- [Narrator] "The Bible": a book whose origins lie
thousands of years ago in the Middle East,
yet still inspires billions today.
- "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
- [Narrator] Seven figures from different walks of life
offer their personal perspective
on the best-selling book of all time
and what it means to them.
- Even if you've never read a word of the Bible,
your life will have been shaped by it.
(inspirational music) - In this program,
historian Tom Holland goes in search of St. Paul.
(dramatic music)
- [Tom] Alongside all its many other glories,
The Bible contains the most famous letters ever written.
- [Speaker] "Oh death. Where is thy sting?
Oh grave. Where is thy victory?
Now we see through a glass darkly,
but then, face to face."
- The man who wrote them,
a Jew from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire
by the name of Paul,
did more to transform the moral and ethical presumptions
of the ancient world than anyone else.
The notions he advocated could hardly have been
more unsettling to a Greek or a Roman
that equality might be a positive,
that change might be a good.
Look to make the world fairer today
and you owe a debt of gratitude to Paul.
His teachings are the pivot on which classical antiquity
and therefore the whole subsequent
course of Western history turns.
So profoundly did Paul shape the way that we in the West
have ordered our sexuality, our society,
our very sense of what it is to be human,
that even now, two millennia on,
Paul's influence is akin to the air we breathe.
(upbeat music)
Paul, this figure from the earliest years
of the spread of Jesus's message,
is often seen now as being hopelessly out of step.
Worse than that, the charge laid against him
is that he twisted and corrupted Jesus' teachings.
You have Jesus, a mellow, bead-wearing hippie,
and then you have Paul, the square who ruins it all.
(gentle music) His letters, 13 in all,
account for no less than a quarter
of the entire New Testament.
And he ranked second only to Jesus himself
as the founder of Christianity.
But today Paul's words are quoted against him
to write him off for being authoritarian,
- [Speaker] "The powers that be are ordained of God".
- [Tom] For being sexist.
- [Speaker] "The head of the woman is the man".
- [Tom] For an uptight homophobe.
- [Speaker] "The men leaving the natural use of the woman
burned in their lust, one toward another.
Men with men working that which is unseemly".
(crows call)
- And yet here's the thing,
the St. Paul who condemns fornicators is also the author
of the greatest description of love ever written.
This is the church where I got married,
and I can remember before the wedding
thumbing through the Bible
trying to find a suitable passage for a reading,
and to be frank, much of it seemed grotesquely unsuitable.
Lots of smiting's, lots of "thou shalt not's".
Now it's true that there was the one love poem,
the "Song of Solomon".
- [Speaker] "Thy two breasts are like
two young rows that are twins."
- But, mmm, didn't really want that read out
in front of my mother.
So in the end, like so many other couples,
we went for the obvious, the cliched,
the transcendent option,
the first epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians,
chapter 13.
(soft music)
- [Speaker] "If I speak in the tongues of men
and of angels but have not love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.
And if I have prophetic powers and understand
all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
So faith, hope, love, abide, these three.
But the greatest of these is love."
(bells toll)
- Yeah. "And so what?", many may be tempted to shrug.
But as the theory of evolution teaches us,
we're all of us the product of our origins.
I'm a historian of antiquity.
It obsesses me partly because of the inherent fascination
of Greek and Roman civilization, but also because,
in a sense, it helped to make me what I am.
And the same, but even more so, is true of Paul's letters.
Just because they're in the Bible
doesn't mean that we should ever forget that they too,
like democracy, or tragedy, or philosophy,
are rooted in the world of our beginnings.
Like Jesus, his contemporary whom he never knew,
Paul, or Saul as he was originally called, was a Jew.
But unlike Jesus,
he'd been born well beyond the limits of the Holy Land.
(gentle music) Saul was a native of Tarsus,
no mean city, as he described it.
It lay in what is now the Southeastern corner of Turkey.
Back then it was a region called Cilicia.
Tarsus itself had always had close links
with the world of Greece,
and these had been immeasurably strengthened
when Alexander the Great conquered the city
in the 4th century BC.
It's this that explains why Saul's native language
wasn't Hebrew but Greek,
the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean.
