Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (28 page)

There was another, more practical advantage to centering the movement in Jerusalem.
The yearly cycle of festivals and feasts brought thousands of Jews from across the
empire directly to them. And unlike the Jews living in Jerusalem, who seem to have
easily dismissed Jesus’s followers as uninformed at best, heretical at worst, the
Diaspora Jews, who lived far from the sacred city and beyond the reach of the Temple,
proved far more susceptible to the disciples’ message.

As small minorities living in large cosmopolitan centers like Antioch and Alexandria,
these Diaspora Jews had become deeply acculturated to both Roman society and Greek
ideas. Surrounded by a host of different races and religions, they tended to be more
open to questioning Jewish beliefs and practices, even when it came to such basic
matters as circumcision and dietary restrictions. Unlike their brethren in the Holy
Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought
processes, the language of their worship. They experienced the scriptures not in the
original Hebrew but in a Greek translation (the Septuagint), which offered new and
originative ways of expressing their faith, allowing them to more easily harmonize
traditional biblical cosmology with Greek philosophy. Consider the Jewish scriptures
that came out of the Diaspora. Books such as
The Wisdom of Solomon
, which anthropomorphizes Wisdom as a woman to be sought above all else, and
Jesus Son of Sirach
(commonly referred to as
The Book of Ecclesiasticus
) read more like Greek philosophical tracts than like Semitic scriptures.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Diaspora Jews were more
receptive to the innovative interpretation of the scriptures being offered by Jesus’s
followers. In fact, it did not take long for these Greek-speaking Jews to outnumber
the original Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. According to the book
of Acts, the community was divided into two separate and distinct camps: the “Hebrews,”
the term used by Acts to refer to the Jerusalem-based believers under the leadership
of James and the apostles, and the “Hellenists,” those Jews who came from the Diaspora
and who spoke Greek as their primary language (Acts 6:1).

It was not just language that separated the Hebrews from the Hellenists. The Hebrews
were primarily peasants, farmers, and fishermen—transplants in Jerusalem from the
Judean and Galilean countryside. The Hellenists were more sophisticated and urbane,
better educated, and certainly wealthier, as evidenced by their ability to travel
hundreds of kilometers to make pilgrimage at the Temple. It was, however, the division
in language that would ultimately prove decisive in differentiating the two communities.
The Hellenists, who worshipped Jesus in Greek, relied on a language that provided
a vastly different set of symbols and metaphors than did either Aramaic or Hebrew.
The difference in language gradually led to differences in doctrine, as the Hellenists
began to meld their Greek-inspired worldviews with the Hebrews’ already idiosyncratic
reading of the Jewish scriptures.

When conflict broke out between the two communities over the equal distribution of
communal resources, the apostles designated seven leaders among the Hellenists to
see to their own needs. Known as “the Seven,” these leaders are listed in the book
of Acts as Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus (a Gentile convert
from Antioch), and, of course, Stephen, whose death at the hands of an angry mob would
make permanent the division between the Hebrews and Hellenists.

A wave of persecution followed Stephen’s death. The religious authorities, who until
then seemed to have grudgingly tolerated the presence of Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem,
were incensed by
Stephen’s shockingly heretical words. It was bad enough to call a crucified peasant
messiah; it was unforgivably blasphemous to call him God. In response, the authorities
systematically expelled the Hellenists from Jerusalem, an act that, interestingly,
did not seem to have been greatly opposed by the Hebrews. Indeed, the fact that the
Jerusalem assembly continued to thrive under the shadow of the Temple for decades
after Stephen’s death indicates that the Hebrews remained somewhat unaffected by the
persecutions of the Hellenists. It was as though the priestly authorities did not
consider the two groups to be related.

Meanwhile, the expelled Hellenists flooded back into the Diaspora. Armed with the
message they had adopted from the Hebrews in Jerusalem, they began transmitting it,
in Greek
, to their fellow Diaspora Jews, those living in the Gentile cities of Ashdod and
Caesarea, in the coastal regions of Syria-Palestine, in Cyprus and Phoenicia and Antioch,
the city in which they were, for the first time, referred to as Christians (Acts 11:27).
Little by little over the following decade, the Jewish sect founded by a group of
rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. No longer bound
by the confines of the Temple and the Jewish cult, the Hellenist preachers began to
gradually shed Jesus’s message of its nationalistic concerns, transforming it into
a universal calling that would be more appealing to those living in a Graeco-Roman
milieu. In doing so, they unchained themselves from the strictures of Jewish law,
until it ceased to have any primacy. Jesus did not come to fulfill the law, the Hellenists
argued. He came to abolish it. Jesus’s condemnation was not of the priests who defiled
the Temple with their wealth and hypocrisy. His condemnation was of the Temple itself.

Still, at this point, the Hellenists reserved their preaching solely for their fellow
Jews, as Luke writes in the book of Acts: “They spoke the word to no one but the Jews”
(Acts 11:19). This was still a primarily Jewish movement, one that blossomed through
the theological experimentation that marked the Diaspora experience
in the Roman Empire. But then a few among the Hellenists began sharing the message
of Jesus with gentiles, “so that a great number of them became believers.” The gentile
mission was not paramount—not yet. But the farther the Hellenists spread from Jerusalem
and the heart of the Jesus movement, the more their focus shifted from an exclusively
Jewish audience to a primarily gentile one. The more their focus shifted to converting
gentiles, the more they allowed certain syncretistic elements borrowed from Greek
gnosticism and Roman religions to creep into the movement. And the more the movement
was shaped by these new “pagan” converts, the more forcefully it discarded its Jewish
past for a Graeco-Roman future.

