In Our Time - St Paul

Episode Date: May 28, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Helen Bond, John Haldane and John Barclay discuss the influence of St Paul on the early Christian church and on Christian theology generally. St Paul joined the Christian church in a time of confusion and wonder. Jesus had been crucified and resurrected and the Christians believed they were living at the end of the world. Paul's impact on Christianity is vast: he imposed an identity on the early Christians and a coherent theology that thinkers from St Augustine to Martin Luther have grappled with. Crucially, Paul is responsible for changing Christianity from a Jewish reform movement into a separate and universal religion.Helen Bond is Senior Lecturer in the New Testament at the University of Edinburgh; John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews; John Barclay is the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, about 2,000 years ago, Saul of Tarsus, a young tentmaker and a Jewish zealot, was travelling to Damascus when a light flashed around him, as the King James Version has it,

and he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me? This is the original Damascene conversion, one that blinded Saul and then transformed him from a persecutor of Christians into a founder of churches and one of the key creators of an institution of faith which is swept over the world for 2,000 years. We know him as St. Paul.

The spirit of St. Paul infuses Christianity still, and his life and his letters real the very early church, a community dealing with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without Paul's energy, his encouragement and his ideas, Christianity as we know it would probably not exist. We need to discuss St. Paul are John Barkley, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University, Helen Bond, senior lecturer in the New Testament at the University of Edinburgh,

and John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy, at the University of St. Andrews. John Haldane, what evidence do we have for what the Bible says happened on the road to Damascus? Well, the only sources we have are ones that are contained within the scripture themselves. I suppose the question would be, what are we to make of those? I mean, it depends very much on what kind of perspective you take on this. There's been a fashion for the last, in the modern period, at any rate,

to try to give a psychological explanation of what may have happened to Paul in terms of prior tensions, unresolved questions in his own life, perhaps some sort of illness and such like. But I think the important thing to do is, in general, actually, with Scripture, is first of all, take it at face value. I mean, it can be criticized, it can be. challenged and so on. But look at what happens next. Let's see what

happens next and what very obviously happens next is that Paul, following these events, this experience, is turned towards a remarkable life of complete conviction in the meaning of the life, death and resurrection as he saw it, of Jesus

Christ and sees himself as called to a particular role, which is to take that to the wider world. So I think if we look at the events in the life as we know them, widely recorded and so on, and then read back from those into this Damascus experience, then I think we have to say that something very significant happened. Because there's been a traditionally the acts and the letters,

and the letters of St. Paul were taken as more than granted God's word. Then there was a huge criticism of them, did these people exist, and now it's more or less settlers. They did exist. They did say these things, and these things most likely happened. Yes, I mean, I think one thing that's been very interesting, in fact, has been the movement in recent years away from a sort of pervasive skepticism about scripture to treating this as quite interesting historical record.

I mean, for one thing, of course, for most of the events that are described, the only access we have to them is through the scriptural account of them. So that's a place where you start. And just one thing perhaps to add to that is that much of the skepticism about scripture was actually driven by my own profession, philosophers.

As really in the 18th century, you get great skepticism about the possibility of miracles and so on, and this trickles down and undermines the confidence often of religious believers who then look for other kind of naturalistic explanations and so on. What I think philosophers have come to see is that actually the idea of miraculous is not absurd, so we're back to considering these things as possibilities. He joined a movement just after the death of Jesus Christ and what people call his resurrection. The apostles are still around. We have Peter, James, John there.

But the Gospels are yet to be written, and it's a time of great uncertainty. How does Paul get involved in these debates and power struggles in the early church? Well, it's very interesting. Of course, what we're told is that he begins as a hostile critic of this new movement of followers of Christ. He sees himself as a persecutor of them. And, in fact, his journey on Damascus to Damascus is probably part of a mission to go off and see what these Christians, not yet called Christians, of course, are getting up to there. But following those events, he comes to identify himself with this new, this event of Christ's resurrection and the movement that follows it.