But there was a further dimension
to Saul's multifaceted cultural identity.
300 years on from Alexander
and Tarsus had come under the rule of a new superpower.
Saul's father it seems, we don't know how or why,
had managed to get on the right side of the conquerors.
So much so in fact,
that he had ended up being awarded a grant of citizenship.
This was why Saul, a Jew, a speaker of Greek,
was also a citizen of Rome.
But what were the relations
between Jews and the pagan world?
Was there a difference between
the Jews who live in Palestine
and the Jews who lived beyond the limits
of the Holy Land in the broader Roman world?
- Yes and no.
I mean, of course, both Jew and Gentile,
Gentile of course being non-Jew in Jewish terms,
were all part of the broader Roman world anyway
but there were certain differences.
In the land of Israel, in Palestine,
you have the temple and you have certain laws that apply
to Jews in the land of Israel.
In the diaspora,
the diaspora being Jews outside the land of Israel,
across the Roman Empire, you have different social contexts.
You have Jews living in largely pagan cities.
And so there are two different worlds
in that sense, but of course,
both are having to deal with the Roman Empire at large.
Now Paul is a product of both of these.
He comes from a cosmopolitan context, from Tarsus,
but he also gets trained as a Pharisee.
(horns blowing) (drums beating)
- [Tom] Which meant that Saul was every inch
a stickler for Jewish tradition.
To be a Pharisee was to be devoted to the study
of the Jews' most precious inheritance.
Way back God had appeared to the prophet Moses
and given him an immense body of instructions.
Ritual, practical, moral.
"Follow these," God had declared,
"And you will have my favor."
Such had been the origins of the Torah, the law.
(soft ethnic music)
When the followers of an executed criminal
named Jesus started preaching
not only that their leader had risen from the dead,
but that he was actually the Son of God,
the fervent young Jew from Tarsus
was outraged by the blasphemy.
This new sect had to be crushed.
Saul was there watching
when the first follower of Jesus to be martyred
was stoned to death.
And when others fled Jerusalem for Damascus in Syria,
Saul was close behind.
- [Speaker] "Breathing out threatenings and slaughter
against the disciples of the Lord."
- Something would happen to him on the road to Damascus,
something that would transform not only Saul's life,
but the very course of global history.
(car purrs past)
In around the year AD 33, Saul,
a young Jew exceedingly zealous
for the traditions of his forefathers
and a wholehearted persecutor of the followers of Jesus,
was on a road trip.
(gentle music)
(door slams)
According to the "Acts of the Apostles",
the book of the Bible which narrates
the first spread of the Christian mission
out into the world, Saul had a vision,
right here on the road to Damascus.
(suspenseful music) He fell to the earth.
Jesus spoke to him.
- [Speaker] "'Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?'
And he said, 'Who art thou Lord?'
And the Lord said, 'I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.'"
- [Tom] Saul was struck blind.
He was led into the city.
- [Speaker] "And he was three days without sight.
And neither did eat nor drink."
- And the stunned and bewildered Saul
was visited by a man named Ananias,
a disciple who once, according to tradition,
lived in this very house.
And Ananias laid his hands on Saul.
(haunting music)
- [Speaker] "And immediately there fell from his eyes
as it had been scales,
and he received sight forthwith,
and arose and was baptized."
- [Tom] It's a strange and haunting story,
and a mysterious one too.
We'll never know what really happened at Damascus
but what we can know is what Saul thought had happened.
He had seen the risen Christ.
But he hadn't been converted.
There was as yet no religion that we would recognize
as Christianity for him to be converted to.
Saul remained what he had always been, a Jew.
And yet it is telling that from this point on, in Acts,
it's the Greek form of his name which is used.
A really profound transformation is being suggested here.
- [Speaker] "Old things are passed away.
Behold, all things have become new."
(fluttering of wings)
- But what did this mean for a man
such as Paul had previously been?
A Jew zealous in his belief
that God had chosen Israel for his especial favor.
If it was now the knowledge of Christ
which promised salvation, then what role, if any,
did this leave for the law?
The framework for living that had been given
to the Jews by God himself
and which governed every aspect of Jewish life?
