NT Wright & Tom Holland • How St Paul changed the world (Full Show)

well today on unbelievable we're asking how did simple change the world ante right or Tom right disease popularly known is one of the world's most influential Bible scholars and his new book Paul a biography is a detailed study of the Apostle who brought Christianity from Jerusalem to the rest of the world some Paul's influence is almost incalculable perhaps second only in the world to Jesus Christ himself as he took the good news of a Jewish Messiah to the Roman Empire that ruled the world rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has described Tom Wright's book as an enthralling journey into the mind of Paul by one of the great theologians of our time a work full of insight depth and generosity of understanding so it's pretty good when you can get endorsements like that on your book jacket opposite Tom Wright for today's discussion is another Tom Tom Holland popular historian whose best-selling books such as Rubicon and dynasty have told a story of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire while not a believer himself Tom Holland is also working on a new book on the way that Christianity became the most revolutionary force for changing the world and it'll be interesting to hear how you've been getting on in that endeavor Tom today though it's really an exchange a collegial discussion between two people who are simply fascinated in this era of history what can we know from acts and the letters in the New Testament about Paul what are the gaps that we need to fill in about who he was and how he went about his mission and we'll talk of course about his famous conversion and the unique way his theology developed as he brought Jewish monotheism and Jesus the Messiah together so were Tom Holland and Tom Wright were can belong to the show thank you very much thank you it's great to have you both joining me today we'll come to you first of all Tom Wright I'm probably gonna have to use certain distinguished you both today but um so you've been writing and researching Paul for decades now haven't you yes I mean the last well a couple of years ago I had you on when you wrote your magnum opus which was actually amazing that's five years maybe that came out yes extraordinary of the two volumes sort of very a call and faithfulness regard here's and and is this really I suppose in a sense the popular level version of what you will sort of yes and no when I did that big book several people both including colleagues in the Lynne said wish you'd do a shorter one of course part of the point of the longer one was that I've been writing shorter things and articles and people had always said yeah but you didn't explain this or yes but surely that has to be contextualized there okay you want the big thing here it is and then of course they all said oh it's far too long so it's as Jesus said you know we danced for you and you wouldn't even sing and we wept and you wouldn't want em but if this isn't exactly a potted down version because that was that was a book on Paul's mind and theology now there's a lot of mind and theology in here but part of the whole point of it is that what Paul was thinking and saying was contextualized in a rich multi-layered life which was to do with both his Jewish upbringing and his amazing knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures and with his contextualizing in the Roman world where he was a citizen and in the Greek world where he knew his Epicureans from his Stoics and we see Paul navigating these things in a multi-layered way which I find just and perpetually enthralling because I grew up with a Paul who was basically a brainbox who said prayers as it were and and then the rest of it was off on the side and the older I've got the more the whole man speaks to this whole man and that's been really exciting you probably feel like you know his era almost as well as you know your own that well let's put it like this my students mock me because when I say the war I mean the jewish-roman war of 60 60 70 not World War one or two and they say well yeah I sort of mentally live in the first thing though I've tried to diversify men recently and get back towards our day as well and just kind of give us a sense of how your you structure this particular poll a biography and in that sense you are trying to write something that's sort of a narrative oh yes it's very it's not a sort of academic book in the traditional sense no no it's not at all I mean the only footnote so basically references to bits of the Bible or bits of classical sources and so on so there's there's no discussion of other scholarly views or if I do say there are various views here I don't actually go into details who said it you can find those elsewhere so this is going through from what we know about or can infer about his early life and how got to the point where he was on the road to Damascus when dot and then what happened next and as with virtually all ancient history there are gaps and that's quite normal but when you have gaps in any narrative ancient or modern what you can do is probe cautiously from either side as it were the bits you do know and say well it's possible this it's likely that or it's almost certain that such and such and that's what I tried to do to construct something a little given to us 2,000 years later that he was obviously a prolific letter writer well he comparatively prolific but actually the letters are short you know how many volumes do we have of Cicero's letters in the lower plastic I mean just they go on and are they don't exactly exaggerate the ball exactly then they they do go on and they're fascinating and they shared a flood of light and all sorts of things in in first century BC Roman culture but for Paul we've just got these snippets because he's writing on the go he's not leisured sitting there with a day to compose he's really he's really sending bulletins from the front as it were and so most of his time he isn't writing letters so far as we know he's talking with people he's preaching he's praying he's all trying to organize these little communities and then from time to time he has to buzz off a letter to somebody and and you're always obviously hearing one side of the conversation and you sort of have to fill in gaps and you have to I suppose as a historian Tom what you're doing as well as saying well here's what we know was going on a wider culture and that makes sense of why Paul said this and did this and particularly I mean I am very fortunate in that I kind of came of age as a scholar just when the contemporary revolution in modern Jewish Studies was happening so that we've got the Dead Sea Scrolls in good modern editions we've got new good editions of Josephus we know much much more about the early rabbis than we did 50 years ago because of massive work that's gone on so we can reconstruct quite a lot about how Jews in that period were thinking and of course that's controversial too but we can see a big picture within which then the way Paul is going after things make sense if you say take somebody in that world who is also very much alive to the Greek and Roman context but who then happens to believe that God has fulfilled his promises by sending a messiah who