St. Paul deserves better. When Vatican II changed our Sunday readings from a one-year cycle to a three-year rotation, it did the good thing of broadening Catholics’ contact with the Scriptures, although I imagine we still hear less than 10 percent of the Bible. But unforeseen was the eclipse into which it threw poor Paul. The Old Testament reading always parallels the Gospel, leaving Paul off on a track of his own. We homilists usually go with the Gospel at Paul’s expense.
Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, perhaps eight years younger. Born in the Diaspora, the dispersion outside Israel, in Tarsus (in modern Turkey), he started life as Saul. In his time more Jews lived outside Israel for historical and economic reasons, so there were plenty of communities of Jews clustered about their synagogues all around the Mediterranean and far inland. He got good rabbinical training in Jerusalem and was zealous in his Judaism by any standard.
Paul learned of an upstart popular movement based around one Jesus of Nazareth. You need to know that Nazareth was a one-donkey town so unlikely to produce anyone notable that a saying arose, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Indeed a term of derision for Christians has been Nozrit, or followers of the Nazarene. Sadly, it corresponds to any number of anti-Semite names we have used. He took it upon himself to get legal authorization to arrest these renegades who were claiming that their Jesus had been executed by Caesar’s justice, but had risen from the dead.
Once Paul was on his way to Damascus, the capital of neighboring Syria, intending another bust when he was prostrated by a voice asking him why Paul was persecuting him. When Paul asked, the voice identified itself as Jesus. The experience left him as radically pro-Jesus as he had been anti, although it was a few weeks till he regained his sight and perhaps his serenity.
Today our Jewish friends have far greater problems with Paul than they do with Jesus. For them, Jesus was a fine prophet, urging Jews to be good Jews. In good conscience they say he was not the messiah, the one anointed to speak and act in God’s name and power. And they do not regard him as divine. But Paul, a zealous Pharisee, one of those who took upon themselves a higher level of practice, the way Trappists do in Catholicism, did the unthinkable by abbreviating the Torah. When taking the message about Jesus to those Diaspora Jews, he should have expected Gentiles in those foreign cities to get curious about a man returning from the dead. These Gentiles so wanted in that they forced a great problem, one that scholars say was our greatest in 20 centuries: should we admit the Gentiles to Christian membership when the Torah commands Jews to distance themselves from Gentiles?
These unbelievers worshipped pagan idols, ate all kinds of unclean foods, had no use for circumcision or mikveh bathing rituals for women, and were not born into the Chosen People. The earliest Christians, all Jews, never dreamed of separating from Judaism or of starting some new religion. But the conservatives among them said it would be wrong to admit Gentiles because of the Torah prohibition. Besides, who in their right mind could expect Gentiles to perform all 613 Torah prescriptions when Jews plainly admitted they themselves could not?
In about the year 49 the leaders decided to convene a meeting in Jerusalem to settle this momentous problem. As conservative Catholics are now glad to admit since the overwhelming majority of them were not born Jewish, the liberals won. The outsiders were allowed in, and besides that, they were relieved of many of the Torah obligations, like the prohibition of pork products or the kosher requirements.
Although he was not one of the original Twelve, he is called the Apostle. Not even Peter is called that. But Paul took the Gospel message as a ministry to the Gentiles and their Jewish friends. To make sure his Greek parishioners in Corinth appreciated him he told them, “Five times at the hands of the Jews I received 39 lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked. . . (facing) dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles. . . .” We could add he was finally beheaded a few miles south of where Peter had been crucified on Vatican Hill. We do owe him.
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