paul had laboured so hard to establish across the span of the Mediterranean, his was the understanding of God’s purpose that was destined to prevail. Never before had Jewish morality and Greek philosophy been fused to such momentous effect. That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics – and yet equally was foreign to them both. Its impact was destined to render Paul’s letters – the correspondence of a vagrant, without position or reputation in the affairs of the world – the most influential, the most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written. Across the millennia, and in societies and continents unimagined by Paul himself, their impact would reverberate. His was a conception of law that would come to suffuse an entire civilisation.

He was indeed – just as he proclaimed himself to be – the herald of a new beginning.

Light my Fire

‘The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.’ ⁴⁵ So Paul wrote to the Hagioi, or saints, who constituted the churches of Rome. The urgency with which he kept travelling the Mediterranean – now planning a trip to Judaea, now an expedition to Spain – reflected his enduring anxiety that the world was running out of time. The whole of creation was in labour. The revolution in the affairs of heaven and earth preached by Paul was of a literally cosmic order. With a mighty blasting of trumpets, with the acclamation of angels, Christ would soon be coming again. Paul, even as he ached for his Lord’s return, shivered at the prospect. ‘May your whole spirit, soul and body,’ he urged his converts, ‘be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’⁴⁶ The word that he used to describe this impending arrival, parousia, was one full of resonance for any Greek. The yearning to behold a god walk the earth, which had seen meretricious warlords like Demetrius the Besieger fêted as divine, was fused by Paul with the natural awe felt by Jews for the one God of Israel. Here, in the prospect of Christ’s return, was a message ripe with multi-cultural appeal.

Rome, though, was already the stage-set for a spectacular parousia. As Paul travelled from city to city, warning that time was short, so in the capital a young Caesar had come to power who took flamboyant pleasure in blurring the boundaries between human and divine. The great-great-grandson of Augustus, Nero also ranked – courtesy of an adoptive father who, following his death, had been briskly promoted to the heavens – as the son of a god. Divine favour had touched him from the very moment of his nativity, when the first rays of a December dawn had bathed him in gold. Flatterers compared him to Apollo, praising him for putting the scattered stars to flight, for bringing a new age of joy, and for ‘giving to silenced laws new breath’.⁴⁷ More literally than Augustus had ever done, he pushed such propaganda to ferocious limits. When Nero brought his euangelion to Greece, he did so in the flashiest manner possible: by remitting the province’s taxes, starting a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth, and starring in the Olympic Games. The resources of the entire world were at his service. Coins, statues, banners: all promoted Nero as a being haloed with divine fire. In the streets of the capital he would pose as the charioteer of the sun. When he made his public debut on the lyre, an instrument to which he had devoted much practice, he pointedly chose to sing of the punishment of Niobe. Apollo, radiant in his cruelty and splendour, seemed to Nero’s dazzled admirers manifest on earth.

To Paul, of course, it was all worse than folly – and not only to Paul. Nero, by appearing in public as a charioteer or a musician, was riding roughshod over a venerable Roman prejudice: that to entertain the public was to become the lowest of the low. Yet the offence, far from giving him pause, only served his purpose. On one thing, at least, the emperor and the apostle were agreed: in a world newly touched by the divine, nothing could quite be as it had been before. Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab and wearisome conventions that governed the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth. What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of ad 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things. In the very heart of the city, a lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest street-walkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them, and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’⁴⁸

Yet out in the vast sprawl of the capital, in the apartment blocks and workshops of the largest city in the world, there were scattered communities of people who, in their rejection of conventions and norms, put even Nero in the shade. Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’,⁴⁹ was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than any of Nero’s stunts. When the masses were invited by the emperor to his street parties, the summons was to enjoy a fleeting taste of the pleasures of a Caesar; but Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had something altogether more startling to offer. ‘The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.’⁵⁰ Here, baldly stated, was a status that Nero would never have thought to share. It was not given to householders filthy and stinking with the sweat of their own labours, the inhabitants at best of a mean apartment or workshop on the outskirts of the city, to lay claim to the title of a Caesar. And yet that, so Paul proclaimed, was indeed their prerogative. They had been adopted by a god.

And not only the householders. In the great parties thrown by Nero for the Roman people, the subversion of tradition sponsored by the emperor had manifest limits. The nobleman’s daughter obliged to work as a prostitute, and serve whoever might demand to use her, was the emblem of a brute truth that most in the capital took for granted: the potency of a Roman penis. Sex was nothing if not an exercise of power. As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior: to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile. While the body of a free-born Roman was sacrosanct, those of others were fair game. ‘It is accepted that every master is entitled to use his slave as he desires.’⁵¹ Nero, by depriving the aristocratic women who worked at his parties of the inviolability that was theirs by right of law, was certainly – even if only for one night – making scandalous play with the Roman class system; but not with a far more fundamental proposition. In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet. In Latin, the same word, meio, meant both ejaculate and urinate. To the presumptions that underlay this, however, Paul brought a radically different perspective. ‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?’⁵² So he had demanded of the Corinthians. How could any man, knowing his limbs consecrated to the Lord, think to entwine them with those of a whore, mingle his sweat with hers, become one flesh with her? But Paul, by proclaiming the body ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’,⁵³ was not merely casting as sacrilege attitudes towards sex that most men in Corinth or Rome took for granted. He was also giving to those who serviced them, the bar girls and the painted boys in brothels, the slaves used without compunction by their masters, a glimpse of salvation. To suffer as Christ had done, to be beaten, and degraded, and abused, was to share in his glory. Adoption by God, so Paul assured his Roman listeners, promised the redemption of their bodies. ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.’⁵⁴

