At Cross Purposes

#### Paul’s uncompromised defense in Jerusalem####

One of my assignments for my Apologetics class this semester was to write a paper reflecting on one of the major sermons in the book of Acts. Over the next few days, I’m going to be posting my paper as a series here for your perusal.

This was actually a fascinating task for me because I got to evaluate a sermon as a sermon. Normally, when you read a section of the Bible, especially in a section where somebody is basically preaching, the tendency is to imagine yourself in the audience and imagine that this speech is given for your own personal benefit. What am I supposed to get out of it? Why, the experience of God speaking through the text and using it to change me, telling me who I am to be, or what I am to do, or deepening my relationship with Christ.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with reading the Bible like that. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the main reasons why God provided us the scriptures in the first place. You can’t deny the subjective power of the Word of God. Yet you can’t help but notice sometimes that some of the “sermons” given, especially in Acts and the gospels, seem to work at cross purposes with themselves.

For instance, consider Stephen. He’s got an angry crowd crowding around him, for all practical purposes, already ready to stone him. Is this really the time to say to someone, “Stiff necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit! As your fathers did, so do you” (Acts 7:51). I mean, really. Who, upon hearing that, is going to cry out, “By gum, you’re right. I have been a stiff-necked fool! Sign me up! I’ll get baptized right now!” Luke’s goal may have been to deepen our relationship with Christ, but Stephen’s goal was to defend against the accusation of blasphemy against the scripture, and then turn the tables to show just who is really a blasphemer.

When we read things like that, it’s unavoidable that we step back and recognize that the primary purpose of the speech was not to get us saved. Those speeches were given to specific groups of people to accomplish specific goals. Sometimes figuring out those goals can be a tricky thing indeed. Sometimes, figuring out if they actually accomplished what they intended just as tricky.

The passage that I’ve selected for this series is Acts 21:37 – 23:11, for several reasons. One of the most fascinating concepts I ran across in my class was that a defense of your beliefs may be successful as a defense without necessarily persuading the other party to your cause. Apologetics and evangelism are not necessarily the same thing, and even in evangelism, it is still the Holy Spirit who convicts of sin and leads to repentance. Stephen’s defense is a great example of this. Paul defending his beliefs on his last visit to Jerusalem is another, but with a great twist: Stephen had one audience – Jews who hated the gospel. Paul had at least two, and as many as four. Because of the variety of the audience and the variety of the charges against him, Paul had to use a great variety of arguments to get his position across. This provides for a much more interesting passage to study. It also provides for a bit of confusion as to what Paul’s purposes are, apologetic or otherwise, which of course leads to a bit of a blurry picture as to whether he accomplishes anything good.

Over the next few days, I’d like to explore some of those purposes, and argue that Paul did in fact accomplish most of them, as evidenced by the fact that Jesus himself appears to Paul in verse 23:11, and encourages him, essentially telling Paul that he did in fact accomplish what was expected of him.

In Acts chapters 21-22, Paul finds himself at the crux of every key group in early Christian History. Specifically he is speaking to non-Christian Jews in Jerusalem, and perhaps some of the Judaising Christians. Additionally, close at hand, and paying close attention are the church of Jerusalem in general, and the Roman army, conveniently representing the (as yet) unevangelized gentile world. He’s just completed his third missionary journey and ended up precisely where everyone told him not to go: Jerusalem. It’s not very clear why Paul was so determined to go to Jerusalem, other than the fact that he was compelled to do so by the Holy Spirit. It says in Acts 19:21 that Paul purposed in the Spirit to go to Jerusalem, and then to Rome, and again at 20:22, Paul says “I go bound in the spirit to Jerusalem,” but it doesn’t say what exactly he planned to do once he got there.

Nevertheless, once he got there, the very thing that everyone was sure would happen happened: An angry mob of Jews found Paul in the temple, assumed he had brought Gentiles into the temple, and dragged him out, with every intent of killing him in the street. The Roman garrison intervened, placed Paul in chains, and began an inquiry to find out what exactly Paul had done that was so terrible. Just as had been prophesied to him, and as Paul himself had anticipated, if he went to Jerusalem, he ended up in chains, in the hands of the Romans. It was in this position that he delivered his two speeches in Acts 22 and 23, once before the angry mob, and once before the Sanhedrin

It’s hard to explain to the modern reader why it was that the Christian habit of preaching the gospel to the Gentiles was so unacceptable to the Jews, except to point out that the very mention of the idea could turn a basically passive audience into a frothing mob in a matter of seconds (cf Acts 22:22). Paul, on the other hand, was an advocate of almost the opposite point of view. Not only is salvation available to everyone, but there is no stipulation to the Gentile convert to follow any but the most basic moral tenants of the Jewish Law. The result was that the biggest hindrance to the gospel being presented to the Jews was the fact that the gospel was being presented to the Gentiles.

