Adventures of the Early Church …

THE MAN THE CHURCH HAD TO HAVE

Looking back on 2,000 years of the Christian faith, it may not be as apparent to us, but the primitive church faced a tremendous problem in becoming a world-wide (ecumenical) faith. Its purpose was to reach out to all mankind. While the Christ described his own mission as being for “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he clearly brought a catholic message and his commission to his envoys was that they were to make disciples of all nations. The apostles understood that when Jesus was lifted up to die on the cross he did so in order to draw all men to himself, not just the Jews (Jn. 12:32).

And yet the context for the beginning of the faith was all Jewish. The protagonist in the drama was Jewish, as were most of the antagonists, whether Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians. The setting, whether the temple, synagogues or Sanhedrin, was Jewish. The early church’s Bible was Jewish, as were its first converts. The earliest missionaries were Jewish and they went first to fellow Jews. Even when it became thinkable that non-Jews were to be included, there was the assurance, “To the Jew first. . .” The first congregations, and they were not just a few, were Jewish, and they were called synagogues. They were in fact Jews who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and not “Christians.” The new Jewish “sect” as it was sometimes called was upwards of ten years old before there was a “Christian” in it. While believers were eventually called “Christians” in Antioch (Acts 11:26), there is a question as to whether the believers ever called themselves that. They were of “The Way” and that way was first walked by Jews.

The new faith’s first major crisis was whether it would remain another Jewish sect, and there were many such sects, or whether it would reach out to all the world. While it had its mandate from its Lord to “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,” it was slow to act. Years passed, perhaps a decade. When persecution finally drove the believers from their homes out into a larger world, they bore witness to their faith as far away as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, but their historian is careful to record that their message was “to Jews alone” (Acts 11:19). It took a miracle, or perhaps several, in the form of “conversion of Peter,” which we might refer to as well as “the conversion of Cornelius” to turn the gospel toward the Gentiles. However much the big fisherman had listened to the ecumenical Jesus of Nazareth, he was not ready to share his riches with non-Jews. It took some doing to bring the apostle Peter, however filled he was with the Holy Spirit, to the place that he could say, “I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right, is welcome to Him” (Acts 10:34-35).

But Peter could not accept emotionally what he understood intellectually, so in spite of the wonders he experienced among the Gentiles he never really accepted the Gentiles in his heart of hearts. Jesus had given him the keys of the kingdom. He understood his use of the first one, when he opened the way to the Jews on the day of Pentecost, but he never quite grasped the significance of the key he used to open the way for the Gentiles in the home of Cornelius. God eventually called another envoy to proclaim the message to the Gentiles, and he would have to stand up to “the chief of the apostles” in his apparent inability to accept Gentile believers as equals (Gal. 2:11-14).

This introduces us to the man the church had to have if it were to become truly catholic. He had to be a certain kind of a man, one far different from the likes of Peter, whose world was small. This man had to belong to two worlds. He had to be a Jew so as to be able to understand and to communicate with the church that was still Jewish but destined to become world-wide. He also had to be a Greek so as to identify with “the Greek world,” which described the nations nestled around the great Mediterranean Sea and reached as far as Rome itself. This was the world that the church was to enter and conquer, as per the charge from the Messiah.

The problem of exclusivism was compounded by the fact that the Jews were hated by other nations, just as they hated other nations. Pagan generals were sometimes urged to destroy Jews since they refused fellowship with other people and supposed all men to be their enemies. Josephus refers to a tradition that even Moses urged the Jews to show no goodwill to other nations and to destroy whatever altars and temples they might have. The Roman historian Tacitus complained that when a Gentile became a Jewish proselyte he was taught to despise the gods, repudiate his nationality, and hold worthless his parents, children and friends.

This means that the man essential to the church at this particular time had to be one who could become “all things to all men” and who could take the Greek concepts of love, brotherhood, community, and fellowship and capture them for the ecclesia of Christ. Such a man could speak of God in Jewish terms but also proclaim him as one in whom “we live and move and have our very being” to Gentiles, while quoting their poets to the effect that “We are offsprings of God.” While it was a miracle that the man God called to be “a light to the Gentiles” would be both a Pharisee and a Roman citizen, such was the case with this man of two worlds, Saul of Tarsus.