And he wants to be part of it. Now, that must have been a slightly difficult business, both difficult psychologically for him to cross that divide, but also difficult for them to receive somebody who wasn't part of the initial calling of apostles and so on. we'll hear more about this in due course, but not only does he join them, but really he transforms in part their conception of whether or not this is something that's a full fulfillment just for the Jewish people

or something that's more extensive. John Barclay, can we develop something that's John Holden? I'm sorry about the full names, but we're stuck with two Johns, has already developed. He's a little bit more about his past the soul of Tarsus. He was a Pharisee,

which meant he was a particular sect, which was looked after the text, the Jewish text very, very carefully. He was very well... You go on from that. Yes. He grew up in Tarsus, which meant that he was used to being in a multicultural environment, spoke Greek naturally.

And Hebrew, of course. Yes, of course, and Hebrew. And he was a Roman citizen. He was very well educated in the... Jewish tradition, not probably particularly highly educated in the Greek classical tradition, but his book, the scriptures, he knew inside out. And he was highly trained as a Pharisee, as he says, which means he was a kind of anti-assimulationist. The Pharisees were particularly concerned for the accurate interpretation and keeping of the law.

Judaism is under huge pressure at this time, politically, socially, and it's always a danger, always a temptation to associate with non-Jews in all kinds of ways that basically watered down the Jewish tradition. Paul is a policer of the boundaries, insisting that Jews have nothing to do with idolatry, insisting that they keep the Jewish food laws, insisting that they watch their interaction with Gentiles with non-Jews to keep Judaism pure. He is, as he says, zealous for the traditions of my fathers. And it's because of that commitment

that he persecutes the early Christians. Well, what grounds, John Buckley, did he persecute the early Christians? Why did they, because he brings it to the, well, yeah, well, he never exactly tells us why, but we can I think see two main grounds.

One is probably the particular early Christians that he is persecuting are those who are already watering down their Jewish identity by crossing boundaries with Gentiles, probably common meals in which Christ believers, Jew and Gentile together, are having, are sharing meals, and Paul feels this is breaking down the boundaries of the Jewish tradition. But also because they... Because you must keep in mind that the early Christians were Jews.

Indeed, indeed. but the mission to Gentiles perhaps begins even before Paul in a sort of elementary way and he feels there is already a threat to the identity of Judaism. But also because they acclaim this figure Jesus as a Messiah. Now that's not in itself problematic. You one could have messianic figures, but it does raise huge expectations that something definitive and final has happened here. And the problem for Paul in particular, it seems, is that this figure, who is acclaimed by Christians as the Messiah, was crucified.

And the problem is then not just that he was put to death as a criminal, but he was brought under the curse of God, as the scriptures say. And it's just blasphemous for Paul that this figure should be God's agent of salvation. And yet we have this conversion or calling, it is sometimes described as well as that. And he finds himself very much on the side of the spreading of belief in the death and resurrection. He'll come to why, theologically, but he's passionate about it, and that drives him. He was in a very, it's probably wrong to call it even a church at that time. They met in each other's houses, were in synagogues, just a few of them. He didn't know, he hadn't known Jesus.

He never refers to the parables. He has persecuted Christians. He advocates radical ideas. He's a very authoritative man. people what to do. How did it, by what authority does he act? How did this sort of as it were, get in there and become a voice when you had people who'd been with Jesus at the

cross as it were and been with him on his preaching to us? Well this is always a huge problem for Paul. As you say he wasn't a disciple of Jesus. He wasn't around in Jerusalem with Jesus' followers at the crucial time and he's not a decide

he's not one of the original band of Jesus' apostles. worse than that, he has this reputation for persecuting Christians. So when he suddenly says, oh, well, I've been called by Jesus to be an apostle, he's understandably met with a certain amount of suspicion and fear indeed. And he can do little more than appeal to the fact that he has this calling and appeal to the authority of the message which he proclaims. The problem is, if he had just towed the Jerusalem line, as it were,

it probably wouldn't have been difficult for him. But he's a radical. He's always at the edge of the Christian movement because he is claiming that in order to be part of this Christian movement, you don't need to be a convict to Judaism. You don't need to be circumcised. You don't need to take on the Gentiles who come into this movement. the non-Jews who come into this movement

don't need to take on all the markers of Jewish identity. And that means that the Christian movement is already at that point beginning to, as it were, spread from being a reform movement within Judaism to being something of much wider impact. And that's a crucial point. But another crucial point, Helen Bond, is that Christians are expecting Christ to come back very soon.