Even among those Jews who were Christians, there seems to have been a good number who wanted Gentile Christians to be bound by the Jewish law. At the very least, as James tells Paul when he first gets to Jerusalem, all of the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem were very zealous in continuing in the Jewish law for themselves. Making matters worse, the general rumor was that Paul was telling the Jews to completely abandon the Mosaic code and Jewish traditions (21:20, 21). As you can imagine, the tension was very great.

At the beginning of Paul’s speech in Jerusalem, having been dragged out of the temple by an angry mob with murderous intent, and rescued by a Roman garrison commander whose only motivation seems to have been that he be killed by due process instead of by lynch mob, Paul finds himself at a singular disadvantage. That Paul’s primary goal is to proclaim the gospel almost goes without saying. ( I’m saying it anyway.) But Paul also wants to defend his own particular emphasis in the gospel, which has been discredited in Jerusalem: That salvation through Jesus Christ is also for the Gentiles. As I said before, this one key tenant of Paul’s teaching was the lynch-pin of Jewish opposition to the gospel. If it could just be removed, the Way would become much more acceptable to the Jew. But Paul can’t remove it, because it is an essential factor in the gospel that he has received. So he heads for this key issue as quickly as he can.

Lastly, before he can even begin to defend his theology, he needs to defend his own person, and he does this in two different directions. To the Roman commander, he plays the culture card, so that he’s allowed to speak to the Jews. He speaks to the commander in Greek, assures him that he’s not an Egyptian rabble rouser, and appeals to his citizenship in a large city as proof of his civilized aims. Later, after apparently inciting a riot in the space of 15 minutes, he escalates his personal defense to the soldiers by appealing to his citizenship. The fact that Paul apparently outranks the commander in social status does a lot toward getting Paul an audience with the Sanhedrin.

To the Jews, he identifies with his audience in their zealousy. He spoke to them in the Hebrew language, which at least got their attention and silence, and then he lists his pedigree of Jewish zeal: raised in Jerusalem, instructed by Gamaliel, strictly taught the law, and zealous beyond anyone in the room toward persecuting the church, to the point of becoming a sort of one man inquisition. In both cases, his method is very similar, sort of an “all things to all people” approach. And it accomplishes precisely what he intends: it gains audience.

Of course, Paul isn’t *faking* any of these things. He really is a Roman citizen from “no mean city.” He really does speak Greek and Hebrew fluently, and he really was a zealous Pharisee, persecuting the church. Identifying with his audience isn’t some kind of card trick—it’s simply pointing out exactly where his audience *can* identify with him, where his convictions and theirs have some common ground. So when he speaks to the Roman commander, he doesn’t mention his religious training, since his religious training would be irrelevant, and somewhat harmful: a Roman commander may be inclined to take a zealous Pharisee as an automatic security threat, instead of someone to be given berth. To the Jews he fails to mention his dual citizenship. He speaks to them in Hebrew. Acts 22:2 specifically states that it was his addressing them in Hebrew (or Aramaic, if you like) that really hushed the crowd. People are just more willing to listen when they entertain the idea that you might be one of them.

You actually read the story of Paul’s conversion three different times in Acts, each time a little differently. Paul’s speech to this mob is the second time, and it has some key characteristics, compared with the other two. The first main difference is a little one: Paul stops to emphasize that Ananias, who prays for Paul after his experience on the Damascus road, was a devout Jew who lived according to the law. Considering his audience, this is a good thing: emphasizing throughout that the Christian religion is nothing if not a Jewish religion. But from there Paul goes careening off the path of sanity: He slips right off the pattern of emphasizing the Jewishness of his faith to telling how the salvation they so treasure as Jews has been taken from them and given to the Gentiles, like pearls cast before swine.

