Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

‘Agreed, then. Let us pursue him.’

Israel means ‘He who struggles with God’. According to the Book of Genesis, the patriarch Jacob was renamed Israel because down by the ford of a river he wrestled an angel for the length of a dark night, until day broke upon them. Even when Jacob’s hip was dislocated, he would not submit. And through his enduring strength, or his perverse stubbornness, he founded a nation.

God told him, ‘ Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have fought with God and with man, and have won .’

So the stranger with whom Jacob wrestled was angel and man and also God. From the beginning, the scriptures left space for confusion and place for confrontation.

By the time the pursuit of his challengers begins in earnest — twenty-two years after the death of Jesus — Paul has come to believe that his congregations of the sanctified are the true Israel. They are Israel according to the spirit. The Jews are Israel only according to the flesh, now severed from God, withering, drying and dying, like pruned branches, because of their own outdated intransigence. Paul writes that the Jews … displease God and are enemies of all men … they fill up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God is to come upon them to the uttermost .

As ever, this will be a battle of words. The teller decides the truth. The men who pursue come armed with epistles and instructions. They say to those communities they try to sway away from Paul: Observe the greatest caution, that you believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the written endorsement of James the Messiah’s brother .

But Paul is also a man of letters and his followers carry his arguments to all the assemblies of believers he has founded, across the Mediterranean seaboard and into the heartlands of Asia, Galatia and Macedonia. Jesus and Baptizer John preached in wilderness places; Paul favours great cities and province capitals.

Some of Paul’s antagonists make claim that he is a scoundrel and a crook . He is not, but he is a man of polar contradictions and he is at his worst when he feels that his mission is under threat.

Paul can be bullying: If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he must acknowledge that what I write to you is what the Lord commands. If anyone ignores this, he himself must be ignored .

And he can be condemning: Even though I am not with you in person, I am with you in the Spirit. And as though I were present, I have already passed judgment on this man .

But Paul can equally be magnanimous: Anyone you forgive, I also forgive .

And touching: Just as a nursing mother cares for her children, so we cared for you .

He can be boastful: Do you not know that we will judge angels?

He can be crude: As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and castrate themselves!

And yet he can eulogize about love with sufficient beauty to be read at every wedding of Christendom for ages yet unimaginable. Unimaginable, not least, because Paul believes this to be already the end time.

The Paul revealed in his epistles is simultaneously self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing; kindly, contemptuous and venomous. At times he sounds like a genius; at others like a fool trying to throw away the basket he is standing in. He can have an incisive clarity and yet be obtuse and confused. He can be intellectually cruel, piercing and mocking; he can be gentle, loving and tender. Sometimes he sounds like a wise old sage; sometimes like a baby, wailing with frustrated rage, because it cannot make people comprehend its needs.

Again and again Paul tells the hearers of his letters — for they were written to be read aloud and in public — that he is not lying, clearly against the claims of opponents who say that he is. Who must state, indeed, that Paul is not an apostle at all, for he replies to his followers: Even though I may not be an apostle to others, surely I am to you?

Those antagonists who come from James, Paul says, are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness .

Identifying his own needs and commands as identical and indivisible with those of Jesus — Christ is speaking through me — Paul harbours the fundamentalist’s urge simply to dictate that all views other than his are heresy, requiring no further reason than that he says it to be so. Yet he is sorely, gratingly, aware of the inherent weakness of his position, when contrasted against that of the brother and closest companions of the Saviour he preaches about.

Maybe the most damaging blows of Paul’s opponents are the accusations of financial indiscretions. In an age where almost every holder of office sieves into his own purse, where rights to taxation are auctioned, where bribery is normality, such charges resonate and perhaps seem not improbable, even to people Paul has personally preached to. Though he tries to practise his trade of leather work when he can — separated from the support of Antioch, constantly moving and frequently in misfortune — Paul is greatly dependent on the patronage of donors; the allegations that he is profiting from them wound him worse than scourging.

Yet these indictments are hard for him to refute. Not least because, remaining true to his word, Paul has had his followers earnestly pooling their money for the poor ones of Jerusalem throughout these past years. They have carefully adhered to Paul’s instructions: On the first day of every week, each one of you should set aside a sum of money in keeping with your income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made . But those men sent by James the Just can report in all honesty that they have come from Jerusalem and so far the coffers of The Way have not seen so much as a single copper lepton arrive from Paul.

At one time, in great Ephesus, Paul might have been making so many converts that the silversmiths threatened to riot, fearing decline in selling images of the goddess Artemis. But the emissaries of the Three Pillars begin to force such inroads into his communities that eventually Paul is not welcome in the city.

Amid the fear that his other foundations could similarly come undone, Paul arrives upon a stratagem, perhaps not shrewd but admirably brazen and daring: he will gather the entire collection — by now a sum of money large enough to make the Pillars choke — and he will deliver it to Jerusalem in person. When they see the magnitude of his deeds, he hopes that his critics will be silenced, and by his generosity to his opponents, he will heap burning coals on their heads.

In his last letter of the period, Paul writes to the Christianoi of Rome, people he does not personally know but who are seemingly already aware of this great and growing division in their young movement: Pray to God for me, asking that I may escape unhurt from those in Judaea who are disobedient, and pray that the donation I take to Jerusalem will be accepted . To speak thus to strangers shows how great his anxiety for the endeavour must be.

For a dark night five years long, the two camps wrestled, like Jacob with the stranger beside the river, but which was the side of men and which of the angels, and where was God all the while?