At that time, they think the end of the world is now. He will return very soon. And to a certain extent, they are waiting for him. And that doesn't happen and doesn't happen. The talk of the end of the world, but the world is not ending. How does Paul address that? Well, yes, that's right. Paul, in common with all other Christians,

is expecting the end of the world to happen any moment. Or at least the end of the age, as we understand it. He thinks that something completely new was inaugurated by Christ's death on the cross. And Christians are living in the final age, and Christ is about to come back, a return in glory for judgment and Christian believers are going to be taken up into some kind of heavenly existence. And I think it's really important to recognize this in Paul's writing. Also the fact that the letters that we have are 20 to 30 years after the time of Jesus's crucifixion

and still this expectation that we're living in the final age is very, very strong. It comes out particularly in Paul's first letter, one Thessalonians. and I think this strong eschatological expectation, as it's referred to, this strong sense that the age is about to dawn, everything we know is about to be swept away, informs a huge amount of what we know about Paul. I think it's behind his very behaviour,

the fact that he feels he has to get out, he has to take the message. There's this frenetic activity about Paul. He's got to take it out. He travels thousands and thousands of miles, doesn't it? He does. And on the... transport systems of the day. I mean, he's

in boats. He says he's shipwrecked several times. I mean, he travels by land. I mean, that kind of itinerary would be quite amazing for anybody today. Setting up cells all over what we were called broadly the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. That's right, particularly sort of the north eastern part of the Mediterranean,

basically that part of the Roman Empire and then finally to Rome itself. So this massive activity I think is really based on the fact that he thinks Christ is about to come down any moment. And also his ethics, too. I think when you expect the world as we know it, society as we know it is about to come to an end,

then that has a huge influence in terms of what you say about marriage, celibacy, what you don't say about slavery. You know, he never condemns slavery, even though he has a letter devoted to it. And again, I think that's all quite understandable because he thinks Jesus is about to return in glory. Can we just develop briefly well? We might have time to take it up later, right? I hope we can make time. What was completely new,

he battened on to the death and resurrection as being a reformulation of the cosmos. It was as big as that. This was what he went for, and out of this, as I understand it, you all put me right, out of this, this was the root R-O-T of his philosophy,

his theology, sorry, his theology. Now, can you just tell listeners what was so significant about that for Paul? Well, I think part of what what he experienced on the Damascus Road was, as John B., John Bartley has been saying already, the idea that he's already persecuting to some extent people who've been a little bit lax about the Jewish law, who've been offering it to Gentiles. And I think part of what he suddenly realized on the Damascus Road was that no longer was the Jewish law,

the root to salvation, but now the root to salvation is through belief in Jesus on the cross. That doesn't mean that he's completely given up on his Jewish heritage, quite the reverse. I mean, I think he thinks this is part of the Jewish heritage, but this is God's new covenant. God has inaugurated a new covenant through Christ's death on the cross. John Holder. Well, what I was going to say, which is relevant to this, but I think as it were, spreads beyond it. John earlier on said that although he was Greek speaking he wasn't highly educated in the Greek classics and so on

I think while that is true he clearly did know a fair bit and we were just given where he grew up in the environment in which he grew up Tarsus in fact was a locus of a school of stoic philosophy and so on he was picking up some elements and I think that the first thing to be said that really is central to all of this is he is a tremendous theologian I mean he is a terrifically sophisticated character

and what he does is he reconceptualises a whole set of issues. So just to pick up the Jewish background, I mean, the narrative up to this point is that salvation, whatever that amounts to, is for the chosen people. The question is, so there's the Jews, they stand in a special covenant of relationship to God. The question is, what about everybody else? Now, up to that point, there was this idea

that the Jews would be the light to the world, a light unto the world, and in some sense that might bring people to God. but not as part of that original covenant. So it wasn't really quite clear what the situation of the Gentiles was. What Paul does is reconceptualized sacred history, as it were, the economy of salvation. He says, no, this is about saving all humankind, because all humankind has fallen will come to this. But through sin, all have fallen.