(gentle music)
Now Paul, had a particular reason why he believed
the law no longer mattered.
His vision of the future was a startlingly radical one.
He believed he'd been called to preach
the good news of Christ to the Gentiles,
to the Greeks and Romans,
to all those who did not observe the Jewish law.
Now it takes a bit of mental gear shifting
to appreciate just how startling and original a notion
this actually was.
(camel grunts)
We're so used to the idea of Christian missionaries
that we tend to assume, I think,
that preaching the word to the heathen
is just the kind of thing that Christians do.
But not in the time of Paul.
He was aiming at something bizarre, heroic,
unprecedented in the scope of its ambition.
Nothing less than the conversion of the world.
And it's the measure of his achievement
that the ultimate consequence of this
would be the emergence of Christianity,
nowadays, the largest religion on the face of the planet
with over 2 billion adherents.
(dramatic orchestral music)
Province by Roman province,
Paul aimed to spread the news of Jesus to the world,
and fast.
The end days, he believed, were at hand.
Christ would soon return. Time was running out.
The world was about to end, so off he went.
(lightning fizzes) (thunder rumbles)
(motorbike putters along)
Now, travel in the ancient world was always dangerous.
- [Speaker] "Thrice I suffered shipwreck,"
- [Tom] Paul would boast.
- [Speaker] "A night and a day I have been in the deep.
In journeyings often in perils of waters,
in perils of robbers."
- But all that granted, getting around the Mediterranean
was probably easier in Paul's lifetime
than it had ever been in history.
Roman power had shrunk the world
and Paul took full advantage.
But he was entering a crowded market.
By traveling from Mediterranean city to Mediterranean city,
preaching his understanding of the truth to the Gentiles,
to those who weren't Jewish,
Paul was going head-to-head with the classical world's
dominant intellectual tradition.
The Greeks could read Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus.
Why should they listen to Paul's claim
that God was a crucified criminal?
No surprise then that the place where he had
his most demoralizing experience of all,
where he realized just what he was up against
should have been Athens,
the powerhouse of philosophy. (gentle music)
(people chattering)
This is Speaker's Corner in London.
It's a place where anyone with a case to make
is free to come and make it.
And it's probably the closest we have to the Areopagus,
the hill in Athens where Paul went
to preach the resurrection of Christ.
(speakers preaching) (men calling)
- [Speaker] "For all the Athenians
and strangers which were there
spent their time in nothing else,
but either to tell or to hear some new thing."
- You just don't read anywhere in the New Testament
where it says that.
In talaq, talaq, talaq.
I divorce you, I divorce you.
Speakers Corner is unique in the world.
There's no other place like it.
There's no other place where we can get up
and actually say the things we say,
ask the questions we ask,
and get the response that we get on a weekly basis.
It's free, and it's right in the middle of London.
I like Speaker's Corner specifically because
it's so much like the environment that Paul came from.
Your God's up in Heaven, totally distant,
he cannot hear you. - Excuse me!
- Paul's the best man for confrontation.
Everywhere he went he confronted,
every people he met, he confronted.
He was a very well known, and certainly well-respected man,
because of his intellect.
Fortunately, because of the fact that he was able to
take people on their own terms, almost on any subject.
Jesus! (people respond)
(solemn music)
- [Speaker] "And when they heard
of the resurrection of the dead,
some mocked and others said,
'We will hear thee again, on this matter.'"
- Hardly the most ringing of endorsements.
And really you can get a sense here
the sheer playground feel of it,
the clamor of different opinions,
of the kind of problems that faced Paul.
How was he to stop people from just
shrugging his message aside?
An awkward question,
but one to which Paul very urgently needed an answer.
(man preaches loudly) (suspenseful music)
Fail to convert the Gentiles
and Paul's ambition to establish faith in Christ
as something universal would fail as well.
Much was stake.
The future of the world, so Paul believed,
was hanging in the balance.
Paul's first Gentile convert was a genuinely big catch.
Sergius Paulus was the Roman governor of Cyprus,
the kind of toga-clad high flyer we see memorialized here.
