Paul and Jesus

Paul believed that his calling and his mission to the Gentiles were witnessed in the Hebrew Prophets, long before his birth (Romans 15:9–12). His was a destined role, backed up by the scriptures and his own visionary experiences. There are various passages in the Hebrew Bible that indicate a time when the Gentiles will turn to the God of Israel (Isaiah 11:10). Notice these lines in particular from one of Isaiah’s passages about a “Servant” of Yahweh who will serve as an agent to bring light to the Gentiles:

Listen to me you coastlands,

and hearken you Gentiles

After a long time it will happen.

From my mother’s womb he has called my name.

He has made my mouth a sharp sword,

and he has hidden me under the shadow of his hand;

He has made me a chosen shaft . . .

Behold I have given you for the covenant of a race,

for a light to the Gentiles,

That you should be for salvation

to the end of the earth. (Isaiah 49:1–6)

The personal way in which this passage addresses one who would specifically be designated from his mother’s womb to preach a message that would bring light to the Gentiles and result in the salvation of the earth likely drew Paul’s attention. He quotes the passage directly in 2 Corinthians 6:2 (Isaiah 49:1–2, 6) in justifying his special “ministry.” Apparently some at Corinth had questioned his authority, suggesting that he needed “letters of recommendation,” presumably from James or the Jerusalem apostles, to vouch for his claims (2 Corinthians 3:1–3). His response was that their Spirit-led lives are his “letters” and his sufferings and hardships are his commendation, including beatings, imprisonments, poverty, and hunger (2 Corinthians 6:4–9). This also fits well with Isaiah 49, where this servant who goes to the Gentiles is “deeply despised, abhorred by the Gentiles,” but nonetheless becomes a “covenant to the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49:7–8).⁹

What Paul expected was that his priestly service of turning thousands of Gentiles to the God of Israel would cause some of those Israelites who rejected Christ to be jealous:

Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead? (Romans 11:13–15)

According to Paul, God had purposely “hardened” the majority of the Jewish people so that they would temporarily reject Christ, so that he, Paul, could then take his gospel message to the Gentile world—thus reconciling the world to God and completing the work of Christ. According to Paul, this was God’s secret plan: “Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brethren: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25). This was Paul’s way of accounting for the fact that the Jewish people as a whole had not accepted Jesus as Messiah but were continuing to practice the Torah of Moses. He had come to believe that everything depended on him and thus he set his travel itinerary to travel west, to Rome and finally even to Spain—so that he could literally say that he had reached to the ends of the earth, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy (Romans 15:23–29).

Paul saw his suffering in the world as an extension of the redemptive suffering of Christ, who was God’s Suffering Servant to the Israelites. At one point, when pressed hard by some of his opponents in Galatia, he declares: “Henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear on my body the wounds [stigmata] of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). He saw his own beatings, lashings, and stoning as equivalent to the wounds Jesus suffered, and as ample testimony to his special apostolic role (2 Corinthians 11:23–25).