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Heavenly Deception?
According to Jewish and Islamic anti-missionaries the
apostle Paul was, by his own admission, a liar, a deceiver and a
confidence trickster. The evidence, they claim, is to be found in 1
Corinthians 9:20-21 where Paul says, “To the Jews I became a Jew, that
I might win Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law,
that I might win those who are under the law; to those who are without
law, as without law … that I might win those who are without law”.
Nor has 2 Corinthians 12:16, where Paul sarcastically
refers to having taken the Corinthians by craft and cunning, escaped
the notice of Paul’s enemies. Strangely, those who condemn the apostle
by his own words never appear to consider that he would have been very
stupid to boast of his lies to the people he had taken for a ride.
But if Paul’s evangelistic policy was not a strategy of
deceit, what did it mean for a man whose former life in Judaism had
been blameless, to put himself “under the law”? A clue can be found in
2 Corinthians 11 where Paul says, “From the Jews five times I received
forty stripes minus one.” We know that Paul and Silas were flogged by
Gentile city officials in Philippi and that Paul avoided a further
Roman whipping in Jerusalem when it became known that he was a Roman
citizen. Nothing, however, is told us of the five floggings that he
received from the Jews.
In the ancient Roman world the Jewish communities of the
Diaspora enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy and were free to manage
their own affairs, including the infliction of punishments on those
members who transgressed the rules of the community. A Jew who was
judged to have broken the law could be tried by the synagogue and be
punished appropriately. To remain a member of the community, a Jew had
to submit to his punishment. On the other hand, he could refuse to
accept the punishment and then walk away from the covenant community.
Until he returned to the community and accepted his punishment, he was
to all intents and purposes “without law”.
The thirty-nine lashes could be imposed for profaning the
Sabbath, working on Yom Kippur, or offences connected with food and
ritual cleanness, the kind of offences Paul would have been liable to
commit by associating with Gentile Christians. These were probably the
cause of his floggings.
It cost Paul dearly to win “those without law”. Few
Gentile Christians can imagine how repellent non-kosher table
fellowship was for a man who had lived blamelessly according to the
law; but for him then to suffer the consequences, by enduring the
maximum sentence (apart from stoning) that the synagogue could impose,
reveals something of the heart of this wonderful man. Acts 22 shows
that Paul could escape a Roman flogging when it suited his purpose. He
could also have escaped the Jewish lash by turning his back on the
synagogue. But by remaining under the authority of the synagogue he
remained “under the law”. Thirty-nine stripes were nothing to a man who
was willing to be accursed from Messiah for the sake of his own people.
In the light of this we must surely ask ourselves how
much we love the lost and how far we are prepared to go to win them.
Mike Moore
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