[MUST READ: Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity; reformatting and highlighting ours; Paul’s ‘quotes’ in red to signify‘caution’.]
Excerpts from INTRODUCTION
Paul never met Jesus. This book is an exploration of the startling implications of those four words. The chronological facts are undisputed. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor or prefect of Judea, in April, A.D. 30. As best we can determine it was not until seven years after Jesus’ death, around A.D. 37, that Paul reported his initial apparition of “Christ,” whom he identified with Jesus raised from the dead. When challenged for his credentials he asks his followers: “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” equating his visionary experience with that of those who had known Jesus face-to-face (1 Corinthians 9:1). What this means is that Paul’s claim to have “seen” Jesus, as well as the teachings he says he received directly from Jesus, came a significant number of years after Jesus’ lifetime, and can be categorized as subjective visionary experiences (Galatians 1:12, 16; 2:2; 2 Corinthians 12:1-10). These “revelations” were not a one-time experience of “conversion,” but a phenomenon that continued over the course of Paul’s life, involving verbal exchanges with Jesus as well as extraordinary revelations of a nature Paul was convinced no other human in history had received. Paul confesses that he does not comprehend the nature of these ecstatic spiritual experiences, whether they were “in the body, or out of the body,” but he believed that the voice he heard, the figure he saw, and the messages he received, were encounters with the heavenly Christ (2 Corinthians 12:2-3).
It was a full decade after Jesus’ death that Paul first met Peter in Jerusalem (he calls Peter Cephas, his Aramaic name) and had a brief audience with James the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:18-23). Paul subsequently operated independently of the original apostles, preaching and teaching what he calls his “Gospel,” in Asia Minor for another ten years before making a return trip to Jerusalem around A.D. 50. It was only then, twenty years after Jesus’ death, that he encountered James and Peter again in Jerusalem and met for the first time the rest of the original apostles of Jesus (Galatians 2:1-9). This rather extraordinary chronological gap is a surprise to many. It is one of the key factors in understanding Paul and his message.
What this chronology means is that we must imagine a “Christianity before Paul,” which existed independently of his influence or ideas for over twenty years, as well as a Christianity preached and developed by Paul, which developed independently of Jesus’ original apostles and followers and with minimal contact with anyone who had known Jesus.
Many of the most important clues are hiding in plain sight. This is as true for a historian as it is for a detective, and I have experienced this numerous times in the course of working on this book, whether researching obscure texts in libraries, visiting the places connected to Paul, or just rereading Paul’s letters in my Greek New Testament. So much depends on one’s assumptions as to what is seen or unseen, what is noted or simply overlooked. This book is about the historical figure of Paul, but at the same time it uncovers a form of Christianity before Paul that has largely escaped our notice. The differences between these two “Christianities” are considerable and we shall explore both in some detail in the following chapters. When Paul is properly placed in this context, and within this world, a completely new and fascinating picture emerges. We are able to understand Paul in his own time and comprehend, for the first time, the passions that drove him.
The obvious place to begin is with Paul himself. His early letters are the first Christian documents of any kind in existence, written in the decade of the 50s A.D., and they are firsthand accounts. They are our best witnesses to the true state of affairs between Paul and the original apostles chosen by Jesus. For Paul this separation and independence, both from the “earthly” Jesus, as he calls him, and the apostles, was a point of pride and authenticity. He boasts that he has not derived the message he preaches “from men or through men,” referring to James and the original apostles Jesus had directly chosen and instructed. Paul claimed that his access to Jesus has come through a revelation of the heavenly Christ (Galatians 1:11-12). He insisted that his second trip to Jerusalem, around A.D.50, was not a summons from the leaders in Jerusalem, as if he were their inferior as some of his opponents had obviously claimed. He says he went there “by revelation,” which is his way of saying Jesus told him to go. He refers to the three leaders of the Jerusalem church, James, Peter, and John, sarcastically as the “so-called pillars of the church” and “those of repute,” but adds “what they are means nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6,9).
