These may be irrelevant questions but they have always fascinated me. How did Paul know where to go to meet the apostles in Jerusalem? It’s not like there were street signs. Also did the Romans allow these people to meet openly after recently crucifying their leader or would they have met undercover? How did Paul, an educated Greek speaker and writer, converse with Peter an illiterate fisherman?
How did Paul know where to go to meet the apostles in Jerusalem?
I think it’s reasonable to suppose that, like in most world capitals, there would be a substantial ex-pat community. I lived in the Wash DC area for 25 years and there are people around there from everywhere. And they tend to congregate. There probably would have been a community of Galileans in some quarter of the city.
Also did the Romans allow these people to meet openly after recently crucifying their leader or would they have met undercover?
Well if we follow Paul he didn’t meet up with the apostles until three years after his conversion which was probably three to five years after the crucifixion. The heat had probably died down by then. Pilate would have already been recalled. But that early the Jesus community was likely still very small and under the radar.
How did Paul, an educated Greek speaker and writer, converse with Peter an illiterate fisherman?
Prof Ehrman doesn’t think so but I have a hard time thinking that an educated Jew like Paul didn’t know Aramaic. But anyway koine was the language of commerce so there were probably a lot of multilingual folks about to translate, even in the Jesus community.
One can only hope for the discovery of an as yet unknown letter from Paul describing this meeting in detail!
Stephen said
“Also did the Romans allow these people to meet openly after recently crucifying their leader or would they have met undercover?”
Well if we follow Paul he didn’t meet up with the apostles until three years after his conversion which was probably three to five years after the crucifixion. The heat had probably died down by then. Pilate would have already been recalled. But that early the Jesus community was likely still very small and under the radar.
…
Quite. The earliest Roman persecution that we seem to have strong evidence for is Nero blaming Christians for the burning of Rome, and the most severe persecutions seem to have been in multiple waves in the 3rd century when the much higher Christian share of the population of the Empire made it a more urgent matter for Emperors to decide whether to persecute them or tolerate them.
Doug891512 said
These may be irrelevant questions but they have always fascinated me. How did Paul know where to go to meet the apostles in Jerusalem? It’s not like there were street signs. Also did the Romans allow these people to meet openly after recently crucifying their leader or would they have met undercover? How did Paul, an educated Greek speaker and writer, converse with Peter an illiterate fisherman?
“Did the Romans allow these people to meet openly after recently crucifying their leader”: the “Romans” is rather broad; there were a handful of roman soldiers in Palestine and most did not reside in Jerusalem except during holidays, including Pilate (I believe his main residency was coastal Caesarea but am not sure). We have to remember that, though the NT and the rest of Western history make the life and death of Jesus breaking news, it wasn’t and would not be for some time. This was a provincial affair. Pilate probably forgot the whole incident within a few weeks or shorter. He had bigger concerns.
How did Paul know where to go to meet the apostles in Jerusalem? I think the answer is the same if we ask how anybody knew where to find anyone anywhere: networks. Paul writes to the church in Corinth and says he has learned from “Chloe’s people” of their disunity. How did Chloe know how to locate Paul? Networks.
How did Paul converse with Peter? I think the same way a Harvard grad converses with a high school dropout, they talk. However, if your concern is that Peter only spoke Aramaic and Paul only Greek, we do not know this to be the case. If Peter were a fisherman in Galilee, he would, as a merchant, have had to communicate with non-Aramaic speakers, and that means using the lingua franca of the time, Greek.
brown.connor4 said
… How did Paul converse with Peter? I think the same way a Harvard grad converses with a high school dropout, they talk. However, if your concern is that Peter only spoke Aramaic and Paul only Greek, we do not know this to be the case. If Peter were a fisherman in Galilee, he would, as a merchant, have had to communicate with non-Aramaic speakers, and that means using the lingua franca of the time, Greek.
We also do not know that Paul only spoke Greek. If he was raised in an “ex pat” Jewish community in some Roman city, he might have picked up some Aramaic … even more if he was raised in a Roman city in a Greek speaking city in a region neighboring the Aramaic speaking regions.
And just as Congolese who move from the war torn East to the capital have to learn Lingala, and if they go to school have to learn to speak, read and write French, but still speak their mother tongue and Swahili …
… being orally bi-lingual but only being in the habit of reading and writing in the language that you learned to read and write in would not be unusual. So “we only have attestation of him reading and writing in Greek” is not evidence regarding whether he spoke and understood Aramaic, it is simply silence.
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