Desire of the Everlasting Hills by Thomas Cahill
Sometimes we blind ourselves to the consequences of our own thinking because we cannot face those consequences. If, in addition to the wars they were already waging, Christians had followed their ideas to their logical conclusions and taken up cultural crusades against patriarchy and slavery, they would never have survived and we would never have heard of Christianity. If the passage above was Paul’s way of exhorting his converts not to rock society’s boat any more than they had to, it is also possible to read into the standard formulas that he trots out here a hint that his heart was not in his instruction. Josephus, the Roman-Jewish historian and general who was Paul’s younger contemporary, defends Jewish family life against Roman suspicions by insisting that Jews are even more patriarchal than Romans: “The woman, says the [Mosaic] Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed, for the authority has been given by God to the man.” Such apologias for Jewish mores, not infrequent in this period, imply Jewish defensiveness in the face of repeated Roman criticism; and against the unqualified enthusiasm of Jewish figures like Josephus and Philo, Paul’s “approbation” of this code, balanced by instructions (missing from other contemporary articulations) on the corresponding obligations of the paterfamilias, looks downright tepid.
We can, moreover, still identify, in the subterranean depths of Paul’s thought, repeated affirmations of his deepest convictions about freedom and equality. His famous dictum “It is better to marry than to burn” (so often misinterpreted as a reference to hellfire rather than to the unfulfilled sexual heat that Paul has in mind) is followed in First Corinthians by a long disquisition on the pluses and minuses of marriage and celibacy. It is an evenhanded presentation, divided into considerations of equal length for men and women, but at the tail end of the passage, Paul gives women an extra paragraph:
A wife is tied down as long as her husband lives. But if her husband dies, she is free—to marry whomever, if she likes.… But she’d be happier to stay single, at least to my way of thinking (and I suspect the Spirit of God would agree).
Paul does not give patriarchal marriage and family life his unalloyed seal of approval. He is aware of its costs to a woman’s spiritual freedom. There is no suggestion here of a woman’s “inferiority,” just that she’s spiritually stuck with the dilemma of society’s binding norms, unless she opts out of the marriage game altogether.
In like manner, Paul gives incidental evidence of his underlying repugnance toward slavery in his briefest letter of all: to Philemon, asking this Colossian paterfamilias to accept back his runaway slave, Onesimus, who had also stolen from him. When Paul writes, squeezing everything he has to say onto a single piece of papyrus, he is in prison, probably at Ephesus. This private letter (the only one of Paul’s that we possess), intended for one family rather than for a regional church, is a masterpiece of person-to-person persuasiveness and a shining example of how the brothers and sisters dealt with one another in sticky situations:
Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, send greetings to our dear friend and fellow worker Philemon, to Apphia our sister [Philemon’s wife], to Archippus our fellow soldier [probably their son], and to the church that meets in your home:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I always thank my God when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and faith, which you hold in the Lord Jesus toward even all the saints.2 I pray that the koinonia of your faith may enable you to understand every goodness that we have in Christ. I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because through you the hearts of the saints have been refreshed, brother.
For this reason, though I am confident enough in Christ to remind you of your duty, yet would I rather appeal to your love. So it is that I, Paul—an old man and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus—I appeal to you for my child whom I begat in chains: Onesimus. In the past he was of no use to you, but now he can be of use to us both. [The Greek adjective onesimos means “useful.”] Now in sending him back to you, I send my own heart. I wanted to keep him with me, for he could have stood in for you, helping me while I am in chains for the Gospel’s sake. But I was determined to do nothing without your consent, for I put my hope not in forcing the issue but in your spontaneous kindness. Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a while was so that you could have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. So if you grant me any koinonia [with yourself], welcome him as you would me. If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge it to me. I am writing this in my own hand: I, Paul, will repay you (not to mention that you owe me your very self).
Well, brother, I am counting on you in the Lord; refresh my heart in Christ. I am writing with complete confidence that you will comply, knowing that you will do even more than I ask.
One last thing: will you prepare a place for me to stay? I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you.
Epaphras, a prisoner with me in Christ Jesus, sends you his greetings, as do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers.
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.
