Paul Wasn’t There

Three scenes from the spring of the year 30 and the years that followed

The room smelled of unwashed wool and old bread.

Fifty days. The same fifty bodies in the same upper room. The bread broken at every meal, the wine watered to make it last, the lamp lit at sundown and left burning through the night because nobody could stand the dark. Mary the mother sat in her corner, her lips moving in a prayer no one could hear. Peter sat against the wall, watching the lamp.

The wind came before the light did.

A gust through the window that had no wind outside. The lamp guttered, then steadied, then guttered again. The flame appeared above each of them. Above Peter, above John, above Mary in the corner, above Mary Magdalene next to her, above Salome, Joanna, Susanna, above the eleven and the women and the brothers. The flame did not burn. The room did not change temperature.

Peter’s hands were shaking.

He stood up. He walked to the door. He walked down the stairs. The stairs creaked on the third step. They had always creaked on the third step.

He walked across the courtyard. The Pentecost pilgrims were in the temple court half a stone’s throw away, drunk on the new wine of the festival at nine in the morning, jeering at the crowd of disciples spilling out into the street.

Peter raised his voice over them.

His voice cracked on the first sentence.

He quoted Joel. He quoted David. He said, you crucified him.

The crowd went quiet.

He said, and God raised him from the dead.

He said, repent and be baptized.

By the late afternoon they had baptized three thousand in the pools below the temple. Peter’s hands had stopped shaking. He walked back across the courtyard, up the creaking stairs, into the upper room.

Mary’s lips were still moving. The bread on the table had been broken while he was gone. John handed him a cup of wine.

Peter sat down and said nothing.

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The desert south of Damascus is mostly rock and the rock holds the heat.

Saul of Tarsus walked into it with one cloak, three scrolls, and a small leather purse. He had been a Pharisee. He knew how to live on bread and water and the right hours of prayer. The voice on the road had said, why are you persecuting me. He could still hear it.

He had a choice.

North to Jerusalem, three days’ walk, where the eleven men who had known the teacher lived in a house with an upper room. Where Mary the mother sat in her corner with her lips moving. Where Peter, who had walked with the teacher for three years, could tell him what the teacher had taught.

Or south into the desert. Alone. With three scrolls and the voice.

He went south.

The first month he did not write anything. He prayed. He read Isaiah. He read the Psalms. He read the Law. He read them through the lens of the voice. He read them through the lens of the light that had knocked him from his horse. He read them through the lens of his own training under Gamaliel.

By the second month he had begun to see a pattern. The pattern was not in the gospels, because the gospels had not been written yet. The pattern was in the prophets and the Law and the voice, working together. The pattern was that the teacher was the sacrifice the temple had been pointing at for two thousand years. The pattern was that the cross was the altar. The pattern was that the blood was the atonement.

The pattern was brilliant.

It was also a pattern about a man Saul had never met.

On the night he understood the full shape of it, he was sitting outside a cave with the moon up. He had a stick in his hand. He drew the shape in the dust. A vertical line. A horizontal line. A circle around them both. He looked at what he had drawn for a long time.

Then he scratched it out and stood up and went into the cave to sleep.

Around the year 95, in a small house in Ephesus, a widow named Tryphaena was reading a letter that had been copied and recopied through the network of churches scattered across the eastern empire.

The letter was Paul’s. First Corinthians.

She had been a leader in her congregation for a decade. Her husband had died eight years ago. She had organized the bread distribution, mediated disputes between members, taught the new believers, and led the prayer meetings on the Lord’s Day. The bishop of the congregation was a man named Onesiphorus who relied on her.

She had reached the passage in chapter fourteen.

Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience.

She read the line three times.

Tryphaena had heard the teacher’s name spoken her whole adult life. She had heard the stories of Mary Magdalene running through the streets of Jerusalem on Easter morning. She had heard about the women who walked with the teacher from Galilee, who funded his ministry, who stood at the foot of the cross when the men ran.

She had heard about the woman at the well who he had revealed his messianic identity to first. She had heard about Mary of Bethany who chose to sit at his feet and was praised for it.

She set the letter down.

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The next morning she went to Onesiphorus and asked what to do.

Onesiphorus held the letter in his hands. He read the line. He read it again. He looked at Tryphaena, who had baptized his own daughter the previous spring.

He said, the apostle Paul is the apostle Paul.

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The upper room is still in Jerusalem. The stairs still creak on the third step. The bread is still broken on the table.

The teaching Peter did not preach that day is still in the room. The kingdom-within teaching. The prodigal son. The woman at the well. The washing of feet.

Anyone can climb the stairs.

<3EKO

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Hand it to the person sitting next to you at church this Sunday.

I love you.

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