As an Adam, all men died, so in Christ are all men raised up again. So this now becomes a universal faith. But in order to do that, sorry, just to say, in order to do that, he has to get a number of concepts in place. And this is what he's a fantastic out. Well, let's come to the idea of original sin, his idea. And John Haldane, coming to John Bucklinger, we're just talking about that, bringing in the ideas that original sin, the fall, the fallenness,

the God turning away, and the re-structuring of the sacred through the resurrection. Yes. Well, Paul has this, if you like, very pessimistic view of the human conditions. and this is partly drawn from his Jewish apocalyptic heritage, the notion that the world has fallen under the influence of evil powers, the notion that it's radically debased, and needs a divine act of intervention to rescue the world.

Paul actually pushes that through at the level of the human condition, much more interestingly than most of his Jewish contemporaries, and thinks about the corruption of the human will, that the corruption of the self goes deep down, if you like, into human psychology. But for him, what's radical about this is that not even obedience to the Jewish law is going to get one out of this situation.

The Jewish tradition takes the law to be the antidote to sin. Okay, we're sinful, but at least we have the law and we're able to keep it, and thereby we're able to please God. And for Paul, he's so pessimistic on this that the law actually far from solving the problem of sin, actually incites it. And this is the dark background

against which he places this extraordinary strong emphasis on God's grace, on God's gift, on God's active initiative. Sorry, can I maybe lumpingly clarify just a little bit? Original sin is Adam and Eve. That is original sin. And the idea of original sin, let's say it came in with Paul or he developed it more than him and else. And this redeems original sin

and allows the contact between, as he sees it, humankind and God, to recommence. Yes, we have to be careful here because there's all layers and layers upon Paul, particularly from Augustine, who I think misunderstood Paul to think that you think. I don't want to go to Augustine. Right, okay.

Okay, Paul does not think that we inherit sin. So he doesn't believe in original sin? He does believe in original sin in the sense that we all have a propensity to say. What do you do then? Sorry? If you don't inherit an original sin, original sin, why do we all have it?

Because we have this propensity to sin. At least he doesn't believe that we have original guilt. In other words, we're not born, as it were, already condemned. But he believes there is, as

a twist in human nature from which we can't escape. But this is part of a larger picture of the whole world being subject to forces which he calls flesh and sin and death from which only the act of God in Christ

can bring to liberation. Helen Mom, would you like to take that forward? Well, yes, I mean, I think that's certainly very important, this whole kind of theological side of things and what he's doing with sin. But I think it's also important to look at the letters as pieces of social history as well, you know, what's going on in these various churches.

And also to realise, I think, too, I mean, a point that hasn't really been made yet is that the letters are occasional letters. They're all designed for a particular... These are the epistles. There are 13, aren't there? Seven are authentic. There are 13 in the New Testament, seven of which all scholars that are agreed are originally from Paul. There's all sorts of disputes on the borders of those. But I think one of the difficulties in terms of trying to sort of piece together this theology is that these are letters written for particular situations.

With the possible exception of Romans, they're all people who've contacted Paul because of a particular problem in the church or because Paul has heard of something and often missionaries preaching something else. And so these are all written because Paul is desperately trying to reassert his own authority, to put his own view forward.