And Sergius was prepared to give Paul his full backing.
When the apostle and his companion
set off to what is now Turkey,
but was then called Asia Minor,
they headed straight for a region called Galatia,
where Sergius Paulus had lands.
This was clearly how Paul liked
to conduct his missionary work,
by fixing on an influential local supporter.
But how on earth had Paul managed to pull it off?
Well, he was clearly a man
of great vision and self-confidence,
of wit, and fire and passion.
Even a Roman aristocrat might be swayed
by qualities such as these,
but there was an additional reason perhaps,
why Gentiles such as Sergius Paulus
might've been willing to give Paul
the kind of hearing that they would
never normally have granted a Jew.
To put it plainly,
Paul was telling his non-Jewish followers like Paulus
that there was no need for them
to put their privates under the knife.
- Being circumcised does not make you a Jew,
nor does being uncircumcised make you not a Jew,
but the circumcision is the strongest sign of commitment
and of the covenant between God, and Abraham the first Jew.
- So would it be fair to say that circumcision
has an emotional as well as a ritual significance
for most Jews?
- Yes. I think that is true.
The circumcision gives this sense of participation,
emotional connection.
In communities where Jews have been persecuted
circumcision has sometimes been banned,
which is a matter of tremendous heartache
to Jewish communities.
And Jews have always put themselves out
to ensure that their sons are circumcised.
(light music)
- But Paul, preaching to Sergius Paulus
and then to the Galatians,
tells them this ritual is no longer necessary.
It is not that he was hostile
to circumcision for Jewish baby boys,
merely that he felt the whole issue for his Gentile converts
was a glaring irrelevance.
Once, before his vision of Christ on the road to Damascus,
Paul had believed that it was the differences
between Jew and Greek that really counted.
But now he told his followers,
difference itself had become a matter of indifference.
- [Speaker] "There is neither Jew nor Greek.
There is neither bond nor free.
There is neither male nor female.
For ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
- But Paul's line on circumcision
was destined to bring him into conflict
with other proclaimers of Christ's message.
Several years after his first visit to Galatia,
Paul wrote the churches there a letter.
And this,
preserved in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin,
is the oldest known copy, from the end of the 2nd century.
I mean, it sends a shiver down the spine to look at this
and feel that you are that close to Paul,
but also the sort of measure of frustration
that you have this gap and you can't quite get back there.
How close do you think this brings us to Paul?
- My own feeling is that it brings us very close to Paul.
It may not look a very impressive object,
but we're looking at one of the
earliest Christian artifacts of any kind,
written by the hand of one of these
very, very early Christians.
We're looking at communication between an elite.
They will then read out these letters to the community.
And the vast majority of Christians
would have heard the letters being read.
And that's how they came into contact with Paul's writings.
Every Christian community who wants to know
anything about Paul had to have a copy of those letters.
So, they generated other copies as they were distributed
through the early Christian communities.
- The letter to the Galatians is Paul's most
combative, personal and emotional piece of writing.
Not a formal statement of doctrine,
but rather the biblical equivalent of an email,
fired off in the heat of the moment.
(gentle music)
So what had prompted it?
Well, what seems to have happened is that the Galatians,
having been converted by Paul,
now wanted as it were, to go the whole hog.
They wanted to become properly Jewish.
They wanted to be circumcised.
Paul is furious.
And what makes him all the more livid
is the fact that rival Christian missionaries
are treading on his patch.
Missionaries who are telling the Galatians that,
"Yes, you do need to be circumcised."
He wrote angrily of these missionaries.
- [Speaker] "I would they were even cut off
which trouble you."
- As the King James version has it, which updated,
roughly translates as, cut off their goolies.
Elsewhere, Paul's tone is more poignant.
"I stand in doubt of you," he tells the Galatians.
You could feel his pain, his despair.
"Take the leap of faith," he is begging,
"believe that we're all of us Christ's,
circumcised and uncircumcised alike."
In his words,
- [Speaker] "Christ hath redeemed us
from the curse of the law."
- When Paul tells his followers that they no longer
need to follow the Jewish law,
that all they require is the spirit of Christ,
do you feel that that is a valid pitch?