Paul’s trance in the temple at Jerusalem seems to be the climax of Paul’s defense, for several reasons: it isn’t found in the other two conversion narratives; it emphasizes precisely the difference that Paul needs to negotiate between his adversaries, and the crowd cuts him off precisely at the end of the thought. Marion Soards’ book The Speeches in Acts mentions that there is a pattern in Acts of a crowd cutting off someone’s speech just when it reaches a good stopping point. At the very least, the crowd cutting him off tells you that the crowd thought he had reached the climax of his message, even if nobody else did. You could also say the speech was intentionally climactic enough to deliberately infuriate the crowd. Either way, Paul’s method veers widely from what any normal apologist today would have attempted to do. He’s already established some rapport with the crowd, and he’s already delivered his testimony whereby he became a Christian, all without offense. It seems that the Jews in Jerusalem, regardless of whether they had themselves become Christians, had at least come to accept Christianity as a valid form of Judaism. The next step, if Paul had really wanted to go there, would have been to say, “See? We have so much to agree on. We just have this teeny little difference on the matter of Gentiles.” He could then maybe discuss the second Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit fell no the household of Cornelius. Or he could talk about the many verses that mention the Gentiles also coming to salvation.

But Paul doesn’t go about it that way. Instead of giving them a spoonful of sugar, he gives them a bigger pill to take. Not only was Paul sent to the Gentiles, but he’s was sent because the Jews wouldn’t accept him. Not only was Paul sent, but the commissioning came through a vision and a trance over and above Paul’s own desire to stay. Not only was it through supernatural means, but it was the Messiah himself sending Paul. To a racist Jew, this is a bolus indeed! You can’t argue with it, you can’t easily deny it, and you won’t accept it. My study Bible describes the crowd’s response as irrational in the footnotes , but considering the options, their response seems very reasonable. To accept Christ is to throw down all my earthly notions of who God is and what he wants? I might have been tearing my clothes and throwing dust in the air myself!

Paul really seems to be shooting himself in the foot. Shouldn’t his defense consist mainly, or even entirely, in presenting his position in the most congenial light possible? Only an idiot could have missed how Paul’s vision might enrage his audience. But Paul, it seems, can’t separate his conversion from his calling: Since they were acquired by the same means (supernatural), the certainty of his calling (controversial though it was) derived from the authority of his conversion. Put in other words, as a Pharisee, the most effective mechanism for convincing Paul that Jesus was, in fact, the prophesied Messiah was the overwhelming experience of the supernatural encounter with the glorified Christ (it would have worked for me too). If a supernatural experience was the final authority for Paul’s conversion, then it must be the same authority in a similar supernatural experience with the risen Christ that authorized his calling. If Paul’s Christianity is reasonable, so must his call be also. There are gentler ways of conveying this message, but none more powerful.

So the crowd rips in to a rage, tearing their clothes and throwing dust in the air. The Roman garrison commander rescues Paul, has him brought back into the barracks and orders him to be scourged until Paul explained what it was they were really so angry about. It seems like Paul is right back where he started, and in a lot of ways he is, only much worse. Instead of rumors of villainy, the Jews have Paul’s own testimony, which they hate. Instead of being merely bound by chains, the Roman commander is about to have Paul whipped. As an apologist, Paul seems to be particularly ineffective. But, again, Paul’s goal is not to persuade, but to defend, and his defense isn’t supported by attempting to diminish their differences. A similar situation today might be in preaching the gospel today and attempting to downplay my conviction that the behavior of my audience is in no way acceptable to God. They may be very comfortable with my belief that God is love, but very unhappy with my position that he is intolerantly holy. A successful defense of my beliefs would have to rigorously defend God’s holiness. Persuading my audience that God’s love is so great that their sin is unimportant in comparison may get them on my side, but it won’t accomplish any real change of heart on the part of my audience. It’s good politics, but bad apologetics. Better to enrage my hearers with a vigorous defense than to win them by arguing myself out of the truth.

Since he is basically in the same situation as a chapter ago (only more so), Paul goes through the same process again—only more so. He defends his character to the Roman in things Roman—by *being* a Roman. He does this so effectively that he actually frightens the Romans, since it was illegal to scourge a Roman citizen , and Paul had only stopped them in the act. The commander sends Paul to the Sanhedrin, since he still needs to know what’s so terrible about Paul, so he can know what to do with him. Before the Sanhedrin, Paul again attempts to clear his character in a Jewish way: “Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this day” (23:1), for which effort, the high priest Ananias orders him struck across the mouth.