“And also with you,” would have been all Philemon could have whispered on finishing this. The Letter to Philemon reveals Paul’s perceptiveness, even craftiness, in dealing with other human beings. Paul can win this one neither by fiat nor by a dazzling display of theological wit. Philemon is free to execute Onesimus for his flight or merely chop off his right hand for his theft. He is free, as he always has been, to do with him anything he likes. Slaves had no rights, and slave owners no legal restraints. So runaway slaves did not return willingly to their masters; and we may well imagine that Paul’s more arduous challenge was not writing this letter but persuading Onesimus, whom he had met in prison, that he should return to his owner rather than attempt the anxiety-ridden existence of a permanent fugitive. Having convinced Onesimus that he can turn the tide on his behalf, he takes up the invidious task of instructing the slave master in his Christian duty, while seeming not to do so.
It would be going well beyond the evidence to assume that Philemon was a villain. He may have been abstracted, aloof, and classist; after all, it is Paul who has “begotten” Onesimus in the faith that Philemon holds but had (apparently) never bothered to communicate to his slaves. He was undoubtedly a sincere man, or Paul could never have hoped to make headway with him on a decision that would only hold him up to scorn among his peers. But he was a Roman paterfamilias, master of life and death within the domain of his household, possessor of the largest male ego the world has ever known, whom no one but Caesar could gainsay. The normally forthright, aggressive, provocative, take-charge apostle has to pull in his horns and follow Jesus’s ambivalent exhortation to his followers to be “wise as serpents and gentle as doves”—and he does so without a false step, waiting till his seventh sentence even to slip in Onesimus’s name and never repeating it, never indeed offering Philemon any irritation more than necessary.
Scripture scholars have often questioned why this short letter about one individual, a letter supposedly lacking in general interest, was preserved when other letters of Paul were lost. To me, this magisterial entreaty says more about the people of the Way than do the exploding numbers of believers and the dazzling miracles of Acts. Paul, with thoughtful caring, puts all his talents into a “miracle” on behalf of a single lost soul. Like Peter’s cure of the cripple, this is simply “an act of kindness”: “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I have I give you.” Philemon almost certainly freed Onesimus, sending him back to Ephesus to work with Paul—how could he not? But like all acts of kindness, this one seems to have yielded unexpected results. Onesimus is likely to have been in his late teens or early twenties at the time of Paul’s letter; and we know that at the beginning of the second cent
Ideas take a long time to ferment to dark fulfillment and rich bouquet. Abraham’s God wanted him to worship no other, but it took the Jews a thousand years more to begin to adhere to strict monotheism—and we’re still trying to get it right. Paul’s encouragement of Christian widows to remain free will blossom into the early monastic sisterhoods, then into the autonomous convents of the Middle Ages, ruled by great abbesses like Brigid of Kildare and Hildegard of Bingen. For the first time, the world will experience the phenomenon of women not ruled, sheltered, or protected by men: free women. Each of these developments will serve as a stage in the gradual blossoming of feminism. Paul’s insistence to Philemon that there are no slaves, only brothers, will prompt Patrick of Ireland in the fifth century to condemn as immoral all trade in human beings, then lead the Anabaptists in the late seventeenth century to the conviction that slavery is against God’s Word, then induce the Abolitionists of the nineteenth century to raise a universal agitation against the “peculiar institution,” and finally fire Martin Luther King in the twentieth century to demand that Americans erase the residual effects of slavery. And far beyond America’s borders, everyone who fights to dismantle systems of class and economic oppression, who seeks to establish human rights and universal brotherhood, is, like Onesimus, a child begotten by Paul.
Not one of these developments, evolving over the ages, can be said to have reached its ultimate expression. But just as we can pinpoint Abraham’s experience of the Voice as the beginning of monotheism—the sprouting seed—we can pinpoint the beginnings of feminism, abolitionism, and the movements for civil and human rights in the spiritual vision of Paul and his converts, who would no doubt be amazed at what we have made of insights that were for them so new, dynamic, and otherworldly.
Paul called his converts “the brothers and sisters loved by God,” and Peter, in a vision, came to the conclusion that “God has no favorites.” The Jesus Movement became a movement for the universalization of Judaism, making Jewish ideas and even the Jewish social context available and applicable to all humanity. We should not, however, see Jesus as the beginning of this development, any more than we see Moses, rather than Abraham, as the beginning of monotheism. Jesus, like Moses, took advantage of a living tradition that was astoundingly rich in possibilities. Long before Jesus, the classical prophets had already looked forward to the outpouring of God’s “Spirit on all humanity,” an incredible outpouring from which no one—not even the “women” and “slaves” of Peter’s quotation from Joel—would be excluded. And we cannot be surprised that women and slaves, far more than any other categories of society, swelled the ranks of a movement that assured them that, however insignificant their places in society, in the eyes of God and his Assembly they were the equals of anyone.
