Religion
Pauline tribute
Martin Sullivan
January 25 is St Paul's day and a Dean of a great Cathedral dedicated to this man ought to pay him some tribute. I gladly do so. Of all the giants of antiquity he is probably the best known, and so is spared the embarrassment of those fairy tales which a paganised Christianity has spun round the lives of lesser known saints. Nietzsche and Renan reviled him; teetotallers claim him on the absurdly literal and false interpretation of his lAcords, "touch not, handle not"; and suffragettes berated him as an intolerant misogynist. In the nineteenth century the man was hidden beneath a volume of commentary and there were many who thought he had founded a new religion in opposition to the teaching of Jesus. But he was more of a missionary than a polemicist, and an itinerant evangelist than a theologian. Hemust have presented an oddly remarkable figure, short, bald, hook-nosed (so we may infer), scarred by flog-. gings and torture. In and out of prison, he was foiever on the move, setting out to visit his friends and encourage them and eager to convert any who fell under his spell. He compassed land and sea like Alexander the Great in reverse direction, froth Asia to Europe. He transformed Christianity from a local cult, to a European religion. All his life he carried his own cross, plagued by some undiagnosed malady, which, despite earnest entreaties to him, God did not remove. He was not a consistently brilliant writer, but he was capable of inspired outbursts, notably in Romans 8 and Philippians 2, and his poem on love in I Corinthians 13 is one of the finest utterances in the Greek language. He was a strong churchman of the Pharisaic school, in which the interests of the Priesthood, the Altar, and the Temple overshadowed everything else. Schooled by the formidable Gamaliel, and trained in the minutiae of the Old Testament, he was also taught to use his hands as a tent maker, a worker as well as a scholar. Born in Tarsus, he was a freeman of Rome, and perhaps this wider attachment unconsciously opened his mind eventually to more liberal ideas. Indeed the seeds of revolt were probably planted in his mind long before his conversion. The immediate circumstances suggest that the ground had been well prepared. The disciple of the tolerant Gamalio must have been deeply shocked by the brutal murder of Stephen. He took no direct part in it himself, holding a few coats but throwing no stones. After the killing, he behaved like a man possessed and flew off, determined to persecute and imptison every disciple of Christ he could find. Was this sudden violence really directed against himself? Had he seen in the young martyr's bearing, or heard in his last message, something which he yearned for and at last had found? As he rushed up the Damascus road the goads of remorse were already stirring in his heart and the vision which suddenly blinded him was the fullness of that dazzling light, a few faint gleams of which he had glimpsed but a short time before. The Pharisee in him was dead and the new life exploded in him.
What, in a sentence or two, was the heart of the message of Paul the Apostle, now the new man inside Saul of Tarsus? To be selective in this way is not to overlook his views on Christology, justification, sanctification and the like. The key to the understanding of the Epistles is a Christ mysticism, summarised in unforgettable words: "I live, yet not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me." "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in you?" "The fruit of the Spirit is joy, peace, love, good temper, tenderness, generosity, fidelity, gentleness." "Christ in you, the hope of glory." This was the apostle's great testimony. Martin Sullivan is Dean of St Pau&
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