We have to remember that Paul did not live in a democracy. Neither did he live in a society that observed the rule of law. The Roman Empire was built on force and coercion. Civilised men like Cicero could practise the law – for a fee. Few could afford that. Quite the contrary. He and others lived in something much more like the law of the jungle. Muscle counted for more than reasoned argument. Lynch mobs had their way.
Paul fell foul of this more than once. In 2 Corinthians 11 he listed his encounters with muscle men. Five times he was given 39 strokes by the Jews. Three times he was beaten with rods. These were agreed penalties from the Jews and the Romans. He went on to list the variety of hardships he had endured, insisting that he was a fool to indulge himself in this way.
The idea of submission, of taking what comes, of seeking peaceful resolutions of problems, grew in soil that would have been derided as a source of such things. The message of Jesus went cross-grained in what could prove to be a toxic environment for such virtues.
We can hardly avoid speculating on what might have been St Paul’s breaking point. Like us, he was conditioned by the society he grew up in. He would have met men who could display their scars and demonstrate their weaknesses. There would probably have been no concern to keep the instruments of punishment out of sight. Everybody knew what happened to those who stepped over the line.
Paul was a hard man. His was the sort that survived in such a society. He knew when he was playing with fire. But this man of muscle was, perhaps unknown to himself, looking for something better. When God reached out and captured him, he discovered that there were other ways of looking at life. Peter, James and John had discovered that. Paul enlisted in the number of those who had tasted the grace of God in Christ. Things could never be the same again.
CALLED A WEAKLING
Not that Paul might have made his name in martial arts or one of the arenas. He was not bellicose. He did not go looking for trouble. But he was often set upon. And that chapter in his second letter to the Christians in Corinth does not read like the cv of a drifter. He kept his calm when he was described as a weakling. Weakling? He changed the world.
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