The Questor

Reflections on St Paul..…

….. The Man

When you think of a Jewish Pharisee, what picture comes to mind? For many people it’s a grumpy authoritarian person that you wouldn’t choose for a companion for a fun evening. Well Paul was a Pharisee by upbringing and training – so was he like that?

He was certainly very serious and uncompromising in matters of faith. His training as a Pharisee had given him great knowledge of the Old Testament – the holy book of the Jews. He was steeped in it and it was his foundation; but, while his Jewish faith remained his bedrock, his interpretation of those scriptures was influenced by his encounters with Jesus.

He was certainly tough and very resilient; how else could he have undertaken all those difficult and dangerous journeys. As we have noted before, in his second letter to the church at Corinth, he says:

Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned (and left for dead), three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea…..

He was also not afraid to take tough decisions either, which at times brought him into conflict with other leading figures in the fledgling church such as Peter and Barnabas. And he was an uncompromising disciplinarian when it came to dealing with the churches he had founded. Time and again in his letters to them he takes them to task on account of their lapses in faith, problems with relationships and issues of morality.

So far then, we have a picture of a tough, uncompromising disciplinarian. But that’s not the whole picture. There’s another side of Paul that we can discern from what Luke wrote in the Acts of the Apostles and from the letters that Paul wrote to the churches.

Paul always supported himself, and sometimes his fellow travellers, by working as a tent maker. So we can imagine him working away in the market place with other tentmakers and tradesmen, like Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth, enjoying and participating in the general banter. Indeed he used that situation to talk to people about the Message of Jesus and it’s inconceivable that the other tradesmen would warm to a grumpy, fanatical sort of guy.

The people in the churches clearly loved and revered him deeply. His parting encounter with the church elders from Ephesus on the dockside at Miletus is very moving. Following his parting words: …he knelt down with all of them and prayed. They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again….

And as he continued his journey to Jerusalem from there, he called at other churches and in every case they beseeched him not to go there because of the imminent danger. Such accounts speak volumes about the depth of love in those relationships. Indeed, his capacity to love is laid out for all to see in his letters. In particular, he expresses his feelings about love in his