The Man from the Damascus Road

Obsessed with nudity and overt sex, hankering after Oriental religions and the occult, London and the other great Western capitals are fast reproducing the paganism of Corinth and Ephesus and other cities in the age of the Apostle Paul. If modern superstitions do not camouflage materialism as much as the ancients masked it by worship of gods and goddesses, man still displays his anxiety to stifle spiritual hunger while going his own way.

But Paul and his friends overturned paganism: the Gospel won in the end. Christians were a tiny minority then, yet the future lay with them and not with the apparently indestructible systems and showpieces of the pagan supremacy.

In that context, we may well focus attention on Paul’s personality. In ages when Christianity appeared dominant, the Apostle’s personality could be forgotten amid discussion and analysis of his doctrines; today, when Christians are faced with recapturing lost ground, they may usefully consider what sort of man won the early, amazing victories, and a mere biographer may creep in among the mighty theologians, philosophers, and newsmen.

Evangelicals believe, with Paul, that he would have achieved nothing except by the transcendent power of God, through the Word preached and the Spirit, which applied the Word to those who believed; still, the earthen vessel that carried the treasure was a vital factor.

Paul is a far more attractive personality than superficial readers will allow. Although he has not had a very good press, the more one studies the Acts and the Epistles for biographical evidence, the more delightful he appears.

Paul had the gift of evoking loyalty. Mutual dedication to a cause alone would not have produced Timothy’s love for him, or Luke’s; Barnabas too was evidently most fond of Paul, and this made their separation the more poignant. Paul made a good companion; those men could never have endured the long journeys on foot through wild mountains and dreary plains unless happy in one another’s company. Paul always preferred a team. He did not like being alone for long. In Philippi, unselfishly, he left Luke to nurse the infant church when Silas and he obliged the officers by departing, with sore backs but dignity; in Thessalonica and Berea he left Silas and Timothy to guard the converts. Thus when his Berean escort left him in Athens and returned home, Paul remained alone. And his loneliness in that city of idolatry and philosophy comes out strongly in the letter that he wrote to the Thessalonians from Corinth soon after.

Only once during the missionary journeys did Paul set off by himself deliberately. He walked a day and a half from Troas to Assos while the others sailed round Cape Lectum. It is an entrancing walk, with the dark blue hills of Lesbos seen across a narrow strip of sapphire water to his right and the distant hills round Pergamum on the horizon in front, and the rock of Assos drawing nearer as he walked. I believe he walked in order to face, alone with the Lord Jesus, the tough future of bonds and imprisonments. This walk enabled him to say soon: “None of these things moves me.”

Paul is popularly supposed to be a misogynist, or at least a disapprover of women. This reputation rests on too hasty a reading of famous passages in First Corinthians divorced from context. He may perhaps have felt a little impatient with women as a sex, or even been a little too conscious that Eve first fell, then Adam. In his dealings with individuals, however, he is chivalrous, understanding, and appreciative, as with Priscilla, who risked her own neck for his sake, and other women to whom he sent touching messages when writing to the Romans and to the Philippians. My personal reading of the scanty extant evidence is that he was not a bachelor but a widower, or, more probably, had been repudiated by his wife when he returned to Tarsus a Christian—he suffered the loss of all things for Christ.

The Victorian biographer F. W. Farrar decided that Paul lacked a sense of humor. The worthy dean had probably never trekked through hard country with companions; he had certainly not been in prison. A man’s nerves grow taut in such circumstances unless he can laugh at himself and at difficulties. A man who wrote much about rejoicing could hardly be humorless; had Paul’s joy been merely the sober, godly “joy” of a good man who never laughed, the jailors and soldiers of his imprisonments would not have learned to love his Lord. And who can read Philemon in the original Greek that Paul dictated in a prison cell without noticing his playfulness?

If he did not lack a sense of humor, he certainly had a temper. I always remember the late Mrs. Will R. Moody, daughter-in-law of D. L. Moody, whom she had known since her childhood, describing how the lovable evangelist lost his temper at some mischief of his two boys; that evening he went up to their bedrooms and apologized, saying, “That was not Christ’s way.” Then Mrs. Will Moody (aged ninety) added sweetly: “I don’t think much of a man if he hasn’t got a temper. Do you?”

Paul flared up, white hot, at the treachery of the Galatians who had so soon deserted Christ for another gospel. During his trial before the Sanhedrin he snapped at the (unrecognized) high priest. Later Paul grew to believe that anger was no weapon for the armory of a Christian. The pastoral epistles show a gentleness under every provocation, as if he had grown into his own teaching, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour … be put away from you.… And be kind one to another, tenderhearted.”

His capacity for growth is a secret of Paul’s greatness. If you study Acts and the epistles from a biographical angle, treating them as source material without getting very involved in the textual arguments of biblical scholars, this aspect of growth will appear strongly. Incidentally, you will be struck as I was by the genuineness and credibility of the character that emerges in this way from the New Testament.

Paul had his weaknesses—perhaps one was a tendency to justify himself. Yet what a man he was compared with any of us. And how far short he fell of the standard of his Master. He was first to admit this but never ceased aiming to be more like his Master. “Be imitators of me,” he could say boldly, because he added: “as I imitate Christ.”