All of this was still many years away. It would not be until after the destruction
of Jerusalem in 70
C.E
. that the mission to the Jews would be abandoned and Christianity transformed into
a Romanized religion. Yet even at this early stage in the Jesus movement, the path
toward gentile dominance was being set, though the tipping point would not come until
a young Pharisee and Hellenistic Jew from Tarsus named Saul—the same Saul who had
countenanced Stephen’s stoning for blasphemy—met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus
and became known forevermore as Paul.

Am I Not an Apostle?

Saul of Tarsus was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples when he
left Jerusalem to find and punish the Hellenists who had fled to Damascus after Stephen’s
stoning. Saul was not asked by the high priest to hunt down these followers of Jesus;
he went of his own accord. An educated, Greek-speaking, Diaspora Jew and citizen of
one of the wealthiest port cities in the Roman Empire, Saul was zealously devoted
to the Temple and Torah. “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of
the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” he writes of himself in a letter
to the Philippians, “as to [knowledge of] the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor
of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5–6).

It was while en route to Damascus that the young Pharisee had an ecstatic experience
that would change everything for him, and for the faith he would adopt as his own.
As he approached the city gates with his traveling companions, he was suddenly struck
by a light from heaven flashing all around him. He fell to the ground in a heap. A
voice said to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.

The reply broke through the blinding white light, “I am Jesus.”

Struck blind by the vision, Saul made his way to Damascus, where he met a follower
of Jesus named Ananias, who laid hands upon him and restored his sight. Immediately,
something like scales dropped from Saul’s eyes and he was filled with the Holy Spirit.
Right then and there, Saul was baptized into the Jesus movement. He changed his name
to Paul and immediately began preaching the risen Jesus, not to his fellow Jews, but
to the gentiles who had, up to this point, been more or less ignored by the movement’s
chief missionaries.

The story of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus is a bit of propagandistic
legend created by the evangelist Luke; Paul himself never recounts the story of being
blinded by the sight of Jesus. If the traditions can be believed, Luke was a young
devotee of Paul: he is mentioned in two letters, Colossians and Timothy, commonly
attributed to Paul but written long after his death. Luke wrote the book of Acts as
a kind of eulogy to his former master some thirty to forty years after Paul had died.
In fact, Acts is less an account of the apostles than it is a reverential biography
of Paul; the apostles disappear from the book early on, serving as little more than
the bridge between Jesus and Paul. In Luke’s reimagining, it is Paul—not James, nor
Peter, nor John, nor any of the Twelve—who is the true successor to Jesus. The activity
of the apostles in Jerusalem serves only as prelude to Paul’s preaching in the Diaspora.

Although Paul does not divulge any details about his conversion, he does repeatedly
insist that he has witnessed the risen Jesus for himself, and that this experience
has endowed him with the same apostolic authority as the Twelve. “Am I not an apostle?”
Paul writes in defense of his credentials, which were frequently challenged by the
mother assembly in Jerusalem. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Corinthians 9:1).

Paul may have considered himself an apostle, but it seems that few if any of the other
movement leaders agreed. Not even Luke,
Paul’s sycophant, whose writings betray a deliberate, if ahistorical, attempt to elevate
his mentor’s status in the founding of the church, refers to Paul as an apostle. As
far as Luke is concerned, there are only twelve apostles, one for each tribe of Israel,
just as Jesus had intended. In recounting the story of how the remaining eleven apostles
replaced Judas Iscariot with Matthias after Jesus’s death, Luke notes that the new
recruit needed to be someone who “accompanied [the disciples] all the time that the
Lord Jesus went in and out among us, starting with John’s baptism, right up to the
day [Jesus] was taken from us” (Acts 1:21). Such a requirement would clearly have
ruled out Paul, who converted to the movement around 37
C.E
., nearly a decade after Jesus had died. But that does not deter Paul, who not only
demands to be called an apostle—“even if I am not an apostle to others, at least I
am to you,” he tells his beloved community in Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:2)—he insists
he is far superior to all the other apostles.

“Are they Hebrews?” Paul writes of the apostles. “So am I! Are they Israelites? So
am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ?
I am a better one
(though it may be foolish to say so), with greater labors, more floggings, more imprisonments,
and more often near death” (2 Corinthians 11:22–23). Paul holds particular contempt
for the Jerusalem-based triumvirate of James, Peter, and John, whom he derides as
the “so-called pillars of the church” (Galatians 2:9). “Whatever they are makes no
difference to me,” he writes. “Those leaders contributed nothing to me” (Galatians
2:6). The apostles may have walked and talked with the living Jesus (or, as Paul dismissively
calls him, “Jesus-in-the-flesh”). But Paul walks and talks with the divine Jesus:
they have, according to Paul, conversations in which Jesus imparts secret instructions
intended solely for his ears. The apostles may have been handpicked by Jesus as they
toiled away on their fields or brought up their fishing nets. But Jesus chose Paul
before he was born: he was, he tells the Galatians, called by Jesus into apostleship
while still in
his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). In other words, Paul does not consider himself
the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the
first
apostle.

The claim of apostleship is an urgent one for Paul, as it was the only way to justify
his entirely self-ascribed mission to the gentiles, which the leaders of the Jesus
movement in Jerusalem appear not to have initially supported. Although there was a
great deal of discussion among the apostles over how strictly the new community should
adhere to the Law of Moses, with some advocating rigorous compliance and others taking
a more moderate stance, there was little argument about whom the community was meant
to serve: this was a Jewish movement intended for a Jewish audience. Even the Hellenists
reserved their preaching mostly for the Jews. If a handful of gentiles decided to
accept Jesus as messiah, so be it, as long as they submitted to circumcision and the
law.