Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (25 page)

I loved being a Paulist, and I grew to love our patron. I thought of him as a manly adventurer whose quick reference to images of sport ("I have run the race") and combat ("fought the good fight") seemed the perfect rebuttal to our great, if unspoken, fear that the celibate vocation was effete. Paul's life of physical struggle—those shipwrecks and jail terms and narrow escapes—gave us privileged white males more courage than we needed. Yet that "thorn in the flesh" of which he famously complained seemed familiar, since I took it as some kind of sexual obsession. Sexual desire was a thorn I knew of. But, above all, I valued the ample evidence of his spiritual struggle, his restless zeal, his longing for God. It was all a model for me, and a consolation. The things I would do, I didn't—to paraphrase him. The things I wouldn't do, I did. I burned to be good.

There was a stone statue of Paul in the grassy circle outside St. Paul's College, the seminary in Washington, D.C., where I lived from 1963 until 1969. It had him crouching, but carrying a sword and a book. (The sword evoked the way he died. As a Roman citizen, he would not have had to suffer the indignity of crucifixion, as Peter did. Paul would have had the honor of being beheaded. ) As the son of a soldier, it was the sword that I favored first, but through the 1960s two things happened. First the coming, and the worsening, of the Vietnam War weaned me from the love of swords and swoop-winged warplanes. Once, when I found myself in jail after an antiwar demonstration, I consoled myself with Paul's prison refrain: "You cannot imprison the Word of the Lord." Then, also in those years, I discovered the book—the Scriptures, of course, which the statue's stone book intended to represent, but all other books as well. In the seminary I learned to read, really read, and I began to write. It was the discovery of Paul's eloquence as a poet that finally sealed my bond with him.

Perhaps the most familiar passage from the Christian Scriptures are these lines from the first letter Paul wrote to his friends at the Greek city of Corinth. Nothing displays Paul's literary genius more eloquently.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and have all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecy, it will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now, we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
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A. N. Wilson, who wrote a life of Paul, cited this passage, as I have after him, and said that "if he had written nothing else, [it] would have guaranteed that subsequent generations would have revered Paul, seeing him as one of the most stupendous religious poets and visionaries whom the world has ever known."
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An extravagant assertion, perhaps, but it seems impossible to read this text, and others, without knowing that Paul had somehow penetrated to the heart of Jesus. For Paul, the manifestation of this self-giving love—the epiphany, as Joyce would have it—was the mystery of the cross. A vivid sense of Christ's Passion drew Paul into his circle—that primal healing circle. How Paul acquired that sense we do not know; Wilson theorizes that Paul was a Temple guard who personally witnessed Jesus' torment, in his trial and at Golgotha.
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The story of the Passion was well developed by the time Paul would have heard it, but it was Paul who gave foundational expression to its meaning, turning the dreaded crucifix against the Romans by declaring it the source of salvation. Why is 1 Corinthians 13 read as often at funerals as at weddings if not because its crystal-clear affirmation of love transforms suffering into its opposite, not something happy—as if a magical Resurrection redeems a horrid crucifixion or, say, an auto wreck—but something hopeful. In this transformation, absurd and violent death is experienced as pointing beyond itself, to God's unbreakable promise. For Paul, this discovery, tied to his experience not of Jesus but of the story the first followers had made available to him, was a confirmation of his Jewish faith, and the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus was a revelation of the faithful love of the God of Israel.

It was during my years under the spell of Paul that I became the man I am—became, that is, haunted by the elusive but trustworthy presence of Jesus Christ, who loves me and, as I first grasped while kneeling beside my mother as a young child, died for me. I never experienced a conversion as such, but I was taught to believe that Paul did. We Paulists emphasized it, celebrating our greatest annual gala on January 25, the solemn feast. That crouching posture of the statue in front of the college was meant to render the very moment of his having been knocked from his horse. The Paulist Church in New York, named for the patron, has a vaulted ceiling under which I was ordained. It is painted with the night sky to show the constellations as they appeared on the night of Paul's conversion. I accepted that moment as the radical demarcation between Paul's life as a Jew, whose name was Saul, and as a Christian, whose name ever after was Paul.

The emphasis in the Christian memory on this distinction between a Jewish and a Christian name—Jewish-Christian conflict reduced to nomenclature—is misplaced. As is clear from Acts, in a scene that occurred long after his supposed conversion, he was "Saul, who is also called Paul." It is the presence in that scene of the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus that occasions the switch to Paul, the Latinized version of his name.
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The Christian preference for "Paul" that follows only reflects the growing Christian preference for Romans over Jews. Not only was this Saul-Paul dichotomy unknown to the man himself, but so would have been our idea of the conversion it supposedly symbolized. I did not know it when we Paulists were celebrating the feast, but our patron's awakening to Jesus Christ could not have been such a radical demarcation between separate religions to him. Paul died thinking of himself as a Jew, and this emphasis on conversion as a moment of ontological change amounts to a denigration Paul would not have recognized.

