03x12 - Spies And Apostles Part 1

[bunniefuu]

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- What does it all mean?

This is where the archeology has been found.

Oh, hi. How are you?

Look at that.

I need a planter.

♪ From the mountaintops ♪

- Shrine to a belly button.

This is a rock of salt.

♪ He digs for clues ♪

♪ In his dusty blues ♪ - Look at that.

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- No one gets into this but Noah.

Don't take me too far.

Now, that's naked archeology.

♪ For his archeology, for his archeology ♪

♪ For his archeology ♪

- No one, besides Jesus himself,

has had more influence on the Christian movement

than St. Paul the Apostle.

There are more New Testament writings credited to him

than anyone else.

They're called the Pauline epistles.

And it's these writings and lessons

that have directly shaped modern-day Christianity.

But Paul wasn't a disciple of Jesus.

He never met Jesus or heard him preach.

You won't find him chowing down to the last supper.

Paul only converted to Christianity

after Jesus had been crucified.

You could say he was your original born-again Christian.

But it turns out that Jesus appointed James,

his very own brother, to lead the Jerusalem church

after the crucifixion.

- I thought I told you to k*ll that story.

- So if James was the appointed leader,

how come Paul gets all the credit?

Some scholars are now suggesting that Paul was a spy.

A Roman agent sent to infiltrate the Jesus movement.

We're out to come face-to-face with the real Paul,

the real James, the real message of Jesus.

(lightning cracking)

Let's set the stage. It's around CE.

Jesus has just been crucified.

But his illegal revolutionary movement

is still burning bright.

The Romans are still persecuting Jesus' followers,

and James, Jesus' brother, was next on their hit list.

James was now in charge of the Nazarenes

and preaching a fervent anti-Roman, pro-Judean message.

- v*olence is the only answer to Rome,

but it must be a nation's v*olence.

What else can save us?

- [Simcha] Josephus the Historian mentions him,

and the Gospel of Thomas calls him

James the Just, the righteous one,

'cause James believed in the strict adherence

to the works of the Torah, the five books of Moses,

just as Jesus did.

So where was Paul in all this?

- Just listen to this.

- [Simcha] It's from Paul's epistles that we are given

the few facts about Paul's early years.

- Read down there where it's marked.

- [Simcha] He was born Saul in or CE in Tarsus,

in what is present-day Turkey.

Received a Jewish education,

supported himself as a tentmaker,

and he was a Roman citizen.

By his own admission he was actually a persecutor

of the early Jesus followers,

until he set off on the road to Damascus.

And somewhere along the way,

he experienced an incredible vision.

There in front of him, Jesus appeared.

- Here's to the first angel I ever met.

- [Simcha] It was a resurrected Jesus with a message.

He wanted Saul to lead the world in a new direction,

towards a whole new brand of Christianity.

The vision and the message so overpowered Saul

that he converted to Christianity on the spot.

And changed his name to Paul.

This miracle is known as the Pauline conversion,

but is this the true story?

m*llitary historian Rose Mary Sheldon

thinks the facts point to Paul, the Roman citizen,

becoming Paul, the Roman spy.

- Is the story as told in Acts plausible?

Visions can be had, and conversions can be done,

but a historian does not deal in miracles.

A historian has to deal with facts.

And so we looked at the store and we said, "Okay,

what could the alternative be?"

A man acting in this manner?

What might Paul be doing other than preaching?

And that's where the undercover part came.

That if you look at the possibility

that he was an intelligence officer,

it all makes complete sense.

And it's much more logical and no miracles are required

to reconcile that kind of story.

- [Simcha] Before we go accusing anybody of being a spy,

let alone one of the fathers of Christianity,

we'll need to know what to look for.

I'm off to travel in the footsteps of Paul,

and I've asked Rose Mary Sheldon

to tell us how to spy on a spy.

- Watch what he does.

You see his actions, not necessarily his words.

See who he associates with.

Paul was always surrounded by Roman officers,

Roman governors, people of wealth.

Certainly aspires to take on many identities,

not just in a change of a name,

but it could be the change of your appearance.

You have to be able to move between

one milieu and the next, those are good skills to have

if you're in the intelligence business.

- You're getting interested, huh?

- Sure, I'm interested.

(electronic whirring)

- I'm going to start my journey

by looking into Paul's actions.

And what better place to start than where it all began,

in his hometown of Tarsus.

I'm here with professor of religious studies Barrie Wilson.