- It's very attractive to offer people
the sublime end that Jewish law and tradition
promises the adherent,
but without making any of the demands of commitment.
After all, Jewish law is very demanding.
It's very rigorous.
It evades and penetrates every aspect of one's life
from birth to death, from morning to night,
and selling that to a people as a desirable lifestyle
is quite a hard sell.
Telling people on the other hand,
that they'll get all the outcome
without having to observe the laws,
that's quite an attractive sell.
- Paul felt that Jewish law was no longer needed.
Faith in Christ was all that mattered.
But this threatened a dilemma,
one which we have still not resolved today.
In a world without rules,
what's to stop us doing whatever we like?
Now Paul doesn't want to think that this is a problem.
Paul wants to think that
if you have the knowledge of Christ, then, whoosh,
you also automatically have the fruits of that knowledge.
Joy, love, peace.
Paul is hippy, if you like.
But what if that whole Woodstock spirit
is then taken too far?
Paul has been telling people, no, you don't need the law,
but now news reaches him of a Christian
in the Greek city of Corinth
who, scandalously, has been going around telling people
that he has a license from God
to sleep with his father's wife.
(smooth music)
"Such fornication," Paul writes,
"as is not so much as named among the Gentiles."
Which is really saying something
because Corinth traditionally had always had
a really sleazy reputation,
so much so in fact, that the very word Corinthiatsain,
to play the Corinthian, meant in Greek, to fornicate.
Even though the heyday of the city,
as a destination for sex tourists was a long gone,
Paul, writing to the Corinthians
must surely have had it in his mind.
And so he's forced to acknowledge that perhaps,
just perhaps, the spirit of Christ on its own
is not actually enough,
and that even if you have accepted
the spirit of Christ into your life,
you might still need laws
telling you how to behave after all.
- Paul is the conduit for what's called
the code of holiness of Leviticus.
This is the one which says that
men who sleep with men like women
should be put to death, basically.
So, St. Paul is the link between the
strictures of the Old Testament
and the modern Christian world.
So he gets rid of an awful lot of the old Jewish law.
He gets rid of the dietary requirements.
He gets rid of the need to be circumcised,
but he likes keep in some of these other prescriptions
against homosexuality, against fornication.
He is the authority for bringing those back into the church.
So he picks and chooses.
- So here is the fundamental tension in Paul's thought.
On the one hand he's preaching a revolutionary new order.
The relationship between God and his people
is no longer defined by the law,
but by the spirit of Christ.
On the other hand, (gentle music)
he doesn't want to say to the churches
that they can just do anything they like.
When it comes to issues of morality,
Paul is absolutely a product of his Jewish upbringing.
He's simply not prepared to compromise
with the moral presumptions of pagans.
Women should cover their hair.
The only natural union is that of husband and wife.
For people of the same sex to sleep with one another
is wrong.
(fast techno music)
Paul May have proclaimed the irrelevance of the Jewish law
but on the question of gay rights
he was quite as disapproving as Moses.
It's a Sunday night,
but it's a fair bet that not many people here
have come from evensong.
It's very much not a St. Paul kind of a place.
And yet there is a sense in which even here,
Paul's influence can be felt.
The willingness of our society to condone,
as well as to condemn love
between people of the same sex
does indeed draw on his legacy.
Because if our own social and moral attitudes
are complex and contradictory,
that's because Paul's were as well.
Like anyone, he had his prejudices.
And these indisputably have been part of the West's
inheritance from him.
But he was also a revolutionary,
and part of what he aimed at overthrowing
were the cultural presumptions inside his own head.
He laid down laws, but he also ripped them up.
In other words, he's the very opposite of inflexible.
His aim is always to push
against the limits of preconceptions
in the name of equality and love.
But it's not a slushy message.
Paul is tough minded.
(soulful clarinet plays)
Indeed, on sexual matters
he makes the Jewish law look positively soft.
- [Speaker] "It is better to marry than to burn",
- [Tom] He writes, but it is better to avoid sex altogether
than to marry.
- [Speaker] "For to be carnally minded is death."
- Life in Christ is about self-mastery.
