Paul’s Missionary Activities Depict a Man on the Run.

Law & Crime Network's Prime Crime on YouTube

I’ve recently started getting into Law & Crime’s true crime content on YouTube, particularly Prime Crime, and what stuck out to me was the similarities I felt existed between what prosecutors were doing and what I had been doing as a storyteller with Paul of Tarsus.

Treating Paul more like a suspect or a defendant in a trial is the right approach because, whether it’s evidence in a court, events in history, threads of a conspiracy theory, what unites them is a story, a story that brings together all the details into a bigger picture.

Paul's Third Missionary Journey from the Jewish New Testament

I propose that the map of Paul’s Third Missionary Journey ends up looking like cellphone data and the use of geo-location and pings on cell towers, and I propose that it can be used to tell a more complete picture of what happened.

Paul’s missionary activities from the Book of Acts depicts a man on the run like Eric Cartman in Casa Bonita, and he even changed his course to avoid accountability to those, who sought to confront him, contradict him, or question him.

Paul’s Third Missionary Journey ends with Paul being confronted by his rivals in Jerusalem “from Asia” at the Temple according to the Book of Acts. I believe the author(s) disguised the relationship that these individuals “from Asia” had with Paul to help facilitate his acceptance and as a way of advocating for their own version of Paul. While one might try to claim that those “Jews from Asia” were not and, somehow, could not be disciples of Jesus, this claim is confounded by church legends about Christians in Asia turning on Paul.

Any claim that “the Jews from Asia” could not be a guised term for the disciples of Jesus in the Aegean is further complicated by the fact that the Book of Acts seems to suggest that Paul’s main adversaries in Ephesus were not Jews. The Book of Acts depicts “non-believing” Jews as defending Paul from the devotees to Artemis in an event that occurred just before Paul departed Ephesus for Macedonia (Acts 19.23-41).

Multiple sources suggest that Ephesus was the center for many of Paul’s rivals in the Jesus movement, and that Paul had tensions with the disciples of Jesus in Asia, who’d come to be viewed as heretics from the perspective of Pauline Christians. In a Pastoral Letter from the second century, it preserves or presents a tradition, which states, “All who are in Asia have turned against me” (2 Tim. 1.15). This tradition is what I among others propose that the Book of Revelation is referring to when it alleges that Jesus by revelation to John praises those in Ephesus for having “tested those who claim to be apostles but are not", having “found them to be false” (Rev. 2.2).

Paul’s first change of plans and his first course correction on his Third Missionary Journey occurs in Cenchreae where the Book of Acts claims that “the Jews” prevented Paul from departing to Judea from that location like Paul did in his previous missionary journey (Acts 20.3). However, in the authentic Pauline materials in 2 Corinthians written in the brief period of time after these events when Paul was in Macedonia, we do not find Paul attacking Jews as his primary rivals, but rather, 2 Corinthians is when Paul shifts his tone and focus to the subject of defending himself from rivals within the Jesus movement. I think that it is more likely that the term “Jews” is used in the episode in order to create a connection with and a continuity with the Paul’s attackers in the Temple.

While the theme of 1 Corinthians was communal living with it transitioning to the Collection, 2 Corinthians is very much about Paul defending himself from accusations from others within the Jesus movement. Because no one was questioning Paul’s authenticity and his Announcement, Paul was able to dismiss divisions and disagreements over important issues in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor. 3.1-9), and Paul does try to minimize the importance of the other leaders (1 Cor. 3.21-23). However, Paul had come to abandon this attitude by the time he arrived in Macedonia on his way back to Judea (2 Cor. 10.10-18, 11.3-23, 26, 12.11-19, 23.3), and the only thing that had changed prior to this was the attitude of Paul’s rivals within the Jesus movement toward Paul.

Paul started to act more suspicious as soon as others within the Jesus movement started to question him, and Paul began a process of avoiding any confrontation with others within the Jesus movement outside of his influence.

While Paul claimed that he intended to return to Corinth in the parts of 2 Corinthians written first in Chapters 10 through 13, however, by the time that his followers return with more money Paul changes his mind to not return to Corinth for a third visit. In addition to changing his mind about this, Paul devotes an ever-increasing word count in his epistle to defenses of himself from his rivals within the Jesus movement in Chapters 1 through 9 of 2 Corinthians.

It’s complicated but in the spirit of not spoiling my novelization — “The Mission: Part 2” — all I’ll say is that from Troas to Assos what Paul lacks is an alibi, and this is important for distancing Paul from any involvement with the death of a mysterious martyr mentioned in the Book of Revelation, Antipas.

Paul avoids the disciples of Jesus, who're questioning his credibility and threatening his acceptance as an apostle of Jesus as well as those, who might have held him accountable for even greater crimes in Pergamum and possibly in Patras. On his return journey, Paul avoids returning to Ephesus altogether, and he calls for only select people to have his own last supper in Miletus. According to the Book of Acts, the Ephesian Christians couldn't get Paul to stay on his first visit, but now they can’t get him to come. But why though? Why this suspicious change? Why avoid a community that he had spent at least three years building up?

The early Church legends about Paul being rejected in Asia and the Book of Revelation’s mentioning of testing false apostles clearly fill in these answers and questions concerning Paul’s motivations. It’s not that Paul didn’t have his side of the story because it’s preserved in the Book of Acts in its own way, but Paul's rational for needing to rush back to Jerusalem comes off as so simple, forced, and unnecessary. Paul’s alleged explanation for needing to meet in Miletus just doesn’t add up, and it doesn’t make sense to skip Ephesus because of a need to get to Judea in a hurry. It doesn’t seem to warrant Paul’s reaction on the surface, unless it’s just a cover for a deeper narrative that better explains all the different pieces.

Paul was a man on the run from his rivals within the Jesus movement. Paul's rivals finally caught up to him in Jerusalem where there the Book of Acts depicts Paul as being rescued by the Roman auxiliaries by order of the Tribune (Acts 23.10). Paul is then given a military escort to Caesarea of “two hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen, and two hundred spearmen” (Acts 23.23), where he remained under the guard of the Roman Procurator for several years before using his Roman citizenship to appeal to the Emperor.

Paul was not only a man on the run, but he escaped justice. Worse yet, Paul's tricked most of the world into seeing things from his perspective, but the picture Paul paints in his defense doesn’t accord with the evidence and neither does the picture his followers have painted — despite it being a defense.

Paul’s career as a Christian may have started off like John Edward, claiming to talk to dead people, but it ended more like Uri Gellar on the Tonight Show only if government authorities had rushed in to save Uri Gellar after being exposed as a fraud.

Instead of “Band on the Run”, Paul’s missionary activities depict a man on the run.