Chapter 50. Paul and the Gentile Mission: The “Second Founder” of Christianity

If the Jerusalem community of James was a messianic sect inside Judaism, Paul of Tarsus is the figure most often credited, or blamed, with turning it into a universal religion. He was a zealous Pharisee who persecuted the new sect, then became its most energetic missionary to non-Jews. He wrote the earliest surviving Christian documents, and he died in Rome under Nero. Wilhelm Wrede called him “the second founder of Christianity”, and meant it as disparagement. Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer used the same title as acknowledgement [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §29.1 n. 8]. This chapter follows James D. G. Dunn’s reconstruction of Paul’s life and mission and sets beside it the readings that make Paul the real architect of Christianity: Hergenhahn’s Paul as the meeting point of Judaism and Greek thought, Ehrman’s thesis of forged Pauline letters, Baigent and Leigh’s suspicion of Paul as a Roman agent, and Mitchell Heisman’s view of Pauline universalism as the vehicle by which Jewish “God memes” conquered Rome.

The persecutor and the Damascus experience

Dunn’s chapter 25 (“The Emergence of Paul”) covers “The Early Life and Education of Saul”, “‘The Persecutor’ (Gal. 1.23)”, “‘Approaching Damascus, about Noon'” and “The Origin of Paul’s Gospel” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, Contents]. Paul’s own self-descriptions are the anchor: “circumcised the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church” (Phil. 3.5–6). He also writes that “in excessive measure I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it, and … progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries … being exceedingly zealous for my ancestral traditions” (Gal. 1.13–14) [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §29.2]. Dunn argues that “Judaism” here means the zealous Pharisaic defence of Israel’s distinctives, and not Jewish identity as such. On this reading Paul left “Judaism” in that sense without ceasing to call himself an Israelite (Rom. 11.1) [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §29.2a–b]. Dunn holds that Saul directed his persecution chiefly against diaspora Hellenists: “a diaspora Saul directed his main zeal against other diaspora Jews” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §24.6]. The popular summary in Hidden Religion gives the traditional version: Paul “converted from Judaism to Christianity during a trip from Jerusalem to Damascus (changing his name from Saul to Paul in the process)” and is “credited with playing the most vital role in the development of Christianity after Jesus’s death” [Main & Issitt, Hidden Religion, #66220, ch. 33]. B. R. Hergenhahn, writing a history of psychology, treats Paul (c. 10–64 CE) as the place where the “many influences converging on early Christianity” meet. In his account Paul was “the first to claim and preach that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah” after a vision on the Damascus road, and he sets this against the Greek philosophical and Jewish influences on the Roman world [Hergenhahn, An Introduction to the History of Psychology, #30761, ch. 3].

Chronology and the Aegean mission

Dunn builds the chronology on a few firm points. They are the crucifixion, “probably 30, but possibly 33”; Paul’s own intervals of three years and then fourteen years (Gal. 1.18; 2.1), “a firm total of 15–16 years”; and “the firmest of all the data”, the proconsulship of Gallio in Corinth, “most likely 51–52”, known from a Delphi inscription. That dating places Paul’s eighteen months in Corinth “as 49–51 or 50–52”. Further anchors are the escape from Damascus under the ethnarch of Aretas IV (2 Cor. 11.32–33), the two-to-three years in Ephesus, the Caesarean custody under Felix and Festus, and the two years in Rome [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §28.1]. Dunn rejects the conventional “three missionary journeys”. After the break at Antioch, Paul “in effect lost (or disowned or was disowned by) what had been his base”, and he worked from Corinth and Ephesus in “Paul’s Aegean mission” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §29.1]. Chapters 31–33 follow it: Thessalonica, the “Confrontation in Athens”, the founding of the church in Corinth, the Thessalonian letters and Galatians; then Ephesus, four letters to Corinth and Romans; and “The Collection” for Jerusalem [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, Contents]. Dunn ranks “the eight or so years of the Aegean mission” with Jesus’ own mission and the first Jerusalem years “as the most crucial for Christianity’s existence and enduring character”. In his view, that is what makes the title “second founder” appropriate [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §29.1].

Crisis over circumcision, the Council and Antioch

Chapter 27, “Crisis and Confrontation”, covers the mission from Antioch, “The Crisis”, “The Council in Jerusalem”, “Confrontation — the Incident at Antioch” and “The Truth of the Gospel” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, Contents]. On Dunn’s reckoning of 15–16 years from conversion, the Council falls in the late 40s. There the Jerusalem pillars accepted a circumcision-free mission to gentiles (Gal. 2.6–9). The rupture came at Antioch. When “men from James” arrived, Peter “began to separate himself” (aphōrizen) from the gentile believers. Barnabas followed him, and Paul “denounced him to his face” (Gal. 2.11–14). Dunn links the verb to Hebrew parash, the root of “Pharisee”, and to Qumran’s separation for purity. He argues that the issue “is not circumcision but purity”, that is, table-fellowship and pressure on gentiles “to judaize” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §27.4 and n. 258]. Because Paul failed to persuade Antioch, his mission went on “independently of Jerusalem and Antioch” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §29.1].

