05.03. Appendix 3. ST. PAUL’S JOURNEY TO ARABIA

APPENDIX III ST. PAUL’S JOURNEY TO ARABIA THE reference in Galatians 1:17 to a visit of St. Paul to Arabia raises several difficulties, which may be conveniently summarized in the questions: (1) Why did he go to Arabia? (2) What does Arabia mean? (3) What is the connection of the incident with the ethnarch of King Aretas (of Arabia) mentioned in 2 Corinthians 11:32?

(1)Why did St. Paul go to Arabia?—The usual explanation is that he went away to meditate in the desert, perhaps on Mount Sinai. This exegesis is not impossible, and can be expanded to any length by references to the psychological influence of solitude, and historical parallels to Moses and Elijah. The alternative, which meets with hardly any support at present, is that he went to Arabia to preach the gospel. It is of course quite obvious that certainty on this point is unattainable, but I would urge that on the whole the balance of probability is that St. Paul means to imply missionary activity in Arabia. He is arguing that he received a commission to preach to the Gentiles direct from God, not from man, and that he therefore had no need to confer with man, or to go to Jerusalem, before beginning to preach the gospel. The antithesis is not between conferring with flesh and blood in Jerusalem, and conferring with God in the desert, but between obeying immediately the commission of God to preach to the Gentiles, and going to some human source in Jerusalem in order to obtain authority or additional instruction. St. Paul’s argument seems to me to require the sense “As soon as I received my divine commission, I acted upon it at once, without consulting any one, and began to preach in Arabia.” Moreover, it is, to my mind, psychologically more probable that St. Paul, once converted, lost no time before beginning to carry out what he felt to be his duty, but this consideration is too subjective to be valuable, and other minds will no doubt feel differently on the point. (2)What does Arabia mean?—The names “Arab” and “Arabian” were used in ordinary Graeco-Roman language of the Kingdom of the Nabataean Arabs, which in the first century was almost at the highest point of its power under Aretas IV. The best statement on the history of this kingdom will be found in Schürer’s Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, I. pp. 726–744. The point which is important for the present purpose is that the Nabataean Arabs had established themselves by the beginning of the first century as the rulers over a large tract of country stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea, with Petra as their capital, and bordering on the Province of Syria. At one time they captured Damascus, but from the time of Pompey this city belonged to the Province of Syria, though even in the second century it was recognized as in some degree Arabian. Their territory was, of course, largely desert, but it contained several towns, of which Petra in the south and Bostra in the north were the most important. When St. Paul says that he went to Arabia the impression which he would make on Graeco-Roman readers, in Galatia or elsewhere in the Empire, would be that he went to this Nabataean kingdom, ruled over from 9 b.c. to 40 a.d. by Aretas IV.

        (3)     The meaning of2 Corinthians 11:32 ff.—St. Paul says, “In Damascus the ethnarch of Aretas the king guarded the city of the Damascenes to take me, and I was let down through a window in the wall in a basket, and I escaped from his hands.” Apparently this is the same incident as that described in Acts 9:24 ff., in which St. Luke says that the Jews in Damascus “guarded the gates day and night to kill him, but the disciples took him by night and let him down through the wall in a basket.” No doubt St. Paul’s own version must be taken as the more accurate, but the reference to the ethnarch of Aretas causes difficulty. It is known that Damascus in the first century before Christ belonged to the Nabataean king, but Pompey gave it to Syria, and the evidence of coins shows that as late as the year 34 a.d. it was Roman. There are, however, no coins from this date until 62 a.d.—in other words, there is no evidence that Damascus was Roman under Caligula or Claudius. The suggestion has therefore been made (and accepted by Schürer) that, at the death of Tiberius, Aretas was made responsible for Damascus. If so, this incident of St. Paul’s life must be dated not earlier than 37 a.d., and it is not easy to fit this into the general scheme of chronology. But the whole basis of this suggestion is extremely frail: it consists entirely of the assumption that if Aretas had an ethnarch in Damascus, Damascus was in his kingdom. What are the facts concerning the word “ethnarch”? It came in time, as Schürer says, to mean some one a little more than a tetrarch, and less than a king, but the really important point is that in the first century it was used as the name of the governor of the Jews in Alexandria. No one concludes from this that therefore Alexandria belonged to the Jews. It is more probable, then, that the ethnarch of Aretas was a representative of the Nabataean king who looked after the Arab element in Damascus, just as the ethnarch of the Jews in Alexandria looked after Jewish interests. In this case the chronological difficulty of the passage is removed.

It is not, I think, impossible to combine the results of this inquiry into a reasonably probable hypothesis. St. Paul immediately after the conversion went into the Nabataean kingdom and preached to the Arabs, perhaps in Bostra. He was not especially successful, but roused the enmity of the Jews, and attracted the hostile attention of Aretas. He returned to Damascus, where both the Jews and the ethnarch of Aretas endeavoured to put an end to his career, but he managed to escape in a basket let down through a window in a house built on the wall. This view is of course largely imaginative, but it may claim the advantage of giving a reasonable explanation of the difference between Acts 9:1-43 and 2 Corinthians 11:1-33. The objection that St. Luke says nothing about this visit to Arabia of course remains: but it is, I think, sufficiently answered by the fact that St. Luke is only concerned with Christianity within the Empire, and Arabia was outside its limits.

¹ Cf. Justin Martyr, Dial. 78: Δαμασκὸς τῆς Ἀρραβικῆς γῆς ἦν καὶ ἔστιν, εἰ καὶ νῦν προσνενέμηται τῇ Συροφοινίκῃ λεγομένῃ.

¹ Καθίσταται δὲ καὶ ἐθνάρχης αὐτῶν, ὅς διοικεῖ τε τὸ ἔθνος καὶ διαιτᾷ κρίσεις …ὡς ἂν πολιτείας ἄρχων αὐτοτελοῦς. Strabo, quoted in Josephus, Antiq. xiv. 7, 2.