Reflections on "Paul"

The only recognizably Roman Catholic member of the clergy I could identify was a nun sitting in the front row. We (and a capacity audience) were watching the North American Premier of Howard Brenton’s “Paul” at the Gamm Theatre. When the play was over, she was the first person to stand and applaud. I turned to my wife, tapped her on the shoulder, pointed to the nun with my chin and asked “Did she see the same play we did?” It’s hard to imagine.

Some background: According to “The Acts of the Apostles” the fifth book of the New Testament, those who knew and followed Jesus were still Jews, but Jews who thought the Messiah had come in the person of Yeshua (Aramaic for Joshua). They still obeyed the old laws but because they shunned rabbinic authority and were baptized, they were shunned and persecuted. The principal persecutor was Saul of Tarsus who, hearing that there were Jewish followers of Yeshua in Damascus determined to go there to stamp out the community. On the way, he was blinded by a light and heard a voice saying “Why do you persecute me?” and realizing that only the voice of Yeshua would say such a thing—though he was dead—he converted to the new faith. And to him it was a new faith. Unlike Jesus’ old colleagues who thought of themselves as Jews, Paul (the name he adopted upon having his miraculous experience on the road to Damascus) creates a new religion, one where circumcision is not required, nor eating of kosher meat etc., the better to attract gentiles (Greeks) to the new faith.

Now, all of that is a given. The play, though, assumes facts not generally found in the Christian texts—that Jesus and Mary Magdelna, a prostitute, were married, that Jesus did not die on the cross, so was not resurrected but kept in hiding by Peter and James (Jesus’ brother—another thing not generally accepted by Christians) that Joseph and Mary were wealthy purveyors of religious objects in Nazareth, that Peter and James sent Paul out to convert the gentiles assuming that he’d be ignored—or stoned, that they brought Yeshua with them to Saul’s encampment and had him talk to Saul, a well meaning hoax that Saul believed in its entirety. The depiction of Nero is so off the wall that I won’t even mention it other than to say that if you missed Kelby T. Akin as the despotic emperor you missed something rare.

So, we are there the night before Paul’s execution is scheduled. He’s chained, chanting almost as if in a self-induced trance “Christ is risen” over and over and over again. He is a man of faith. But then Peter (played by Gamm veteran Jim O'Brien) is brought into the prison and as the play unfolds he reveals to Paul all the deceptions. Jesus was not God, but an inspiring man. This Paul the believer refuses to believe, that he has been deceived, that his life’s work is based on someone else’s artifice. Peter, who knows the truth ultimately joins in with him intoning, imploring, Jesus the risen God, to help them. If he’s going to die, he may as well die for a cause—whether he believes it or not.

So, why was that nun applauding? I don’t know, but I suppose she does.

A good piece of theater ought to leave us with questions—all the best literature does. Here the question is not so much was Jesus God (the answer is “No”) but the epistemological question, how do we know that the things we know (and are the things we know truly true)?

And we Jews? We enter the Passover season in a couple of days. Our tables will groan under the weight of food, we’ll be a little drunk after four cups of wine, we’ll open the door to allow Elijah the prophet to come join us (he hasn’t yet, but maybe this year) we sing songs and prayers, we ask questions to which we already know the answers, but do we? Were our ancestors slaves in Egypt, rescued by God through his servant Moses? Were there all those plagues? Or miracles? It hardly matters. If one wants to believe, there’s no harm; if one sees the story simply as a metaphor for the potential of the oppressed to rise and liberate themselves, so be it. To my uncertain knowledge there is no historical evidence that the story of the Exodus is true, but it’s a wonderful story nevertheless. If nothing else it gives us the opportunity to clean behind those corners we never normally get to, to be with friends and family to sing and rejoice. Dayenu.