There is no need to belabor the point that Saul of Tarsus who became God’s chosen vessel “to bear my name before the Gentiles” was thoroughly Jewish. He had no problem in saying “To the Jews I became a Jew” (1 Cor. 9:20), for he could describe himself as a Hebrew,” an Israelite, and of the seed of Abraham, as he did in 2 Cor. 11:22, which was more than most Jews in his day could say. A Hebrew was one who still spoke Hebrew, while most Jews scattered among the Greek nations had forgotten their native language. An Israelite was one who belonged to the covenant people, while one “of the seed of Abraham” could claim racial purity. Moreover, he was circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee” (Phillip 3:5). The term “a Hebrew of Hebrews” meant he was nurtured in his native tongue by parents who also spoke the language. Saul of Tarsus, a zealous Pharisee who became the apostle Paul, could argue that no one was more Jewish than he.

But he could also argue that no Jew was more Hellenistic (Greek) than he. Not only did he speak Greek as well as Hebrew, but he was a citizen of a Greek city, Tarsus in Cilicia, which he proudly hailed as “no mean city.” Tarsus was both a trade and manufacturing center, one of its products being goats’ hair felt for tent-making, a trade that Paul learned. Since ships from all parts of the Mediterranean sailed through Tarsus’ rivers and docks, the future envoy of Christ to the Gentiles grew up with an expansive world-view.

Paul’s home city also exported scholars since it had its own university. Strabo, a Roman historian, names as many as five scholars, all from Tarsus, who taught in Greek universities. Tarsus also produced several Stoic philosophers. It also enjoyed the status of being a free city, self-governing and independent, which may have influenced some of Paul’s democratic principles for the ecclesia of Christ. “No mean city” was an apt description.

Paul’s Roman citizenship, which was his not for a price but because he was “free born,” qualified him all the more as “an apostle to the Gentiles.” And it sometimes spared his life and tempered the persecution he was destined to suffer (“I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’s sake” — Acts 9:16). The magistrates at least apologized to him for applying the lash to his back once they realized he was a Roman citizen (Acts 16:39), and his citizenship gave him the right to appeal to Caesar, which enabled him to proclaim the gospel in faraway Rome (Acts 25:11-12).

It could be argued that Saul of Tarsus was the only man in the world at that time who could do what had to be done to move the ecclesia of Christ from the thralldom of a Jewish sect to the church catholic. Paul certainly saw himself as especially called for such a mission, “even from my mother’s womb” he wrote in Gal. 1:15. All along God was nurturing him and preparing him for the task, so that “I might preach Christ among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:16). He was convinced that it was “by the will of God” that he was called to his mission (2 Cor. 1:1).

Paul became the great communicator as well as a bridge builder between worlds. His teaching about God, the Messiah, grace, sin, and salvation, and even ethics found their source in Jewish and Greek life and culture as well as “by revelation there was made known unto me the mystery,” as he put it in Eph. 3:3. Even “the mystery” that he refers to touches the two worlds, for it was the great truth that Jews and Gentiles, long deemed irreconcilable, were destined to become one body in Christ Jesus (Eph. 3:6). We may conclude that the God of heaven called Paul, even before he was born, to make the great mystery happen.

And yet it was this ecumenical mission that brought Paul into conflict with his own Jewish brethren. They could accept the fact that the gospel was “To the Jew first,” but they had trouble with the rest of the statement: “but also to the Gentile.” When Paul addressed his brethren in Jerusalem, he recounted how God had called him to bear witness to all men of what he had seen and heard, which was difficult enough for the Jews to accept, but when he insisted that God appeared to him in their own temple and said to him, “I will send you far away to the Gentiles,” it was too much for them. Only the strong arm of Roman law kept them from killing the apostle on the spot (Acts 22:21-24).

Paul suffered as few men have for the cause of Christ and largely because of his broader vision and ecumenical mission. And because of him the apostle John was one day able to write of what he saw when he looked into heaven: “I looked, and behold, a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands” (Rev. 7:9).

The lion of God, as Paul is sometimes called, had a great mind and a great heart, and he was a man of two worlds. God had prepared him for an almost impossible task and gave him victory. Because of him we can all affirm, as the church has for centuries: We believe in the one, holy, apostolic and catholic church. Had the ecclesia of Christ remained a sect, we would not be here; if we allow it to be sectarian again, we don’t deserve to be here. — the Editor