Travel and Religion in Antiquity

VIII: “Danger in the wilderness, danger at sea”: Paul and the Perils of Travel

VIII “Danger in the wilderness, danger at sea”: Paul and the Perils of Travel Ryan S.Schellenberg UNIVERSITY OF ST. MICHAEL’S COLLEGE, TORONTO The apostle Paul is among the most famous of ancient travellers. I first knew the map of the ancient Mediterranean as a backdrop on which to trace Paul’s three daring missionary journeys. I am sure my experience was not unusual. So it is all the more surprising to note how superficially New Testament scholarship has sought to understand Paul’s travels. The hagiographic tendencies of an earlier era may now be met with some skepticism , but no alternative portrayal of Paul the traveller has been proposed. Moreover, anachronistic presuppositions about the motivations behind and exigencies of Paul’s peripatetic lifestyle continue to shape the contemporary picture of Paul.Above all, previous attempts to describe Paul’s travels have not sufficiently accounted for the precariousness of his position . This is due, in large part, to continuing dependence on the portrait of Paul provided in the Book of Acts. In Acts, travel is a narrative trope that 141 142 P RO M OT I N G A D E I T Y O R WAY O F L I F E allows Luke to emphasize the superior character of his hero: Paul faces hardship with courage and calmly overcomes the dangers of road and sea. Paul’s own letters, however, paint a very different picture. His autobiographical comments suggest that his journeys were fraught with peril and that he did not always emerge unscathed. Moreover, unlike the purposeful travel portrayed in Acts, Paul’s own discussions of his travel plans are characterized above all by uncertainty and contingency. Clearly it will be impossible to exhaust the topic of Paul’s travels in this chapter. My intent is simply to demonstrate that this largely neglected biographical issue poses significant challenges to current portraits of Paul and the so-called Pauline mission. I will begin by briefly surveying descriptions of Paul as traveller from the last hundred years or so of scholarship . This discussion will highlight the distorting influence of Acts and demonstrate that the task of understanding Paul’s travels on the basis of his own writings remains almost completely untried. I will then survey significant references and allusions to travel in the Pauline corpus. Notably, these references to travel occur primarily in contexts that emphasize the dangers and hardships involved in ancient travel and that highlight the uncertainty of Paul’s “itinerary.” Whereas in Acts, Paul’s travel is presented as geographic mastery and contributes to Luke’s characterization of a self-assured hero, in Paul’s writings reference to travel functions as an indicator of hardship, uncertainty, and precariousness. The Legacy of the Acts of the Apostles The Book of Acts is packed with references to Paul’s journeys. Luke’s hero covers vast distances, both by land and by sea. So it is surprising to note thatActs contains only one anecdote wherein we actually see Paul on the road– –the well-known story of Paul’s interrupted trip to Damascus (9:3–8) –– and just one episode that takes place at sea –– the dramatic account of the shipwreck in Acts 27.1 Paul is always leaving cities and arriving in them –– often in the same verse. The miles of travel this requires are never narrated. The travel narrative in Luke’s gospel notoriously features Jesus always on the road but never getting anywhere; in Acts, Paul travels mile after mile but is never actually on the road. As Richard Pervo (1987: 54–57) has seen, this lacuna helps us appreciate Luke’s utilization of travel as a narrative trope. Harland’s introduction and Scott’s chapter in this volume highlight the role of travelling holy men in Greco-Roman literature: their mastery of foreign lands and people typically functioned as an attestation of their superior character and often “ DA N G E R I N T H E W I L D E R N E S S ” / S C H E L L E N B E R G 143 of their religious authority.2 John Elsner has noted that Paul’s travels in Acts function much like those of Philostratus’ Apollonius: “Travel –– including visits to the cardinal centres of ancient religion, like Athens, as well as to the sites of the new Christian cult which he propagates– –establishes a hagiographic superiority...