was then crucified yeah that's bizarre but the sense Paul makes of it is the sense that it would make within that Jewish world and just before we come to Tom Holland here that was going to be my next question was will people reading this book simply know a lot more about Paul by the end of it or will it give us a better picture of Jesus the person he was obviously speaking of I'm not sure it would necessarily give you a better picture of Jesus but but it would give you a better picture of how the very first followers of Jesus were wrestling with the question what does it mean that God's Messiah was crucified and raised from the dead you know that's not part of the game plan but if that's what we've got how does that reconfigure everything obviously I and many others have written quite a lot about Jesus as well that's another story but it's so it's probing back and and I mean that for me I just go on being fascinated by the fact that within I would say 20 or so years of the crucifixion here is a highly intelligent man saying he loved me and gave himself for me you know that that is extraordinary it's hard to imagine anybody saying that about anybody else in the last 20 years unless all sorts of other things were true as well and yet Paul says it Tom Holland thank you for joining us on the program today we've thrown you in at the deep end you really thank you for putting yourself in the you know the opposite chair as I say this isn't sometimes this program is combative I have a feeling that won't be the case today it'll very much be a a meeting of minds but tell us where your interest in the the whole Classical Age really began you've sort of been doing this all of your adult working life haven't you well it goes right the way back to childhood and I was the kind of child who loved that dinosaurs and I liked them because they were big and they were fierce and they were glamorous and they were extinct and my interest didn't really and I space in the Roman army and then by extension the Roman is a kind of it was it was a seamless movement from you know Tyrannosaurus Rex to to Caesar and and and so that the kind of the glamour and the beauty and the power and the cruelty of the Greeks and the I found very appealing and in contrast to that although I went to Sunday school and I was very very interested in in biblical history as well I found them all a bit po-faced kind of I didn't like their beards I preferred kind of the clean-shaven look of Apollo and and and so in a way I was kind of seduced by the glamour yeah off of Greece and Rome I suppose and so the first books I wrote about of history were about Greece and Rome and in many ways you know the appeal particularly I think of of Rome is that in certain ways they do seem very like as you were talking about Cicero's letters and this is a man who you know is worrying about property prices he's worrying about the weather he's bitching apparently yes in all kinds of ways he seems very familiar but the more you live in the minds of the Romans and I think even more the Greeks the more alien they come to seem the more frightening they come to seem and what becomes most frightening really is a kind of quality of callousness that I think is is terrifying because it is completely taken for granted there's a kind of innocent quality about it nobody really questions it and what sort a norm would did that take well if we you know within the age of Cicero you know Cicero's great contemporary Caesar is by some accounts slaughtering a million ghouls and enslaving another million in the cause of of boosting his political career and far from feeling in any way embarrassed about this he's kind of promoting it and say when he holds his triumph people are going through the streets of Rome carrying billboards boasting about how many people he's killed and this is this is a really terrifyingly alien world and the more you look at it the more you realize that it is built on systematic exploitation mmm-hmm so the entire economy is founded on slave labor right the the sexual economy is founded on the absolute right of free Roman males to have sex with anyone that they want any way that they like and in almost every way this is a world that is unspeakably cruel to our way of thing and so this worried me more and more and it was kind of like I was thinking well you know what I'm clearly not as I had vaguely imagined the air of the Greeks and the Romans in any way really and and so where am i coming from and it was like a kind of itch you know you go your back and you can't find it and this was then enhance for me by then writing a book about the about late antiquity and the emergence of Islam from the the late religious conflict that caught the religious and imperial context of late antiquity and again finding in Islam a profound quality of the alien that you know there were aspects of Islam that were very familiar but there were many aspects of it that again seemed deeply deeply alien and I began to realize that actually in in almost every way I am Christian and I began to realize that actually Paul although in in in many ways he seems a much less familiar figure than Cicero in the kind of you know urbane man with his property problems I know Paul never had any property it made late ends yeah that in almost every what is it seven that is the seven letters that are conventionally people absolutely exhale that you know and as Tom Wright was saying you know this is not a very lengthy amount of writing but compacted into this very very small amount of writing was almost everything that explains the modern world well the Western world as we take for granted yeah but also the way that the West has then moved on to shape you know concepts like international law for instance so the fact the baton had concepts of human rights all these kind of things ultimately they don't go back to Greek philosophers they don't go back to Roman empiricism they they go back to Pauls and the human is really this his letters his letters I think are along with the the four Gospels the most influential the most impactful the most revolutionary writings that have emerged from you when when you penned that that that article I think it was for the States New Statesman where you said what I got wrong and and you sort of came out as it were and said as far as my values and you know background of concern I am a Christian yeah and it was interesting to see the response to that because I saw lots of atheists and humanists saying oh hang on you know we democracy that goes back to the Greeks you know yes and don't pretend the Christianity gave us everything we're grateful for but you honestly think that actually people simply haven't appreciated just how much we owe to well I think I think um I mean if we're talking of poor I think of him as a kind of depth charge deep beneath the foundations of the classical world and you know it's it's not anything that you particularly notice if you're you know in Corinth or Alexandria and then you start feeling this kind of rippling outwards and you know by the time you get to the 11th century in in in Latin Christendom everything has changed and you have this guy I think essentially what's Paul significance is is that he sets up ripple effects of revolution throughout