Paul’s churches

Dunn asks whether Paul’s house churches looked to outsiders like “An Association or a Religious Cult?” (§30.3). Greco-Roman associations, he notes, had typically 30–40 members. They centred on shared meals, existed “typically for the non-elite (the urban poor, slaves, freedmen)”, and had patrons. No association “lacked a religious dimension”, and all were “thoroughly integrated” into the imperial cult [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §30.3]. The Christian assemblies took over the form, the household meal and the patron, while refusing the imperial rites. Dunn’s sections on social composition, organisation, meetings and “boundaries” (§§30.4–30.7) develop this tension [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, Contents].

Arrest, Rome and death

Chapter 34, “The Passion of Paul”, covers the arrest in Jerusalem while Paul was delivering the collection, the trials, the voyage to Rome, Philippians, Philemon and Colossians. It ends by asking “When Did Paul Die?” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, Contents]. Bacchiocchi notes that Paul brought “alms and offerings” (Acts 24:17) partly “to draw the Jewish and Gentile wings of the Church closer together”, together with a public show of loyalty to the law [Bacchiocchi, From Sabbath To Sunday, #63620, ch. 5]. Dunn concludes that Luke ends Acts with Paul preaching in Roman custody (c. 60–62) because “Luke indeed knew all too well that the trial of Paul … had gone badly for Paul and that he had been summarily executed, immediately or a little later”. He notes McKechnie’s observation that Nero’s rulings on Judean embassies consistently favoured the Jerusalem priesthood [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §34.7 and n. 405].

Disputed letters and slavery

Dunn treats the Pastoral Epistles as “most probably … letters written in the Spirit of Paul some twenty or thirty years later”, which may still incorporate genuine material [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §34.7]. Bart Ehrman is blunter. His chapter “Forgeries in the Name of Paul” argues that the personal notices in 2 Timothy “serve … to convince readers that this really is written by Paul, even though it is not”. His index files Ephesians, Colossians and the “deutero-Pauline letters” under “Pauline forgeries”. He notes the irony that 2 Thessalonians warns readers not to be misled by a letter “as if by us” (2:2), and he rejects the scholarly euphemism that “this kind of pseudonymity should not be labeled as ‘forgery'” [Ehrman, Forged, #63605, chs. 3–4, index].

Philemon tests Paul’s ethics. Norman Geisler, writing as an evangelical, says one reason for the letter was “to state the Christian view on slavery”. He insists: “Slavery is unethical and unbiblical, and neither Paul’s actions nor his writings approve of this debasing form of treatment … Paul neither commends nor condones it; rather he undermines it and condemns it implicitly” [Geisler, A Popular Survey of the New Testament, #65488, “Philemon”]. Dunn reads the household rules of Colossians differently. They assume “the centrality and dominance of the paterfamilias” and command “slaves, obey in everything”. Their purpose was partly to “reassure any visitors to (or informers within) the Colossian congregation that the Christians were good citizens”, even as they set master and slave under “the one Lord” [Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, #63287, §34.6].

Paul as subversive: Heisman, Baigent and Leigh, Keshe

Heisman reads Paul’s universalism sociobiologically. He quotes Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female”. He observes that Paul’s mission targeted “those culturally between Jews and pagans”, the God-fearers, who “reflected Jesus himself as the living border between Jew and gentile”. He concludes: “Just as Roman conquerors penetrated the territorial-sociobiological boundaries of the ancient Jewish state, the Jewish-based God memes of Christianity penetrated the ancient Roman world” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp. 441–442]. He adds that “the internationalism of Christianity laid the common ground for a world that has a place for the nationalism of the Jews”. He also argues that Roman altruism, which “made their empire one of the most effective political forces the world has ever known”, became “absolutely deadly” when Christian love loosed it from its kin-selective bounds [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, part 169]. Baigent and Leigh go further. Their final chapter, “Paul — Roman Agent or Informer?”, treats Acts as “a kind of picaresque novel” in which “everything is focused on, and restricted to, St Paul”. Following Eisenman, it reads Paul against the scrolls’ “Liar”, who leads members to “cease to adhere to the Law” [Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, #71853, ch. 16]. Keshe speaks of messengers in general. He says he has “always respected the prophets”, but “the followers have done exactly what the Messengers have done”, turning the soul’s message into physical law and control: Moses “transferred it into the physical tablets, which was not the condition” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 205, #377848].

Key points

• Paul described himself as a zealous Pharisee and persecutor (Gal. 1.13–14; Phil. 3.5–6). Dunn holds that his zeal targeted the Hellenist believers.
• Dunn’s chronology rests on a crucifixion c. 30, Paul’s 3 + 14 years, and Gallio’s proconsulship (51–52), which places Paul in Corinth c. 49–51.
• At Antioch the conflict was over purity and table-fellowship, not circumcision. Paul’s defeat there made his Aegean mission independent.
• Dunn sees the Aegean mission and its letters as the basis for calling Paul “the second founder of Christianity”, a title first used by Wrede as a criticism.
• Dunn infers from Luke’s silence that Paul was executed in Rome after c. 62. He treats the Pastorals as written in Paul’s spirit a generation later, while Ehrman calls them and other letters forgeries.
• On Philemon and the household codes, Geisler sees an implicit condemnation of slavery and Dunn a reassurance of civic conformity.
• Heisman treats Pauline universalism as the means by which Jewish “God memes” penetrated Rome. Baigent and Leigh suspect Paul of Roman agency, and Keshe sees institutions as compromising the messengers.