It is about pushing yourself to the limits.
It is about keeping your body under control
and winning the prize of eternal life.
(dramatic music) And here to his pagan converts
is something that does speak to them.
Writing to the Corinthians,
Paul compares his own self-discipline
to that of an athlete.
(starter pistol fires) "Run", he says,
"that ye may obtain".
Nothing more Greek, less Jewish, than athletics.
Yet here is Paul's genius.
Somehow against all the odds,
he finds a way of fusing the two.
- [Speaker] "And every man that striveth for the mastery
is temperate in all things.
Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown,
but we, an incorruptible."
- This to Paul is what it is to follow Christ.
It is to compete as an athlete of God.
a vision of striving and spiritual struggling
that would end up superseding
that of the classical world altogether.
It's important to appreciate just how radical
was his overturning of the traditional values
of the world he inhabited. (tense music)
"Always fight bravely", Greek and Roman boys had been told,
"and be superior to others."
But Paul's advice to his converts among the Galatians
could hardly have been more opposite.
Peace, long suffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith, meekness.
These, so the apostle declares,
are the fruits of the spirit.
And as Paul preached, so he lived.
Willingly, he called himself a doulos, a slave of Christ,
and submitted to being beaten,
according to his own testimony, three times by rods,
the punishment, almost by definition, of a slave.
- Good morning, Tom. Welcome. (gravel crunches)
Hi, come in.
It is amazing for us at the beginning of the 21st century
when we realized the power that a master had over his slave.
That he could do anything, even decree death.
When Paul then uses this term
to describe his relationship with Jesus,
namely Jesus becomes Lord, He becomes his master,
Paul looks at himself as a slave.
Very, very strong language,
which is somewhat shocking to us.
Even so much in our translations
we sometimes prefer to use,
talk about a servant as opposed to slave,
but basically what it conveys, what Paul is using here,
it becomes a metaphor to describe
his complete dedication to Jesus and the cause of Jesus.
That he's willing to do anything to follow Jesus
and to announce Jesus to Jews and non-Jews
in the Roman Empire.
(rhythmic ethnic music)
- It also suggests scorn for presumption
deep-rooted in antiquity,
that relationships were determined above all by power.
Paul had abandoned the comforts of his background
and willingly become, in effect, a wandering beggar.
"Powerlessness," Paul was saying "had become the new power."
And certainly, his life was a hard one,
traveling between the new Christian churches
encouraging and guiding them.
Now we have plenty of evidence, fragmentary, perhaps,
but enough to be confident
that Paul's missionary journeys did indeed take him
across the entire span of the Roman world.
But when we come to the years before his death,
Paul just vanishes from the historical record.
(gentle music) The author of the
Acts of the Apostles tells us that he ended up
involved in a crowd disturbance in Jerusalem
and was arrested by the Roman authorities.
Paul appealed to Caesar, his right as a Roman citizen,
and was sent here to Rome.
He stayed under house arrest until, it's thought,
at least two years later, he was put to death.
The most popular theory is that Paul died
in the first wave of persecutions against the Christians.
In AD 64 there was a devastating fire in Rome.
It began just over there
in shops above the Circus Maximus,
the place where the Romans raced their chariots.
By the time it was finally extinguished,
whole swathes of the city had been left as nothing
but blackened, smoking rubble.
Obviously, the Imperial authorities needed a scapegoat
and so they fixed on the followers
of the mysterious and deeply subversive sounding, Christ.
(bell tolls) (dog barks)
Legend says that Paul was executed here
where the Abbey of the Three Fountains now stands.
(haunting music)
(blade swishes)
His head was cut from his neck.
It bounced three times,
and with each bounce a fountain sprung up.
A fantastical story perhaps,
but one thing is clear enough.
Paul died willingly.
By submitting to an earthly king
he had won for himself a heavenly crown.
- [Speaker] "We suffer with him."
- [Tom] Death however, was hardly the end of Paul's story.
Paul died as he'd lived, a revolutionary.
Everything had to change.
This in the context of the age
was a profoundly subversive message.
His end had come, however, not on the barricades,
but submissively, on the executioners block.
