Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (28 page)

We can, moreover, still identify, in the subterranean depths of Paul’s thought, repeated affirmations of his deepest convictions about freedom and equality. His famous dictum “It is better to marry than to burn” (so often misinterpreted as a reference to hellfire rather than to the unfulfilled sexual heat that Paul has in mind) is followed in
First Corinthians by a
long disquisition on the pluses and minuses of
marriage and
celibacy. It is an evenhanded presentation, divided into considerations of equal length for men and women, but at the tail end of the passage, Paul gives women an extra paragraph:

Paul does not give patriarchal marriage and family life his unalloyed seal of approval. He is aware of its costs to a woman’s spiritual freedom. There is no suggestion here of a woman’s “inferiority,” just that she’s spiritually stuck with the dilemma of society’s binding norms, unless she opts out of the marriage game altogether.

In like manner, Paul gives incidental evidence of his underlying repugnance toward
slavery in his briefest letter of all: to Philemon, asking this Colossian paterfamilias to accept back his runaway slave, Onesimus, who had also stolen from him. When Paul writes, squeezing everything he has to say onto a single piece of papyrus, he is in prison, probably at
Ephesus. This private letter (the only one of Paul’s that we possess), intended for one family rather than for a regional church, is a masterpiece of person-to-person persuasiveness and a shining example of how the brothers and sisters dealt with one another in sticky situations:

“And also with you,” would have been all
Philemon could have whispered on finishing this. The Letter to Philemon reveals Paul’s perceptiveness, even craftiness, in dealing with other human beings. Paul can win this one neither by fiat nor by a dazzling display of theological wit. Philemon is free to execute Onesimus for his flight or merely chop off his right hand for his theft. He is free, as he always has been, to do with him anything he likes. Slaves had no rights, and slave owners no legal restraints. So runaway slaves did not return willingly to their masters; and we may well imagine that Paul’s more arduous challenge was not writing this letter but persuading
Onesimus, whom he had met in prison, that he should return to his owner rather than attempt the anxiety-ridden existence of a permanent fugitive. Having convinced Onesimus that he can turn the tide on his behalf, he takes up the invidious task of instructing the slave master in his Christian duty, while seeming not to do so.

It would be going well beyond the evidence to assume that
Philemon was a villain. He may have been abstracted, aloof, and classist; after all, it is Paul who has “begotten” Onesimus in the faith that Philemon holds but had (apparently) never bothered to communicate to his slaves. He was undoubtedly a sincere man, or Paul could never have hoped to make headway with him on a decision that would only hold him up to scorn among his peers. But he was a Roman paterfamilias, master of life and death within the domain of his household, possessor of the largest male ego the world has ever known, whom no one but Caesar could gainsay. The normally forthright, aggressive, provocative, take-charge apostle has to pull in his horns and follow Jesus’s ambivalent exhortation to his followers to be “wise as serpents and gentle as doves”—and he does so without a false step, waiting till his seventh sentence even to slip in Onesimus’s name and never repeating it, never indeed offering Philemon any irritation more than necessary.

Scripture scholars have often questioned why this short letter about one individual, a letter supposedly lacking in general interest, was preserved when other letters of Paul were lost. To me, this magisterial entreaty says more about the people of the Way than do the exploding numbers of believers and the dazzling miracles of Acts. Paul, with thoughtful caring, puts all his talents into a “miracle” on behalf of a single lost soul. Like Peter’s cure of the cripple, this is simply “an act of
kindness”:
“I have neither silver nor gold, but what I have I give you.”
Philemon almost certainly freed Onesimus, sending him back to
Ephesus to work with Paul—how could he not? But like all acts of
kindness, this one seems to have yielded unexpected results. Onesimus is likely to have been in his late teens or early twenties at the time of Paul’s letter; and we know that at the beginning of the second century the name of the bishop of Ephesus, who is credited with making the first collection of Paul’s letters, was—Onesimus.

Ideas take a long time to ferment to dark fulfillment and rich bouquet. Abraham’s God wanted him to worship no other, but it took the Jews a thousand years more to begin to adhere to strict
monotheism—and we’re still trying to get it right. Paul’s encouragement of Christian widows to remain free will blossom into the early monastic sisterhoods, then into the autonomous convents of the Middle Ages, ruled by great abbesses like
Brigid of Kildare and
Hildegard of Bingen. For the first time, the world will experience the phenomenon of women not ruled, sheltered, or protected by men: free women. Each of these developments will serve as a stage in the gradual blossoming of feminism. Paul’s insistence to Philemon that there are no slaves, only brothers, will prompt
Patrick of Ireland in the fifth century to condemn as immoral all trade in human beings, then lead the Anabaptists in the late seventeenth century to the conviction that
slavery is against God’s Word, then induce the Abolitionists of the nineteenth century to raise a universal agitation against the “peculiar institution,” and finally fire
Martin Luther King in the twentieth century to demand that Americans erase the residual effects of slavery. And far beyond America’s borders, everyone who fights to dismantle systems of class and economic oppression, who seeks to establish
human rights and universal
brotherhood, is, like Onesimus, a child begotten by Paul.