Although he calls himself the least and the last, he is keen to make the point that his own revelations directly from the heavenly Christ are more significant than anything Jesus taught in his earthly life, and thus supersede the experiences of the other apostles (1 Corinthians 15:9-11; 2 Corinthians 5:16; 11:5). The force of this point has profound implications for our investigation of Paul and the gospel message he preached. He also boasts that he has “worked harder than any of them,” referring to the other apostles who had known Jesus face-to-face (1 Corinthians 15:10). He refers to the period when people knew Jesus as “Jesus according to the flesh,” and contrasts it with his own spiritual experiences, including the message he received from the heavenly Christ, which he asserts is far superior (2 Corinthians 5:16; Philippians 3:3).
Most readers of the New Testament have the impression that references to “the Gospel” are generally and evenly distributed throughout the various books. After all, Christians came to understand “the Gospel” as the singular message of Christianity — the Good News of salvation brought by Christ. In fact there are seventy-two occurrences of the term “the gospel” (to euangelion) in the entire New Testament, but they are not proportionately distributed. The letters of Paul account for sixty of the total, and Mark, who was heavily influenced by Paul, contains eight. Paul refers to his message as “my Gospel,” and it is clear that his usage is proprietary and exclusive (Romans 2:16; 16:25; Galatians 1:11-12). Rather than a generic term meaning “good news,” Paul uses the term in the sense of “My Announcement”—a reference to a very specific message that he alone possessed. The implications of this point are revolutionary: it means that the entire history of early Christianity, as commonly understood, has to be reconsidered.
The standard “Sunday school” or catechetical view of Christian origins goes something like the following: Jesus came to preach a new covenant gospel that superseded the Jewish understanding of God and his plan for the salvation humankind. Jesus passed on the fundamentals of this new message to his chosen twelve apostles, who came to understand its full implications only after his death. Paul, who at first bitterly opposed the newly formed Christian Church, arresting Christians to be delivered up for execution, became the “Thirteenth Apostle,” last but not least, chosen directly by Jesus Christ, who had ascended to heaven. Paul’s mission was to preach the gospel message of salvation to the non-Jewish, or gentile, world, while Peter, leader of the twelve apostles, led the mission to the Jews. Both Jew and Gentile were united in the one Christian Church, with one single unified gospel message. According to this mythology, despite a few initial issues that had to be worked out, Peter and Paul worked in supportive harmony. They were together in life and in death and they laid the foundations for a universal Christian faith that has continued through the centuries.
Historians of early Christianity question such a harmonizing view linking Jesus, his first apostles, and Paul. It serves theological dogma more than historical truth. To defend such a portrait requires one to ignore, downplay, or deny altogether the sharp tensions and the radically irreconcilable differences reflected within our New Testament documents, particularly in Paul’s own letters.
“Christian origins,” as an academic field of study, has been largely concerned with three issues: a quest for the historical Jesus; comparing him as he most likely was with what his first followers might have made of him in the interest of their own emerging Christian faith; and, finally, exploring the question of whether and to what degree Paul, who is a relative latecomer to the movement operates in continuity or discontinuity with either the intentions of Jesus or those of his original apostles. There is also the related issue of whether Paul’s “Gospel” represents the establishment of a new religion, wholly separate and apart from Judaism.
It is generally agreed that Jesus, who lived and died as a Jew, as well as his earliest followers, nearly all of whom were Jewish, continued to consider themselves as Jews, even with their conviction that Jesus was the promised Messiah. To identify someone as the Messiah was not uncommon in first-century Jewish-Roman Palestine. Josephus, the Jewish historian of that period, names half a dozen others, before and after Jesus, who made such a claim and gathered followers behind them. Like Jesus, they all, without exception, were executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.
What about Paul? Did he merely adapt his Jewish faith to his new faith in Christ or did he leave Judaism behind for what he saw as an entirely new revelation, given to him alone, that made the Torah of Moses obsolete?
