He was indeed – just as he proclaimed himself to be – the herald of a new beginning.
Light my Fire
‘The night is nearly over; the day is almost here.’ 45 So Paul wrote to the Hagioi, or saints, who constituted the churches of Rome. The urgency with which he kept travelling the Mediterranean – now planning a trip to Judaea, now an expedition to Spain – reflected his enduring anxiety that the world was running out of time. The whole of creation was in labour. The revolution in the affairs of heaven and earth preached by Paul was of a literally cosmic order. With a mighty blasting of trumpets, with the acclamation of angels, Christ would soon be coming again. Paul, even as he ached for his Lord’s return, shivered at the prospect. ‘May your whole spirit, soul and body,’ he urged his converts, ‘be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’46 The word that he used to describe this impending arrival, parousia, was one full of resonance for any Greek. The yearning to behold a god walk the earth, which had seen meretricious warlords like Demetrius the Besieger fêted as divine, was fused by Paul with the natural awe felt by Jews for the one God of Israel. Here, in the prospect of Christ’s return, was a message ripe with multi-cultural appeal.
Rome, though, was already the stage-set for a spectacular parousia. As Paul travelled from city to city, warning that time was short, so in the capital a young Caesar had come to power who took flamboyant pleasure in blurring the boundaries between human and divine. The great-great-grandson of Augustus, Nero also ranked – courtesy of an adoptive father who, following his death, had been briskly promoted to the heavens – as the son of a god. Divine favour had touched him from the very moment of his nativity, when the first rays of a December dawn had bathed him in gold. Flatterers compared him to Apollo, praising him for putting the scattered stars to flight, for bringing a new age of joy, and for ‘giving to silenced laws new breath’.47 More literally than Augustus had ever done, he pushed such propaganda to ferocious limits. When Nero brought his euangelion to Greece, he did so in the flashiest manner possible: by remitting the province’s taxes, starting a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth, and starring in the Olympic Games. The resources of the entire world were at his service. Coins, statues, banners: all promoted Nero as a being haloed with divine fire. In the streets of the capital he would pose as the charioteer of the sun. When he made his public debut on the lyre, an instrument to which he had devoted much practice, he pointedly chose to sing of the punishment of Niobe. Apollo, radiant in his cruelty and splendour, seemed to Nero’s dazzled admirers manifest on earth.
To Paul, of course, it was all worse than folly – and not only to Paul. Nero, by appearing in public as a charioteer or a musician, was riding roughshod over a venerable Roman prejudice: that to entertain the public was to become the lowest of the low. Yet the offence, far from giving him pause, only served his purpose. On one thing, at least, the emperor and the apostle were agreed: in a world newly touched by the divine, nothing could quite be as it had been before. Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab and wearisome conventions that governed the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth. What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of ad 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things. In the very heart of the city, a lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest street-walkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them, and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’48
Yet out in the vast sprawl of the capital, in the apartment blocks and workshops of the largest city in the world, there were scattered communities of people who, in their rejection of conventions and norms, put even Nero in the shade. Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’,49 was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than any of Nero’s stunts. When the masses were invited by the emperor to his street parties, the summons was to enjoy a fleeting taste of the pleasures of a Caesar; but Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had something altogether more startling to offer. ‘The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.’50 Here, baldly stated, was a status that Nero would never have thought to share. It was not given to householders filthy and stinking with the sweat of their own labours, the inhabitants at best of a mean apartment or workshop on the outskirts of the city, to lay claim to the title of a Caesar. And yet that, so Paul proclaimed, was indeed their prerogative. They had been adopted by a god.
And not only the householders. In the great parties thrown by Nero for the Roman people, the subversion of tradition sponsored by the emperor had manifest limits. The nobleman’s daughter obliged to work as a prostitute, and serve whoever might demand to use her, was the emblem of a brute truth that most in the capital took for granted: the potency of a Roman penis. Sex was nothing if not an exercise of power. As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior: to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile. While the body of a free-born Roman was sacrosanct, those of others were fair game. ‘It is accepted that every master is entitled to use his slave as he desires.’51 Nero, by depriving the aristocratic women who worked at his parties of the inviolability that was theirs by right of law, was certainly – even if only for one night – making scandalous play with the Roman class system; but not with a far more fundamental proposition. In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet. In Latin, the same word, meio, meant both ejaculate and urinate. To the presumptions that underlay this, however, Paul brought a radically different perspective. ‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?’52 So he had demanded of the Corinthians. How could any man, knowing his limbs consecrated to the Lord, think to entwine them with those of a whore, mingle his sweat with hers, become one flesh with her? But Paul, by proclaiming the body ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’,53 was not merely casting as sacrilege attitudes towards sex that most men in Corinth or Rome took for granted. He was also giving to those who serviced them, the bar girls and the painted boys in brothels, the slaves used without compunction by their masters, a glimpse of salvation. To suffer as Christ had done, to be beaten, and degraded, and abused, was to share in his glory. Adoption by God, so Paul assured his Roman listeners, promised the redemption of their bodies. ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.’54