So what did this willingness to bow his neck before Caesar
say about his attitude to the Imperial State?
Certainly, when Paul wrote his last
great epistle to the Romans,
he advised the Christians of the capital
to acknowledge the authority of the higher powers.
- [Speaker] "Let every soul
be subject unto the higher powers,
for there is no power but of God.
The powers that be are ordained of God."
- Many brutal regimes since,
from the Nazis to the Apartheid State in South Africa,
have made use of this passage,
making it one of the most notorious
in the whole of the Bible.
Was that a justifiable use of the Bible verse?
- Absolutely not.
It would have been a terror, it's a terrible misuse of that.
Ultimately, I think what Paul is doing is,
Paul is the absolute realist.
He's accepting the world as it is.
He realizes he's a citizen in the Roman Empire
and realizing nevertheless,
and I think he's thinking as a very good Jew here,
realizing that God in his providential way
is overseeing the affairs of man.
And as a result of that, realizing that,
even these authorities are legitimate
and that God can work through them to accomplish his will.
- Though he advised submission to Rome
Paul was no enthusiast for worldly power.
We have to remember always,
that for Paul the end was near.
Christ's return in a blaze of glory was hourly expected.
There was for his followers
quite simply no time to reorder the world.
(light music)
- [Speaker] "The night is fast spent. The day is at hand."
- Except that it didn't turn out that way.
Time did not come to an end.
Paul had not lived to see the return of Christ.
The years slip by,
and new generations found themselves
wrestling with the very same issues
that had so troubled Paul in his own lifetime.
And always at their heart,
the most sensitive issue of all.
In a world redeemed by Christ,
what, of their Jewish heritage, should be preserved?
Attempts to answer that question would lead some Christians
in an increasingly radical direction
with consequences that would have an incalculable impact
on what would become the Christian Bible.
In AD 66, the Jews rose in revolt against the Roman Empire.
It was a reckless action.
Four years later, Jerusalem was captured
and its treasures carted off to Rome.
Christians frantic to distance themselves
from the defeated and mistrusted Jews,
increasingly turned their backs on the mother religion.
The kind of Christian who would provoke Paul
into writing his letter to the Galatians,
the kind who favored circumcision or the law of Moses
faded from the scene.
(gentle music) By the 2nd century AD
there were some Christians, like Marcion,
a radically innovative theologian from Sinope in Asia Minor,
who wanted to make the divorce
between their faith in Christ and Judaism terminal.
Marcion hoped to mark out the boundaries of Christian belief
by drawing up a canon,
an authoritative list of texts
which would define Christian thought.
Paul's letters were destined to play a key role.
- Marcion is the first one we think
to actually formulate a distinctively Christian canon.
And in his case, it comprised solely of one gospel,
the gospel of Luke,
and a collection of 10 letters of the apostle Paul.
And that's it, no old Testament or anything like that.
And no other early Christian writing.
He recognized only one true apostle
and for him that was Paul.
And he could accommodate only one gospel rendition
of Jesus' message.
- I mean, that's really startling to think
that he left out the whole of the Old Testament (chuckles).
Why did he do that?
- He found all kinds of things
problematic in the Old Testament.
It's interesting.
He didn't challenge the reality of the Old Testament God.
Said, "Oh yeah, the God of the Jews is, there's a real God.
And he's the God of the Jews, got nothing to do with us."
And therefore these scriptures are scriptures of the Jews.
They can have them, they can do what they want to with them,
but they have nothing to do with us.
And which just sounded incompatible
with what he understood to be
the teaching of Paul in particular.
- So in a sense, the response of his enemies,
the attempt to combat that resulted in
the Christian Bible as we know it today?
- He does appear to be,
to get the jump on the church
as far as canon forming is concerned.
And in that sense, he probably helps accelerate
and helps intensify the question,
well, okay, if Marcion's canon
isn't adequate and isn't right, what the heck is?
- Now, all of this can seem rather
lacking relevance to the here and now,
but, just think, for example,
about the anti-Semitic uses
to which Paul's letters have been put
and of which Marcion's heresy was only the first example.
Biblical scholarship is not exclusively
about ancient texts.