FOR ALL THIS, the first Christians were not ivory-tower intellectuals but ordinary people confronted, as we all are, with the practical problems of daily life. A relatively small band to begin with, they knew one another and could rely on person-to-person interaction rather than edicts and memorandums. If they hadn’t all known Jesus in life, they knew many who had—and this situation prevailed nearly to century’s end, as the Jesus Movement grew into a Eurasian network of local churches, many with a resident elder or two who remembered his or her encounters with Jesus. We get a glimpse of how close-knit the leadership was when, at the close of Paul’s Letter to Philemon, he sends greetings from Mark and Luke, who are with him at Ephesus. There is not much doubt that these are two of our evangelists, who, together with the author of the letter himself, may be responsible for nearly sixty percent of the pages of the New Testament.
Having, at least to begin with, “neither silver nor gold,” the people of the Way relied on one another’s hospitality. Peter is described in Acts as staying at Jaffa with Simon the Tanner in his house by the sea and “visiting one place after another,” a project that presumes the hospitality of many. Lydia, an independent woman “in the purple-dye trade,” insisted that Paul, who was chary of accepting favors, stay with her at Philippi and would “not take No for an answer.” We have already seen the names of two who opened their homes to “house-churches,” the regular assemblies of the people of the Way: the Ephesian woman Chloe of First Corinthians and Philemon (and his family) at Colossae. Nympha ran another house-church at Laodicea, not far from Colossae. Besides these, Acts mentions Mary, Mark’s mother and aunt to Barnabas, another of Paul’s many missionary companions. She was a middle-class woman who ran a Jerusalem house-church and kept an addled servant named Rhoda, who was so surprised to see Peter at the peephole one day (he was supposed to be in prison but had escaped) that she neglected to open the door to him and left him standing in the street while she ran inside to give everybody the news. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul at Corinth sends greetings from “Gaius, my host and the host of all the church … and from Erastus, the city treasurer,” who, like Magdalene and other women disciples of Jesus’s day, must have helped bankroll operations.
Many, but scarcely all, of these hosts would have been people of means. On no one did Paul rely more than on the redoubtable Prisca and her husband Aquila, who like him were in the tent-making, pavilion-stitching trade. When Paul met them they were Jewish refugees from Rome, expelled in the early 40s by an edict of the emperor Claudius. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the emperor had tired of Jews because of their “constant rioting at the instigation of Chrestus”; and behind Suetonius’s careless reference, we can discern that the probable cause of Claudius’s displeasure was the public conflict between establishment Jews and Messi-anists, which had already spilled into the diaspora. Paul first ran into Prisca and Aquila at Corinth, a magnet for all tentmakers because of the Isthmian games, second in importance only to the Olympic games and celebrated in a great swath of hucksters’ booths and tourist tents encircling the sanctuary of Poseidon just outside the city.
But if it was business that brought Paul together with Prisca and Aquila, it was their common faith that kept them united. Though we don’t know who evangelized them, these two were already part of the Jesus Movement when they encountered the apostle. They gave Paul shelter in their little house and allowed him to work with them and have a share of their business. Though they opened their house to a “church,” this cannot refer to a meeting of more than ten or twelve. The houses of tradespeople like Prisca and Aquila were woefully small affairs, usually of two rooms, the ground floor open for trade and the upper room reserved for living, the whole space measuring not more than fourteen feet wide by twenty-four deep, sometimes much less. Each story provided little more than enough height to stand upright.
When the church at Corinth grew beyond such confines, it had to move to Titus Justus’s larger house (beside the synagogue), which probably boasted the cool inner court and frescoed dining room of the upscale urbanite. When Paul explained to Prisca and Aquila, however, that he needed their continuing help, the couple shut up shop at Corinth and went on to Ephesus to open a house-church there. For tradespeople like Prisca and Aquila, starting over for a second time cannot have been easy. But their trade, unlike most, did allow for such a possibility—and there was no part of the Near East that attracted more tourists than Ephesus of the Great Mother. Paul almost always mentions Prisca first, most unusual in a civilization where women, whether in the forum or in literature, invariably walk a step behind their husbands. It was Prisca who was the essential friend, probably more practical, almost certainly more devoted, than Aquila, however dear he may have been. We next spot the two tentmakers in Rome, after Claudius’s death in 54, establishing yet a third house-church and continuing to give Paul their unfailing support, for, as he tells the Romans, “they risked their own necks to save my life.” We glimpse these permanent pilgrims for the last time back at Ephesus, greeted by Paul in Second Timothy not long before his execution.
The pages of Ac