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.