One night in jail? Welcome to Dreamland

“And when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they caught Paul and Silas, and drew them into the marketplace unto the rulers, And brought them to the magistrates, saying,

These men, being Jews, do exceedingly trouble our city, And teach customs, which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe, being Romans.

And the multitude rose up together against them: and the magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them. And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailor to keep them safely.”

– Acts 16.19-23

 

The idea that Roman magistrates, high ranking soldiers at that, would follow the practice of Jewish high priests and tear their own clothes on hearing blasphemy, is farcical in the extreme. But then the whole “biography” of Paul in Acts is a palpable fiction. The trial in Philippi cannot itself be countenanced as an historical event because it is predicated on the unreasonable claim that the apostle and his acolytes could really have enraged the “multitude” and “troubled” the city. As ever, the Christian story-tellers love to aggrandize the comings and goings of their super heroes.

Acts reports that the magistrates accept without question the accusers’ statement and order immediate scourging. Paul and Silas (but not Timotheus and Luke?) submit to the beating, are imprisoned and only then, after a night in the stocks, claim their rights as “Roman citizens”? The author of the yarn knows full well that the story would collapse if his hero had made the claim up front.

The “Christ-like” trial, scourging and imprisonment provide the setting for a “mighty deliverance” whereby midnight prayer brings on an earthquake so localized that it merely opens doors and unfastens fetters. And unlike Peter, freed by an angel from a Jerusalem gaol, who speedily makes good his escape, Paul hangs around to baptize a convert. Such stoicism!

• How did Paul know that the gaoler had drawn his sword and was about to kill himself when he and the gaoler couldn’t see each other?

• Why would the gaoler (converted by obvious magic) have credited Paul’s prayer for the earthquake anyway – he was asleep at the time?!

• Would the manifestly unsympathetic magistrates really have reacted to a micro-tremor by releasing a couple of Jewish prisoners?

The story contrives to have Paul simultaneously in the house of the repentant gaoler (having “meat” and rejoicing) and petulantly refusing to leave the gaol until asked to leave personally by the city magistrates. Even then, Paul dallies at the house of Lydia until he’s good and ready. The motif is clear: apostolic authority is superior to civic authority. The whole tale is a pastiche of unreality.

Paul deigns to leave Philippi after “abiding certain days”. And left behind in the city – but leaving not a trace on the historical landscape – was his purported biographer, “Doctor” Luke.

Cool Hand Luke?

” If Luke travelled with Paul on the journeys covered in the ‘we passages’ he would have spent long hours talking to him on the roads and the high seas, and he should have known his character and his life story very well indeed; that would make it even more difficult to explain the contradictions between the other parts of the Acts and Paul’s letters, and the complete absence of any reference to the letters in the Acts.”

– Stourton, In the Footsteps of St Paul, p93.

Apologists sometimes suggest – without a shred of evidence – that the apostle Luke, purported author of Acts (and thus the “biographer” of Paul), settled in Philippi, thus explaining away the curious switches between “we” and “they” in the narrative of Acts. For unexplained reasons Luke was supposedly in Troas when Paul came into town.

” They passing by Mysia came down to Troas … after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia … Therefore loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothracia, and the next day to Neapolis.”

– Acts 16.8,11.

Luke, it seems has joined, the great mission. But maybe not. When the “soothsayer” incident gets Paul and Silas beaten and thrown into jail, Luke (and presumably Timothy) remain fancy free. Paul and Silas soon leave town and “they”, not “we”, continue the pioneering journey.

So Luke “stays on” at Philippi?

The return to “we” narration in Acts 20/21 and again in 27/28 suggests that Luke rejoins Paul on the return leg of the apostle’s third missionary journey, having missed all of Paul’s adventures in Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth.

But just what does “Luke” have to show for his four years in Philippi? Absolutely nothing. Paul’s “one night in prison” basks in eternal fame and yet “Dr” Luke, supposedly author of both a gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, reports not a word. The fate of Luke is completely unknown (“hanged on an olive tree” and “dying naturally and unwed at 84” are both Church “traditions”).