The revolutionary implications of this message, to those who heard it, could not help but raise pressing questions. In the cramped workshops that provided the Hagioi of Rome with their places of assembly, where they would meet to commemorate the arrest and suffering of Christ with a communal meal, men rubbed shoulders with women, citizens with slaves. If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended? Paul, in giving his answer, betrayed a certain ambivalence. Certainly, he refuted any notion that the divine justice promised to those baptised in the name of Christ might be determined by their rank. ‘God,’ he declared firmly, ‘does not show favouritism.’⁵⁵ All were equally redeemed from the servitude of sin and death. The master of a household was no more or less a son of God than his slaves. Everyone, then, should be joined together by a common love. Yet even as Paul urged this, he did not push the radicalism of his message to its logical conclusion. A slave might be loved by his master as a brother, and renowned for his holiness, and blessed with the gift of prophecy – but still remain a slave. ‘We have different gifts,’ so Paul explained, ‘according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. If it is serving, let him serve.’ And if he combined the gifts, then, of course, let him do both.

Paul, in urging this manifesto, could at least argue that he practised what he preached. Willingly, he had abandoned the privileges of his upbringing. Not just a scribe and a scholar, he had inherited from his father – if Luke’s history is to be trusted – the rights of a Roman citizen.* He rarely stood upon them, though. Fearless in proclaiming what he believed, he perfectly accepted that those placed in authority were entitled to punish him for what he said. Repeatedly, rather than abandon his right to speak in synagogues, he submitted to their codes of discipline. ‘Five times have I received at the hands of the Jews the thirty-nine lashes.’⁵⁶ In a similar spirit, and despite his scorn for the pretensions of the Caesars, Paul warned the churches of Rome not to offer open resistance to Nero. ‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.’⁵⁷ Paul’s conviction that the only true citizenship was that of heaven was matched by his determination to exploit the manifestations of earthly authority as effectively as he possibly could. If synagogues offered him a chance to win his fellow Jews for Christ, then he would seize it. If householders in Corinth or Rome provided him with financial backing, and with spaces in which his various converts could meet, and with funds to help relieve a famine back in Judaea, then he would take full advantage of their generosity. If Roman power upheld the peace that enabled him to travel the world, then he would not jeopardise his mission by urging his converts to rebel against it. Too much was at stake. There was no time to weave the entire fabric of society anew. What mattered, in the brief window of opportunity that Paul had been granted, was to establish as many churches as possible – and thereby to prepare the world for the parou-sia. ‘For the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.’⁵⁸

And increasingly, it seemed that the world’s foundations were indeed starting to shake. In the summer of 64, a few weeks after Nero’s notorious street party, a deadly fire broke out in Rome. For days it raged. When at last it was extinguished, perhaps a third of the city was left as smoking rubble. Nero, looking around for culprits, fixed on the Hagioi. The charges against them – arson, and ‘hatred of humankind’⁵⁹ – betrayed no detailed interrogation of their beliefs. They were scapegoats, nothing more. Nero, ever fond of a spectacle, displayed a vengefulness worthy of Artemis and Apollo. Some of the condemned, dressed in animal skins, were torn to pieces by dogs. Others, lashed to crosses, were smeared in pitch and used as torches to illumine the night. Nero, riding in his chariot, mingled with the gawping crowds. Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, were two famous names. One was Peter. The other – beheaded, as befitted a Roman citizen – was Paul. Whether, in truth, he perished in the wake of the great fire, or some time before, is unclear; but that he was indeed executed seems certain enough. Within thirty years of his death, he was being hailed in Rome as the very archetype of a witness to the glory of God: as a martus, a ‘martyr’. ‘For after he had been bound in chains seven times, driven into exile and stoned; after he had preached in both the East and the West; after he had taught what it was to be righteous to the whole world, even to the furthest limits of the West; then he won the noble glory that was the reward for his faith.’⁶⁰

