Following Socrates: A Way
of Life
It was modesty that invented the word ‘philosopher’ in
Greece.
NietzscheSt Paul is locked up in a dank Roman dungeon with St Peter,
on the night before their executions. It is a predicament that
focuses the mind and elicits honesty. Peter, in particular, has a
confession to make. He knows that what he must say to Paul
could be shattering. After a few false starts and circumlocutions,
he gets to the point. He tells Paul that Jesus did not rise again.
He was resuscitated. On that fateful Friday, years before, Jesus
did not have time to die the slow death of crucifi xion with the
Sabbath starting only hours after he was hung from the tree.
Worse still, the Jesus Paul had seen on the road to Tarsus was
not a vision: he was the real thing. After the trauma of the
torture, Jesus had become obsessed with Paul who before his
conversion was second to none in persecuting Jesus’ followers.
It was pure coincidence that their paths had crossed – affording
Jesus the chance to ask Paul why. What had doubly shocked
Jesus, his brother James and Peter, though, was the subsequent
turn of events. They had thought Jesus’ message was for the
Jews alone. They did not suppose that Paul would join them,
and then take the gospel half way around the world.
This is the version of events told in the play Paul by Howard
Brenton. And it might be thought controversial. That it does
not attract much animosity, at least when it was on at the
National Theatre in London in 2005, may be because people
see that it would be wrong to take it as yet another historicist
attack on the Christian story. Brenton’s point is far more subtle