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A Thought from Bart D. Ehrman

Image result for traveling show

Professor Ehrman teaches Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of MISQUOTING JESUS and HOW JESUS BECAME GOD, both NY Times best sellers.

Ehrman's most recent book is THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY, which discusses the long period in Christianity's history between the conversion of Paul (some time before AD 36) and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in AD 312.

Here are two brief  paragraphs from Ehrman's discussion of Paul's post-conversion missionary activity.

   It is difficult to know for certain how Paul conducted his mission on the ground. He was moving to cities that, so far as we can tell, he had never visited before, and trying to convert strangers to the faith. He apparently succeeded a good deal. But how did he do it?

    We should not think that Paul staged 'tent revivals' like a traveling American evangelist in the nineteenth or twentieth century. There is no reference to any such undertaking in his letters or even in the Acts. The public speeches in Acts are almost always occasioned by a random and fortuitous event, sch as a public miracle. They are not organized in advance.

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So it wasn't like Elmer Gantry. Moreover, Ehrman believes (and this speculation is new to me) that Paul had a quotidian 'day job.' Along with the tent revivalist image we have to abandon the idea that Paul supported himself by passing a hat around after sermonizing, that the preaching itself WAS his job. In this context, one thinks of the first letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 2, verse 9. Paul reminds his converts in that verse, "you remember ... we labored so as not to burden you." What was the day job?

Acts 18:3 describes Paul as a "tentmaker." So he didn't travel with a tent, like Gantry, but he did make tents? Ehrman suggests the term had a broader significance. Tents were made from leather, as were a lot of other things. If Paul were skilled in leather goods work, he could have set himself up in a repair shop in any new city at which he arrived.  His shop would then also double as a base of operations for his proselytizing in that city.

Fascinating line of speculation, though I still like the first-century traveling salvation-show imagery I'm here being instructed to reject.
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