It impacts directly on the here and now.
And if that is obviously the case with a relationship
as sensitive and significant as that
between Christians and Jews,
then so also is it true
of an even more fundamental relationship,
that between men and women.
- [Speaker] "Let the woman learn in silence
with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach
nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."
- These assertions from the first of Paul's
supposed letters to Timothy,
have had a fundamental impact on the way
that the two genders have related to one another
over the entire course of Western history.
To this day it is used
as a justification by many Christians
to deny the validity of women priests.
Simultaneously, it is Exhibit A in the case that
Paul was a snorting chauvinist pig.
but here is where biblical scholarship
comes into its own again.
Did Paul actually write the first letter to Timothy?
In Paul's first letter to Timothy, we read,
"I suffer not a woman to teach
nor to usurp authority over the man
but to be in silence."
In the opinion of most scholars
are these the actual words of Paul himself?
- No, the message that you get in Timothy there
does seem to be so strikingly different
from other bits of Paul's writings,
that many scholars would say
that they aren't actually written by Paul
but were written by a Pauline community
some years after Paul's death.
- And why are they doing that?
- The reason why the Pauline community,
it seemed to want to write words like that,
might have been in order to be able to rein back
some of the radical message of Paul's theology
which seemed to be immensely inclusive.
- So, of the letters in the Bible
that are attributed to Paul,
how many do scholars think were actually by Paul himself?
- There are seven undisputed Pauline letters,
and there are a number of others which are disputed
more or less by scholars.
Some think that there are more than seven, others think,
others say were just the seven are written by Paul.
- So if as many scholars suggest,
many of these letters post date Paul himself,
what does their existence tell us about the attitudes
of subsequent generations to Paul's initial radicalism?
- Well, many scholars would say
that what happens in the writing of Timothy
is an attempt to readjust Paul's theology
in the light of their current context.
So if they are written after Paul's death
they began to realize that some of Paul's radicalism
sits uncomfortably with the kind of Christianity
that they now follow.
And therefore they rewrote the texts
in order to be able to represent a Christianity
that they were more comfortable with.
- So what is it about Paul's message on gender relations,
on women, that is so unsettling, that is so radical?
- I think one of the really striking features of Paul
is that he throws open the doors in terms of equality,
in terms of gender and in terms of all sorts
of other relationships in the community,
and issues a welcome to anyone
who wants to be a member of this Christ community.
(religious choral singing)
- No-one's influence did more to shape the Bible
that has been read over the centuries
by millions upon millions of Christians than St. Paul.
The tensions that run throughout his letters
are the same that run throughout
the entire practice of the Christian faith
and therefore of Western society as a whole.
Between the conservative and the revolutionary,
between our debt to the past and our hopes for the future,
between the letter and the spirit of the law.
Today, we live in a society that shrinks
from looking to the Bible to define itself.
All the same, it seems to me that Paul remains
the West's patron saint.
More than Darwin, more than Marx, more than Freud,
it's Paul, this man who died almost 2,000 years ago
who lives on inside our heads,
in all his contradictions, in all his complexities.
When we look at the world we do so for good and ill
through Pauline eyes.
(gentle music)
- [Speaker] "There is neither Jew nor Greek.
There is neither bond nor free.
There is neither male nor female."
- And perhaps, following the implications
of his praise of love to their logical conclusions,
there is neither straight nor gay as well.
And like Paul himself, after his vision
of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus,
we are caught between two conflicting desires.
On the one hand,
we want to proclaim a glorious new beginning,
liberated from all Paul's tut-tuttings, all his strictures,
but at the same time, we do, I think,
want to continue to define ourselves
in terms of the ethics, the morals, the ideals,
that Paul more than any other writer
has bequeathed to us today.
That we're all one.
That the weak can confound the mighty.
That all you need is love.
(dramatic music)
- The Lord destroyed with a word that proceeds
out of his mouth.
- [Narrator] In the next program,
Robert Beckford goes in search of the "Book of Revelation".
- The Book of Revelation speaks to everybody.
It just doesn't say the same message to everybody.
It doesn't always say the message that you want to hear.
(end theme music)