And so I think one of the difficulties in trying to sort of construct a theology of Paul is that quite often the slightly different pictures and nuances in the different letters. The image people often have of Paul sitting in a quiet room, calmly writing down theological tracts, I think it's really not the way that we should be imagining it. I think it's more Paul pacing up and down dictating to a secretary who's desperately trying to write down what he says. But more importantly than how he did, it's what he did.

I mean, what we're talking about is somebody who's issuing practical advice and instructing to churches all over at large tract of land saying, no, you don't do this, you do that, you do that, in the name of universality, which is a radical thought, it's going to cause a lot of trouble and a lot of eruptions and then an immense explosion of this faith

all over the world for hundreds and into thousands of years. So he's doing that at the same time. I just want to nail the theological thing. I don't think we've quite got that. John Holden, can you just... Well, yeah, I mean, I think it is very important to get this sort of framework because there's so much is going to be

situated within it. Let's just go back for a moment to sin, and you were pressing the question quite rightly, I think, about understanding original sin and what that means for successive generations and so on. I think what we have to, here's the way of thinking about this. Paul sees all of this within a framework of the natural and the supernatural. Now in the modern idiom, when we talk about the supernatural, we're thinking of the ghostly, the spooky, and so on. He's not interested in that. That's what the medieval theologians would have called the praeternatural, what goes beyond nature. But he's sees in a sense two worlds. There's the world

of space and time, the world we inhabit, the visible world and so on, the natural world. Then there's this other world, the order of grace, the divine economy, the pattern of salvation, what's going on according to God's providence and so on. He sees everything within that framework. So Jewish history, Jewish sacred

history, the events of the prophets and so on, is part of the divine economy, the divine purpose working its way out. Now, what he thinks he sees is, and this is transformative, is that the divine economy is not just one of a relationship with a covenant of people.

It's one with all mankind, not just as a creator of mankind, but as a providential governor of mankind, that God wants to stand in a relationship to all mankind. But there's been a breach, this is original sin, there's been a breach.

And one result of that breach is that things have been set out of order, out of spiritual order. And he's looking again and again to try to, he's discered, he's discerning signs of the effects of sin in our lives and signs of the effect of the overcoming of sin in our lives. But just to understand original sin,

I sometimes think that a helpful analogy is this. In the last 20 or 30 years, we've heard a great deal about structural racism or structural injustice, structural problems, not somebody individual's responsibility, but something that's built into the structure. I think Paul thinks of the effects of Adam's fall as being like that, that there's an inherited structural fault.

It's not so much the question of whether or not I was guilty with Adam's sin. It's that something having happened, we all inherit the effects of that through this fallen structure. John Markley. Yes, I think it's important to see Paul is kind of radicalizing the Jewish tradition from within. The Jewish tradition has long thought about God's grace. But Paul sees, when he looks at the scriptures again, in the light of his own experience and in the light of the Christ event,

he sees a pattern whereby God's grace comes out of nowhere, as it were. It's not preconditioned. It's not based on some previous work or some previous worthiness. And he sees that is how God has chosen Israel. And because that is how God has chosen Israel, of course that's how God chooses and saves the whole world. His own life is turned upside down because he thought he was 100% right. and he was doing what seemed the perfectly right thing for a Jew to do,

and then he realized it's 100% wrong, and yet, despite him being 100% wrong, God has chosen him, as he says, by his grace. And he finds, as he goes out into the non-Jewish world, all these unlikely people who have no dignity in Roman terms, no moral worth, who have nothing to, as it were, commend them. And yet God's spirit, as Paul puts it, lands on, on them and they become believers.

And he finds this, all the expression of this kind of definitive great act of grace that comes from, as it were, nowhere, that comes from what John was calling there, the supernatural, though I'm a bit reluctant to impose those terms on Paul. But it comes out of the void, as it were. And this is his great notion that there is a new creation. It's coming out of nothing. God is, as it were, recreating the world again by his goodness. Helen Bond, can you give us something of Paul's character,

take the epistle to the Galatians, the letter to Galatians? Can you use that and just give us some idea of the man you can construct behind the words? I think that's what's so fascinating about the epistles, the fact that they are really a window into Paul's personality. You get the sense of fiery passion. All of the letters, with a possible exception of Romans, are written to churches that he's founded and that he knows well. Quite often he's lived there quite a long time, 18 months, two years, say.