Western history so the 11th century where with the paper revolution essentially it establishes this idea that society has to be reborn reconfigured and that vested interests have to be torn down and then the Reformation what we call the Reformation is a further ripple effect of that and the Enlightenment is a further ripple effect of that and you know it spilled out so much that now in the 21st century we don't even realize where these ripple effects are coming from we just take them for granted i I can hate Tom right you want to come in and well I'm just thinking I haven't actually read from cover to cover but Steven Pinker's two books where he's saying effect you like had him on the show my recent oh really okay he's saying you know forget all that religion stuff we invented the real world as it should be in the Enlightenment and all we have to do is apply that more and more rigorously and and just kick that religion stuff into touch and it's it's very interesting that some commentators have said well if that was going to be the case it would work in America better than anywhere else and look at America and what's actually happening and you'll see it it doesn't but I think I want to respond with what Pope Benedict said ten years ago when he was speaking at United when he said that the whole idea of human rights is absolutely rooted in the judeo-christian tradition and if you try and get the fruits of that without the roots all you'll get is the thing will collapse into shrill special-interest rhetoric everyone claiming the status of victim analogy when I had these exact stinkles but the power of victimhood yeah yeah is again something that is part of the Revolutionary inheritance of Christianity because because that is the point of the crucifixion nobody in Cesar's world would have said oh I'm a victim therefore therefore I owe you I've got to be prioritised Steven Pinker in the very day or so chicken right now Tom right his response to this argument which at this point was being put by Nick Spencer who's written a very good book as well on the evolution of the West making this very argument his argument was no but you know ok Christians may have given us some good principles but what we all we need to recognize is our universal humanity that we're part of the same species were all sent in that gives us every grounding we need for treating each other with dignity and human right and who thought like that in the first century I mean Paul talking about Adam and Christ basically so are you saying that that kind of a belief Kant doesn't simply emerge from a vacuum inside yeah the idea of universal humanists is something that actually even in the 18th century they struggled with you know when when missionaries went to America and came back arguing about whether the American Indians had souls or not you know were they really the same species is us and and then John Wesley and George Whitfield and so on saying no these people have to be taught to love God like any of us and so that there's there's stuff going on there which is again rooted in and you're part of the pushback on this in a way idea I mean it seems to me that the most influent single most influential phrase for understanding why we have a notion of a kind of common humanity is in Galatians where Paul says you know that there is no they neither Jew nor Greek neither neither slave nor free neither male nor female and it's there you have this idea that that we are of course he goes on to say in Christ Jesus and that for you know the contemporary world is we just but that's more to do that but of course there is an issue there as Daniel Boyer in in a faceted Jewish scholar writing about Paul says yeah okay so so Jewishness and Greek nurse gets dissolved into this universal humanity but what if I as a Jew want to stay at you and and and so in a sense they're also you have the kind of you know the issues that that continue to obsess our society which is essentially you know if you don't want to be part of a kind of universal commonality what then do you do the dangerous thing I was at a conference in America a couple of years ago two three years ago based on the big book on Paul and there was an african-american theologian a woman at full of seminary who basically pushed back at me on this and said the danger is that when you say we're all one in Christ Jesus what that means is that everyone else is an honorary white male right and the white males have got it and that everyone else has to say okay we're sort of part of your team as it were and I said if that's what you're hearing that's certainly absolutely not what I was intending and certainly not what Paul was intending either and I know Danny Boy are in and we've had this we've had this debate it's great fun because I think what we're seeing there is very interesting cultural moment on the cusp of modernity and postmodernity and David Horrell in Exeter his book on Paul solidarity and difference says it all that on the one hand we've got this cultural drive towards we're all part of this what's going on with the European debate at the moment solidarity we're all just part of this nice big family and that's how it all works in economy of scale and so on and then lots of people including in Scotland where I now live saying no that's squelching our identity and we're not going to let you do and the interesting thing is that Paul in say first corinthians is faced with the same issues how do you navigate past surely and theologically where you're simultaneously saying we've all got to be one family and then you're saying but if your conscience means that this is where you are at the moment here's how we live with that and how we have to respect that and he's he's basically wrestling with the big issues that we're wrestling with as well doing so very sophisticated ly let's come to some of his specific story because you do a fabulous job in the opening chapters of the book in setting the scene of who Paul was what we can know about his background the sort of Judaism that he came from and for me one of the fascinating bits was was was you of speculating on what he might have been thinking about when he was on that famous road to Damascus because I thought that was quite interesting you know what what was occupying Paul's mind at the moment when that famous event occurred so do you want to just walk us through that because I think this is probably the most famous conversional in all of history in a way yes if if conversion is the right word and let you say well but right right off the top the danger with saying conversion is that what that word means in our world if I say so and so just got converted the chances are this means that so and so it was probably an atheist or an agnostic and they have now found some sort of faith and one would hope it might be for me my new Christian faith um that's not really at all what's going on for Paul and it's certainly not about swapping from one religion to another that that's the the layers of misunderstanding there in terms of what the word religion meant in the ancient world in terms of what the word religion means in our world neither of those fit what's happening to Paul Paul always had believed in the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob