Going biblical

Sunday's performance of Mendelssoh's Paulus ran smoothly, filling Heilbronn's Kilianskirche with people and melodious sound. The choir never did drop the exaggerated pronunciation of the word "Jerusalem" (see post of November 5, 2011), but you can't say I didn't make an attempt at correction. I think that word presents a legitimate point of debate because many of the German speakers I polled were either uncertain how to say the word or pronounced it the "wrong" way themselves. What that all means is that Hochdeutsch (especially as used in theater, broadcast, and music) is an artifice. One choir member told me after the performance that the Swabian dialect is especially challenging for those who train themselves to be radio broadcasters and the like. According to him, no matter how hard they try, they can never quite erase the Swabian lilt and twang.

In preparing for the Mendelssohn concert, I decided to something about my lack of knowledge of the story of Paul. Was he one of the twelve disciples? I didn't think so. I skimmed the full text of the oratorio, including its many recitatives and arias for soloists. About a third of the way in, there's a character named Saul who is "spoken to" in an eerily beautiful women's chorus. After that, there's a character named Paul. I asked Markus, who had been to catholic religion class growing up. Hmm, he said. Is that the one who turned from Saul into Paul? From there, I decided to have a look in the Bible.

For two semi-lapsed Unitarians (lapsed due to lack of our denomination here in Germany), we have a lot of Bibles: two revised standards, one Good News, one Die Bibel, and one Das neue Testament. According to the explanatory note in the Peters Edition of Paulus, the text is all taken from Bible verses, especially the Acts of the Apostles, with the exception of the chorale texts that came from the hymnal of Mendelssohn's day, the most prominent being a delightfully bombastic "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" with full brass flourish.

When I sat down with the Bible on my lap, I indeed began to find the story of Paul. As I read, I became slightly less uncomfortable with the oratorio's generally negative and/or dismissive attitude toward "the Jews" and "the Heathen." While it's good dramatic fun for the choir to play the part of the nasty crowd crying things like "Stone him to death!" it's also unsettling to see lines drawn so Christo-centrically. Taking a fuller look at the context helped me get a more nuanced view of the historical impact of Paul.

Here's how I understand the story. Saul was a Jewish man living in Jerusalem in the first century after the death of Jesus (Wikipedia has his date of birth as AD 5). Saul also happened to be a Roman citizen, a circumstance that not only afforded him certain benefits but also seems to have played a significant role in the spread of Christianity. In Saul's Jerusalem, followers of Jesus went about preaching their gospel and facing persecution, among them Stephen, whose death by stoning occurred under Saul's approving watch. Saul had made a name for himself as a persecutor of Christians, and he asked to be sent to to Damascus to round up people who were speaking out against Jewish faith and tradition. On the famous road to Damascus, he had a vision, immediately followed by a loss of his eyesight. The vision instructed him to go to Damascus and await further word. After three days of solitude and prayer, he was found by Ananias, who was also following a vision. Ananias baptized him as Paul, upon which he became fully devoted to the Christian path and regained his eyesight.

Once Paul is an apostle, the remainder of Acts reads a bit like a road movie. The Mendelssohn piece makes it clear that, frustrated by his lack of progress in converting the Jews (my Bible says Hebrews), he turns to the Heathen (my Bible says Gentiles). Paul seems to be credited with loosening rules about circumcision and Kosher eating, a necessary compromise, I imagine, when appealing to Greeks and others for new converts. He travels with a variety of companions far and wide, a true traveling missionary. He nearly always evades persecution. Late in his life, he is captured in Jerusalem and imprisoned in Caesarea. As a Roman citizen, he claims his right to be tried for his crimes in Rome. Thus, courtesy of the Roman authorities, he enters into his final voyage.

The oratorio ends with Paul conquering the world in ecstatic praise. (Vocally speaking, you have to save a few high A's for the final moments of a 2-hour performance.) The Book of Acts also gives no details on Paul's demise (perhaps that is elsewhere in the Bible). Wikipedia informs me that Paul was put to death in Rome by beheading (a more merciful form of execution on account of his citizenship). And although Paul met a bad end, it seems quite clear that his voice must have been one of the first and most convincing to reach Rome and plant the seed of Christianity. It is strange to picture Rome and Italy without Christianity's central presence, as a place where no one revered Jesus, the Pope, and the Virgin Mary. Yet it all seems to have come about as the result of real people taking real trips and telling others their stories.

Why on earth, you might be wondering, am I blogging about the Book of Acts? Well, for one thing, I am amazed myself that I read an entire book of the Bible. It was not an easy text to read, but it wasn't as difficult as I anticipated. It's not at all unusual for me to check sources and do background reading on topics that grab my interest. But it is unusual for me to interact this directly with a Bible story. I really did need to know what was going on in the oratorio I was rehearsing hour after hour. That's a personal requirement. The fact that I came away from my reading with a moment of historical wow (the vagaries of the life of Paul just happened to transport Christianity to Rome) may have been teased along by my current reading: Geoffrey Blodgett's Oberlin History. That book is about many, many things, but most vivid to me is the keen sense of history, its making and its telling, that infuses every word.

Would you believe that, when I sat down this afternoon to blog, there was a different question altogether that had me reaching for a Bible? I was wondering about the word "begat" because I am working on some intriguing genealogy. He begat him, who begat him, and so on seems to be a rather efficient way of listing out a lineage. And I didn't want to imitate the begats without knowing my source. But, as it turns out, that formulation is a thing of the King James version. My reader-friendly mid-20th century Bibles say "had a son named so and so". Wordier. Anyway, I didn't end up blogging about the family tree stuff today, did I?