And then he's moved away. So he's writing to people he knows well, and he certainly feels a strong sense of pastoral support. He refers to himself as the father, they're the children. And what's really interesting about Galatians is that he's heard that there are some other missionaries who've come to the church and are starting to say things about Paul. They're saying he's not really a proper apostle. His gospel is coming from people, not from God. And they're actually turning away the Galatians.

And so he writes an extremely fiery letter. Oh, foolish Galatians, he starts. I mean, that's, you know, and all the way through, there's all kinds of different changes and shifts. He's appealing to them out of friendship one moment. Next minute, it's sort of sarcasm. Next minute it's burning anger. And I think you get a real sense of the passion of the man

and a sense of how it could be that somebody like that could have the energy to get himself halfway across the Mediterranean. You know, you get this strong sense that he desperately wants to keep in touch with them. John Holden? Well, I was going to say if we try to understand how effective this was, how he could have achieved these effects, I think it's important to see that he is, of course, on the one hand, drawing upon Jewish understandings

and then sort of extrapolating from those and extending those to others and so on. But he is also drawing, although he's critical of worldly wisdom, and he says, you know, the philosopher's wisdom has really achieved nothing when it comes to understanding the facts of salvation and so on. Having said that, he does appeal to some rather strands or ideas that would have been familiar outside the Jewish faith. I mean, when he writes to Romans, for example,

he makes a reference to the fact that evidence of the divine ordering of the world has always been there. need to look at the sky and so on. And the words that he uses there really recall very much lines in Cicero, for example, which his Roman readership, at least some of them were educated, would have been familiar with. He also talks about what we would now talk about conscience, as well, the way in which God works within the human heart and such like, and also about providence, the governance of the world. So these three ideas, if you like, evidences of design of divine ordering, evidence of a sort of moral source of guidance.

and evidence of the governance of history is something that clearly resonated with ideas among intellectuals outside of the Jewish tradition. And I think the power of his achievement within the Gentile world, to some extent we're to explain it, has to draw upon that as well. But some of the ideas he had are resonating with ideas that have a place outside of a Jewish faith.

But these are a layer above the fundamental idea he has of universalism and of the reconstruction of the world through the death and resurrection, as it is assumed, of Christ. So this is what John Haldane has said is a laird on top of that. Yes, the interesting thing about Paul is that although he's the first Christian writer and thus closest to the life of Jesus, he actually says very, very little about the life of Jesus, the parables of Jesus or the miracles of Jesus. He says really nothing about that.

Everything focuses for him on two events, on the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus. And those two sort of cataclysmic, world-changing events are the center of his theology. And then he's thinking through, and this is his great creativity, he's thinking through what these mean in terms of how they fit within the Jewish story, how they fit within the pattern of the scriptures, but also how they fit within the story of the world. And as he say, he has this extraordinary notion that in these events is, as it were, the death of the old world and the beginning of a new creation. There's this huge sort of sense of the cosmos having turned on its hinge at this point

and a new world coming into being. And this is what fires the creativity in Paul of the foundation of new communities that cross ethnic boundaries and cross social boundaries. And that give him this sort of universalistic feel that a whole new world is coming into being. And he's thinking through in very subtle ways how to form communities that cross boundaries, the boundaries of gender and social status. Yes, women very early on are very prominent in his letters to them, encouraging women to come into the church. He teaches them naturally as priest-deacons. I haven't got the terminology right,

but they're part of the church. Yes. Yes, well, there are ambiguities in Paul on that, and there are passages in Paul which look quite conservative, but he's basically relativizing human differences. And this is what makes him so extraordinarily fertile as a thinker, that the differences between male and female, between slave and free, between Jew and Greek, as he puts it, are relativized very strongly by a new identity, by a new sense of self and a new sense of social community.

