Peter and Paul

Peter and Paul

By John Taylor; 2007 May 03

Not often do I recommend a film as wholeheartedly as this one: "Peter and Paul," starring a very young Anthony Hopkins as Paul. I had never heard of this production, probably because it started off as a television mini-series. Normally I avoid made-for-television fare and its notoriously poor production values, but this is a big exception. It may not be easy to chase down. In fact, I did not uncover this in a video store but in St. Paul's Anglican Church's library, across the hall from where our kids take piano lessons. I signed it out for a week and am glad I did, though it took most of the week to get through it, watching in dribs and drabs.

When a film is several hours long it is usually a bad thing. A long story gets watered down by detail. But not this time. The relationship between Peter and Paul was a genuinely complex one that simply cannot be conveyed in the two hour time frame of a normal movie. It was so subtle that I now realize that having read the New Testament over several times I still did not have a clear picture of what happened. Strange to say, this stirring story, so central to Christianity, is not told in the Bible. It took place both after and before the chief centers of attention for most Christians, the life of Jesus and current doctrine. Perhaps it is avoided intentionally, because it undercuts the leadership pretensions of a professional clergy. After all, Peter starts an ignorant fisherman and Paul a rabid fanatic; the only thing that distinguishes them from a million other ordinary men -- and even very gifted and learned men -- is the teaching of Jesus and the mysterious motions of the Holy Spirit.

In fact the more I read the Paul of the Biblical text, the less I understood him. He is incoherent; it must be a nightmare to try to translate him. Peter, who wrote not a word, is even harder to grasp. As a Baha'i I might not have considered a failure to understand what went on between Peter and Paul as such a serious hole in my education if it were not for the fact that Abdu'l-Baha brought Peter and Paul up so often as exemplars. He emphasized very strongly how important it is to understand who they were in order to fully grasp the Christian message, and therefore to be a good Baha'i too.

Here are some examples of how the film helped me.

When you read the words of Paul in his letters he comes across so garbled that the question I constantly ask are, Why did anybody at all listen to him? How did they decipher him, much less change their religion on hearing him? How did he have such long-term success? This is answered in this mini-series. It seems that Paul as public speaker was what they call in football a "garbage runner," the running back who stumbles around, looks incompetent and infuriates the fans, but when the coaches go over the statistics they find that he is getting six or seven yards a carry, a very respectable average. Paul was a garbage thinker, probably the sort of leader you had to meet in person and feel the love and passion resonate in his voice. Paul's love made up for it all, and then some.

Plus, Paul had a good slogan. Just as Martin Luther King had his "Freedom Now!," Paul had "By Faith Alone!" That is, you did not need to worry about whether a convert was obeying the Jewish laws or not in order to accept him into the Christian fold. And Peter did not disagree with him on that (as you would think on reading the Bible alone).

On the other hand, as the film makes clear, Peter was a vacillator. A waverer, a fence sitter, a middle-of-the-roader who gets trampled in traffic, in this case his own fanatical fellow believers. It seems that Peter was not just indecisive after the crucifixion when the cock crowed thrice, he was like that all his life. It was his disposition. Some people by nature think twice about everything and contradict themselves as a matter of course. Like my father. All my life his opinions would bounce back and forth between communism and rampant capitalism, the incompatibilities being wiped out by the ravages of a bad memory. I have a friend who is the same way with the Baha'i Faith; one minute he is sympathetic, the next he wishes it did not exist.

Later on when the church sprung up in Jerusalem, Simon Peter was acutely aware that Jesus had singled him out as the "rock" on which His church would be built. Some rock, he thought. When he became leader of the Christians he had to consider the outspoken opinions of the converted Jews in Jerusalem. If he ignored their wishes, the foundation would crumble. On the other hand, he saw the courage, genius and inspiration radiate from Paul; here was an intellectual who put his belief into action, a very rare thing.

