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A final missing step?
16th June, 2009 - Posted by Archbishop Mark -
One of the most difficult things to know about St Paul is whether or not he ever got to Spain. We know from the Letter to the Romans that he definitely had it in mind, and it would have fitted well with his sense of himself as one sent to preach the Gospel where others hadn’t gone. By the standards of the time, Spain was quite accessible - only seven days sailing from Ostia, the port of Rome.
But for other reasons it would have been a very daunting prospect for Paul, unlike anything he’d tackled before. For one thing, almost no-one there spoke Greek. Latin (of which Paul must have had some knowledge) would have been the language of officialdom, given that Iberia was the most highly Romanised of all the provinces of the Empire. But most of the people would have spoken local languages of which Paul would have known nothing. Nor was there the Jewish network which was so important for the Pauline mission in the Eastern Mediterranean. Part of what I mean by the Jewish network were those called “God- fearers”, Gentiles who inhabited the margin of syngogue life and from whom some of Paul’s most important converts came. Spain would have meant for Paul a whole new missionary strategy. He may well have hoped that the Church in Rome would have helped him in this and that the Roman Christians could even in a sense have “owned” the Western mission. But that, it seems, never happened.
It has been suggested - and it’s certainly possible - that Paul did in fact make it to Spain. The city of Tarragona preserves a folk memory of his visit there, and such memories are not necessarily to be dismissed out of hand. Clement of Rome, writing at the end of the first century, also reports a Pauline visit to Spain. A possible scenario is that after his first imprisonment in Rome - two years according to the end of the Acts - Paul was released and then headed west for missionary work, as he had planned to do. If he did get to Spain, it would seem that his mission there was no great success - given that the criterion for success in the Pauline mission was always the founding and nurturing of a local community. We have no evidence of that in Spain, at least as a result of a Pauline mission.
Then he may have returned to Rome where he was again arrested and finally executed in the last violent years of Nero’s reign, possibly in 67AD. In the end, it’s impossible to know, but a mission to Spain would have fitted well with Paul’s own understanding that he was entrusted with the preaching of the Gospel “to the ends of the earth”, as the prophet Isaiah has it. And for Paul and his contemporaries, Spain was quite literally the end of the earth.
Tags: Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, footsteps of saint paul, pilgrimage, st paul
Posted on: June 16, 2009
Filed under: Archbishop Mark's teachings
1 Comment
Lizzie Moore
June 18th, 2009 at 6:06 am
surely he would have? - he was right out there adventurous, as evidenced by all the shocking things he went through on other journeys. I’m for St Paul in Spain!
Lizzie in Bendigo.
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