THE BOOK OF LOST BOOKS - ST. PAUL (SAUL OF TARSUS)

(First Decade– c. 65 C.E.)

Around 200 C.E., an unknown Christian bound together a codex containing ten epistles by St. Paul (known to us as p46, the “Chester-Beatty Papyrus,” the earliest extant manuscript of Paul’s work). It includes Romans, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Did the compiler pause as he or she inscribed the text of 2 Thessalonians 2:2, where the saint warns the church at Thessalonica to be troubled “neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us”? Since Paul himself had been vexed by forged letters purporting to be his, the scribe’s task took on the onerous responsibility of regulating divine revelation. Unfortunately, 2 Thessalonians is not by Paul.

Saul, born in Tarsus, the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, was a Jewish Roman citizen. He was educated by the Pharisee Gamaliel and came from a family of tent-makers (though given the importance of canvas shelters to the Roman army, “military procurement” might be a more apt description of his profession). He tells us in the Epistle to the Galatians that he was “exceedingly zealous” in his faith, to the extent that he persecuted the apocalyptic sect founded by a Nazarene called Jesus, which his followers called “the Way.” When Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned to death by a mob, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of Saul. According to the Acts of the Apostles, this Saul “made havock of the church.”

The convert Marcion, whose heretical beliefs were subdued in the middle of the second century, knew of Paul’s letters, but did not include in his canon the Second Epistle to Timothy. An alert reader, Marcion believed only Luke’s Gospel was necessary for salvation (though even that benefited from some judicious pruning), and he must have been struck by the contradiction between the letter supposedly by Paul and the accounts of Paul’s travels in Acts, Luke’s continuation of the history of the earliest church. In 2 Timothy, the author impersonating Paul says that he has left Trophimus sick at Miletus: nonetheless, a perfectly healthy Trophimus is with Paul in Jerusalem after the saint’s departure from Miletus in Acts of the Apostles. Was it this inconsistency that suggested to Marcion that the letter was not, in fact, by Paul? Or was it the overly vehement assertion that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God”?

On his way to Damascus to continue the extirpation of the Jesus cult, Saul was confronted with the object of his hatred. In a blinding vision, the risen Christ asked, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Saul’s sight was restored by a follower of the Way in Damascus, and the erstwhile intimidator performed the most famous volte-face in the history of religion. Saul’s name did not immediately change; it was only when he struck the sorcerer Elymas blind through the power of the Holy Spirit that we learn he was now also called Paul.

Paul’s mission was not to convert the orthodox Israelites whose rejection of Christ he had so recently enforced, but to proselytize among the Gentiles. His evangelical itinerary took him to Antioch, Athens, Ephesus (where he burned “books of curious arts” worth fifty thousand pieces of silver), and eventually Rome. He was mistaken for the god Mercury in Lystra, and was told by the Roman governor Festus at Caesarea that “too much learning doth make thee mad.” He was whipped thirty-nine times on five occasions, beaten thrice with rods, stoned once, and shipwrecked three times. Although the Book of Acts informs the reader of numerous miracles, including even the raising of the dead, his own Epistles are remarkably coy about supernatural powers, preferring instead a catalogue of his physical sufferings.

In 367, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, decreed that the New Testament had twenty-seven books. Paul, of course, had not been writing a testament, and would have been surprised that his letters dealing with specific crises in various churches now had universal relevance (though he would have been equally surprised that the world still existed). Although Athanasius commanded, “Let no one add, let nothing be taken away,” the newly crystallized “Bible” still retained the traces of its less than monolithic conception. In 1 Corinthians 5:9, Saint Paul had said, “I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.” The “0 Corinthians” letter is lost, presumably because its antilibertine agenda was adequately dealt with elsewhere (or, an admittedly remote possibility, because it was rather too specific about the sexual proclivities of the Corinthians; the demotic expression “to corinthicate”—κορινθιαζεσθαι—meant to whore around).

Paul hoped to preach the gospel as far as Spain. Conflicts and tensions between converted and traditional Jews, however, meant that he was forced to return to Jerusalem and defend himself against a charge of sedition. A conspiracy of forty men loyal to the Sanhedrin had sworn an oath not to eat before they had murdered Paul, and it was therefore in Paul’s own interests to allow the Roman overlords to decide his case, rather than the Jewish Temple authorities; moreover, being a Roman citizen, Paul had the right to appeal to the emperor himself. Unluckily, in this case the emperor was Nero.

Agrippa, the client-king, and Festus, the Roman overlord of Judaea, agreed to Paul’s request, ruefully noting that if he had not invoked this right, they were minded to set him free anyway. Paul was transferred to Rome, and while the boat was buffeted by tempests and stymied in doldrums, he impressed the crew by prophesying that none of them would come to harm, for it was decreed that he would stand before Caesar. They safely reached Rome, and, practically at that point, the Acts of the Apostles unexpectedly ends. The whole narrative has been moving toward this encounter, yet the final climactic showdown between Nero and Paul is either lost or was never even written.

We do not know how Paul died. One tradition asserts that he did reach Spain, but, given the emperor’s notorious sadism and insanity (he used Christians dipped in pitch to light the streets), it would be nothing short of miraculous for Paul to have persuaded Nero to let him go free. But miracles had been known to happen, if we trust the author of Acts.

Paul disappears from the narrative like Enoch or Isaiah ascending into Heaven. One ingenious speculation reads the text of Acts of the Apostles as a kind of legal briefing for the lawyer who would defend Paul: it insists, for example, that he has always been deferential to political authorities. The ending was not written because it had not yet happened. This hypothesis cannot, however, explain why no later writer appended the details of what transpired, the arguments for faith put forward by Paul or the emperor’s retort. There is no ancient account of the death of St. Paul.

The very fact that Paul’s name was later used to bolster missives by other authors attests to his phenomenal standing among his peers. Never having met the physical Jesus, never even using the word “Christian,” Paul invents Christianity. If the whole of philosophy is merely footnotes to Plato, then the entirety of Christian theology is an attempt to unravel the insights of Paul.

By Stuart Kelly in "The Book of Lost Books", Random House, New York, 2005. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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