The World of Paul

The gospel went out through Paul into a world made unusually ready to receive it: a Jewish diaspora threaded across the cities of the empire with its synagogues and its “God-fearers,” a Roman peace that opened the roads and standardized the law, and a Greek culture that gave the whole Mediterranean a common tongue. This file describes that first-century world — its synagogue networks, its imperial infrastructure, its cities and their religious ferment — as the medium through which Paul’s mission moved.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Jewish Diaspora

By the first century the Jewish people were no longer confined to Judea. A vast diaspora had spread through the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and beyond — Alexandria, Antioch, the cities of Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome itself — so that, as later writers observed, there was scarcely a city without its Jewish community (cf. Acts 2:9–11, the catalogue of nations at Pentecost; Josephus, Antiquities 14, on the diaspora’s privileges). The institution at the heart of this dispersed Judaism was the synagogue, a house of prayer and Scripture-reading that did not depend on the Jerusalem Temple and could exist in any city. It was the natural first platform for Paul’s preaching: again and again Acts shows him entering the synagogue of a city and reasoning from the Scriptures, “as his manner was” (Acts 17:2; cf. 13:14; 14:1; 18:4; 19:8).

Crucially, the synagogue had drawn to itself a fringe of sympathetic Gentiles — the “God-fearers” (sebomenoi, phoboumenoi ton theon) who were attracted to the ethical monotheism of Israel without becoming full proselytes. Acts repeatedly names them among Paul’s first hearers and converts (Acts 13:16, 26; 16:14, of Lydia “which worshipped God”; 17:4, 17; 18:7). This pool of Gentiles already primed by the Scriptures and the synagogue was, humanly speaking, the seedbed of the Pauline churches (Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life, 1996; Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul, 1991). The diaspora and the Greek Bible (the Septuagint) — from which Paul almost always quotes — together made it possible to preach a Jewish messiah to the nations in a common idiom (on the Scriptures, see Holy Scripture).

The Roman Order

Paul’s world was bound together by the Roman Empire at the height of its early consolidation under Augustus and his successors. The Pax Romana, the long internal peace of the empire’s first two centuries, made travel across the Mediterranean basin safer and easier than it had ever been: the Roman road system, the suppression of piracy that opened the sea-lanes, a common coinage, and the framework of Roman law gave a missionary an infrastructure no previous age had offered. Paul’s journeys move along the great roads — the Via Egnatia across Macedonia, the routes of Asia Minor — and by ship across the Aegean and the Mediterranean (Acts 13–28). His Roman citizenship (Acts 22:25–28) is itself a feature of this order, granting him a legal standing that protected him and, in the end, carried his case to Rome on his own appeal to Caesar (Acts 25:11; on the citizenship, see Saul of Tarsus).

The empire was not merely a convenience but also a power Paul had to reckon with theologically and practically. He could counsel submission to the governing authorities as ordained by God (Rom. 13:1–7), and he could suffer at their hands — beaten with rods, imprisoned, finally (by tradition) executed at Rome (2 Cor. 11:23–25; see The Roman Martyrdom). The same imperial order that opened the roads also enforced the cult of Caesar, and the confession that “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor. 12:3; Phil. 2:11) carried, in that world, an unmistakable counter-imperial edge.

The Greek City and Its Culture

The cities Paul evangelized were Hellenistic cities, and Greek — the koinē of the eastern empire — was the language of his mission and his letters. A diaspora Jew of Tarsus, Paul was at home in this culture: he could quote a Greek poet to the Athenians (“For we are also his offspring,” Acts 17:28, from Aratus), reason in the agora and on the Areopagus (Acts 17:17–34), and shape his letters with the rhetorical and epistolary conventions of the Greek-speaking world. The Greek city, with its agora, its civic life, its associations and trades, was the social setting of the Pauline churches, which met in households (Rom. 16:5; 1 Cor. 16:19; Philem. 2) and drew their members from across the urban social range — slaves and free, the well-placed and the poor (1 Cor. 1:26–28; cf. the social analysis of Meeks, The First Urban Christians, 1983).

A World of Religious Ferment

Finally, Paul’s world was one of intense and various religiosity. Alongside the civic cults of the Greek and Roman gods flourished the mystery religions — the cults of Isis, Mithras, the Eleusinian and Dionysiac mysteries — promising the initiate communion with the divine and, in some, a hope beyond death; alongside these ran astrology, magic, and the philosophies that functioned for many as ways of life: Stoicism (native to Paul’s own Tarsus), Epicureanism, Cynicism, the emerging Platonisms (Acts 17:18 names the Stoics and Epicureans of Athens). Scholars have long debated how far Paul’s language was shaped by, or was deliberately set against, this religious environment — the older “history of religions” school pressed the mystery-cult parallels hard, while more recent work stresses the thoroughly Jewish and scriptural roots of his thought [Disputed: the degree of mystery-religion influence on Pauline categories (e.g., dying-and-rising, mystery, initiation) was urged by the older Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (Bousset, Reitzenstein) but is now widely judged overstated, most scholars deriving Paul’s key categories from Scripture and apocalyptic Judaism (Hengel 1991; Sanders 1977)]. What is clear is that into a world hungry for salvation, communion with God, and a hope beyond death, Paul preached the crucified and risen Christ — and that the very categories the age longed for were the ones his gospel claimed to fulfill (1 Cor. 1:22–24).

A World Made Ready

The Fathers read this convergence — diaspora, empire, and Greek culture meeting in one prepared moment — as providential, the “fullness of the time” of Galatians 4:4. The roads, the peace, the common tongue, and the synagogue networks were, in the patristic reading, the outward arrangement of a providence ordering all things toward the gospel (Chrysostom, Homilies on Galatians 4, on Gal. 4:4; trans. NPNF I/13). The world of Paul, in short, was a world humanly and providentially fitted for the mission that would carry the name of Christ from Jerusalem to Rome (see The Journeys).

References

The Holy Bible, King James Version. The Acts of the Apostles; the Epistles to the Romans, First Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on Galatians and Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vols. 11, 13.
Hengel, Martin. The Pre-Christian Paul. Trans. John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1991.
Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977.