John Gresham Machen - The Origin of Paul's Religion

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The Origin of Paul's Religion is intended to deal, from one particular point of view, with the problem of the origin of Christianity. It is an important historical problem not only because of the large place which Christianity has occupied in the medieval and modern world, but also because of certain unique features which even the most unsympathetic and superficial examination must detect in the beginnings of the Christian movement. The problem of the origin of Christianity is also an important practical problem. Rightly or wrongly, Christian experience has ordinarily been connected with one particular view of the origin of the Christian movement; where that view has been abandoned, the experience has ceased.

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Birth in a Greek university city and Roman citizenship constitute the two facts which bring Paul into early connection with the larger Gentile world of his day. Other facts, equally well-attested, separate him just as clearly from the Gentile world and represent him as being from childhood a strict Jew. These facts might have been called in question, in view of the present tendency of criticism, if they had been attested only by the Book of Acts. But fortunately it is just these facts which are attested also by the epistles of Paul.

In 2 Cor. xi. 22, Paul is declared to be a "Hebrew," and in Phil. iii. 5 he appears as a "Hebrew of Hebrews." The word "Hebrew" in these passages cannot indicate merely Israelitish descent or general adherence to the Jews' religion. If it did so it would be a meaningless repetition of the other terms used in the same passages. Obviously it is used in some narrower sense. The key to its meaning is found in Acts vi. 1, where, within Judaism, the "Hellenists" are distinguished from the "Hebrews," the Hellenists being the Jews of the Dispersion who spoke Greek, and the Hebrews the Jews of Palestine who spoke Aramaic. In Phil. iii. 5, therefore, Paul declares that he was an Aramaic-speaking Jew and descended from Aramaic-speaking Jews; Aramaic was used in his boyhood home, and the Palestinian tradition was preserved. This testimony is not contrary to what was said above about Paul's use of the Greek language—not improbably Paul used both Aramaic and Greek in childhood—but it does contradict all those modern representations which make Paul fundamentally a Jew of the Dispersion. Though he was born in Tarsus, he was, in the essential character of his family tradition, a Jew of Palestine.

Even more important is the assertion, found in the same verse in Philippians, that Paul was "as touching the law a Pharisee." Conceivably, indeed, it might be argued that his Pharisaism was not derived from his boyhood home, but was acquired later. But surely it requires no excessively favorable estimate of Acts to give credence to the assertion in Acts xxiii. 6 that Paul was not only a Pharisee but the "son of Pharisees"; and it is exceedingly unlikely that this phrase refers, as Lightfoot [24]suggested, to teachers rather than to ancestors. For when Paul says in Gal. i. 14 that he advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of his contemporaries, being more exceedingly zealous for his paternal traditions, it is surely natural, whatever interpretation may be given to the word "paternal," to find a reference to the Pharisaic traditions cultivated in his boyhood home.

There is not the slightest evidence, therefore, for supposing that Paul spent his early years in an atmosphere of "liberal Judaism"—a Judaism really though unconsciously hospitable to pagan notions and predisposed to relax the strict requirements of the Law and break down the barrier that separated Israel from the Gentile world. Whether such a liberal Judaism even existed in Tarsus we do not know. At any rate, if it did exist, the household of Paul's father was not in sympathy with it. Surely the definite testimony of Paul himself is here worth more than all modern conjectures. And Paul himself declares that he was in language and in spirit a Jew of Palestine rather than of the Dispersion, and as touching the Law a Pharisee.

According to the Book of Acts, Paul went at an early age to Jerusalem, received instruction there from Gamaliel, the famous rabbi, and finally, just before his conversion, persecuted the Jerusalem Church (Acts xxii. 3; vii. 58-viii. 1; ix. 1, etc.). In recent years, this entire representation has been questioned. It has been maintained by Mommsen, [25]Bousset [26], Heitmüller, [27]and Loisy [28]that Paul never was in Jerusalem before his conversion. That he persecuted the Church is, of course, attested unequivocally by his own Epistles, but the persecution, it is said, really took place only in such cities as Damascus, and not at all in Palestine.