- So we're walking along an ancient Roman road.

One that Paul undoubtedly walked along many times.

- It's not a choice, right? - No other choice.

This was the road that connected Tarsus

and the plain of Cilicia behind us.

It takes us in the direction of the Taurus mountains.

- He was a determined guy to walk, what, thousands of miles?

- Thousands of miles in pursuit of his religious quest.

- [Simcha] He changed the world.

- He did, perhaps more than any other person has ever done.

He has changed the world.

And I think there's more to Paul than meets the eye.

There's a lot of things that we really do not

know about him, when we start to look at

what he says critically.

We don't know what kind of upbringing he had.

We don't know anything about his family,

his family connections, how Jewish they were.

We don't know what to make out of his conversion

or so-called conversion experience.

And it really wasn't a conversion experience.

It was a remarkable life changing experience.

But if we don't know from what, it's hard to imagine

what that transformative experience really was.

And when he comes up to Jerusalem many years later,

I mean, he only spends a couple of weeks

with the acknowledged head of the followers of Jesus.

- Jesus' brother.

- Jesus' own brother James,

a person who knew Jesus and knew what he stood for.

It's from Paul that we get the Christianity that we have,

but he truly was a mystery man.

- [Simcha] So when we analyze the texts,

we find out that we don't know much about the man.

But Paul's sketchy past didn't stop him

from becoming Christianity's top guy.

- Make yourself so valuable your employer can't let you go.

- [Simcha] And before Paul had his born-again experience,

he had another identity, a bounty hunter,

hot on the trail of the Nazarenes

and the showdown between James and Paul was inevitable.

- All that work, courage, going after these thugs.

- [Simcha] And as archeologist Robert Eisenman will tell us

that confrontation did happened,

(g*nsh*t pops) (man grunts)

on the steps of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

Not just a showdown.

- I don't suppose you'd fight a man without your sword.

- [Simcha] A showdown throwdown.

(man grunts) (man thuds)

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- [Simcha] I'm on a search to find the real Saint Paul,

the man celebrated as the father of Christianity.

And as it turns out, the closer we look at the life of Paul,

the more questions we have.

Rose Mary Sheldon has told us that having many identities

is crucial to being a spy.

And Paul had plenty.

- Who would that be?

- [Simcha] Before he was Paul he was Saul,

and he was a bounty hunter persecuting the Jesus movement.

- You're a special something-or-other, aren't you?

- Prosecutor.

- [Simcha] Until he had his conversion experience

and became Saint Paul.

(telephone rings) - Get down there

right away and take care of things.

- Yeah, I'll do that.

- [Simcha] We're off to the Second Temple steps

in Jerusalem.

It's here that a showdown is said to have occurred

between Paul and James,

the leader of the Jesus movement after the crucifixion.

- I'm a patriot and a zealot.

- I'm meeting archeologist Robert Eisenman.

Robert Eisenman, revolutionary theory, take one.

(electronics whirring)

Robert Eisenman has compared the writings of Pope Clement.

called the pseudo-Clementine writings,

with the Book of Acts.

In Acts, Paul watches on as St. Stephen,

the first Christian martyr, is stoned to death.

In the Clementine version, and Clement, by the way,

was there witnessing these events,

a Paul-like figure actually assaults someone.

Eisenman believes that someone is not Stephen,

but James, the brother of Jesus.

Basically you're decoding the text.

- Coding multiple texts, putting them together side-by-side

and trying to find out what actually underpins them all.

- If we go to these other texts

that were kind of de-legitimized by the official church,

we get the inside story of what Paul

really did on these steps.

- Who Paul was, what he did.

Who James was, how important he was, the real story.

- [Simcha] The Second Temple was the center

of Jewish worship at the time with James and Paul.

It's where the action happened.

Thousands would assemble.

Roman sentries watched the masses closely,

always on the lookout for a riot.

- Clement comes to Palestine just at the time

that the authorities have invited

the early Christian leaders to come onto these Temple steps

and quiet this mass of people down here,

who the document admits were hungering after the Messiah.

So each of the apostles, just like Acts,

is pictured as giving his speech in turn

until finally my lord James speaks last.

And the narrative said he's just about to win the crowd over

to how he is seeing the Messianic movement

when, "an angry riotous enemy, a hostile man,

the man who was our enemy" emerges and yells at the crowd,

"Why are we being misled by these people? Come att*ck them."

- According to Eisenman, that hostile man was Paul.

