Tulia dose ikuingie vizuri kama uko chumbani Kwa Askofu wako
And on to Rome?
As it happens, the transportation of the apostle to the imperial city – complete with
shipwreck and snake miracle – is
NOT an event confirmed by Paul's own letters.
The so-called "prison letters" –
Philippians, Philemon, Colossians and Ephesians – though traditionally
ascribed to Paul in his Roman captivity – actually say nothing beyond the words "prisoner in Jesus Christ" and "bonds" to endorse that claim. Yet, the Pauline lexicon is redolent with words of servitude, suffering and "imprisonment", all of which relate to his
service to Christ, not to a literal state of affairs.
"Rome" is
nowhere mentioned in any of the prison letters. A whole edifice of fraud rests on the single reference to "Caesar's household" of Philippians 4.22, and a curious use of "palace" in Philippians 1.13:
"My bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace, and in all other places."
We might reasonably suppose that a "victim of Nero's persecution" might have recorded
some comment on the
Great Fire of Rome which provoked the official hostility,
some comment on the "
witchhunt of the Christians" which supposedly followed the disaster,
some comment on the
lurid treatment later scribblers say was meted out to his fellow Christians, some pithy words of consolation for
martyrs that surely had so recently gone before him. But no, not a word.
Our heroic Paul is
preoccupied with himself and his own fate. He finds time to brag of his Hebrew ancestry (Philippians 3.5) –
at a time like this? He actually anticipates "coming to see" the Philippians (1.27; 2.24); he speaks of
sending Timotheus ("fellow servant of Jesus Christ") and confirms that he has reluctantly "supposed it necessary" to release his other skivvy,
Epaphroditus, who made himself very ill servicing Paul's needs!:
"Because for the work of Christ he was nigh unto death, not regarding his life, to supply your lack of service toward me." – Philippians 2.30.
Damning the missive as late and fake is the opening salutation to the “
bishops and deacons” (
Philippians 1.1), an anachronism later corrected with a whole raft of less embarassing alternatives (overseers, presbyters, elders, etc.). Yet the Greek is clear:
episkopoi and
diakonoi.
In the brief 25 verses of
Philemon, Paul, "a prisoner of Jesus Christ" (
NOT of Caesar Nero!) writes to "fellow labourer" Philemon and "fellow soldier" Archippus.
Should we suppose the apostle is also literally a labourer and a soldier?! Yet by verse 9, Philemon has also become a "prisoner of Christ" and Paul tells his "fellow prisoner" to put any debts of runaway slave Onesimus "on his own account"! Paul then gives instructions for a lodging to be prepared for his own use – quite an extraordinary request for a prisoner facing martyrdom!
Colossians similarly is ludicrous understood as a "prison letter". Again, the apostle speaks of sending one of his sidekicks – this time it's Tychicus – to learn of affairs at Colosse. Another of the brothers, Aristarchus, is called both "fellow prisoner" (4.10) and "fellow worker" (4.11). The only reference to the writer's location is verse 4.9.
"They shall make known unto you
all things which are done here."
But where is
here? Paul, it seems, has learned of a church not of his own foundation. He is anxious to impose his own theology and attacks "errors", almost the entire content of the letter. Verse 4.9 refers to "correct practice" in Christ's ministry –
and certainly not to how things are run in a Roman prison!
But not only is the
where in doubt but also the
when. Detering draws our attention to the Elchasai of the 2nd century whose "errors" are precisely those attacked by a "first century Paul":
"
So far, the exegetes’ attempts at identifying the heretics in the Epistle to the Colossians have failed because they started from the unprovable assumption, that the letter had originated in the second half of the 1st century. A better approach would take as its starting-point the parallels found in 2nd century history of religion, and proceed from there in order to finally come to a dating of that letter. A great many parallels between the Colossian heresy and the Jewish-Christian sect of Elchasai that came up in 2nd century CE clearly show that those groups are identical and therefore it’s one and the same faction we have to deal with here. Not only is the synthesis of circumcision and στοιχεῖα (the elementals) worship, of which there isn’t any analogy elsewhere in the history of religion, a feature of both heresies; one can moreover demonstrate it to be probable that Col. 2:18 presupposes knowledge of the Book of Elchasai." –
Dr. Hermann Detering, translated by Frans-Joris Fabri
The final "prison letter",
Ephesians, is the least convincing. It is a veritable comedy of errors. Paul, we are led to believe by
Acts, spent at least three years with the brethren in Ephesus. Yet
Ephesians is the most impersonal of letters, devoid of any human touch or individual greeting. The writer has the "detachment" found in Colossians: "After
I heard of your faith ...I cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers" (1.15,16). Indeed, whole chunks of
Ephesians are copied from
Colossians, leading scholars to speculate
Ephesians is a pastiche of earlier letters and is not really the work of Paul at all.
But then, are any of the letters the work of Paul? Other scholars suggest
Ephesians is a re-labelled letter to the Laodiceans, that perhaps it was sent from Caesarea, or even from Ephesus itself. Whatever else,
Ephesians gives NO support to the notion that Paul was ever in Rome.
Indeed, the "
Epistle to the Romans" gives the game away. Supposedly
Romans was written in Corinth about the year 60 by a Paul who was
anticipating his first visit to Rome,
not a prisoner in chains. In chapter 16, the apostle greets by name and personal salutation some
27 individuals in the city he has never visited! The one person we might expect him to address, St Peter, first "Bishop of Rome", is NOT among them! What has been changed is not the salutations
but the address:
Romans makes better sense understood as originally an
epistle to the Corinthians, warning the brethren of "greedy men deceiving the simple minded".
Now who could they be, one wonders?
Raskin observes, Paul's commendation of an assistant (16.1): "
Phebe our sister, a servant of the church at Cenchrea" (a port near Corinth) makes
no sense to the church at Rome and
perfect senseto the church at Corinth
(Raskin, p468).
Source?
As for Rome, we do have a clue to the source of the "Pauline voyage": our old friend and cornucopia of the Christian fraudsters,
Josephus. And if we need a template for "martyrdom in Rome" in the mid-60s we need look no further than the betrayed conspiracy to assassinate Nero in the year 65 of
Gaius Calpurnius Piso. The "martyrs" to liberty on that occasion included the philosopher Seneca, the poet Lucan and
"... line after line of chained men dragged to their destination at the gates of Nero's Gardens ... Executions now abounded in the city." (Tacitus Annals 15).
Is this reference to condemned men at Nero's garden gate the seed for the bogus tale now found in Tacitus book 15 of "
torched Christian martyrs"?
When Nero botched his own suicide a few years later, his former slave completed the job. The freedman's name is shared by Paul's supposed playmate from Philippi –
Epaphroditus.