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.