Not one of these developments, evolving over the ages, can be said to have reached its ultimate expression. But just as we can pinpoint
Abraham’s experience of the Voice as the beginning of
monotheism—the sprouting seed—we can pinpoint the beginnings of feminism, abolitionism, and the movements for civil and human rights in the spiritual vision of Paul and his converts, who would no doubt be amazed at what we have made of insights that were for them so new, dynamic, and otherworldly.

Paul called his converts “the brothers and sisters loved by God,” and Peter, in a vision, came to the conclusion that “God has no favorites.” The Jesus Movement became a movement for the
universalization of Judaism, making Jewish ideas and even the Jewish social context available and applicable to all humanity. We should not, however, see Jesus as the beginning of this development, any more than we see
Moses, rather than Abraham, as the beginning of monotheism. Jesus, like Moses, took advantage of a living tradition that was astoundingly rich in possibilities. Long before Jesus, the classical prophets had already looked forward to the outpouring of God’s “Spirit on all humanity,” an incredible outpouring from which no one—not even the “women” and “slaves” of Peter’s quotation from Joel—would be excluded. And we cannot be surprised that women and slaves, far more than any other categories of society, swelled the ranks of a movement that assured them that, however insignificant their places in society, in the eyes of God and his Assembly they were the equals of anyone.

F
OR
ALL
THIS
, the first Christians were not ivory-tower intellectuals but ordinary people confronted, as we all
are, with the practical problems of daily life. A relatively small band to begin with, they knew one another and could rely on person-to-person interaction rather than edicts and memorandums. If they hadn’t all known Jesus in life, they knew many who had—and this situation prevailed nearly to century’s end, as the Jesus Movement grew into a Eurasian network of local churches, many with a resident elder or two who remembered his or her encounters with Jesus. We get a glimpse of how close-knit the leadership was when, at the close of Paul’s
Letter to
Philemon, he sends greetings from
Mark and
Luke, who are with him at
Ephesus. There is not much doubt that these are two of our evangelists, who, together with the author of the letter himself, may be responsible for nearly sixty percent of the pages of the New Testament.

Having, at least to begin with, “neither silver nor gold,” the people of the Way relied on one another’s hospitality. Peter is described in Acts as staying at Jaffa with
Simon the Tanner in his house by the sea and “visiting one place after another,” a project that presumes the hospitality of many. Lydia, an independent woman “in the purple-dye trade,” insisted that Paul, who was chary of accepting favors, stay with her at
Philippi and would “not take No for an answer.” We have already seen the names of two who opened their homes to “house-churches,” the regular assemblies of the people of the Way: the Ephesian woman
Chloe of
First Corinthians and Philemon (and his family) at Colossae. Nympha ran another house-church at
Laodicea, not far from Colossae. Besides these, Acts mentions Mary, Mark’s mother and aunt to
Barnabas, another of Paul’s many missionary companions. She was a middle-class woman who ran a Jerusalem house-church and kept an addled servant named Rhoda, who was so surprised to see Peter at the
peephole one day (he was supposed to be in prison but had escaped) that she neglected to open the door to him and left him standing in the street while she ran inside to give everybody the news. In his
Letter to the Romans, Paul at
Corinth sends greetings from “Gaius, my host and the host of all the church … and from Erastus, the city treasurer,” who, like Magdalene and other women disciples of Jesus’s day, must have helped bankroll operations.

Many, but scarcely all, of these hosts would have been people of means. On no one did Paul rely more than on the redoubtable
Prisca and her husband
Aquila, who like him were in the tent-making, pavilion-stitching trade. When Paul met them they were Jewish refugees from
Rome, expelled in the early 40s by an edict of the emperor Claudius. According to the Roman historian
Suetonius, the emperor had tired of Jews because of their “constant rioting at the instigation of Chrestus”; and behind Suetonius’s careless reference, we can discern that the probable cause of Claudius’s displeasure was the public conflict between establishment Jews and Messi-anists, which had already spilled into the diaspora. Paul first ran into Prisca and Aquila at Corinth, a magnet for all tentmakers because of the Isthmian games, second in importance only to the Olympic games and celebrated in a great swath of hucksters’ booths and tourist tents encircling the sanctuary of Poseidon just outside the city.

But if it was business that brought Paul together with Prisca and Aquila, it was their common faith that kept them united. Though we don’t know who evangelized them, these two were already part of the Jesus Movement when they encountered the apostle. They gave Paul shelter in their little house and allowed him to work with them and have a share of
their business. Though they opened their house to a “church,” this cannot refer to a meeting of more than ten or twelve. The houses of tradespeople like
Prisca and
Aquila were woefully small affairs, usually of two rooms, the ground floor open for trade and the upper room reserved for living, the whole space measuring not more than fourteen feet wide by twenty-four deep, sometimes much less. Each story provided little more than enough height to stand upright.