the Creator God he never for a moment stopped believing in that God he was living in a narrative which said all those ancient promises have got to come true God's got a show that he's in the right that he meant what he said and that he's going to renew the whole world quite possibly not all Jews believe this through a messiah who will come and do justice and re-establish the Temple in Jerusalem so that God will come back and live there gloriously etc so Paul is living with that narrative and in particular within that and you see this in the later rabbis but it's clearly there in Maccabees as well there are two figures from the ancient world the ancient Jewish world who Paul is identifying with Elijah and Phineas they are the great messengers of zeal if you like bad things are happening we've got to do some sacred violence to stamp out the nonsense and get his role back on track and porous is role-modeling phineas and Elijah and the texts which embody their stories are clearly present he was very much part of this movement wanting to keep the law better yeah so that we hasten on this and let's be quite clear this is not as used to be said in Protestant rhetoric about earning my ticket to heaven or doing enough good works so that God will be pleased with me it's it's God wants to and restore this world and for the sake of that he's called Israel to be as special people as holy people and so it's for the sake of God's purposes they have to do this and make more and more Jews do this stuff so yes this bunch you are letting the side down and going off after a crucified Messiah who ever heard such nonsense so Paul is off to do the Phineas thing the Elijah thing these are like the new prophets of Bale and we know we have to do with them and then if you're in that mode um how do you pray we know from everything Paul says he was he was a person suffused with prayer and there are standard Jewish prayers and it's a guess but I'm not the only one to make this guess that on the road to Damascus he was meditating like many people in his tradition did on the throne chariot in the beginning of the Book of Ezekiel where the Prophet sees the whirling wheels and then the chariot and then he his eye is raised up and he sees the figure sitting on the throne and he falls down crash as though dead and then the Prophet is commissioned etc I think Paul was meditating on the throne chariot longing to get a glimpse of the God he'd worshipped all his life and I think he gets to that glimpse and it's Jesus of Nazareth and simultaneously all his life is fulfilled and all his life is shattered and that is just the most devastating and the most fulfilling moment and in a sense he spends the rest of his life working out what that means and encouraging other people to explore with him what I wouldn't want to say forcing them to do and believe what because you can't force people to do and believe that kind of stuff but helping them to share the sense that Jesus really is Israel's Messiah lots of people have given different explanations for what happened to Paul the psychological some epileptic fit lady who knows where do you go as a historian Tom Holland with this obviously very significant event that I think you'd agree there's some historical basis to that the something happened on the road to Damascus what what do you think happened there in your view I think in the broadest context Paul is negotiating attention that is an inherent within the understanding of the God of Israel because he is on the one hand the God of Israel and on the other hand the creator of the entire world so how do you negotiate that tension and in the globalizing world off the Roman Empire in which many Jews live this becomes particularly pressing house you live in the wild yes yes so to what extent is God also the creator of you know of the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians and whoever I mean that this is a kind of somewhere in anywhere kind of question that you know we were talking about earlier still we still have today and I I would suspect that Paul is struggling to negotiate that as a Greek speaking Pharisee what persuades him to think the things that he does I think it's profoundly mysterious and I have no doubt that he did think that he had seen Jesus I mean now I can't think of any other reason that would explain why he does what he does and I mean it's mysterious in in in in two ways really one is that that he Chuck's over what presumably would have been a very comfortable career and to essentially embark on a life as a kind of wandering bum who he's going to face repeated beatings shrimper it ultimately face death and the other is why it would ever cross his mind that in some way a crucified criminal is a part of the One God of Israel and the strange thing about about all his letters is that although he's arguing repeatedly for his understanding of who Jesus is and and how he should be understood and how he should be comprehended I mean I may be corrected on this but I don't think at any point does he feel the need to actually argue that Jesus is in some way a part of God I mean this is just taken for granted and it used to be so and when you had Larry Hurtado on the show you mean resumed to discuss these kinds of things um used to be thought that Jesus only was regarded as fully divine much later like the end of the first generation or even early second century and only at the end of the New Testament period and I think now most New Testament scholars are convinced actually this is on the table from the beginning and it's certainly taken for granted in Galatians which I think and the strangeness of that is something that we perhaps are unkind of immune to because I mean it's in the Bible to you read it and but you think why why would he think that is it's a very strange thing for a but a devout Jew to have thought but I but I would guess I mean and I got I can't remember whether you whether you say this in your rug because I read it a couple roof but but having you know having had presumably this kind of convulsive experience presumably then he turns to scripture to try and work out what's HAP to try and practice actually he you know he reads through all the passages and and and and kind of constructs this theology I think one of the things we fail to realize often in modern Western Christianity never mind the secular world is the stories that people had in their heads about what God was going to do and particularly the end of the Book of Ezekiel hugely important and parallels in Isaiah particularly as are 40 and 50 to God's promised that he will one day come back visibly in person to dwell in the temple to rescue his people to do what has to be done etc etc and those promises are kind of shimmering in the background and some people in the Jewish world like the author of the book we call Ben Sira or ecclesiasticus seems to think that this sort of has happened because wisdom has come to dwell in the temple in the form of the teaching of tirana most Jews in Paul's day had only believed that they still thought there was something major yet to happen and it is as though with Paul and indeed with the Gospels it isn't just that they are telling Jesus stories and somehow saying by the way there's another dimension to this