Twenty-Fourth Tuesday after Pentecost

Tuesday and Saturday are the Bible study days on the blog. Please read Acts 9:19-22.  This is one of those brief summary statements we find throughout Acts. They are not narratives, not at all specific, very general, something like, "Paul did some stuff in Ephesus." Some are hardly more than this, but some, like ours today, have ideas and connections worth out exploring. 

Although God has called Saul/Paul first and foremost to be apostle to the gentiles, he begins his Christian mission by going to Damascus synagogues. As his ministry moves into the the gentile world in subsequent chapters, Paul will take on a practice of preaching first in the synagogue (to the Jews) then in the marketplace (to the gentiles). Here at the beginning of his ministry in the Damascus synagogues, the Jewish men are confused on hearing him, because they know of his reputation as a persecutor of a dangerous new Jewish sect (the Christians), yet now he is proclaiming the divinity of the founder of this sect. 

Paul speaks two quite different statements about Jesus in Damascus, although few modern day Christians fully grasp this difference. Paul preaches that Jesus is the messiah (v. 22) and proves it by showing Jesus as the fulfillment of OT prophecies. Jews would not be offended by this. Numerous people have been and will be proclaimed as the messiah. This may seem odd to say, but for the Jewish people of the time, the coming of a messiah was not that big a deal. The Sadducees (priests) didn't believe in it; the Pharisees (rabbis) believe in it but have hardly anything to say about it. Its not really that important to them. The word occurs rarely in the OT. The only person identified as the messiah in the OT was the Persian king Cyrus (Isaiah 44:19, 45:1). There was no Jewish thinking that the messiah would be divine. He was always understood as a charismatic leader human being. Saul's claiming Jesus as the messiah might have aroused some interest, but not likely any anger.

Saul also proclaims of Jesus, "He is the Son of God." Here's where we have some problem. The Jews are radical monotheists. This belief, that there is only one God distinguishes the Jews from all the other peoples and religions of the ancient world. The Christian understanding of Jesus as Son of God, as the incarnation of God, as a man walking on the earth, being born, living and dying, was not acceptable. It was okay to understand Jesus as a prophet or even as a (the) messiah, but not as a divine human.

Saul/Paul preaches to the Jews that Jesus was the messiah. "Messiah" was a term the Jews knew and most accepted, although they differed on how the messiah would be and what he would do. They thought he would come, live, lead, die, and that was it. They had no concept of the messiah being resurrected from the dead.

When Paul's missionary journeys lead him into gentile territory, he will preach Jesus as the Son of God to the gentiles, but he will not proclaim Jesus as messiah to them, because "messiah" is a category they do not understand. 

As Christian theology develops, the concept of "messiah" under goes a change, a change that will suit it to the life and death of Jesus. It will be foreshadowed in the prophecy of the suffering servant in Isaiah 52-53 the text that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading and not understanding in Acts 8, until Philip explained it to him. 

Next Bible study we are going to get into the difficult, I could even say tricky, matter of trying to square up what Luke says about Paul at this point in Paul's career and what Paul says about Paul, in Paul's letters, at this point in his career.

Faithfully,

Christian