This elimination of the early residence of Paul in Jerusalem is no mere by-product of a generally skeptical attitude toward the Book of Acts, but is important for the entire reconstruction of early Christian history which Bousset and Heitmüller and Loisy propose; it is made to assist in explaining the origin of the Pauline Christology. Paul regarded Jesus Christ as a supernatural person, come to earth for the redemption of men; and toward this divine Christ he assumed a distinctly religious attitude. How could he have formed such a conception of a human being who had died but a few years before? If he had been separated from Jesus by several generations, so that the nimbus of distance and mystery would have had time to form about the figure of the Galilean prophet, then his lofty conception of Jesus might be explained. But as a matter of fact he was actually a contemporary of the Jesus whose simple human traits he obscured. How could the "smell of earth" have been so completely removed from the figure of the Galilean teacher that He could actually be regarded by one of His contemporaries as a divine Redeemer? The question could perhaps be more easily answered if Paul, before his lofty conception of Christ was fully formed, never came into any connection with those who had seen Jesus subject to the petty limitations of human life. Thus the elimination of the early Jerusalem residence of Paul, by putting a geographical if not a temporal gulf between Jesus and Paul, is thought to make the formation of the Pauline Christology more comprehensible. Peter and the original disciples, it is thought, never could have separated Jesus so completely from the limitations of ordinary humanity; the simple memory of Galilean days would in their case have been an effective barrier against Christological speculation. But Paul was subject to no such limitation; having lived far away from Palestine, in the company, for the most part, of those who like himself had never seen Jesus, he was free to transpose to the Galilean teacher attributes which to those who had known the real Jesus would have seemed excessive or absurd.

Before examining the grounds upon which this elimination of Paul's early Jerusalem residence is based, it may first be observed that even such heroic measures do not really bring about the desired result; even this radical rewriting of the story of Paul's boyhood and youth will not serve to explain on naturalistic principles the origin of the Pauline Christology. Even if before his conversion Paul got no nearer to Jerusalem than Damascus, it still remains true that after his conversion he conferred with Peter and lived in more or less extended intercourse with Palestinian disciples. The total lack of any evidence of a conflict between the Christology of Paul and the views of those who had walked and talked with Jesus of Nazareth remains, for any naturalistic reconstruction, a puzzling fact. Even without the early Jerusalem residence, Paul remains too near to Jesus both temporally and geographically to have formed a conception of Him entirely without reference to the historical person. Even with their radical treatment of the Book of Acts, therefore, Bousset and Heitmüller have not succeeded at all in explaining how the Pauline Christology ever came to be attached to the Galilean prophet.

But is the elimination of the early Jerusalem residence of Paul historically justifiable? Mere congruity with a plausible theory of development will not serve to justify it. For the Jerusalem residence is strongly attested by the Book of Acts. The testimony of Acts can no longer be ruled out except for very weighty reasons; the history of recent criticism has on the whole exhibited the rise of a more and more favorable estimate of the book. And in the case of the early Jerusalem residence of Paul the testimony is so insistent and so closely connected with lifelike details that the discrediting of it involves an exceedingly radical skepticism. The presence of Paul at the stoning of Stephen is narrated in the Book of Acts in a concrete way which bears every mark of trustworthiness; the connection of Paul with Gamaliel is what might have been expected in view of the self-testimony of the apostle; the account of Paul's vision in the Temple (Acts xxii. 17–21) is based, in a manner which is psychologically very natural, upon the fact of Paul's persecuting activity in Jerusalem; the presence of Paul's sister's son in Jerusalem, attested in a part of the narrative of which the essential historicity must be universally admitted (Acts xxiii. 16–22), suggests that family connections may have facilitated Paul's residence in the city. Finally, the geographical details of the three narratives of the conversion, which place the event on a journey of Paul from Jerusalem to Damascus, certainly look as though they were founded upon genuine tradition. One of the details—the place of the conversion itself—is confirmed in a purely incidental way by the Epistle to the Galatians, and the reader has the impression that if Paul had happened to introduce other details in the Epistles the rest of the narrative in Acts would have been similarly confirmed. Except for Paul's incidental reference to Damascus in Gal. i. 17, the conversion might have been put by Heitmüller and others in a place even more conveniently remote than Damascus from the scene of Jesus' earthly labors. But the incidental confirmation of Acts at this point raises a distinct presumption in favor of the account as a whole. The main trend of modern criticism has been favorable on the whole to the tradition embodied in the accounts of the conversion; it is a very extreme form of skepticism which rejects the whole framework of the tradition by eliminating the journey from Jerusalem to Damascus.

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