Paul -- Christianity’s unlikely champion

MENTION the term “son of God” and many people today think immediately of Jesus. But if it had been uttered anywhere in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus, most would have thought of Augustus Caesar -- divi filius, divine son of the deified Julius Caesar. Augustus had conquered the world and established the Pax Romana that would last some 200 years. He was revered as Lord, Redeemer and Savior of the World.

Now imagine the apostle Paul crossing the Mediterranean to proclaim that Jesus, a man he’d never met and who’d been executed by Rome as a criminal years earlier, was actually the son of God, our Lord. Paul was usurping titles reserved for Caesar -- a calculated act of treason.

In their engrossing book, “In Search of Paul,” John Dominic Crossan, a scholar on the historical Jesus, and biblical archeologist Jonathan L. Reed tour ruins in Italy and Greece, Turkey and Syria to see the world in which Paul lived and preached. They also use historical and exegetical analysis to revive Paul, a Jew who understood Hebrew and helped persecute the early church before becoming one of Christianity’s most dominant, and enigmatic, figures.

The authors try to set the record straight on Paul’s view of women, distinguishing between New Testament letters he wrote and others attributed to him. The authentic Pauline letters (e.g., Romans, Galatians) speak of a radical equality in Christ in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. Later non-Pauline writings, such as 1 Timothy, which says that women should stay home, get pregnant and keep silent, tried to “sanitize a social subversive, to domesticate a dissident apostle, and to make Christianity and Rome safe for one another.”

In a world divided between Jews and Gentiles, how did Paul establish Christian communities in the capitals of the major Roman provinces so rapidly? If he’d gone to synagogues to convert Jews (as the Acts of the Apostles says he did), he’d have encountered serious resistance; had he targeted Gentiles, he’d have had to spend months or years tutoring them in Jewish practices, traditions and scriptures.

The authors argue compellingly that Paul reached out to a vast third group identified in the New Testament as “God-fearers” or “God-worshipers.” These were pagans who admired Jewish culture, supported synagogues and attended services. Because they were already familiar with Jewish theology, Paul could work quickly. “The Pauline express thundered along on God-worshiper rails,” they write, “and Paul moved fast because he did not have to lay track.”

Paul opposed Roman imperial theology, which in its claims for the emperor’s divinity went beyond rhetoric or Caesarean swagger to form “the ideological core of Roman imperial power, the theological heart of Roman global rule,” Crossan and Reed write. Caesar ruled by a mandate from heaven to secure peace through victory.

Like Jesus, Paul was a Jewish visionary in the tradition of Old Testament prophets who claimed that if justice were established, peace would follow. Paul offered Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God, which promises equality and peace to all, here and now, as a gift of God.

Paul opposed the Roman empire not because it “was particularly unjust or oppressive, but because he questioned the normalcy of civilization itself, since civilization has always been imperial, that is, unjust and oppressive,” Crossan and Reed write. Thus Paul asked: Who is God -- a God of violence and power, or a God of justice and equality? And in whom do you find God -- Caesar or Christ?

The authors pose the same questions for today’s society, asking to what extent America can call itself Christian. “We are now the greatest postindustrial civilization as Rome was the greatest preindustrial one,” they write. “That is precisely what makes Paul’s challenge equally forceful for now as for then.”

John D. Spalding edits Somareview.com and is the author of “A Pilgrim’s Digress: My Perilous, Fumbling Quest for the Celestial City.”