they are telling the story which was Israel's story about God coming back but the only way they can tell it is by talking about Jesus so it's not just a Jesus story with a God dimension it's actually the God story with the Jesus focus yeah and and it's hard for us to realize that because the last 200 years philosophically theologically we haven't been there so when I then look at how Paul is handling Isaiah how he's handling the the passages about the new Exodus with the pillar of cloud and far coming only now it's Jesus and the spirit you see he's drawing on Jewish traditions about the presence and saving power of God and then of course they all get focused not least on that middle chunk of Isaiah where you get the so called suffering servant and the suffering servant seems to be God saying actually when you look to see what it's like when I come back to rescue you oh my goodness it's gonna be like this and we see Jewish exegesis at the time struggling with Isaiah 53 some of them thinking it's a messiah but actually the suffering is what he inflicts on other people and other people thinking no it's his real suffering but it's the martyrs it's not the Messiah and Jesus and then Paul picking this up seemed to have fused these two together with this extraordinary notion of a suffering Messiah who turns out to be the personal embodiment of Israel's God and that that and then we see this already by early on in Paul woven into fresh praying's of Central Jewish prayers the famous one in 1st Corinthians 8 where as here o Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one in Greek Kyrios hothea same and Kyrios he says 10 and Paul astonishingly finds Jesus inside that so he says for us there is one God the Father from whom are all things we to him and one Lord Jesus the Messiah through whom are all things so you've got he's the Oscar he's curious but it's God and Jesus so at the heart of Jewish monotheism Paul finds this bifurcation and and in a sense that's a massive transformation but at the same time somehow for Paul it is a fulfillment of evil it's not it's a final revelation because he then obviously looks back and says oh my goodness we now read the scriptures with this in mind he is the image of the invisible God so when humans were made in God's image he is the image in whom we were made and so on and just how strange would this idea of a God who or a Messiah or whatever who becomes crucified be have been in the Roman world that this message was being delivered into beyond weird be totally beyond weird as Paul repeatedly says I mean he says that you know foolishness it's it's ridiculous and he's aware of this the whole time how embarrassing this is in a sense it is kind of I mean it and that is the whole point yeah that to suffer death on a cross is you know it's it's the worst death that the Roman state can inflict but it is also shaming in the context of the Mosaic law which also says that you need to be hung from a tree as a cause of and we often forget with our stylized depictions of the crucifixion just how gory and shameful yes was and and so what is happening is that the it's like a kind of it's the ultimate judo throw where you turn the strength of your opponent against him the Roman power is affirmed by brutality the the governor of a province has the right to burn to throw to beasts to crucify anyone who he feels is a danger to Roman power and governors did that absolutely at the drop of a hat so what is happening with Paul's proclamation of the one God in some way suffering this fate is to absolutely upend the very fabric and basis not just of Roman power but a powerful stop because of course the the Assumption through you know from reading that the Jewish Scriptures was that God is a warrior and that God will you know the overthrow of Roman power the the establishment of a kingdom of peace will in some way be effected by the sword and what Paul is saying is that actually the true source of power is is to suffer and that notion you know that that to be a victim can somehow be a source of power is unbelievably subversive in the context of classical integral and it's still today to some extent but I mean you know it's not as though we all believe that today although you see you know you see all the time in the news at the moment that that to cast yourself as a victim is somehow to give yourself power and and you would only have power by virtue of being a victim if you existed in the context of a society that was still in its fundamentals Christian in the Roman world if you said I'm victim they take ya and enslave you exactly thanks for rape you I'll do whatever I mean and on top of this was also this statement which I think was being used in quite a political way of Jesus's Lord which was obvious and so yes and set against the idea that that's well know Caesar is lost if we think if we think of Paul arriving in Galatia it would seem that in some way that the Galatians feel that they have a particular relationship to the figure of Augustus so they transcribe the Rays guessed by his account of of his achievements and we it seems to have been done to a far greater degree than anywhere else in the Roman Empire and so they are inscribing this idea of Augustus who describes himself as d-v filius son of God son of Caesar but you know he raised up to the heavens he has been he is a Prince of Peace he has established a universal Amity across the world and this is you angei Leon this is good news this is a gospel to be proclaimed but the statues of Augustus the Rays guest:i of Augustus the the very essence of Augustus is that the peace that he has brought has been brought by a sword he is an Imperator he is a general who is victorious this this is what an emperor is and so in this in the cities that Paul is arriving at this cult of Caesar which is the fastest-growing cult probably in history up until that point you know it's spread like wildfire and it's not a kind of frigid cult it's a cult that people across the Roman world if invest in with a deep emotional sense this idea of a conquering human who is divine who was risen from the earth and gone to the heavens he is the epitome of earthly power and they're full of divine power as well and so in that context the subversion that Paul is affecting by turning up and saying actually the son of God that I preach is someone who was crucified by Roman power I mean you can it's it's that kind of makes you win but why did it work then what what why did anyone listen to such an that crazy message that's a great question I mean I just wanted loss everything that Tom said I think this it is one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in history that the symbolism of crucifixion said we run this world and if you get in our way we will rub you out and that is callous brutal power and then to have within 20 years the crucifixion as a symbol of all conquering self giving love that's just quite extraordinary and and as you said we in the modern Christian world see crucifixes we have them you know as jewelry decoration or nice pretty things in churches and actually this was like an electric chair or a horrible gallows or something and so so so why did it work and I think if we'd asked Paul that he would have said because when you announce the