Paul the Prisoner of Jesus Christ

The fourth ground of his criticism is at the beginning of my second book, where I explained Saint Paul’s statement, “For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles.” The passage in itself is perfectly plain, so I give only the part of my comment on it that lends itself to hostile remark: “The words describing Paul as the prisoner of Jesus Christ for the Gentiles may be understood of his martyrdom, since it was when he had been thrown into chains at Rome that he wrote this letter, at the same time as those to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Philippians, as we have shown before. “Certainly we might take another sense. Since we find this body called in several places the chain of the soul, in which it is held as in a close prison, Paul may speak of himself as confined in the chains of the body, so that he could not return and be with Christ, and so that he might fully carry out his office of preaching to the Gentiles. Some commentators, however, bring in another idea: that Paul, having been predestined and consecrated from his mother’s womb, before he was born, to be a preacher to the Gentiles, afterward took on the chains of the flesh.” [a]

Here too, as before, I gave a threefold explanation of the passage: first my own view, second the one Origen supports, and third the opinion of Apollinaris, which runs contrary to his teaching. Read the Greek commentaries over. If you do not find the facts to be as I state them, I will confess that I was wrong. What is my fault in this passage? The same, I suppose, as the one I answered before: that I did not name those whose views I quoted. But there was no need, at each separate statement of the apostle, to give the names of the writers whose works I had declared in the preface that I intended to translate.

Besides, it is not an absurd way of understanding the passage to say that the soul is bound in the body until Christ returns and, in the glory of the resurrection, exchanges our perishable and mortal body for imperishability and immortality. For it is in this sense that the apostle uses the words, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?” He calls it the body of death because it is subject to vices and diseases, to disorders and to death, until it rises with Christ in glory. Having been nothing but fragile clay before, it is then baked by the heat of the Holy Spirit into a solid jar, changing its degree of glory, though not its nature.