"Jesus invented Christianity, and Paul preached it." – Agree? Disagree?

[First posted in 2012;  here’s the original Introduction:  This glimpse into the times of John the Baptist/Herod/Jesus/Paul is from A History of the Jews by Christian historian Paul Johnson.

We have earlier introduced this book as MUST READ, if only to maintain a balance in points of view and belief systems we present in this website;  how else do we learn to be discerning if we are exposed only to one side? This historian reconstructed as best he could the intertwining lives of these NT figures, culled from scarce historical sources and unfortunately, for lack of more reliable information, he inevitably relies on the NT. Make sure you read to the very last sentence of this post.  

 

Actually we don’t agree with that statement; our view is this:  

Jesus a Torah observant Jew

would have preached the Torah;  

whatever myths revolved around him

after his crucifixion

spun out into a new religion,

and from Paul of Tarsus

comes the main doctrines of Christianity.  

 

This excerpt is from Part II titled “Judaism.”  Reformatted and highlighted for this post, images added.—Admin1.]

 

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  John the Baptist lived and worked for the most part in Galilee and the Peraea, territory which was now overwhelmingly Jewish but which had been annexed to Judaea by fire and sword — and often forcible conversion –in Maccabee times.  It was an area both of fierce orthodoxy and diverse heterodoxy, and of religious and political ferment.  Much of it had been devastated in the rising immediately after Herod’s death and in 6 AD; and the great man’s son, Herod Antipas, whom the Romans made governor, tried to rebuilt it by planting new cities on Greek lines.  Between 17 and 22 AD he created a new administrative center at Tiberias on Lake Galilee, and to people it he forced Jews from the surrounding countryside to give up their farms and live there  He drafted in the poor and ex-slaves too.  It thus became a curious anomaly: the only Greek city with a majority of Jews. Antipas attracted criticism for other reasons.  His Judaism was suspect because he had a Samaritan mother; and he broke Mosaic Law by marrying his brother’s wife.  It was John the Baptist’s preaching against this sin which led to his imprisonment and execution.  According to Josephus [Jewish historian] Antipas felt that the Baptist’s following was growing so formidable that it was bound to end in revolt.

 

 

The Baptist was a believer in what the Jews called the Messiah.  His mission centered on two books — Isaiah and Enoch.  He was not a hermit, a separatist or an excluder.  On the contrary:  he preached to all Jews that the day of reckoning was coming.  All must confess their sins, repent and receive baptism by water as a symbol of atonement, and so prepared themselves for the Last Judgment. His task was to respond to the injunction in Isaiah, ‘Clear ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord,’ and to proclaim the coming of the end of days and the advent of the Messiah, who would be the Son of Man as described by Enoch.  According to the New Testament, the Baptist was related to Jesus of Nazareth, baptized him and identified him as the Son of Man; and it was shortly after the Baptist’s execution that Jesus began his own mission.  What was this mission, and who did Jesus think he was?

 

The Jewish doctrine of the Messiah had its origins in the belief that King David had been anointed by the Lord, so that he and his descendants would reign over Israel to the end of time and would exercise dominion over alien peoples.  After the fall of the kingdom, this belief had been transformed into a prophetic expectation that the rule of the House of David would be miraculously restored.  On top of this was grafted the Isaiac description of this future king as the dispenser of justice, and this was perhaps the most important element in the belief because Isaiah seems to have been the most widely read and admired, as it was certainly the most beautifully written, of all the Bible books.  During the second and first centuries BC, this justice-dispensing reincarnation of the Davidic ruler fitted neatly into the notions, in the Book of Daniel, the Book of Enoch and other apocalyptic works, of an end of days and the Four Last Things—death, judgment, hell and heaven.  It was at this comparatively late stage that the divinely chosen and charismatic figure was first called the Messiah or “the anointed [king]’.  The word was originally Hebrew, then Aramaic, and simply transliterated into Greek as messias; but the Greek word for ‘the anointed’ is christos, and it is significant that it was the Greek, not the Hebraic, title which was attached to Jesus.

