Paul And Jerusalem -- By: F. F. Bruce
Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 19:1 (NA 1968)
Article: Paul And Jerusalem
Author: F. F. Bruce
TynBul 19:1 (1968) p. 3
Paul And Jerusalem
New Zealand Tyndale Lecture, 1966
The purpose of this paper is not to examine the thesis so cogently defended of late by Professor W. C. van Unnik that Jerusalem, and not his native Tarsus, was the city of Paul’s boyhood and upbringing,1 but rather to consider the place which Jerusalem occupied in Paul’s apostolic strategy and in his understanding of the outworking of the divine programme in which he himself had a key part to play. Our evidence will be drawn mainly from Paul’s epistles, although the narrative of Acts will make a subsidiary contribution to it at certain points.
I
‘From Jerusalem’, says Paul towards the end of his Epistle to the Romans, ‘and as far as Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ’ (Rom. 15:19).
But for this brief reference, we should not have known that he had travelled so far west as Illyricum by the winter of AD 56-57. It should probably be inferred that his visit to Macedonia, passed over quickly in general terms in Acts 20:2 (‘when he had gone through these parts and had given them much encouragement’) was more extended than we might otherwise have though—that on this occasion he travelled farther west and north-west through the Balkan Peninsula than he had ever done before, reaching the frontier of Illyricum and perhaps even crossing into that province.2
The mention of Illyricum, then, presents us with an interesting question. But a question of another kind arises in the same sentence: why the reference to Jerusalem, as though that was the place where he began to preach the gospel? So far as we can judge from the autobiographical outline in Galatians 1:15ff.,
TynBul 19:1 (1968) p. 4
it was not. Paul does not say there in so many words that as soon as he received the call to proclaim the Son of God among the Gentiles he proceeded to obey it, before he went up to Jerusalem in the third year after his conversion; but this is implied both by his words ‘I did not confer with flesh and blood’ (Gal. 1:16) and perhaps also by his later statement that the Judaean churches, before ever they came to know him by sight, heard that their former persecutor was now proclaiming the faith which he once tried to destroy (Gal. 1:22ff.).3
For Paul, in fact, as for Luke, Jerusalem is the place where the gospe...
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