This is where Abdu'l-Baha's teaching about Peter comes in useful and complements the film. Never forget, the Master repeatedly says, that Peter was a humble, non-learned fisherman who had to portion out his meals in order to know when to observe the Sabbath -- in other words he was an illiterate and could not read a calendar. There was no way that Peter, no matter how learned he became spiritually, was ever going to be able to take the new religion to Greece and then Rome, the most advanced, sophisticated places in the known world.

That is why Paul was struck down on the road to Damascus. Paul was an intellectual, but the most unlikely kind, one whose mission in life was to exterminate all Christians. So the Spirit, Jesus, asked him: "Why do you persecute me?" Not surprisingly, Paul converted. Nor did he vacillate. He had a determined, steadfast disposition, the mirror opposite of Peter's. And he did what Abdu'l-Baha called us Baha'is to do, he went out and traveled and taught till he dropped, or rather was beheaded by the Roman authorities.

Anthony Hopkins' brilliant portrayal makes Paul into a hesitant speaker; he breaks off in awkward pauses in the middle of his sentences. Truly, a garbage speaker, redeemed by love alone. You can feel Paul's love in your bones, his iron determination, but also -- how can I express this? -- his broken manner of speech reflects the fact that the Spirit, by putting Paul through such a dramatic and violent conversion, had in some hidden way shattered his soul and made him into what Baha'u'llah calls an "entity of a new creation." In his letters Paul speaks of constantly fighting a "fire in his limbs," and more than one gay priest has taken this to mean that he had homosexual leanings that he successfully suppressed and redirected for good. Be that as it may (the frequent stonings he underwent, it seems to me, is a more than adequate explanation for fire in the limbs), the quality of Paul's love, broken but fervent, is a force of nature, or rather a force of heaven.

Words cannot express how inspiring it was for me to see Paul do what he did. No wonder Abdu'l-Baha held Peter and Paul up as examples! Paul stood up before hostile, foreign and angry crowds and spoke until, as often as not, they literally stoned him. And here we worry about a little stage fright!

And Peter's response to Paul's success was, in its way, exemplary too. Nothing was going to make the Rock of the church into an eloquent speaker, a deep thinker, an effective leader of men, or even the sort of rock-like, steadfast personality that we all dream of having. But he had Christ's instructions, "Go out and spread the Gospel to the world." That was enough. So when Paul overshadowed his prominence in Greece, instead of undermining the new rival or sitting and arguing with the truculent Jerusalem Christians, Peter picked another direction, in this case Babylon, and went off to teach there. Have a beef or a problem? Do just that, go off in another direction and spread the Good News.

The end of the film is poignant. Peter comes back to Jerusalem and hears how Paul has taken the message to Rome. Peter swallows his pride as the rock of the church and humbly follows the example of this courageous parvenu and goes in his footsteps to Rome. But Paul is martyred before they can meet, to Peter's chagrin. I was reminded a little of the love that existed between the Bab and Baha'u'llah, how they never met, how the Bab freely and gladly acknowledged the ascendancy of the One Whom God Will Make Manifest.

One important fact is made invisible in this all-English film, the language barrier. Peter was not only illiterate but obviously did not speak Greek or Latin, so his coming to Rome meant that everything he said would have to be translated. There was therefore no question of Peter's substantially proclaiming the Faith to Romans; he came to Rome to meet Paul only. Yes, also (to use the Baha'i term) he came to "deepen" the new Christians in the Faith; but mostly it was a symbolic gesture of love and solidarity with Paul and his new converts across the Roman Empire. The gesture saved the Faith from splitting completely, but mostly it was done out of love for Paul, the man without whom (Abdu'l-Baha Himself says this) Christian faith would never have become universal. Then when the persecutors catch up to Peter in Rome and he is strung up on a cross, he has them put him upside down to express humility and unworthiness to suffer the same fate Jesus had. In a weighty way, the Message of Jesus was mirrored in this underworld. It was "on earth as it is in heaven."

Ordinary people everywhere can learn from this to heed not our shortcomings, but simply arise and teach the Cause, and thereby found the democracy of the Spirit.