crucified Jesus as Lord there is a strange power which he sometimes calls the gospel and sometimes calls the spirit and that power goes to work in people's minds and hearts and stuff happens they find themselves gripped and grasped grasped by it and I think Paul would have said there is no logical explanation of course there is nobody actually wants to sign off this but it's I mean everything that Tom Holland was saying just now was reminding me of of mark 8 where Jesus says you know we're going to Jerusalem and it's all going to happen and if you want to come after me you got to be prepared to die take up your cross as well I think they thought that was a metaphor but in fact Jesus really meant it and then he marked 10 when he says don't you real when James and John want to sit in the best seats to be his right and left-hand men and he said to realized the rulers of the nation's bully people and hairy people are lauded we're not going to do it like that we're gonna do it the other way anyone who wants to be great must be your servant because the son of man didn't come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many so Jesus himself is precisely articulating the redefinition of power with the cross at the center of that and Paul picks up from that and says that and I think this is what Paul would would actually want to say first on the cross Jesus did in fact defeat the principalities and powers he says that two or three passages he disarmed the powers and made in public exhaust course it didn't look like that this is the theological interpretation in the light of the resurrection but then when you've got that interpretation you can go to work and say now actually Jesus crucified is the fulcrum around which world history turns and people find that it's true for them I mean this brings us to that interesting tension that you sit in in a sense as both a believer and a historian of the Scriptures tom-tom right because in a sense you're saying Paul the ex-patient Paul would have given is that something supernatural happened this gospel changed people or are you and are you allowed to as a historian be interesting to see what happens when Tom Holland has a past Galilean or all into the 18th and 19th century because this word supernatural has changed his meaning okay the word supernatural in the middle in the Middle Ages as far as I understand it meant a super abundance of godness over on top of but not excluding what goes on so it's it's what normally goes on plus some extra dimensions but from the 18th century onwards something very interesting happened culturally and the ancient philosophy called epicureanism really became the dominant philosophy of the west and with epicureanism the gods and our world are totally separate they're made of the same stuff they're made of atoms but they they have nothing to do with us so supernatural means something out there as opposed to something down here and then Christians trying to make sense of the faith within a basically epicurean world think of God quote intervening so you either have natural events or supernatural events and I I resist that dichotomy I think it's a product of agency courses if you want more on this the Gifford lectures that you gave this year thank you yes unfortunately it's gonna take a little while before they get published because I've got some work to do but they are available on yeah yeah they are yeah YouTube our goodness but but that the point is this that we still in our culture and I think I say this imported the Givens actually um the only real question that the great British public no theological II is does God into in the world or doesn't he which is why a journalist faced with the new archbishop says do you believe in the virgin birth in the resurrection in other words are you going to be one of those embarrassing fundamentalist who says you believe it all or are you going to be one of those equally dodgy liberals who says you just believe it all it's it's a horrible dilemma and I'm gonna say wrong question this is not for me as a historian the more I know about history the more I think yeah all sorts of odd things happen in the world and the idea that everything is just a closed continuum is is a very particular philosophical thing so um I want to have it both ways actually how do you do you approach this because I you know we can talk about metaphysical commitments or on your pot Tom Holland but at the end of the day someone like that you're sitting opposite like Tom right obviously does believe the Bible to be both a historical document that we can you can both agree on you can pull apart and dissect and look at but is also a source of divine revelation rather as a kind of Darwinian right in the sense that I assume that Christianity triumphs or have you know achieves what it achieves because it gives something that people want yes they haven't previously been given so there's a social survival of the fittest so if you if you I mean it's evident fruit you know most famously from Paul's stay in Athens that that there is in a sense a marketplace for God's in antiquity so if you if you think of Paul arriving in Galatia the Galatian gods are famously horrible there's one god that supposedly goes around punching women in the breasts and you think this is this is this is not a kind of pleasant particularly pleasant the other for the other famous deity in Galatia is Keyblade who sits on a mighty mountain and in the ecstasy of their worship men will castrate themselves in her honor and Paul kind of makes a grim joke about this emulation saying you know if his opponents I wish that they would castrate gods or so so so these are kind of these are intimidating gods these are gods who certainly then love you hmm you know maybe you're a philosopher and you you you look at the god of aristotle the-the-the the fixed i mean there was a kind you have to love this fixed mover but there's no implication at all and if it was a relationship it was quite transactional it was sort of it keep them happy and then we can get on with our lives that is also true of of DV phileas or Guster's you know this is you know this is also kind of transactional relationship we were worshipping and then please don't come and kill us you know so in in that context the the God of the Jews you know it provokes a lot of mockery a lot of kind of contempt but also have a fair degree of envy because actually I think it's pretty clear that there are lots of people in in the greco-roman world who were quite jealous of this idea of a God who loves the Jews and who particularly cares for them and who would like to be a better fit and so you have these kind of liminal figures who you know they're Gentiles but they kind of would like to have a part of this kind of Jewish vibe yeah and in that context Paul turning up and saying you know you don't have to give up Paul you don't have to be circumcised and and this God loves you as he loves me you know why that would have been attractive I think you can absolutely see why that would be attractive and I think that um clearly this does this does cut through to people who are who who were relatively prosperous and and Paul mentions him in his letters you know we're women as well as men who can provide him with with with