Scholars are sharply divided on these complex questions, and the positions they take resist neat and easy categorization. Some see Paul as extending and universalizing the essential teachings of Jesus and his early followers, so that differences are recognized but understood to be cultural and developmental. In this view Paul would be neither the apostle who betrayed the historical Jesus, nor the apostate who betrayed Judaism, but one who skillfully fashioned a version of Jesus’ message for the wider non-Jewish world. Others recognize the sharp dichotomy between Jesus’ proclamation that the kingdom of God was soon to be established on earth and Paul’s message of a heavenly Christ, but nonetheless they imagine a practical functional harmony between Paul and the original apostles. In other words, Paul and the apostels agreed to disagree, recognizing that there was more that united them than divided them, particularly since Paul, in preaching to Gentiles, would have to tailor his message to fit the non-Jewish culture.
I go much further. Not only do I believe Paul should be seen as the “founder” of the Christianity we know today, rather than Jesus and his original apostles, but I argue he made a decisive bitter break with those first apostles, promoting and preaching views they found to be utterly reprehensible. And conversely, I think the evidence shows that James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, as well as Peter and the other apostles, held to a Jewish version of the Christian faith that faded away and was forgotten due to the total triumph of Paul’s version of Christianity. Paul’s own letters contain bitterly sarcastic language directed even against the Jerusalem apostles. He puts forth a starkly different understanding of the message of Jesus—including a complete break from Judaism.
This viewpoint changes our understanding of early Christianity. But linking Peter and Paul in Christian tradition, history, and art is one of the bedrock foundations of the Christian Church in the past nineteen hundred years. How did this view come to prevail?
The answer seems as clear as it is surprising. Paul’s triumph is almost wholly a literary victory, reinforced by an emerging theological orthodoxy backed by Roman political power after the time of the emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-37). This consolidation was not achieved in Paul’s lifetime but it emerged by dominance of pro-Pauline writings within the New Testament canon that became the standard of Christian orthodoxy. Even the order and arrangement of the New Testament books reflect the dominance of Paul’s perspectives. Gradually alternative visions and voices faded, particularly those belonging to James and the early Jerusalem Church. “Judaism” became a heresy, an obsolete religion replaced by a new covenant. Heresy became not simply an alternative opinion but a crime. We find the beginnings of this process in the letters of Paul and, surprisingly, even in the New Testament gospels that most people assume have little to do with Paul.
Paul’s literary victory rested upon three pillars:
- the gospel of Mark, our earliest narrative of the career and death of Jesus, is heavily Pauline in its theological content;
- the two-volume work Luke-Acts vastly expanded Mark’s story to culminate with a final scene of Paul preaching his gospel in Rome; and,
- the six later letters written in Paul’s name, but after Paul’s lifetime offered a more domesticated Paul, which pleased the church and ensured the muting of his more radical message. (These six letters are Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus).
The master narrative of Paul’s literary triumph was the book of Acts. The author purposely hides his name and publishes his work anonymously—giving us our first signal that he wants us to think his work dates to an earlier time. He ends his story with Paul under house arrest in Rome. By not relating the story of Paul’s death, which he surely knew, he leaves the impression that his book dates to the time of the emperor Nero, when Paul was executed. All this is a purposeful ploy.
Traditionally, the work was attributed to Luke, a companion of Paul as well as a purported eyewitness to some of its main events. Paul mentions a certain Luke once in passing in a list of his fellow workers or assistants (Philemon 24). Presumably the same Luke, the “beloved physician,” is named two additional times in later letters attributed to Paul but not written by him (Colossians 4:14; 2 Timothy 4:11). The final editors of the New Testament, in trying to support the tradition that Luke wrote both the gospel that bears his name and the book of Acts, likely added these references. The writer of 2 Timothy says that Luke was with Paul in prison and has Paul ask Timothy to “get Mark” and also bring his “books, and especially the parchments.” The author’s clear implication is that these purported gospel writers, Mark and Luke, were companions to Paul, eyewitnesses to many of the events in Acts, with access to documents they got from Paul.
Scholars have usually dated Luke-Acts to the 90s A.D., but a number of scholars have convincingly argued, more recently for a date well into the second century A.D.