Can we just, as it were, come to the end of his life before we discuss his influence, Helen Bond. He has this conversion. He sets up these cells, small groups, people, and a huge area. Three massive journeys, come to about 10,000 miles. He writes these epistles,

these letters, and then after his death, Luke writes the Acts of the Apostles in which Paul figures. Can you just briskly take us towards his martyrdom? Well, one of the difficulties is that the author of Acts, who, as you say, most people think is Luke, ends the story with Paul under arrest in Rome.

He's been arrested in Jerusalem. He's appealed to the emperor, and that's where Luke ends his story. He's a Roman citizen or his father or grandfather. So he can be tried by the emperor. That's right. He's uncertain that he's going to get a fair trial in Jerusalem, and so he appeals to the emperor, and he's sent to Rome. And it suits Luke's story to end things there,

because he has Christianity being preached openly in Rome, and that's it as far as Luke goes. But we, of course, would like to know the end of the story. Paul is on his way to Spain. That's what he really wants to do. But most people think that following church tradition, that Paul never made it to Spain and that he was actually martyred in Rome,

tradition has it that he was martyred there as part of the Neuronian persecution of 65 AD. I think that's probably a fairly strong tradition and certainly there are no letters that we can safely date after that time. Just one little footnote to that. I mean, the idea that Paul was martyred in Rome is a very ancient tradition and evidence of it to some extent persisting at the present day is this. The churches were very concerned about which churches were apostolic.

I mean, which church was founded by an apostle. And even in the present day, for example, the Russian and Greek Orthodox recognized the primacy of the Sea of Rome, not as authoritative over them, but as a double apostolic foundation. They say that Rome among the apostolic churches enjoys primacy because it's a double apostolic foundation, Peter and Paul. So they recognise, they accept Paul as an apostle in this respect,

akin to the other apostles, although he comes on the scene as well a slightly later. And he defends himself the least of the apostles. Indeed so. But this tradition of Paul's martyrdom in Rome really is, you know, we don't have no direct evidence, of course, of it, but it is a very ancient and authoritative tradition. Can we rather sweepingly, and please forgive me, say that he is setting up the institution of the church, the organisation of the church.

Others are doing it later. But he is beginning that or at the beginning of that in a substantial and effective way. These cells are all over the place and they're growing. And he's this great idea of universality he has put in front of people and it is being accepted that you can bring in the Gentiles and the Gentiles don't have to convert to Judaism and they can meet with the Jews and the Jews don't have to give up their dietary. So there's a convergence here, which is quite remarkable, must have been very radical at the time. But his ideas too have been very influential.

So can we start, John Haldane? I'd like to talk about ideas with St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and see if we can get to Bath. If we can, we can, and we're doing great if we can. Right, let's start with St Augustine, and why it was important, where Paul was important to St. Augustine and why St. Augustine was important to Christianity. Right, deep breath, and here we go. All right. So, I mean, Augustine in his earlier life, is not himself a Christian.

He's taken with... We're talking about the late 4th century. Indeed so, yes. And he is taken with certain ideas current in the time that the universe, the cosmos as we encounter it, is perhaps the product of two forces. Because you look at the world, you see

some things that are good, you look at you see some things that are bad, you find intellect, but also you find depravity and so on. And so in that period there's this idea that there are really two sources, a source of good, a source of evil and so on. Augustine abandons that in favour of a view that there is a single unitary cause of the world,

a divine creator who is all good and so on. So now, of course, he's got to deal with those aspects of the world that seem flawed or failed. He introduces this idea of a privation or lack and so on, and that gets in some way. But he also introduces and draws on Paul this idea of a fallenness, a woundedness in human character. And he says that there are two principal effects of that,

natural effects. One is a darkening of the intellect. and another is the disturbance of the passions. And he tries to analyze so much in human life in terms of these effects. And what he's looking for, Augustine, what he's looking for, is the way in which grace, providence, and so on,

can pull us back from our fallen condition. But this analysis is essentially Pauline. It really is working with Paul. Now, we can either discuss it a little bit more or just leaping to Luther. No, I'm going to ask, John Barker, to leap to Luther. So he's taken, so in August, has taken on Paul, Paul has reinforced

