Freedom, though, as Paul was discovering, might easily bring its own stresses. If in Galatia it had left some of his converts so dizzied that the Law of Moses had come to seem to them a welcome crutch, then in Corinth it inspired a giddy sense that anything might be permitted. Some years after Paul had left the city, news was brought to him of a shocking development: one of his converts had gone to bed with his father’s wife. Paul, unsurprisingly, was horrified. Yet when he wrote to the church in Corinth, warning it against incest and prostitution, against greed, and drunkenness, and back-biting, he could not ignore the charge that he himself might have sanctioned them. What was freedom, after all, if not a licence to do as one pleased? Paul, never one to duck a challenge, met the question head on. ‘Everything is permissible,’ he wrote to the Corinthians, ‘but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible – but not everything is constructive.’36 Here, plucked from the seeming implosion of the church in Corinth, was a momentous argument: that law was most properly ‘the law of Christ’37 when it served the good of those who obeyed it. Commandments were just, not because God had decreed that they were, not because he had uttered them to a prophet, not because he had issued them amid fire and thunder from some distant mountain in a desert, but because they worked for the common good.
But how were Paul’s followers to judge what ranked as mutually beneficial? As with the Galatians, so with the Corinthians: the apostle sought to answer this question by preaching the primacy of love. Without it, so he stirringly proclaimed, a knowledge of right and wrong was as nothing. ‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.’38 Consistent though Paul was in preaching this message, he nevertheless remained haunted by a dilemma that he struggled to resolve. He had travelled widely enough to know how various were the customs of different peoples. Like the great salesman that he was, he always made sure to pitch his message to his audience. ‘I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some.’39 Despite this claim, and despite the convulsive transformation in his understanding of what it meant to be a Jew, in his instincts and prejudices he remained recognisably the product of his schooling. Confronted by Greek traditions about what love might mean, the disgust he felt was recognisably that of a Pharisee. Paul, brought up to regard monogamous marriage as the only acceptable form of sexual relationship, and sex between two men as utterly beyond the pale, did not hesitate to identify these teachings as the will of God. That he could no longer draw on the Law of Moses to back up these convictions did not inhibit him in the slightest. Indeed, if anything, it seems only to have rendered him the more assertive. Paul, in the final reckoning, did not trust his converts to recognise for themselves what was beneficial and constructive.
The result, lurking at the very heart of his teachings, was a paradox with seismic implications. Between the rupture in the fabric of things preached by Paul and the interminable challenges of daily life, between the volcano-blast of revolution and the shelter from it provided by tradition, a tension existed that he could never entirely resolve. Why, for instance, if male and female were indeed ‘all one in Christ Jesus’,40 should women not take on the full prerogatives of men? Paul, wrestling with this question, found himself torn. Revelation and upbringing pulled him in opposite directions. His faith in the transformative impact of Christ’s gospel was everywhere manifest among his converts: for whenever the Spirit was believed to have descended upon a woman, her standing among them would be no less than that of a man. Paul himself took for granted that this should be so. Women risked their lives for him; helped to fund his missions; served as leaders in his churches. Yet the notion of equivalence between the two sexes – liable to be as startling to a Jew as it was to a Greek – could not help but give Paul pause. That men might become indistinguishable from women was, after all, the very curse that he had pronounced upon his opponents in Galatia. Understandably, then, the possibility that the church in Corinth might be serving to incubate the mirror image of the Galli, women who looked like men, was one that he refused to countenance. Short hair on a woman, so Paul sternly informed the Corinthians, was as repellent as long hair on a man; a woman praying without a veil was unacceptable, because – among other horrors – it would offend any visiting angels. So might a man who had just scuttled a ship clutch on the swelling of a wave after its wreckage. ‘The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man.’41
Paul himself, even as he delivered these rulings, never for a moment forgot his own limitations. He was not such a hypocrite as to set himself up as a second Moses. If asked for counsel, he would give it; but this was not to be mistaken for commandments from God. His correspondence was no second Torah. Rather than lay down the law of Christ, his role as an apostle was altogether more modest: to help his converts recognise it within themselves. ‘You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.’42 Paul, in struggling to articulate what he meant by this, naturally looked to the scriptures: for there, in the writings of the prophets, assurances were indeed to be found of a time when God, making a new covenant with his chosen people, would put his law ‘upon their hearts’.43 These haunting promises, though, did not provide Paul with the only precedent for what he was trying to express – and he knew it. Writing from Corinth to the churches of Rome, he freely acknowledged that Jews were not alone in having a sense of right and wrong. Other peoples too, however dimly, possessed one. How had they come by it? Since God had never given them a Law, it could only have derived ‘from nature’.44 This, for a Jew, was an astonishing acknowledgement to make. The concept of natural law had no place in Torah. Yet Paul – as he struggled to define the law that he believed, in the wake of the crucifixion and the resurrection, to be written on the heart of all who acknowledged Christ as Lord – did not hesitate to adapt the teachings of the Greeks. The word he used for it – syneidesis – clearly signalled which philosophers in particular he had in mind. Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.
Here, in the great struggle to define what the coming of Christ had meant for the world, was a decisive moment. The opponents so forthrightly dismissed by Paul in his letter to the Galatians, the missionaries who preached that to be baptised meant submitting to circumcision as well, were not yet defeated; but they were in retreat. In the churches that Paul had laboured so hard to establish across the span of the Mediterranean, his was the understanding of God’s purpose that was destined to prevail. Never before had Jewish morality and Greek philosophy been fused to such momentous effect. That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics – and yet equally was foreign to them both. Its impact was destined to render Paul’s letters – the correspondence of a vagrant, without position or reputation in the affairs of the world – the most influential, the most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written. Across the millennia, and in societies and continents unimagined by Paul himself, their impact would reverberate. His was a conception of law that would come to suffuse an entire civilisation.