Sermon for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul

admin | 25 January 2016

“He spake unto them in the Hebrew tongue”

Paul’s conversion is momentous in the story of Christianity. He is sometimes called the second founder of Christianity for with Paul the Christian Faith goes global at least historically. His travels along Roman roads and in Roman captivity contributes to the spread of the Christian Faith. His story, especially his ‘conversion’, marks the beginnings of Christianity as distinct from Judaism and from the surrounding Hellenistic culture under the dominance of the Roman Empire. Yet his conversion is entirely within the context of Judaism and within the syncretic nature of what will come to be called the first century AD, anno domini, in some sense because of St. Paul as he, too, will come to be called.

Told to us three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s conversion is more about the beginnings of a process of discovery and understanding than simply a one-off event. Certainly there is a dramatic quality to the way Paul tells his story about what happened on the Damascus road. Certainly, it seems, something happened. But his conversion is not from one religion to another because Christianity does not yet really exist as a distinct entity. His conversion is really his insight into a new understanding about the nature of the Messiah which has yet to be fully developed.

He is, he says, a Jew from Cilicia, from Tarsus, “a citizen of no mean city”, and crucially too, he will lay claim to being both a Pharisee and to being a Roman citizen. Both are equally important in terms of the significance of Paul and what will be his teachings for the development of Christianity.

The lesson is Paul’s speech to the people about his experience and its meaning. The context is more powerful than we might realize and more complex in ways that challenge Christians with respect to other religions and cultures. The context is one of extreme hostility and violence. The preceding verses of this chapter are altogether remarkable. Paul has gone into the Temple in Jerusalem with the intention to teach about Jesus. Before he can say anything he becomes an object of derision and hate. He is, first, accused of “teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and his place.” Secondly, he is accused of bringing a gentile, a Greek from Ephesus named Trophimus, into the temple which is regarded as a defilement of “this holy place.” He does not seem to have been responsible for this but in another way it belongs to the interplay between Jew and Gentile.

Paul is seized by the Jews who drag him out of the Temple with the clear intention of putting him to death. There is civic unrest, a riot, as it were, which brings into the play the Roman authorities whose job is to keep the peace. They actually have to intervene to rescue Paul from his Jewish persecutors. The scene is especially intense. The Roman soldiers literally bind him and carry him away “because of the violence of the crowd.”

Paul speaks to the Tribune. We actually know his name, Claudius Lysius. He asks, “May I say something to you?” The Tribune’s response is most revealing. “Do you know Greek?” he first says in astonishment, revealing to us that Paul, a Jew, also knows Greek and that this is the language used even under Roman rule; the Tribune, too, knows Greek. We begin to get a sense of the interplay of cultures and languages without which Christianity is not thinkable. But the next thing that Tribune says is astounding because of what he says and how it has been frequently mistranslated.

He says that he had mistaken Paul for a certain Egyptian who had stirred up a revolt and subsequently led four thousand men into the wilderness. Out of forty-five different English translations, twenty-six of them describe the men as ‘assassins’, ten use the term ‘terrorist’! Other translations in other languages speak of rebels or brigands. Here is the problem. These terms are all anachronistic. Terrorist is our modern word, for instance, a term much used in our description of current affairs. Assassins is a word which only emerges a thousand years later than The Acts of the Apostles and in an entirely different context. It is the term for a group of Nizari Ismailis, an offshoot of Shia Islam fighting against Sunni Islam, particularly Seljuk Turks, as well as against the Christian crusaders in the 11^th century in Syria. In other words, the translation brings Islam into the Christian story albeit in ways that are quite anachronistic.

The actual term used in very few translations is sicarii, the term applied to Jewish zealots who were strongly opposed to Roman rule and to Jews who collaborated with the Roman authorities. The term is repeatedly used by Josephus, an early Jewish historian of the period itself. Sicca is the term for a dagger. The sicarii would kill Romans and Roman sympathisers in crowds, not indiscriminately, but deliberately. The term assassin refers to similar tactics a thousand years later within Islam in Syria. The word assassin has also been wrongly associated with hashish; it is more properly derived from an Arabic word as Amin Malouff points out, for those who are faithful to the foundations of the Faith (meaning Islam), the word which sounds similar to the word for hashish. The word assassin entered into the European languages in the early modern period. Shakespeare has the first known use in English literature of the noun assassination in his play Macbeth for example. Luther translated the term into German as menchelmörden which influenced Tyndale’s more modest translation of “murderers” which carried over into the King James Bible.

Not bad, at least not as misleading as attributing the acts of first century Jewish zealots to eleventh century Islamists! But the mistranslation, assassins for sicarii, paradoxically highlights an important feature of Christianity especially in our contemporary world. Christianity cannot be understood apart from its relation to Judaism and to the culture of the Greco-Roman world in which it emerges and by extension to later developments such as Islam.

Paul’s conversion requires our deeper engagement with the interplay of these religions and cultures, a deeper understanding of the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity. What we celebrate is the beginning of that deeper engagement through Paul’s insight about the suffering of Christ as essential to the glory of the Messiah. It is a break-through moment. Not just in terms of the emergence of Christianity but in terms of an understanding about God and our humanity.