funding and with backing but in the song that but but it must also have given I mean what what the impact it must have had on on slaves to be told that you know you are one with the free to Beto you know a slave in Rome in the household of a Christian to be told you are a child of God at a time where Nero is absolutely in his pomp and Nero is kind of dramatizing what it is to be a son of you know yea the son of a god in the August and sense to you know to an astonishingly histrionic degree for a slave in some you know tick in the suburbs of Rome to be told I mean it's been overwhelming it is short and and also for women and so point Rodney stark makes in his book the rise of Christianity and I think it needs to be drawn out particularly in today's culture but that the the valuing of women there is no male or female and female in Galatians three that that is almost unthinkable in a post Aristotle world where men and women are almost different species and and you know who's who's in charge here and and then when you see the way that Paul treats his female co-workers in the way that he when he's written this extraordinary letter called Romans one of the most amazing pieces of writing in the ancient world he entrusted to Phoebe who is a deacon in the church in Ken creo she takes it to Rome and I mean to know Tom Hollands take on this but my understanding is that when you give a letter to somebody to take to somebody to a group she is likely to be the person who reads it out and quite possibly explains it may be the first but there is another brilliant book that I'm sure you're aware of by Paula Gouda on this very subject her her novelization of how Phoebe's I know of that I'm very proud of Paula she's former student of mine and I'm looking forward to reading that book yes yes I had her an unbelievable right a rather different actually interlocutor that was a Francesca Stavropol ooh she doesn't like she likes Paula and funnily enough Francesca was a student of Paula's okay so yes it's the world of books which I mean I'm very much interested would like to press this further because I do totally agree that this idea that you can all be one there is a new community and you are loved and valued I was thinking about this in relation to forgiveness the other day that the the ancient gods didn't forgive people I mean Zeus and Poseidon code you might be able to placate them you might be able to sneak round when they weren't watching but the idea they would forgive you is is quite different I don't think you find that in the greco-roman world and people didn't as far as I know reckon that they were going around needing forgiveness in that sense but I'm still I'm still confused at one level as to I mean I accept that there's this thesis okay it the reason it caught on was because it allowed slaves to suddenly feel like they it there were people who maybe wanted in on this but the same time you make very clear in the book Tom just how socially inconvenient it was it Sam if summer Christmas massively so it's not like this is a way to climb the ladder I mean no absolutely absolutely not and this is part of the problem all the way through in fur Thessalonians Paul looking back to the time when they became believers just a few weeks earlier he says you turned from idols to serve the living and true God now it's hard for us to imagine what that's like but an ancient city like this along occur or Corinth or Ephesus or anywhere you've got Idol temples or temples on every street corner you've got processions you've got games in honor of the Lord God so and so whatever it is particularly Lord Caesar you've got celebrations regular festivals regular holidays and everyone shows up people are regular people are regularly coming through the streets with sacrificial animals that's what you do and in a world where there is no such thing as private life except for the very very rich um everybody knows if you suddenly aren't showing up you know that family down the street they haven't been to anything this last month what's going on Oh haven't you heard they've joined this funny new group well who are they well they say they're Jews but they're not you so we don't know who they are and and so suddenly you're not doing all the things that people in your world you like in it in the modern world simple say going into Wall Street and sort of saying right we've got to abandon all of these formations okay we run up oh you know I sometimes say to people when when people say why didn't Paul say that slavery was wrong I say well when did you last go into the pulpit on a Sunday morning and say by the way it's quite clear that motorcars are polluting our planet from destroying our world so I want you to leave your cars in the parking lot we'll have them taken to the dump later on because we're all going to be either walking or on horseback from now on you know most congregations would not think that was very good sermon but actually when you're talking about a major social revolution you're just not going to be doing those processions anymore and this is why in southern Greece they get permission to shelter under the Jewish permission because the Jews had permission not to do that stuff and this is where a lot of the hassle comes from because then when suddenly there's a bunch of non-jews claiming the same permission the authorities want to know who are and then they'll go around to the Jewish commands that means getting out can I think this is the best explanation for a lot that's going on in Galatians particularly and I very soon Tom's well I mean I've got a slightly edgier comparison any any comparison between the 21st century and the first century is obviously you know they're so different but but but if you think about the the spread of radical Islam if you think about the way that people worry about their children or their wives or their sons becoming radicalized I think you might have some faint echo of how it's working and we were talking about you know Paul's use of of letters the reason that he can he can do this the way the reason that he can communicate across the Roman world is because there is an enormous road system which is being used by Caesar and by governors to communicate you know it's the yeah so it's the kind of ganglion that's connecting the fabric of the mighty brain of Rome um and Paul is kind of piggybacking on that rather in the way that Islamic radicals are piggybacking on the internet which was originally developed by you know the the Internet is our of Roman Road system of today and so it's kind of using technology and the infrastructure of of a superpower and to come up with things that are profoundly opposed to it and in a sense part of the appeal of radical Islam is precisely that it is subversive of almost everything that people in secular society take for granted intro so going you know I'm not saying that you know that you know Paul is with it I'm not comparing portal controls but I understand that you're employing there yeah but part of that you know people say why why would why would anyone run off to Syria I mean you know and sign up to you know this terrifying cult in a sense the it's precisely the challenge of it that becomes the appeal and you know Paul talks a lot about the spirit and he