 

The messianic doctrine, being of complex and even contradictory origins, created great confusion in the minds of the Jews.  But most of them seem to have assumed that the Messiah would be a political-military leader and that his coming would inaugurate a physical, earthly state.  There is an important passage in the Acts of the Apostles describing how Gamaliel the Elder, grandson of Hillel, and at one time president of the Sanhedrin, dissuaded the Jewish authorities from punishing the early Christians, but arguing that the authenticity of their Messiah would be demonstrated by the success of their movement.  There had been, he said, the case of Theudas, ‘boasting himself to be somebody’, but he had been killed, ‘and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered and bought to nought’.  Then there had been Judas of Galilee, ‘in the days of the taxing’, and ‘he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed’.  The Christians, he said, should be left alone because, if their mission lacked divine sanction ‘it will come to nought’.

 

The other Jewish elders were persuaded by Gamaliel’s argument, for they too thought in terms of an uprising designed to alter the government.  When Herod the Great heard that the Messiah or Christ was born, he reacted with violence as if to a threat to his dynasty.  Any Jew who listened to a man making messianic claims would take it for granted he had some kind of political and military programme.  The Roman government, the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Sadducees and even the Pharisees assumed that a Messiah would make changes int he existing order, of which they were all part. The poor people of Judaea and Galilee would also believe that a Messiah preaching fundamental changes would be talking not, or not only, in spiritual and metaphysical terms, but of the realities of power — government, taxes, justice.

 

 

Now it is obvious from the evidence we have that Jesus of Nazareth conformed to none of these messianic patterns.  He was not a Jewish nationalist.  On the contrary, he was a Jewish universalist.  Like the Baptist, he was influenced by the teachings of the pacific elements of the Essenes. But like the Baptist he believed that the programme of repentance and rebirth should be carried to the multitude, as was forseen in Chapter 53 of Isaiah.  It was not the job of the teacher of righteousness to hide in the desert or in caves; or to sit in the seats of the mighty either, like the Sanhedrin.  It was his mission to preach to all, and in a spirit of humility before God who might demand the extremities of suffering.  The person of whom Isaiah wrote had to be the ‘tender plant’, the ‘despised and rejected of men’, the ‘man of sorrows’, who would be ‘wounded for our iniquities, bruised for our transgression’, ‘oppressed and afflicted and yet he opened not his mouth’.  This ‘suffering servant’ of God would be ‘taken from prison and from judgment’, ‘brought as a lamb to the slaughter’, be buried with the wicked and ‘numbered with the transgressors’.  this Messiah was not a mob leader or democrat or guerilla chieftain, let alone a future earthly king and world sovereign.  He was, rather, a theologian and sacrificial victim, a teacher by his word and example, and by his life and death.

 

If Jesus was a theologian, what was and whence came his theology?  His background was the heterodox Judaism and increasing Hellenization of Galilee.  His father, a carpenter, died before Jesus was baptized, in 28/29 AD.  In the Greek New Testament Joseph bore a Hebrew name, but Jesus’ mother was called Mary, a Greek form of Miriam.  Two of Jesus brothers, Judah and Simon, had Hebrew names but two others, James (in Hebrew Jacob) and Joses (in Hebrew Joseph), did not; and Jesus was the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua.  The family claimed descent from David, and it may have been predominantly conformist, since the New Testament hints at family tensions created by Jesus’ teaching.  After his death, however, the family accepted his mission.  His brother James became the head of the sect in Jerusalem and, after James’ martyrdom by the Sadducees, Jesus’ cousin Simon succeeded; the grandsons of his brother judah were leaders of the Galilean Christian community in the reign of Trajan.

 

The evidence we possess shows that, though Jesus was influenced by Essene teaching and may have spent some time living with them, and though he was personally connected with the Baptist sect, he was in essentials one of the Hakamim, the pious Jews who moved in the world.  He was closer to the Pharisees than to any other group.  This statement is liable to be misleading, since Jesus openly criticized the Pharisees, especially for ‘hypocrisy’.  But on close examination, Jesus’ condemnation is by no means so severe or so inclusive as the Gospel narrative in which it is enclosed implies; and in essence it is similar to criticisms levelled at the Pharisees by the Essenes, and by the later rabbinical sages, who drew a sharp distinction between the Hakamim, whom they saw as their forerunners, and the ‘false Pharisees’, whom they regarded as enemies of true Judaism.