Paul died disappointed in his hope that he would live to see the return in glory of Christ. Yet the most revolutionary of all his teachings – that the Lord of Hosts, rather than preparing amid fire and thunder to rescue Israel from foreign oppression, had opted instead to send His Son to perish on a Roman cross, and thereby to usher in a new age – was soon to receive what, to his followers, could only seem awful confirmation. In ad 66, the smouldering resentments of the Jews in Judaea burst into open revolt. Roman vengeance, when it came, was terrible. Four years after the launch of the rebellion, Jerusalem was stormed by the legions. The wealth of the Temple was carted off to Rome, and the building itself burnt to the ground. ‘Neither its antiquity, nor the extent of its treasures, nor the global range of those who regarded it as theirs, nor the incomparable glory of its rites, proved sufficient to prevent its destruction.’⁶¹ God, whose support the rebels had been banking upon, had failed to save his people. Many Jews, cast into an abyss of misery and despair, abandoned their faith in him altogether. Others, rather than blame God, chose instead to blame themselves, arraigning themselves on a charge of disobedience, and turning with a renewed intensity to the study of their scriptures and their laws. Others yet – those who believed that Jesus was Christ, and whom the Roman authorities had increasingly begun to categorise as Christiani* – found in the ruin visited on God’s Chosen People the echo of an even more dreadful spectacle: that of God’s Son upon the gallows. Paul, although he had not lived to see the destruction of the Temple, had been expecting it. The conviction that God was a warrior bound by a timeless covenant to the defence of a particular people was one that he had abandoned after his first vision of Christ. It was a new covenant that he had preached. The Son of God, by becoming mortal, had redeemed all humanity. Not as a leader of armies, not as the conqueror of Caesars, but as a victim the Messiah had come. The message was as novel as it was shocking – and was to prove well suited to an age of trauma. ‘Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom – but we preach Christ crucified.’⁶²

It was hardly surprising, then, in the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction, and with Jesus starting to pass out of living memory, that Christians should have set to transcribing reports of his life and sayings. Paul, in his letters, had often made allusion to the passion of Christ – to the night of his arrest, to his flogging, to his crucifixion – but, confident that his correspondents already knew the details, had neglected to make it the focus of his communications. The gospels written in the tense and terrible years that immediately preceded and followed the annihilation of Jerusalem were different.† The four earliest and most influential all had as their climax the death and resurrection of Christ. But these were not their only theme. ‘You have one teacher.’⁶³ So Jesus, in one of the gospels, declared. His manner of teaching, though, was nothing like that of a philosopher. Those who paraded their virtue, and condemned the faults of others, he dismissed as painted tombs heaving with maggots and corruption. The standards of virtue he preached – to love one’s enemy, to abandon all one’s worldly goods – were so demanding as to seem impossible to meet. He was peculiarly tender with sinners. He dined with Jews who violated the law and talked beside wells with adulterers. He had a genius for simile. The kingdom of God was like a mustard seed; it was like the world as seen through the eyes of a child; it was like yeast in dough. Again and again, in the stories that Jesus loved to tell, in his parables, the plot was as likely to be drawn from the world of the humble as it was from that of the wealthy or the wise: from the world of swineherds, servants, sowers. And yet, for all that, they had an eerie quality. Repeatedly, the familiar was rendered strange. Seed falling among thorns; a lost sheep; bridesmaids waiting for a wedding to start: all, in Jesus’ teaching, shed a haunting light on the purposes of God. Yet nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever before been portrayed in literature. The measure of this was that Christians, when they read the gospels, were able to believe that the man whose life they depicted, a man whom they described as weeping, sweating and bleeding, a man whose death they vividly and unsparingly related, had indeed been what Paul claimed him to be: ‘the Son of God’.⁶⁴

Six and a half centuries before the Roman sack of Jerusalem, when the Babylonians had visited a similar fate on the city, those hauled away into captivity had kept faith with their god by imagining that all would ultimately be for the best. Israel would be restored, and princes bow down before her. The darkness would ultimately be lifted. So the Lord God himself had declared.

‘I will give you as a light to the nations,

that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’⁶⁵

Now, in the wake of a second Temple’s destruction, the darkness seemed only to have thickened. What prospect, then, of light? To this question, the writers of the gospels provided a startling answer: it had already appeared. ‘The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.’⁶⁶ So began a gospel which Christians in due course would attribute to John, youngest of the twelve original disciples of Jesus, and the one whom he had particularly loved. The Logos, which was with God, and was God, and through whom the world was made, had come into the world, and the world had failed to recognise him. No less than Paul’s letters, it was – in its fusion of Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy – a recognisable monument to the age. Certainly, the notion that light and truth were synonymous was not original to John. It reached back at least to Darius. Yet what followed had no parallel in the utterances of Persian kings, nor of Greek philosophers, nor of Jewish prophets. The Logos – the Word – had become flesh. His disciples had been fishermen and tax-collectors. They had trodden dusty roads together, and slept on hard floors. Then, when the night came of Jesus’ arrest, they had abandoned him. Even Peter, standing by a fire in a courtyard outside where Jesus had been taken, had three times denied him before cockcrow. The betrayal had seemed beyond forgiveness. But then, at the end of the gospel, it had come. John described how the risen Christ had appeared to the disciples as they were out on a lake fishing, and had lit a fire, and had invited them to cook their fish on it. Then, when they had finished eating, he had turned to Peter, and three times asked him, ‘Do you love me?’ Three times Peter had answered that he did. And three times Jesus had commanded him, ‘Feed my sheep.’⁶⁷

So ended a gospel that had begun with the Word that was with God, and was God, at the moment of creation: beside a barbecue on the shores of a lake. Hope from despair; reconciliation from betrayal; healing from trauma.

It was a message, amid the convulsions of the age, to which many would find themselves drawn – and for which some, as time would prove, were more than willing to die.