The First Reading for the fifth Sunday of Easter is Acts 9:26-31. Luke is often thought to give an ideal, or idealistic, picture of the earliest Church, and perhaps this is so, though elements of friction, disputation and consternation amongst the earliest Christians can be found throughout the Acts of the Apostles. It might be better to say that Luke stays “on message” – in the parlance of politicians and advertising executives – and accentuates the positive. This can be an easy sell when the accent falls on the power of the Holy Spirit, as it does in Acts, the prime example being the Holy Spirit falling on the Church at Pentecost.

Now, I know that Luke probably became a Christian long after Saul, who is also known as Paul, but let’s try the following as a thought experiment. You can hear the voices in the gathered Christian crowd a few years after Pentecost, prodding Luke as he speaks of the Holy Spirit, shouting, “And this Holy Spirit, how powerful is it?” Imagine, if you will, the voice of Luke, strangely and anachronistically reminiscent of Johnny Carson, starting to speak, “The Holy Spirit is so powerful…” – “How powerful is it?” – “so powerful that Saul the persecutor became a Christian…” An uneasy silence descends. Not funny. No sense of awe or wonder falls on the crowd, just awkwardness. A whisper, “I heard Luke was good, but this is embarrassing.” And then in walks Saul.

He wants to join the disciples; they do not want him. Why? “They were all afraid of him, not believing he was a disciple.” Fear is like that, and there are good reasons for our fears some times. Jesus asks us to be as “wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). It was probably wise for the disciples to have some reticence when Paul first approached – what game was he playing? – but when Barnabas vouched for him, told of Paul’s conversion and of how he had boldly spoken on behalf of Christ in Damascus, the greater part of wisdom won the day. Paul was accepted as a believer. He then does his “Paul thing” – which I believe is a technical theological term, but I might be mistaken – and that is get in people’s faces. The group with whom he debates, “the Hellenists,” must be different than the Christian Hellenists we meet in Acts 6:1, but similar to the group described in 11:20. The term must in chapters 9 and 11 denote Greek-speaking Jews. Paul riles them up, and when his life becomes endangered (“they tried to kill him”) Paul is spirited out of town by his fellow believers to preach another day.

Paul is not a neutral figure. The fear the early Christians in Jerusalem have of him was certainly due to his bold and zealous persecution of the earliest Christians, including the death of Stephen.  It must have been difficult to welcome him as a brother, even after he had repented and converted, even after Barnabas had vouched for him. Pain must have lingered, wounds re-opened as images of Stephen’s martyrdom came back to them, or as stories of Saul hunting down Christians were told. Others might have wondered about his approach to evangelization, even after being convinced of his bona fides, as he was hustled out of Jerusalem on the sly. Yet, there could be no doubt of his zeal for Jesus Christ.

Paul challenges us today, especially at a time in the United States when it seems that political divisions for some take precedence over our common faith. We fear “them”. We have a hard time believing some of them are really disciples. We do not like the way they evangelize. We do not like them. Perhaps Luke is an idealistic historian, but if it is it is because he goes to the source of the Church’s power and unity: the Holy Spirit. “The church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Sa

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.