I don’t know why Ananias ordered Paul to be hit, but I can say that Ananias was a model of corrupt authority, so it’s not very likely that Ananias was indignant about Paul’s claim for purely theological reasons. Nevertheless, Paul responds with his famous temper: “God will strike you, you whitewashed wall! For you sit to judge me according to the law, and do you command me to be struck contrary to the law?” (v. 3) which catapulted Paul in to a much more concrete application of his character. He was right in one sense: Jewish law is the foundation of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” yet Paul was being judged before it even began. But Paul wasn’t mouthing off to just anybody—that was the high priest, the highest Jewish authority in the room. When it’s pointed out to him just who it is that he’s reviling, Paul backs down quickly, quoting the law in Exodus that says you shouldn’t revile an authority, and saying that he wouldn’t have spoken so if he had known Ananias’ office.

From here, Paul plunges headlong into his defense, which again seems to be a non sequitur: “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee; concerning the hope and resurrection of the dead I am being judged!” (v. 6). It seems like Paul’s only purpose in making this announcement is to stir up contention among the sects and get their focus off of him, especially since Luke precedes Paul’s statement with “when Paul perceived that one part were Sadducees and the other Pharisees.” Paul isn’t being judged for his position on the resurrection; he’s being judged for his position on the Gentiles. But Paul has been maintaining all along that the Gospel he preaches is not something he made up, but something he received directly from the risen Son of God. “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen, and if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty” he says in 1 Corinthians 15:12 and 13. In Galatians 1:6, he says “If we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.” Why? “I neither received it from man, not was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ” (v. 12). In other words, it is the resurrection from the dead, one dead in particular, that is the foundation for all of Paul’s behavior. So it precisely follows that Paul is being judged not just because of what he says, but also because the authority with which Paul says it is insufficient. Insofar as Paul is a Pharisee, he is being judged for the resurrection of the dead.

This argument flips the switch in Paul’s favor among the Pharisees. They weren’t necessarily converted on the spot, but they were suddenly much more willing to listen and consider whether Paul had in fact received his position by a revelation, say from a spirit or an angel. Of course, this line of reasoning does nothing for the Sadducees in the group, and so a great argument breaks out, and once again the garrison commander hustles Paul back into the barracks.

At this point, honestly, it would still be very murky whether or not Paul actually was an effective apologist for his cause: Everybody still hates him, he hasn’t particularly convinced anybody beyond a reasonable doubt, and he’s still holed up in a Roman barracks—not exactly the most effective place to be ministering in Jerusalem. It would be easy to judge Paul’s performance in a lot of different ways, depending on what you think the intended goal was. For instance, Eung Chun Park has a book called Either Jew or Gentile: Paul’s Unfolding Theology of Inclusivity, in which he argues that resolving a conflict between Paul and the Judiasers was Paul’s primary goal in Jerusalem, and that it was ultimately a failure. In this light, the contribution Paul brought to Jerusalem (mentioned in Romans) was also intended as a peace offering from the Gentile churches to the Jerusalem church. Or we could assign a smaller goal to him, like leaving Jerusalem a free man. There’s another goal that failed.

But I think Paul’s goals were pretty simple and straight forward: minister to the local Christians; defend the gospel; go to Rome. This is pretty much the plan Paul outlines several times. Romans 15:22-29 is one place he does so. Paul achieves these three goals, and achieves them with flying colors. We can be confident about the flying colors part because in Acts 23:11, Jesus appears to Paul that night and encourages him: “As you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must also bear witness at Rome.” It’s very tempting to respond to this verse by thinking “Aw, how nice, Jesus stopped by to give Paul a thumbs up.” But there are very few epiphanies in scripture after Jesus’ resurrection: In Acts, you can see mention of maybe 3 (or 4, if you count Stephen’s experience). Jesus obviously doesn’t just show up for anything. I think it would be unwise to give less than the highest possible weight to each of these events. I would think that Jesus appearing to me and congratulating me after a sermon would be the highest confirmation of my performance I could imagine. Jesus also used this occasion to affirm to Paul that he was in the right place and that this was the means that he was to use to get to Rome, but if nothing else, Jesus appearance has to be the most dramatic indication available that Paul’s defense was precisely what was required.