A Special Year

THE JUBILEE will mark 2,000 years of Pauline Christianity, and will terminate exactly a year later, on June 29, 2009.

A series of special celebrations will remember this saint who, along with Saint Peter, is one of the two spiritual pillars upon which the Catholic Church was built. The rich programme of events, organised by Cardinal Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, archpriest at the Papal Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, comprises liturgical ceremonies, ecumenical meetings, pilgrimages, conferences and workshops.

Paul’s exact date of birth is unknown, though scholars reckon he was born between 5 and 10 AD. To celebrate Paul’s bi-millennial anniversary, therefore, any year between 2005 and 2010 was eligible, and the choice eventually fell to 2008. But why is Saint Paul so important that a jubilee has been dedicated to his memory?

Vessel of election

At the General Audience of November 15, 2006, Pope Benedict, to set the mood for the forthcoming Pauline Year, said of the Apostle, “We have before us a giant, not only in terms of his actual apostolate, but also of his extraordinarily profound and stimulating theological teaching”.

Then, on October 25, 2006, the Holy Father went on to say, “Saint Paul shines like a star of the brightest magnitude in the Church’s history, and not only in that of its origins. St John Chrysostom praised him as a person superior even to many angels and archangels (cf. Panegirico, 7,3). Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, inspired by Luke’s account in Acts (cf. 9:15), describes him simply as ‘vessel of election’ (Inf. 2:28), which means: instrument chosen by God. Others called him the ‘13th Apostle’, or directly, ‘the first after the Only’.

Certainly, after Jesus, he is one of the originals of whom we have the most information. In fact, we possess not only the account that Luke gives in The Acts of the Apostles, but also a group of Letters that have come directly from his hand and which, without intermediaries, reveal his personality and thought”.

As a voluminous body of writings exists on Saint Paul, so huge, in fact, that it is impossible not to lose one’s way in it, we decided to turn to Monsignor Romano Penna, one of the greatest authorities in the world on this saint, for some quick answers to a number of fundamental questions.

Professor Penna, a 70 year-old-expert in New Testament exegesis, teaches at the Pontifical Lateran University, and has authored various publications on Saint Paul’s life and teachings.

Monsignor Penna was only too glad to answer my questions for the benefit of the readers of the Messenger of Saint Anthony.

Professor Penna, what do we know about Paul’s family and background?

Very little. We know that he was born in Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, a region in modern-day Turkey. His parents were Jews who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees. From The Acts of the Apostles we know that he was a Roman citizen, and Paul himself writes that he was such from birth. This is why, alongside his Jewish name, Saul, he also had a Roman name, Paul.

We also know that Paul had a married sister living in Jerusalem, because she is mentioned specifically in Acts.

From Acts 18:3, we also know that Paul was a tentmaker. Now, as in those days professions were passed on from father to son, it is reasonable to assume that Paul’s father had himself been a tentmaker.

Paul’s parents were probably ordinary Jews of the ‘diaspora’, in other words, those Jews who were forced to leave their native homeland on account of persecution or for other reasons.

Tarsus was a cosmopolitan city where both the Jewish and Greek influences were strong. At Tarsus for example, women had to wear veils, which did not occur in exclusively Greek cities. But in Tarsus many people also participated in the Mystery cults typical of the Greek religions. So in his youth Paul breathed a multicultural atmosphere in a city that, besides having a synthesis between Greek and Jewish culture, also had as a university renown for its faculty of letters and philosophy. Strabo, one of antiquity’s greatest historian, wrote that Tarsus was the second city after Athens for her philosophical and literary schools.

So Paul would have known Greek, Jewish and Aramaic. At 13, however, he moved to Jerusalem.

What type of education did he receive in the Holy City?

According to Acts 22:3, he studied in Jerusalem under the Rabbi Gamaliel, who was well known in Paul’s time. From that moment Paul plunged headlong into the study of Jewish culture and law, but he always remained open to the Hellenic culture he had breathed in Tarsus, and this comes out pretty clearly in his writings.

In what language did he write?

All of his Letters are written in Greek. However, Paul’s Greek is not that of the men of letters or of the philosophers, but that of the ordinary man-in-the-street. This reveals how Paul’s whole orientation was towards common people. His writings are never directed to an elite few, but to ordinary human beings, and address their spiritual needs.

Do we know what he looked like?

We have nothing really reliable to go on. We have a somewhat dubious description of him from the end of the 2nd century, which claims that the Apostle was fat, short, bow-legged, and with a single eyebrow, but that he nonetheless looked like an angel.

Traditional iconography portrays him as a bald, bearded gentlemen, but that was the way all philosophers were portrayed after the 3rd century!

We know that he went through an incredible amount hardship in his life. He often went without sleep, he fasted frequently, and was often exposed to the cold. He experienced three shipwrecks, and walked thousands of miles. He was flogged five times by the Jews, and was caned by the Romans. If this was not enough, he was also lapidated, and did time in prison. His health must have been exceptional to endure all of this.

What do his writings reveal about his character?

The fact that before the event of Damascus he had been a passionate persecutor of Christians reveals a fiery temperament. He seems to have been the only Jew who engaged in this practice at the time.

After his encounter with Christ at Damascus, his character changed, but he still maintained his strong character, which often comes out in the harsh tones used in his Letters, but he could be very kind and affectionate at times. He compared himself to a father, but also to a mother. Saint Paul is a complex character, and there are many contradictory sides to his personality.

What actually happened during his conversion at Damascus?