It was him that ordered the crowd to att*ck James.

But the New Testament says Paul was just watching

over the coats of the guys who stoned Stephen to death.

As it says, "And when the blood of Stephen, your witness,

was being shed, I myself was standing by and approving

and watching over the garments of those who k*lled him."

Eisenman thinks the Book of Acts was out

to clean up Paul's image.

He believes that Acts is covering up Clement's version.

It's not Stephen who was stoned to death,

but James who's thrown down the Temple steps.

You're saying the guy in Acts that's called Stephen,

that's really not Stephen.

That's really the brother of Jesus, James.

- What Acts has done is substituted

the Jews attacking Stephen

for Paul's att*ck on James.

Both occur around the early s.

The att*ck by Paul on James is so embarrassing

to the early church that a whole other narrative

is developed, overtopping it.

- It it's embarrassing because here's Paul

stoning, the brother of- - No, not stoning,

physically attacking him.

That's what these stairs are about.

Throwing him down these stairs.

- I wouldn't want to be thrown down the stairs.

You're saying this, what Paul did

is he grabbed James physically,

and he threw him down stairs like this.

I'm just thinking of what it would feel like

to be thrown down these steps.

I don't think it would feel very good.

James is said to have escaped the riot

with the help of the apostles,

but suffered two broken legs from the att*ck.

For Saul, the persecutor,

another identity change was needed.

The Messianic movement was still growing,

and for Paul, it was time to switch to plan B.

If you can't b*at him, join him.

- Here's to the first angel I ever met.

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- [Simcha] We're traveling in the footsteps

of St. Paul the Apostle,

the man known as the father of Christianity.

But some scholars think that Paul

might've had another agenda.

- It's hard to tell what you mean.

- [Simcha] That Paul was an undercover agent for the Romans.

So far we've learned that Paul was a persecutor

of the early Christians,

now led by Jesus's brother, James.

- Judea was a nation once. Someday she will be again.

- [Simcha] But for Saul the bounty hunter,

a public persecutor is too well known

and he needed a new cover story.

- [Man] You need help, see the angel. Who's this angel?

- And in m*llitary historian Rose Mary Sheldon's view,

Paul's miraculous conversion

is the most convincing evidence of all

that he was a Roman spy.

Why do you suspect that maybe it's not authentic?

- Well, you have to imagine he's working

with police from Jerusalem.

They're pretty hard-nosed bunch of people.

And they're with him on the road.

We don't know what they heard,

whether he was the only one that heard it,

but suddenly poof, he becomes a Christian.

And think of it in modern terms.

If this were a bunch of FBI guys

working for J. Edgar Hoover,

suddenly one of them turns and says, "I had a dream.

Karl Marx came to me and I've seen the light

and I've now gone over to the other side."

They either k*ll him on the spot

or send him to a mental hospital or lock him up.

- [Simcha] According many scholars,

Paul's message seems to have nothing in common

with the message that Jesus' followers

had been hearing until now.

(men cheering)

Paul's message, which he said was given to him by Jesus.

- A very important guy, calls himself the angel.

- [Simcha] Seems to completely contradict

what the Jesus of history taught and said.

- Maybe a diagram will help.

- [Simcha] It emphasized circumcision,

respecting the Sabbath,

keeping Passover, and maintaining a kosher diet.

But Paul heard a very different message.

- I'm a reformed man.

- [Simcha] In his version you didn't have to circumcise,

you didn't have to follow a kosher diet,

and he canceled all the Jewish holidays.

Why was Paul so off message?

- You know, even angels can get their wings clipped.

- You've got the scissors?

- [Simcha] And then there's the big one.

Jesus said, "I come not to bring peace on earth,

but the sword."

But Paul never hung out with revolutionaries.

More than this, Paul seemed to be

very comfortable with the Romans.

James and his g*ng weren't buying Paul's approach.

- Thanks, friend.

- Friend, to a Roman?

- [Simcha] And since Jerusalem was James' turf,

Paul took his brand new message and hit the road.

The first stop on his salvation tour was Ephesus,

an ancient Greek city in what is today Turkey.

And it's here that Paul was able to interact

with all the cultures of the ancient world.

(electronic whirring)

We are here with professor Barrie Wilson.

- Ephesus was the Istanbul of the time.

It was where East met West.

But in Paul's time, this was a major port city.

It was a cosmopolitan city.

People came from all over the empire here,

and it was on a major trade route.