 

The truth seems to be that Jesus was part of a rapidly developing argument within the pious Jewish community, which included Pharisees of various tendencies.  The aim of the Hakamim movement was to promote holiness and make it general.  How was this to be done?  The argument centered around two issues;  the centrality and indispensability of the Temple, and the observance of the Law.  On the first point, Jesus clearly sided with those who regarded the Temple as an obstacle to the general spread of holiness, since the concentration on the physical building, with its hierarchies, privileges (mostly hereditary) and wealth, was a form of separation from the people—a wall built against them.  Jesus used the Temple as a preaching forum; but so had others who had opposed it, notably Isaiah and Jeremiah.  The idea that the Jews could do without the Temple was not new.  On the contrary, it was very old, and it could be argued that the true Jewish religion, long before the Temple was built, was universalistic and unlocated.  Jesus, like many other pious Jews, saw holiness spreading to the whole people through the elementary schools and synagogues.  But he went further than most of them by regarding the Temple as a source of evil and predicting its destruction, and by treating the Temple authorities and the whole central system of Judaic administration and law with silent contempt.

 

On the second issue, the degree to which the Law must be obeyed, the original argument between the Sadducees, who admitted only the written Pentateuch, and the Pharisees, who taught the Oral Law, had by Jesus’ time been supplemented by a further argument among the Hakamim and Pharisees.  One school, led by Shammai the Elder (c. 50 BC-c. 30 AD), took a rigorist view especially on matters of cleanliness and uncleanliness, an explosive area since it militated strongly against the ability of ordinary, poor people to achieve holiness.  The rigorism of the Shammai school, indeed, was eventually to take his descendants and followers out of the rabbinical-Judaic tradition altogether, and they vanished like the Sadducees themselves.  On the other hand there was the school of Hillel the Elder, Shammai’s contemporary.  He came from the diaspora and was later referred to as ‘Hillel the Babylonian.’  He brought with him more humane and universalistic notions of Torah interpretation.  To Shammai, the essence of the Torah lay in its detail; unless you got the detail exactly right, the system became meaningless and could not stand.  To Hillel, the essence of the Torah was its spirit:  if you got the spirit right, the detail could take care of itself.  Tradition contrasted Shammai’s anger and pedantry with Hillel’s humility and humanity, but what was remembered best of all was Hillel’s anxiety to make obeying the law possible for all Jews and for converts.  To a pagan who said he would become a Jew if he could be taught the Torah while standing on one foot, Hillel is said to have replied, ‘What is hateful to you, do not unto your neighbor; this is the entire Torah.  All the rest is commentary –go and study it.’

 

Jesus was a member of Hillel’s school, and may have sat under him, for Hillel had many pupils.  He repeated this famous saying of Hillel’s and it is possible that he used other dicta, for Hillel was a famous aphorist.  But of course, taken literally, Hillel’s saying about the Torah is false.  Doing as you would be done by is not the entire Torah.  The Torah is only in part an ethical code.  It is also, and in its essence, a series of absolutist divine commands which cover a vast variety of activities many of which have no bearing at all on relations between men.  It is not true that ‘all the rest is commentary’.  If it had been, other peoples, and the Greeks in particular, would have had far less difficulty in accepting it.  ‘All the rest’, from circumcision, to diet, to the rules of contact and cleanliness, far from being commentary were injunctions of great antiquity which constituted the great barriers between the pious Jews and the rest of humanity.  Therein lay the great obstacle, not merely in universalizing Judaism but even in making its practice possible for all Jews.

 

Jesus’ teaching career saw him translate Hillel’s aphorism into a system of moral theology and, in doing so, strip the law of all but its moral and ethical elements.  It was not that Jesus was lax.  Quite the contrary.  In some respects he was stricter than many sages.  He would not, for instance, admit divorce, a teaching which was later to become, and still remains today, enormously important.  But, just as Jesus would not accept the Temple when it came between God and man’s pursuit of holiness, so he dismissed the Law when it impeded, rather than assisted, the road to God.

 

Jesus’ rigorism in taking Hillel’s teaching to its logical conclusion led him to cease to be an orthodox sage in any sense which had meaning and, indeed, cease to be a Jew.  He created religion which was sui generis, and it is accurately called Christianity.  He incorporated in his ethical Judaism  an impressive composite of the eschatology he found in Isaiah, Daniel and Enoch, as well as what he found useful in the Essenes and the Baptist, so that he was able to present a clear perspective of death, judgment and the afterlife.  And he offered this new theology to everyone within reach of his mission: pious Jews, the am ha-arez, the Samaritans, the unclean, the gentiles even.  But, like many religious innovators, he had a public doctrine for the masses and a confidential one for his immediate followers.  The latter centered on what would happen to him as a person, in life and in death, and therein lay his claim to be the Messiah —not just the Suffering Servant, but someone of far greater significance.