When I was writing a biography of Paul (The Apostle) and reached the point where he is dictating First Corinthians, I wanted to show the range of meanings of each Greek phrase in the matchless central section of the thirteenth chapter without interrupting the narrative flow. As a first step I made a chart for myself showing the different words used by six or seven modern translations. Suddenly they merged into a character sketch of the Lord Jesus (Paul’s favorite phrase for his Master).

So I suggested in the book that before continuing his dictation Paul went away alone on a hillside above Ephesus and looked, though only as through a colored glass, at the face of Perfect Love as he had come to know him, the Lord Jesus: patient and kind, never jealous, not possessive, envying no one. Not boastful nor anxious to impress; not arrogant, proud, or haughty, not giving himself airs. Not rude or discourteous. The Lord Jesus did not insist on his own way, pursue selfish advantage, claim his rights. He was not touchy or irritable or quick to take offense. He did not brood on injustice, bear a grudge, or show resentment; he did not gloat over other men’s sins or feel pleased when others went wrong; nor did he condone injustice. Instead he was gladdened by goodness and could overlook faults. There was no limit to his endurance, no end to willingness to trust, no fading of his hope.

This was the personality Paul sought to be like. Men saw as he lived among them what Paul had become, and many sought the power that made the man.

Paul’s skill as a preacher and debater needs no elaboration. He was a superb strategist, too, who planned campaigns carefully, yet had that supreme gift of generalship, ability to seize the unexpected opportunity, as at Athens, or to retrieve a disaster and “turn it to a testimony,” as in the riot at Jerusalem or the shipwreck.

A Reason For Hammers

The strange beast

I used to be

still hides

in the back of a mirror

I find sometimes conceald

in the pocket of

my best suit.

It is a dark & rusty

mirror. I’ve had

the pockets sewn shut

but still feel an opaque

rectangle nicking my flesh

with murky corner.

I smash the cloth with heavy steel

but then the grains

of dark reflection

work thru my skin

to become seeds of pain

in my bloody garden.

These strange plants deceive no one.

EUGENE WARREN

He could also quickly assess the best route to an audience’s heart and mind. In the Athens streets, if one reads between the lines of the brief account in Acts, he used the familiar Socratic method; when summoned to defend his teaching before the Court of the Areopagus, he employed allusions to Aeschylus, Plato, and Epimenides, even a touch of Euripides—but all to lead his audience to the incomparable glories and uncompromising demands of the love of God in Christ. In Ephesus, the city of magic and spells and abracadabras worn next to the skin, Paul allowed his sweat-bands to be laid on patients by his converts, as a focus for weak faith, as they prayed for healing in the Name of Jesus.

Adaptability of method coupled with consistency of message, always a sign of an outstanding evangelist, is seen to a marked degree in Billy Graham. Graham has studied Paul’s methods and indeed follows him exactly when bringing the Gospel to heads of state: like Paul before Agrippa, Graham introduces Christ by way of personal testimony.

Paul would certainly have seized Graham’s opportunities for reaching vast audiences. These were denied him. On the only occasion when he came near to preaching to 19,000 at once—when the citizens of Ephesus were jammed, yelling, in the theater cut from the hillside of Pion—Paul’s powerful friends in the civic government would not allow him to risk his life.

He worked instead through small groups of men and women who caught his enthusiasm for Christ and passed it on—fast. The extraordinary speed with which the Gospel spread came home to me when I walked beside Lake Egridir in Anatolia, the Lake Limnai in Southern Galatia of Paul’s day, and then looked carefully at the New Testament record. This little-known lake is one of the world’s most beautiful. The hills all about it, and a snow-capped Mount Olympus far ahead, make a perfect setting for the startling turquoise of the water. When Paul and Barnabas first walked up the lakeside, past village after village of reed-thatched cottages, not one Christian lived in the region; a year later they came down again from Derbe and Lystra and Iconium and Pisidian Antioch, which lay on the far side of Mount Olympus—and found the lakeside districts alive with Christians. It was the same story in Corinth and Ephesus: the Gospel spread fast.

Paul would have had no doubt of the basic reason: his Gospel was “the power of God unto salvation.” It was not he who achieved these results but “the grace of God that was with me.”

The overriding factor in Paul’s personality was his passion for the Lord Jesus. It is impossible to study Paul’s life and character with an unprejudiced biographical eye without a growing conviction that he believed totally that Jesus not only died on the Cross but rose bodily from the grave. Paul as the New Testament discloses him is absolutely certain that Jesus is alive: that the dead, crucified Man of Nazareth has risen from the grave and is at Paul’s side, “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

All Paul’s journeys, his sufferings and self-denials, his mental wrestlings and hard sayings, are simply the consequence of his unquenchable desire to help others to know his best Friend.

John Pollock is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Hudson Taylor, D. L. Moody, Billy Graham, the Apostle Paul, and—the most recent—L. Nelson Bell (“A Foreign Devil in China”). He has the Master of Arts from Trinity College, Cambridge, and also studied at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, a theological college.

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