Paul's ferocious interior struggle between the Judaism into which he was born and the Judaism as he then saw it in light of Jesus Christ gave external shape and language to the equivalent struggle of the entire Jesus movement. E. P. Sanders says that, for Paul, "the experience of being 'in Christ' was not the same as the experience of being 'in Israel.'"
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It is a distinction that can be, and has been, read as supersessionist, implying that the former had completely displaced the latter—which is, of course, how Christians soon began to talk. But w hat if, instead of being taken as opposites, the two experiences are taken together, not with reference to divergent Judaism and Christianity, but pointing to the covenant of Israel, which remains the one tie to God. In other words, the real meaning of Paul's struggle is lost when what is essentially a paradox comes to be defined as a contradiction.

As a young man, a literal Paulist, I was bothered to hear Paul characterized as the true founder of Christianity, implicitly charged with a betrayal of Jesus by turning the free-spirited movement into a bureaucratic Church. Later, I heard Paul defined—when, say, he coins the phrase "Old Covenant"—as the initiator of Christian contempt for Jews. Now I understand that Paul's preoccupations, reflected in these charges, were an inevitable expression of the tensions of a Jesus follower who was also a Jew of his time. As such, his every action, wish, hope, and belief was conditioned by the Roman oppression that was soon to explode into violence. But perhaps a stronger determinant of his theological preoccupation was his clear conviction that the End Time, with the return of Christ, was imminent. Paul wrote of hearing the trumpets, and the people he assembled shared his passionate expectation. If he did not urge his Gentile followers to become Jews, that was because the Jewish expectation of the Messiah included the conviction that "the nations...[would] walk in his paths," as Isaiah put it.
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They would do so
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the nations, not as converts to Judaism. Paula Fredriksen's work clarified for me the importance of understanding Paul's reflections on Jews and Gentiles in the light of his heightened sense that Christ's return was near, and that that return would resolve the ever more apparent conflict arising between Jewish and non-Jewish believers. Here, in her words, "we see most clearly the measure and consequences of Paul's foreshortened perspective on time."
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Paul's belief in Christ was the belief that he was returning soon—precisely as the Messiah of the Jews, who, as Jews firmly believed, would be the Lord of all.

Thus the emphasis on Paul's theology as innovation entirely misses its point. What we have in Paul is not innovation but a deepening of biblical faith, as it would necessarily appear on what was taken to be the very eve of the End Time. The perhaps inevitably complicated long-run implications of Paul's firm distinction between "in Christ" and "in Israel" were of no concern to him because, as Fredriksen puts it, Paul "did not expect a long run."
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That there has been one, it turns out, is another of those accidents that has shaped history.

So when it comes to the question of the origin of Christian hatred for Jews, Paul is at the story's center. His letters, as the oldest extant Christian writings, reflect the turmoil and contradictions of the kerygma as it was being composed in the decades after Jesus. The letters also show him at his most flawed. His rage, prejudice, and self-obsession are as evident as his courage, gentleness, and faith. Yet it seems that Paul's appeal, then and now, lay in his being so prodigiously complex. His influence in that period was great, particularly regarding the tectonic shift separating Christians and Jews. Volumes have been written attributing to Paul's habit of mind the opposition between Jewish "works" and Christian "faith," between Jewish "law" and Christian "freedom," between the Temple and Jesus who replaced it, between religiosity and true belief. Martin Luther's dichotomizing in this way, as much against the Roman Church as against the Jews, has skewed, perhaps forever, our ability to read Paul as he himself might have wanted to be read. Paul would acknowledge such faith-law oppositions, of course—he does so often—but he would have insisted on what those who came after him quickly lost sight of: The oppositions occur within one people, Israel. Paul could never forget that, because these same oppositions occurred first within one man—himself.

"We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus ... Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?"
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Paul asks versions of this question about "works of the law" often, and his opposition between Law and Christ, between exterior and interior, between flesh and spirit, must have taken on special power to those who knew that, at the same time, the Pharisaic movement—that sibling rival—was giving new emphasis to observance of the Law as Israel's only hope. But Paul had himself been a Pharisee, and he would have known that characterizations of Pharisaic piety as merely outward, as unconcerned with faith, as intrinsically hypocritical, were false.

Krister Stendahl helped me understand this movement in Paul's perceptions of this conflict with "the Jews."
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In his earliest letter, written to the Thessalonians around the year 51, "he had no hesitation," as Stendahl writes, "about the punishment of Israel for not having faith in Jesus Christ: God's wrath has come upon them at last.'"
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Stendahl notes that that phrase "at last" can also mean "in full," or even more ominously, "forever." But some years later, as the conflict between the Jewish followers of Jesus and the Jewish rejection of Jesus had begun to evolve into a conflict between Christians (many of them Gentiles) and "the Jews," Paul had reason to reconsider. He also had to take into account the passage of time, which in his first flush of apocalyptic fervor years before, he would have been hard put to imagine. That Christ had not returned was already beginning to challenge the movement's first assumptions, and now there were things of which to be truly wary. "In his mature reflection on the 'No' of Israel to Jesus Christ," Stendahl says, "Paul sharply warns his gentile followers against feeling superior to Israel."
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Indeed, Paul's warning to the Christian community at Rome, sent about ten years after Thessalonians, reads like a warning to all who will ever think of Israel as surpassed or superseded. "Lest you be wise in your own conceits," he writes in Romans, "I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, 'The Deliverer will come from Zion, he will banish ungodliness from Jacob; and this will be my covenant with them when I take away their sins.'"
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