I believe that ‘conversion’ is an improper term to describe that event. Paul himself never used it. Paul writes that he “saw” the Lord; that he was “enlightened”; that he was “called”. These are the actual expressions he uses. In other words Paul had a vision, a spiritual experience in which he was able to associate God with a human figure and a voice, and for him that human figure and voice was that of Jesus.

Is it true that during that event he was “caught up to the third heaven”?

In 2 Corinthians 12:2, Paul writes, “I know a man in Christ who 14 years ago – whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows – such a man was caught up to the third heaven”.

It is unlikely that Paul is here referring to his own experience at Damascus, because this Letter was written more than 14 years after that event.

Paul is here referring to some very particular spiritual and mystical experience, but he mentions it almost reluctantly, probably because he did not want to mesmerise or embezzle people by boasting of special favours from God.

From the event of Damascus and the beginning of his ministry there is a 10 year pause. Why?

Because the Lord wanted to prepare him for his future mission. The experience at Damascus took place around 30 AD. After that encounter Paul spent three years in the desert meditating. He then went to Jerusalem, where he met the Apostles and the Christian community. He then went to Antioch, and it was only after this long preparation that he received the official task of proclaiming the Gospel to the Gentiles.

Antioch in Syria has central importance in the history of Christianity because it was the first city in which the Gospel was preached to the pagans. Jesus had never preached to the pagans, but only to the Jews. The Apostles too, at the beginning, only preached to the Jews. It was at Antioch that the great turning point took place, and it was also from that city that Paul left for his first apostolic journey.

Is it true that he quarrelled with other disciples during that first trip?

He did have differences of opinion with some of them. Paul had a strong character, and he had a new mission to perform – that of preaching the Gospel to the Gentiles (the pagans). The other Apostles at the beginning could not understand this. They believed Jesus had come to save the chosen people of Israel only.

Moreover, Paul was regarded with suspicion by the Christian community because he had persecuted it, while the Jews saw him as a traitor who had abandoned the religion of his fathers. He had a really hard time getting his ideas across to his fellow Christians, especially with regard to the belief that Christ had come for all human beings, and not only for the Jews. He also contended that converted pagans did not need to subject themselves to all aspects of the Mosaic law.

In his travels Paul founded numerous communities based on this vision of Christianity, but then other disciples would arrive and impose the observance of Jewish laws on the new converts. This grieved him a lot, and he referred to these disciples in disparaging terms such as ‘superapostles’ or ‘false brothers’.

Paul even had a strong disagreement with Saint Peter. The chief of the Apostles had, at first, sided with Paul, but he later lapsed back to a rather formal Christianity dominated by the Mosaic law, and Paul publicly reproached him for this.

After these initial difficulties, however, all the Apostles gradually came to understand and embrace Paul’s version of Christianity.

What are the salient features of his teaching?

At the heart of Paul’s message is the idea of freedom from the law. Paul teaches that the essence of our relationship with God does not lie in morality, that is, in how good we are at observing the divine commandments, but on receiving God’s grace through Jesus Christ.

I am justified in God’s eyes not by what I do for God, but by what God does for me by freely granting me grace through Jesus Christ, and faith is the acceptance of this gift of grace that has been offered to me.

This aspect of Paul’s teaching is at loggerheads with an opposite conception which we may easily fall into. According to this conception each one of us has the capacity to acquire grace from God through our own efforts; that we have the power to build up our own justification and holiness in God’s eyes. In other words I, by behaving well, by observing the Ten Commandments, etc, gradually become acceptable to God.

This is still a widely held conception, but there is a flaw in it. Martin Luther was quite right in this respect when he said, “We are not justified by doing what is right. But when we are justified, we do what is right as a consequence”. In other words, morality is a consequence of our being in Christ, of having first receive grace through Him, irrespective of whether we were formerly good or bad.

Who was the true Christian, according to Paul?

Saint Paul believed that the distinguishing trait of a true Christian was not to be found in the juridical concept of a ‘just man’, that is, a man who does what is right. The true Christian was one who ‘participates’ in the being of Christ, in other words, a human being who lives in Christ and in whom Christ lives.

And what about the Christian community?

 Paul calls a Christian community a ‘church’. However, for him the term ‘church’ does not have an abstract meaning. Whenever he uses it he is always referring to a specific and tangible community: there is the Church of Corinth, the Church of Thessalonica, etc. The concept of the Church as Catholic, that is, as abstract and universal, only developed after Paul.

For Saint Paul a Church was a ‘reciprocating communion of people’ of an extraordinary nature. These people met at private homes for dinner, and read and commented the sacred texts together. Church buildings in our sense of the term did not yet exist. Paul defined these ‘communities’ as the ‘Body of Christ’. It is from him that we have received the concept of the Church as the Body of Christ.

Paul’s ‘churches’ had a totally egalitarian character. He taught, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Galatians 3:28) These communities had ministers, but they were not organised in a hierarchy like modern-day priests. There were presidents, but these were only administrators who merely organised the meetings.

What do we know about his martyrdom?

There is a 2nd century legend that claims that Paul was beheaded, and that his head bounced three times on the ground before coming to a standstill, thus giving rise to three springs at the place now called ‘Tre Fontane’ (Three Fountains).

A more reliable source is a letter on saint Peter and saint Paul written by Pope Clement to the Church at Corinth in 90 AD.

The letter informs us that Saint Paul died a martyr’s death, but it does not specify exactly how he died. The only certain fact we have about Paul’s death was that he was buried along the Via Ostiense, at the exact spot where the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls now stands. It is estimated that his death occurred between 58 and 67 AD.