The unabashed hero of the book of Acts is Paul, so much so that the work might be more properly named “The Acts of Paul,” with a few preliminary remarks about the rest of the apostles. Peter and the others show up in the early chapters, but seldom again. The author’s main intention is to glorify Paul as the apostle who brings the Christian message to Rome. Paul’s enemies in Acts are the Jews, not the Romans or other non-Jews that he encounters. Acts is a remarkably pro-Roman book, and the author’s implied context reflects a period many years after the destruction of the city of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D.70, with the crushing of Jewish national and messianic hopes and the scattering of the original Jerusalem church (Luke 19:41-44; 21:23-24).
This is not to say the book of Acts lacks historical value. For one thing it is all we have. It covers the critical period from the death of Jesus to Paul’s journey to Rome (A.D. 30-60). As such, despite the author’s strongly pro-Paul bias, it can serve as a source for a critical reconstruction of those missing “lost decades” of early Christianity. In fact it reveals much more than the author perhaps intended, once we factor in what we know from Paul’s letters as well as some of our newly discovered other sources. The author apparently has access to some materials that go back to the days in the Jerusalem church, when James the brother of Jesus led the movement, even as he tries to mute influence of James. The cracks of his presentation show through since we have the other side of the story from Paul, and even a bit from James.
Unfortunately, Acts is seldom read critically. It is usually taken at face value and the portrait of Paul presented therein has become the dominant narrative. If people know anything about Paul, what they know is more than likely drawn from hearing about or reading the book of Acts.
Imagine the implications. Our primary sources for the story of the origins of the Christian Church was written by an anonymous devotee of Paul decades removed from the events he purports to narrate. Some scholar have even called the book of Acts the great “cover-up” and as we will see, this language might be considered relatively mild. Is it possible that this anonymous author has become, unwittingly, one of the most influential writers of the past two thousand years? Has he shaped our view of Jesus and early Christianity in ways that don’t conform to the historical facts? As we will see, the author of Luke-Acts knew precisely what he was doing, and his deliberate obscuring of the original version of “Christianity before Paul” is one of our great cultural losses. So long as the portrait of Paul in Acts prevails, it obscures for us the Christianity of Jesus and his earliest followers.
Ironically, one need only go to Paul’s own letters to recover a more authentic and reliable account of his relationship with James, Peter, and the Jerusalem church—what came to be called “Jewish Christianity” by later generations. Pauls seven earliest letters—1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon, read carefully tell the entire story, no holds barred. Most scholars consider these seven to be authentic and relatively free from later interpolations. They occupy just fifty pages in a typically printed English New Testament totalling 275 pages, but implications of what they say are far-reaching. In this book I try to take Paul very much at his word. When he is allowed to speak for himself, without any predetermined assumptions about the essential unity of early Christianity, the results are clear and unambiguous, but also quite shocking and provocative.
It is also from these authentic letters of Paul that we can most reliably begin to reconstruct the bare biographical outlines of Paul’s life.
- Paul calls himself a Hebrew or Israelite,
- stating that he was born a Jew
- and circumcised on the eighth day,
- of the Jewish tribe of Benjamin (Philippians 3:5; 2 Corinthians 11:22).
- He was once a member of the sect of the Pharisees.He zealously persecuted the Jesus movement (Galatians 1;13; Philippians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 15:9).
- He states that he advanced in Judaism beyond many of his contemporaries, being extremely zealous for the traditions of his Jewish faith (Philippians 3:5; Galatians 1:14).
- Sometime around A.D. 37 Paul had a visionary experience he describes as “seeing” Jesus and received from him his gospel message as well as his call to be an apostle to the non-Jewish world (1 Corinthians 9:2; Galatians 1:11-2:2).
- Paul was unmarried, at least during his career as an apostle (1 Corinthians 7:8, 15; 9:5; Philippians 3:8).
- He worked as a manual laborer to support himself on his travels (1 Corinthians 4:12; 9:6, 12, 15:1 Thessalonians 2:9).
The book of Acts supplies many more biographical details, some of which might be historically reliable while others have been questioned by critical scholars. I address these issues in the appendix, “The Quest for the Historical Paul.” In terms of method I have chosen to begin with what Paul says about himself, so that we get Paul, first and foremost, in his own words.