Friday, June 16, 2023
Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
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Journeys with Paul
Moses said to the people, “You are a people sacred to the Lord, your God; he has chosen you from all the nations on the face of the earth to be a people peculiarly his own.
Phil Jenkins wasn’t there. Was he? He’s a Baylor professor, he writes books about global Christianity … he wasn’t there.
But Phil Jenkins thinks. A lot. He imagines himself into story after story and comes up with new perspectives (at least to me). This time he imagines himself into Paul’s story two thousand years ago, and then of the next few decades, and what happened to the rest of Paul’s letters, and why those included in the Bible are there. Why most of them are written for Gentiles rather than Jews.
Jenkins writes and writes. I’ve read The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, The Many Faces of Jesus and Jesus Wars. This time he asks:
Have you ever read St. Paul’s powerful letters to the church at Jerusalem? How about to the Damascus folks (the Damascenes)? To the people of Caesarea Maritima? Obviously, you have not. But why do we not possess such things?
But they did exist, they must have, at least until the Jewish revolt and subsequent scattering and annihilation of Jewish people between 66 and 73 A.D. Whatever Paul wrote to them (and surely he did write to them) would have been destroyed.
Someone (Jenkins suggests Theophilus?) gathered what was left. Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, and Colossae are represented, all of them areas and cities in Gentile Greece.
As to the principle of selection, the one thing all the surviving letters have in common is how thoroughly they follow the geography outlined in Acts. If you just used Acts as a source of places to check, you would immediately hit names like Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus, Thessaloniki, and Rome.
Jenkins points out some dates. Paul’s travels and letters fill the decades between 30 A.D. and 60 A.D. Luke wrote Acts thirty years later, in the 90’s. The massive Jewish-Roman war came between.
Luke certainly did not know Paul’s letters—nothing of them whatever. If he had, he would have cited Paul’s ideas and speech differently. He would have changed his narrative in various ways, for instance, in the details of what Paul does after his conversion. He would also have added references to people mentioned in the letters and developed them as characters. So here is an author very interested in Paul, well informed and curious about sources, yet who does not know what we regard as the most basic building blocks of the story.
As normalcy slowly redefined Israel, Paul’s letters began showing up, and people loved them. But they mostly focused on concerns of their Gentile listeners. “We hear very little of what Paul must have written to Jewish Christians.”
Perhaps the Jewish revolt, by removing the influence of Paul’s “Jewish” letters, prevented many Jewish people from becoming Christians. They never heard the Good News, not as preached by Paul. The psalms and stories of the Torah and the prophets, rather than being the foundation of the Good News as they were for Christians, remained the beginning and the end of biblical wisdom. Jesus’ new understanding of the rules and regulations was not available.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.
(Deuteronomy 7, Psalm 103, 1 John 4, Matthew 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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