Oh well. Perhaps Luke just put his feet up for a while and let that egocentric tentmaker from Tarsus earn his money.

Paul’s Church at Philippi?

There is neither archaeological nor literary evidence for the foundation of a Christian community at Philippi by an apostle called Paul. But there is evidence for the manufacture of martyr cult of Paul at Philippi beginning in the 4th century, that is, after the Christian religion entered the corridors of power. Funerary inscriptions indicate the presence of Christians in the city in the 3rd century but how “orthodox” they may have been is impossible to establish.

If we can believe Church “tradition” as it relates to Polycarp, a bishop at Smyrna – eighty-six years in the service of Christ and then martyrdom – in the latter half of the 2nd century the venerable bishop wrote a two-thousand word epistle to the Church of God at Philippi. Evidently, the early church here, as elsewhere, was rent by discord and factionalism. Repeatedly, Polycarp calls for “fortitude” and “endurance“. He berates “vapid discourses and sophistry of the vulgar“, warns against “love of money” and condemns “fornication, perversion and sodomy“. Clearly, the early Church had already acquired all the characteristics it would manifest in later centuries.

Aside from the sexual and financial malpractice of the Philippians, “orthodoxy” clearly had a problem with doctrinal variety – its cardinal dogmas were being challenged:

“To deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is to be Antichrist.
To contradict the evidence of the Cross is to be of the Devil.
And to pervert the Lord’s words is to suit our own wishes, by asserting that there are no such things as Resurrection or Judgement, is to be first-begotten of Satan.
So let us have no more of this nonsense from the gutter , and these lying doctrines, and turn again to the Word originally delivered to us.”

– Epistle to the Colony of God’s Church at Philippi, 7 (Maxwell Staniforth translation, Penguin Classics)

Polycarp gives Paul a passing mention but of “Luke” he has not a word. He does, however (9.2) endorse the ridiculous “celebrity tour” of Ignatius, taking in the sights of Philippi on his way to Rome and an insistent martyrdom.

Paul writes a letter?

Supposedly, a century before Polycarp, around the year 60 AD, Paul himself wrote to the Philippians. Paul’s epistle is one of the so-called “prison letters” (together with Philemon, Colossians and Ephesians), traditionally ascribed to Paul in captivity – though without any consensus as to where or when that captivity might have been. Apparently, Paul has the services of his servant Timotheus, a truly curious “imprisonment”. Whilst the letter speaks of being a “prisoner in Jesus Christ” it also anticipates “coming shortly” to see the Philippians (1.27; 2.24), which hardly suggests impending doom:

“I trust in the Lord Jesus to send Timotheus shortly unto you … I trust in the Lord that I also myself shall come shortly.”

Does the letter really belong in the 1st rather than the 2nd century? In common with several other Pauline epistles the letter appears to be a composite of two or three original documents, itself evidence of a later hand at work. A “creedal hymn” in verses 2.6-11 (the so-called Carmen Christi) glorifying “Christ Jesus as God” and giving him “a name which is above every name” certainly indicates an inclusion from another source – and the most likely source, given the esoteric language, is early Gnosticism.

“Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count it robbery to become equal with God … who took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men … in fashion as a man.”

The Docetists of the 2nd century would not have had much difficulty with this “appearing to be a man” formula!

The fact that the letter is addressed to “all the saints … bishops and deacons” hardly suggests the embryonic community of a new church.

The letter has no obvious motive or occasion. In part it expresses thanks to the Philippians for support, both material (“fruit“) and for the loan of Epaphroditus who “ministered” to Paul’s wants and had been sick “nigh unto death, not regarding his life, to supply your lack of service toward me” (2.30). Yet elsewhere (2 Corinthians 8.2) Paul records the “deep poverty” of the Macedonians. Apparently, the Philippians gave Paul money when no one else was forthcoming (and this support is seemingly confirmed by the reference in 2 Corinthians 11.9 to “that which was lacking to me the brethren which came from Macedonia supplied.“

But “giving and receiving” aside, Paul, here is also the target of a surprising degree of enmity from the same Philippians.

“Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife … Christ of contention, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds.” – 1.15,16.

Why would Paul be facing such hostility at this early stage? In his sights, of course, are the Jews or “Judaizers” and in the epistle Paul takes the opportunity to brag of his own Jewish ancestry – “Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee.” Such fulsome “self-disclosure” might well betray the over-compensation of the forger as much any foil for the Jews. Paul rejects his Jewish credentials, warning of “Jewish dogs”, and calling Judaism “dung”:

“Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision … But what things were gain to me … and do count them but dung.” – 3.2,8.

But why would Paul need to issue such a warning to a Latin city and to a congregation made up of non-Jews? Was it not after, rather than before, the Jewish wars that Jews were dispersed in any numbers across the eastern Mediterranean – or are we to suppose that numerous Jewish proselytizers followed Paul’s unlikely path to Philippi – all of them disdaining a hundred more accessible towns?

A Christian city

“The events recorded in the Gospels had little or no immediate or ostensible influence upon history … Historically, the Church came into existence in a world ostensibly quite unchanged by the events in which the Kingdom of God came … The Church had emerged and yet there was scarcely a ripple on the surface of the great stream of history in the Graeco-Roman world.”

– C. H. Dodd, Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge (History and the Gospel, 1938, p102,3)

 

Beginning in the 4th century, and after Constantine’s seizure of power, all the large public buildings at Philippi were replaced by churches. In the centre of town stood a 2nd century AD Hellenistic heroon (hero’s shrine), built in memory of an initiate of the Samothracian mysteries. It was replaced by the earliest of several churches, an octagonal structure dedicated to St Paul. Nearby, a whole city block was taken up with the bishop’s residence, including his own winery. Another small church, dating from the late 4th century, was built within a mixed pagan/Christian graveyard to the east of the city.

In the 5th century, a large basilica was built over the proscribed pagan sanctuary on the north side of Philippi. It was brought down by an earthquake shortly after completion and was never rebuilt. In the following century, in the southern quarter, the Christians demolished the 80 metre palaestra (the wrestling/athletics court) and robbed-out the stones to build another basilica. This poorly designed structure collapsed before it could be dedicated! Four hundred years later its ruins were re-purposed as a less ambitious church, the remnants of which can be seen today.

In the Christian city, the bathhouse complexes were converted to workshops which quickly went out of use. The communal latrine adjacent to the palaestra (seating for 42!) – offensive to Christian sensibilities – disappeared under the courtyard of the basilica. The last attempt to strengthen the city walls was made by Justinian in response to attacks by the Goths. From the 7th century onward the population began to abandon the town, many for the relative safety of villages hidden in the mountains. In the later Byzantine period Philippi was simply a fortress and by the 15th century, a ruin.

An Origins Myth

The incredulous conversions made by the apostle Paul in Philippi – the Asian “Lydia” (and her household!) and his overnight gaoler (and his household!) – underscore the entirely fictional nature of the supposed establishment of a foundational church by the apostle in this most unpromising of towns.

The curious anticipations of divine word to be found in prosaic literature, the inane contrivances of plot found in the book of Acts, the palpable falsity of so-called epistles to Philippi, the martial character of this Latin city, the invisibility of the “resident evangelist” Luke – all point towards a single conclusion: Paul’s escapade and daring-do in Philippi is nothing other than pious fabrication.

That a church was eventually established in the city no later than the 4th century is not in doubt. But its existence is most certainly the result of two processes: official patronage of the Christ cult which followed the triumph of Constantine; and the ernest desire to give physical form to an heroic “origins” tale already celebrated in a religious fable.