talks a lot about the spirit bringing freedom and that idea of being free in a world where everyone else is not free gives you a kind of dignity and status that in the long run will enable people to suffered torture and even death in the cause of affirming that and and today to this extent I think that that Paul and the early Christians are the ancestors of Isis and are the ancestors of almost every group that defines themselves in terms of belief because they're willing to suffer martyrdom for belief you don't really get I mean you know there's the obvious Socrates is kind of an example but but but but the idea that you as you know as a slave girl or that you are willing to suffer death for a belief that is really something that obviously there are parallels and it's very interesting to explore those and they go back of course to the the pre-christian Jewish radical zealots as in the Maccabean period who were prepared to die for their hope that God was going to renew the world and you see that in the book called second Maccabees particularly I mean just just just I mean that is also about kind of defending land that's all the offending land re-establishing the temple etc etc etc sure yes but what we see in Paul is the taking of that radical tradition which is also a violent tradition I mean some of them are martyred but some of them are going to sharpen their swords and win a extraordinary battle and in the second century AD you see this with the Bar Kochba revolt in 132 to 135 we have a brief little messianic Kingdom of Judea under the rule of this man the son of the star and they are going to have they think an astonishing military victory over the Romans so that that continues on what you see and Paul has all of that energy but turned upside down exactly as Tom Hollands was saying before through the notion of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus that this is a different kind of victory won by a different kind of means and we see if if there is a sense in which Paul is the ancestor of Isis Paul is also the ancestor of son Francis under mother Teresa and of the people who are saying no there is a different way to transform the world and it is the way of love it's the way of self giving and the ancestor of people like Desmond Tutu who you know we forget that in the 70s Desmond Tutu was standing in front of crowds of angry people his own people who wanted to use violence and he was saying that is not the way we transformed the world and astonishingly that message got through and won the day though South Africa is still a difficult but but there is a message of love and forgiveness well I hesitate to bring up the subject of Paul and the Lord hubristic thing to do but but but but Paul is clearly also I think the the ancestor of the modern notions of international law that the dices are committed to overthrowing right because what Paul introduces into the bloodstream of the West and then by extension because the West spreads those ideas across the world the entire kind of global framework of how international law is structured is the idea that God's law can be written on the heart that you no longer need the Torah that you that the Spirit will write it on the heart and and therefore you will know what is right and that will be illumined and so what that gives in the long run the West is a notion that law can be human and and and be morally valid and that's the great contrast with the Islamic world where law is you know in in the sense of the Torah and the Talmud you know Sharia is is about the idea of of God having directly revealed kind of legal rulings which is imposed on people were they like whereas in the West the idea that law can be something that is of human origin is absolutely taken for granted right and so this this is kind of the the great gripe that Islamic radicals have with international law is precisely that they recognize it's Christian origins so that there's a guy al Makdessi a palestinian jordanian radical who was a hugely influential intellectually on on isis and on al qaeda and he detest Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia is part of the United Nations and he's saying well the chart of the United Nations is of human origin it is not of divine origin so essentially his argument is with the poor line idea that that is fascinating and and it goes I mean obviously that's an ancient Jewish idea the writing of the law on the heart is Jeremiah thank you that's it and and it fits with this whole idea that basically poor line Christianity is too kind of an odd phrase Judaism for the masses I mean Nietzsche said it was Platonism for the masses that's absolutely wrong it's in the 19th century many Christians were Platonists and and that's a problem but the idea that this Jewish insight about a loving God who will inscribe the law in the hearts of his people and now this could happen to anyone does it's liberalism it's Christianity for the master in a sense good but then what we get with that is with Paul this extraordinary thing which when I was writing this book it impinged on me again that what we already see when there's a rumor that there's going to be a famine coming the church in Antioch instantly instead of stockpiling food they said we've got to help them down in Jerusalem and you have a sense of a trans local community as well as a trans ethnic community in a way which I think is unprecedented in the ancient world the Jewish communities the synagogue communities were trans local they were across the world and they sort of knew about one another and were in touch with one another but it was basically Jews and proselytes or god-fearers or whoever and there was there were trans local communities of the Roman Imperial administration and the Roman army but that was all jolly well loyal to Caesar thank you very much what you have in Christianity is a community which Paul insists is one it's a united community and has to be struggled for that unity and that's precisely the origin of the United Nations that's a that's a Christian poor line idea the problem is if you try to get it without the roots in an explicit belief in this particular God who has rescued the world in this particular way well you can see go to the UN today you can whistle for it because it's falling apart because we've tried to get it without the without the the bases we're gonna have to leave it there I wish we had more time but thank you so much gentlemen both Kampala and Tom Wright for joining me on the program today and Tom Holland we want you back when your book is available and we'll get you in another interesting discussion about it Tom right I'm looking forward we've got a little bit of a plan in the pipeline for a regular podcast with you so watch this space if you're a Tom Wright fan you might be able to get more of a conversations like this coming to you in the future but for the moment thank you both for being with me unforgivable from the thank you you

Channel: Unbelievable?

Views: 208,027

Rating: 4.8744006 out of 5

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, tom wright, nt wright, paul, st. paul, gospels, roman world, romans, tom holland, historian

Id: nlf_ULB26cU

Length: 58min 8sec (3488 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 20 2018