- You make a change at Ephesus,

and there'll be a ripple effect around the world.

- This was a strategic location for Paul and his message.

- [Simcha] Paul's MO was always the same.

He targeted pagans who were attracted

to the religion of the Jews.

They were called God-fearers,

and they had their own sections and synagogues.

The synagogue where Paul preached

disappeared thousands of years ago,

but professor Wilson wants to show me

what he thinks is a reused stone from that very synagogue.

- Simcha, I want to show you something absolutely amazing

here at Ephesus.

Take a look down here and just tell me what you see.

- [Simcha] Oh wow, a menorah. This is amazing.

- I've never seen it referred to.

Everybody who comes to Ephesus either stands on it,

walks on, it sits on it, nobody notices it.

- [Simcha] It's clearly original.

The Book of Acts refers to a synagogue at Ephesus

and here's archeology that links us to Paul.

- When Paul was here, there was a synagogue.

We've never found the synagogue.

And yet this is the only Jewish symbol

that we find in Ephesus.

- The lost synagogue. - The lost synagogue.

This could very well have come from that synagogue

that Paul talked in, this is absolutely crucial.

- You should publish it.

- That's a good idea.

- [Simcha] So Paul could move through many worlds

like a spy.

In fact, no one was better at it in his day than Paul.

Maybe at Ephesus he delivered his famous lines

- [Paul] To the Jews, I pretend to be a Jew.

To those who observe the Jewish law,

I pretend to be observant.

To those who are not observant, I say I'm not observant.

To the weak, I pretend to be weak.

I have become all things to all men."

- [Simcha] A man of many faces, indeed.

Next I'm on my way to the place

where Paul was imprisoned by the Romans, or was he?

- Give me time to run this down?

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

- Place looks like the last act of "Hamlet".

- It's the last act for all kinds of things.

- [Simcha] We're traveling in the footsteps

of St. Paul the Apostle, the man credited

with spreading Christianity around the world.

- Has anybody invited you to join the crusaders?

- [Simcha] We're continuing our journey to Caesarea

on the Israeli Mediterranean coast.

Caesarea was the city in the Book of Acts

where Paul was tried and imprisoned.

But to Rose Mary Sheldon, the story just doesn't add up.

(electronic whirring)

- This is a rare opportunity we have

to be sitting on the actual spot where Paul was arrested

and supposedly tried before the Roman governor.

This is the Roman governor's palace.

And Paul would have walked through the entrance

and sat before the governor, Felix.

What the charge is, we're not exactly sure.

He caused a riot in Jerusalem,

but why the Roman governor would care

about some Jews arguing, you know, in Jerusalem is obscure.

- You know, if I was making a painting of Paul

in front of Felix, I would have him in chains.

Is that what happens?

- Acts tells us that the guards were told

to give him a very loose leash,

to make sure he had the access to where he wanted to go.

And he never suffered physically in any way.

He seems to live in the governor's palace.

- It brings to mind how they treated Jesus.

I mean, overnight they crucify him.

And Paul seems to get a very different treatment.

- That's right. We know that Jesus was followed.

We were told that there are men being sent

by the government to see what he's doing.

What does he do publicly?

He starts a riot at the Temple.

He is surrounded by men that are known revolutionaries.

Paul doesn't cause any public disturbance,

doesn't preach against the Roman state,

makes no public statement that could be

in any way considered seditious.

He's not surrounded by revolutionary types.

It seems that the Romans want him

for the information he has.

I think it's because he has been investigating

the revolutionaries and so they can debrief him.

- He's not an enemy in custody. He's an agent brought home.

- He's an agent brought home in protective custody.

And even when he's brought to Rome he remains

an intelligence asset because he has,

he's an eye witness to what is happening in Judea.

He can testify to the groups he infiltrated.

He can identify people to the Roman authorities,

and it's gonna be not too many years after he arrives

that there's gonna be a full scale w*r in Judea.

And so an intelligence asset with that kind

of firsthand information

would be very valuable to the Romans.

- So Paul has hit every point on our spy checklist;

his associates, his aliases, his actions.

On our next program we're gonna travel even further

and dig even deeper to see how scrolls found in a cave

in reveal further evidence

that Paul and James were worlds apart.

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ From a tall, tall land ♪

♪ He makes no apologies ♪

♪ For his archeology ♪

♪ He's a tall, tall man ♪

♪ From a tall, tall land ♪

♪ He makes no apologies ♪

♪ For his archeology ♪