Paul the Traveller: The Life of Paul the Apostle by Ernle Bradford

Author:Ernle Bradford [Bradford, Ernle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2019-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One – ‘Through Many Troubles...’

How long Paul and Barnabas stayed in Pisidian Antioch is never indicated. It must certainly have been a matter of months, not weeks, and it is quite clear that Paul was ill for some time while he was in the city. There can be no doubt of their success in promoting this new belief in a risen saviour, destined for all mankind. Paul aptly quoted the words of Isaiah: ‘I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles, to be the way of salvation for the whole of the world.’ Such sentiments were naturally attractive to all the non-Jewish people who came to listen to him, but to the orthodox they must have been more than irritating. The trouble was — and it always was — that Paul’s excellent training under Gamaliel, coupled with his acute intellect, meant that he could meet the Jews on their own ground, outquote them and demolish their arguments at source. Irascible and prone to argument, the Jews were hardly likely to enjoy this experience.

The basic attraction of Paul’s message was that all people were acceptable. The saviour had died in the most ignominious way as a condemned criminal in the company of two proven criminals, leaving the promise that all human failures — and everyone was a failure — were redeemable by this scapegoat of God. It was an astounding statement, and it remains so to this day. No one, without skipping the hurdle of disbelief, can quite cross into that special ground where fact, reality, and on the surface of it unreality, become one. Paul could do this. He could also convince thousands of hearers during his years of travel and endurance that there truly was another life — one beyond the whips of slave-dealers, the extortion of money-lenders, the avaricious and sensual desires of the human animal and the petty life of man on this planet. Whatever he was. whatever his physical condition was, he was a genius of a unique degree.

The news that Paul and Barnabas between them brought to Antioch was not confined to the city itself but ‘spread everywhere in that region’. Antioch was not only the military, but the administrative centre for the whole of the region called Phrygia, the western area of the province of Galatia. How much Paul may have known of the city’s importance in this respect before making it his target is open to conjecture, but undoubtedly he will have heard about the city in his previous travels, and have come to the conclusion that it would be an excellent centre for disseminating the faith. It is clear that his optimism was justified. Almost inevitably, however, the orthodox Jews were not going to tolerate for long what they now saw quite clearly was the dissemination of a heretical branch of Judaism, and one which contravened the Law in accepting into its worship uncircumcized Gentiles and former pagans. The Roman administration, for its part, was unlikely to be concerned about theological disputes among the Jews.

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