 

The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable.  His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality.  His rejection of the Law was fundamental.  Mark relates that, having ‘called all the people unto him’, Jesus stated solemnly: ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.’ This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man’s obedience to the Torah which creates God’s response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.

 

  To most learned Jews, this was false doctrine because Jesus was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith.  If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him.  By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple — an it was on this that his enemies concentrated. [Source: E. Bamel (ed.), The Trial of Jesus, esp. ‘The Problem of the Historicity of the Sanhedrin Trial’.]  False teachers were normally banished to a remote district.  But Jesus, by his behavior at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment.  Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially vs. 8 to 12, appears to state that in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death.  In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offense of the “rebellious elder’, was considered essential to hold society together.  Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him ‘rabbi’.  Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin – or whatever court it was – he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence.  No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus’ doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture.  But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code.  In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence.  To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion — Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough.  So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons.  Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome. The circumstances attending Jesus’ trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels. But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.

 

What mattered was not the circumstance of his death but the fact that he was widely and obstinately believed, by an expanding circle of people, to have risen again.  This gave enormous importance not just to his moral and ethical teaching but to his claim to be the Suffering Servant and his special eschatology.  Jesus’ immediate disciples grasped the importance of his death and resurrection as a ‘new testament’ or witness to God’s plan, the basis on which every individual could make a new covenant with God.  But all they were capable of doing to further this gospel was to repeat Jesus’ sayings and recount his life-story.

 

 

ENTER PAUL

 

The real evangelical work was carried out by Paul of Tarsus, a diaspora Jew from Cilicia, whose family came from Galilee, and who returned to Palestine and studied under Gamaliel the Elder.  He possessed the Pharasaic training to understand Jesus’ theology, and he began to explain it —once he was convinced that the resurrection was a fact and Jesus’ claims to be the Christ true.  It is often argued that Paul ‘invented’ Christianity by taking the ethical teachings of Christ and investing them in a new theology which drew on the intellectual concepts of the Hellenistic diaspora.

•  His distinction between ‘the flesh and ‘the spirit’ has been compared to Philo’s body-soul dichotomy. [See E.R. Goodenough, ‘Paul and the Hellenization of Christianity’, in J. Neusner (ed.) Religions in Antiquity.]]
• It is also maintained that by ‘Christ’ Paul had in mind something like Philo’s ‘logos’.  But Philo was dealing in abstractions.  For Paul, Christ was a reality.[Samuel Sandmel, Judaism and Christian Beginnings]. By body and soul, Philo meant the internal struggle within man’s nature. By spirit and flesh, Paul was referring to the external world —man was flesh, the spirit was God — or Christ. [E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism]

 

The truth seems to be that both Jesus and Paul had their roots in Palestinian Judaism. Neither was introducing concepts from the Hellenistic diaspora.  Both were preaching a new theology, and it was essentially the same theology.  Jesus prophesied a new testament by the shedding of his blood ‘for many’ and his resurrection. Paul taught that the prophecy had been accomplished, that the Christ had become incarnate in Jesus, and that a New Covenant had thereby come into existence and was offered to those who had faith in it.

 

Neither Jesus nor Paul denied the moral or ethical value of the Law.  They merely removed the essence of it from its historical context, which both saw as outmoded.  It is a crude oversimplification to say that Paul preached salvation by grace as opposed to salvation by works (that is, keeping the Law.)  What Paul said was that good works were the condition of remaining eligible for the New Covenant, but they do not in themselves suffice salvation, which is obtained by grace.  Both Jesus and Paul were true Jews in that they saw religion as a historical procession of events.  They ceased to be Jews when they added a new event.  As Paul said, when Christ became incarnate in Jesus, the basis of the Torah was nullified.  At one time, the original Jewish covenant was the means whereby grace was secured.  That, said Paul, was no longer true.  God’s plan had changed.  The mechanism of salvation was now the New Testament, faith in Christ.  The covenantal promises to Abraham no longer applied to his present descendants, but to Christians.  And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. What Jesus challenged, and Paul specifically denied, was the fundamental salvation-process of Judaism:  the election, the covenant, the Law.  They were inoperative, superseded, finished.

 

   A complex theological process can be summed up simply:

 

 Jesus invented Christianity,

and Paul preached it.