Photograph by Ananth Pai via Unsplash
Jim Huffman
I love books that set my mind to racing. The latest to do that — published two decades ago and loaned to me by a friend — was “The Brother of Jesus” by Jeffrey J. Bütz (Inner Traditions, 2005).
I’d known that James headed the Christian community in Jerusalem after Jesus died, but I’d not realized what a central role he played in the development of the church — for three whole decades, before he was martyred himself.
Nor had it occurred to me how thoroughly Jewish both he and Jesus were. Or that Jesus seems not to have thought of himself as the founder of a new religion — but simply as the Messiah for whom his Jewish people had so long looked.
I also was challenged by Bütz’s insistence that the church’s failure to recognize Jesus’ thoroughgoing Jewishness has played an enabler’s role in the dark history of Christian antisemitism.
I will be thinking about those issues for a long time. But the insight that really set my mind’s bell ringing was more personal. It had to do with why Paul departed so radically from most Jerusalem Christians when he demanded that Gentiles be allowed to convert without following most of the Jewish laws that Jesus so carefully followed.
His position — salvation by faith, for law-breaking Gentiles as much as for Jews — eventually became orthodox, but it marked a radical departure, a heresy, when he first proposed it. It was so great a heresy, in fact, that it took a church council in Jerusalem (Acts 15) to deal with it. Paul’s position even changed the name of the religion: from Jesus-believing Judaism to Christianity.
What turned Paul into such a radical? He had, after all, been a Jew among Jews, so steeped in his Jewish convictions that he persecuted the followers of Jesus.
The scriptures tell us about his conversion, his return to Tarsus in present-day Turkey, his travels, and his call to Macedonia. But they offer no explicit explanation of why his understanding of faith’s requirements changed so greatly.
Reading Bütz, I had a flash of insight: I suspect the travels themselves and the encounters with new people and cultures played a major role in changing Paul. Travels do that. Even tourism gives us new ways of seeing the world; deeper encounters of the kind Paul had often change us.
New Gentile cities gave the apostle Paul fresh understandings of what should be required of Jesus’ followers.
The first place to profoundly challenge my own way of seeing the world was Japan, where I went as a historian-in-training decades ago. There were, of course, lots of little things. Enjoying foods such as sea urchin, squid ink, and sour milk (calpis). Feeling comfortable with strangers in a public bath. Coming to enjoy being squeezed like sardines into a rush-hour train.
But there also were deeper things. During that first sojourn in Japan, my wife and I decided to visit the Soviet exhibition at the world’s fair in Osaka. I knew what to expect: military equipment, examples of Soviet superiority in space, anything that showed how tough the Russians were. I knew because I paid attention to American media.
Never will I forget my shock when the first exhibit room we entered was filled with school children’s art. On the walls were hundreds of sentimental, childish, sweet renditions of everyday life. How could that be? How could a people I knew to be brutish produce such a warmly human display? The moment was transformative, shattering my way of seeing the world: If the “truths” I had learned about Russians were so wrong, what other American “truths” might need to be re-examined?
Nearly two decades later, in 1986, my wife and I spent a week with a pastor in what we then called East Germany, three years before the Berlin Wall came down. He lived simply, read voraciously, and espoused pacifism with his whole being. On Sunday, we joined him and the three other worshipers (all elderly women) in his church, a crumbling building where we could see the sky through holes in the ceiling.
We were depressed by the obvious truth: this congregation was dying. But we were wrong. As the week went along, we learned that the congregation was not just alive; it was full of energy. A youth group met on Monday evenings, reading circles engaged other community members, the church brought people together for justice work. Steeped in my Midwestern Christian tradition, I had had no idea that a church could be healthy without a large Sunday morning congregation. Here, in then-communist Germany, I discovered a different model. And it was exciting.
That appears to be what happened to Paul as he journeyed to the towns and cities in what we now know as Turkey and Greece. He met mature truth-seekers who never had known the rules of the Jewish people, and he found them as sincere and earnest as the people among whom he had been reared. To have required that they follow the core Jewish demand of circumcision would have been cruel, even dangerous.
So, he confronted the church leaders in Jerusalem — people who had not been immersed in the cultures of the new places Paul visited — with a fresh understanding of what it meant to be “Christian.” And according to Paul’s account in Galatians, when other leaders such as Peter joined him in Antioch (south-central Turkey), they too were forced to accept a new way of following Jesus.
In “Ithaka,” the poet Constantine Cavafy says the journey is more important than the destination. That was true for Paul. New Gentile cities gave him fresh understandings of what should be required of Jesus’ followers. And it is true for me. When I meet people who see life differently from me, my eyes are opened. New glimpses of truth are revealed. And I experience growth.
Jim Huffman is a retired historian of Japan, a member of Lake Street Church of Evanston, and a peace activist.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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