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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