St. Augustine's development of theology, which itself becomes a very forceful theme in Christian theology. Augustine inherits from Paul this idea of human fallenness, that, you know, we find recurrently in our lives that we have an intimation, a sense that we

can understand things, and yet we only understand them imperfectly, or that understanding is distorted by will, it becomes perverse and so on. We have a sense we've been oriented towards the good, but we also recognize in ourselves, the orientation towards the bad. Augustine takes these as absolutely

central tropes for his understanding of the human and infers back from them to a theology that was going to explain this, but also overcome it. And these are really absolutely central to everything Augustine writes. John Barclay, a friend of Martin Luther is Philip Melanchthon,

referred to Paul's letter to the Romans as a summary of all Christian doctrine. So we have Paul entering into the thought of Luther, who let us say, struck the first blow for Protestantism. Yes, I think of the legacy of Paul as like a kind of slowly burning firework. I say it's always there sending off a little bit of flame and a little bit of spark. But every now and then, and somewhat unpredictably, some huge flare goes up that completely changes everything around it.

And the exciting thing about the Pauline legacy is you never quite know when that flare is going to go off. And what happens with Luther is this rediscovery of Paul. and rediscovering in particular the theme of divine grace that comes from outside. Luther is reacting against a medieval piety that is basically confident that with a bit of divine help, we can make ourselves worthy of God's good judgment on the last day. And that is bound up with the church's power

to tell us how we are to be, to become worthy. And Luther re-reads Paul and then goes back to Augustine and finds here this extraordinary powerful idea that actually God has done everything already, that the gift has already been given. And we don't have to wind ourselves up in coils of anxiety as to whether we've done enough to be right before God.

And that is not only psychologically, hugely liberating, but it's politically explosive because it undermines the power of the church, which has the power to tell you that you are not going to hell according to whether you're doing what the church asks you to do. And Luther starts this revolution which is not only religious but also social and also psychological in a sense. and many people have said is there's at least one of the foundations of modern individualism there, the notion that we have a relationship with God which is entirely direct and not mediated through the church. Alan Bond, the language in which we receive, Paul, is mostly the language of the great Tyndall,

and so it is an incredibly powerful force, a work of art, you might say, in itself. Do you think that's part of the persuasiveness? And first of all, I think that's part of the persuasiness of Paul. Yes, I think so. I mean, we've already talked about the strength of passion, the strength of feeling that you get in Paul. But you also get all, I mean, all the deep theological ideas. I mean, almost any sentence of Paul you could reflect on for hours.

But you also get beautiful poetry. I mean, as the wedding season is almost upon us, probably a lot of people are going to hear one Corinthians 13, read out in church, that beautiful hymn to love. Faith, hope and love remain, he says, but the greatest of these is love. I mean, of course, that was written for a community that was in great turmoil and fragmentation, but it remains that that very short chapter is a beautiful poem to love. Of course, I've given you that in the modern translation. There are all kinds of other older translations of that, and I suppose most people are more familiar with Paul in the King James

version or older ones. I've got an awful question John, sorry John, hold on. Really, we've got so few seconds that I'm wasting the amount. Do you think Christianity would have been radically different without Paul? Yes. But just one briefly.

I don't think we've got even briefly, the downside of Paul, of course, is that he leaves us with this question is what's our contribution in all of this. And this can be disabling. That really by playing down works and playing up faith, there is a question of what the human contribution is. And this can produce a certain kind of depression in a way, but another matter. Different, John Berkeley?

Yes, I think he gave the foundation for the notion that this movement is going to spread throughout the whole world, and so it has. Thank you very much. John Haldane, John Barkley, Helen Bond. Next week we'll be talking about the trial and execution of Charles I. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.com.uk forward slash radio four.