[Continued from James D. Tabor’s book, downloadable from amazon.com on kindle app.
Reformatting and highlights added.]
Based on Paul’s authentic letters I have isolated six major elements in Paul’s Christianity that shape the central contours of his thought—and thus my presentation in this book. Before considering each in detail it will be helpful to get an overview:
1. A New Spiritual Body.
For Paul the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead was a primary and essential component of the Christian faith. He states emphatically: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). His entire understanding of salvation hinged on what he understood to be a singular cosmic event, namely Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Paul’s understanding of the resurrection of Jesus, however, is not what is commonly understood today. It had nothing to do with the resuscitation of a corpse. Paul must have assumed that Jesus was peacefully laid to rest in a tomb in Jerusalem according to the Jewish burial customs of the time. He even knows some tradition about that burial, though he offers no details (1 Corinthians 15:4).
Paul understood Jesus’ resurrection as the transformation—or to use his words—the metamorphosis, of a flesh-and-blood human being into what he calls a “life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). Such a change involved “putting off” the body like clothing, but not being left “naked,” as in Greek thought, but “putting on” a new spiritual body with the old one left behind (2 Corinthians 5:1-5). So transformed, Jesus was, according to Paul, the first “Adam” of a new genus of Spirit-beings in the universe called “Children of God,” of which many others were to follow.
What is often overlooked is that Paul is our earliest witness, chronologically speaking, to claim to have “seen” Jesus after his death. And his is the only first-person claim we have. All the rest are late and secondhand. His letters were written decades earlier than Mark, the first written gospel. This means that Paul’s view of Jesus’ resurrection has profound implications for how we read the later gospel accounts—from the empty tomb to the “sightings” of Jesus reported in Matthew, Luke, and John. Most people read the New Testament “backwards,” chronologically speaking, beginning with the gospels and then moving on to Paul, but Paul actually comes decades earlier and offers critical insight into what the earliest resurrection faith entailed. Once re-examined, the entire history of what happened “after the cross” is transformed and a new understanding emerges of what James, Peter, and the rest of the original apostles experienced and believed.
2. A Cosmic Family and a Heavenly Kingdom.
According to Paul this new genus of Spirit-beings of which Jesus was the “firstborn” is part of an expanded cosmic family (Romans 8:29). Paul believed that Jesus was born of a woman as a flesh-and-blood human being, descended from the royal lineage of King David, so he could qualify as an “earthly” Messiah in Jewish thinking. But for Paul such physical Davidic lineage was nothing in comparison to the glorification of Jesus as the firstborn Son of God. Paul describes it thus: “The gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh but appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness through the resurrection of the dead” (Romans 1:4). What this means is that God, as Creator, has inaugurated a process through which he is reproducing himself—literally bringing to birth a “God-Family.” Jesus, now transformed into the heavenly glorified Christ/Messiah, is the firstborn brother of an expanded group of divine offspring. Those who “belong to Christ” or are spiritually “in Christ,” to use Paul’s favourite expressions, have become impregnated by the Holy Spirit and like tiny spiritual embryos are growing and developing into the image of Christ until the time comes for their transformative “birth” from flesh and blood to life-giving Spirits. As Paul says, “He who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.” Paul compares this union of “spirits” to that of a man and a woman when “the two shall become one flesh” (1 Corinthians 6:17).
The destiny of this cosmic heavenly family is to rule over the entire universe. Everything is to be put under their control, including things visible and invisible. At the center of the message of Jesus was the proclamation that the kingdom of God had drawn near. This kingdom, spoken of by the Hebrew Prophets, was envisioned as an era of peace and justice on earth for all humankind, inaugurated by a Messiah or descendant of the royal lineage of King David ruling over the nations of the world (Jeremiah 33:15; Isaiah 9:6-7). Jesus described it in clear and simple terms in the prayer he taught his disciples: “Let your Kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven” (Matthew 6:10). In anticipation of that reign Jesus had chosen the twelve apostles, whom he promised would rule over the regathered twelve tribes of Israel when the kingdom fully arrived (Matthew 19:28-29; Luke 22:30).
In Paul’s view the kingdom of God would have nothing to do with the righteous reign of a human Messiah on earth, and the status of the Twelve or any other believers was to be determined only by Christ at the judgment. Paul understood the kingdom as a “cosmic takeover” of the entire universe by the newly born heavenly family—the many glorified children of God with Christ, as firstborn, at their head. Paul taught that when Christ returned in the clouds of heaven, this new race of Spirit-beings would experience its heavenly transformation, receiving the same inheritance, and thus the same level of power and glory, that Jesus had been given (Romans 8:17; Philippians 3:20-21). This instantaneous “mass apotheosis” would mark the end of the old age that began with Adam, and the beginning of a new creation inaugurated by Christ as a new or second Adam (Romans 8:21). This great event, the most significant in human history, would signal the arrival of the kingdom of God of which nothing flesh and blood could be a part (1 Corinthians 15:50). The group of divinized, glorified Spirit-beings would then participate corporately, with Christ, in the judgment of the world, even ruling over the angels (1 Corinthians 6:2-3).
3. A Mystical Union with Christ.
Paul completely transformed the practice and understanding of baptism and the Eucharist to his Greek-speaking Gentile converts. Although rituals of water purification were common in Judaism, including the ceremonies of immersion practiced by John the Baptizer and Jesus as a sign of repentance, Paul’s adaptation of baptism moved beyond ceremonial signification. Baptism brought about a mystical union with what Paul called the “spiritual body” of Christ, and was the act through which one received the impregnating Holy Spirit.
Sacred meals involving the blessings of bread and wine were also common in Judaism, and were thus part of the communal meals of the early followers of Jesus. Within apocalyptic groups, such as the Jesus movement and the sect that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, such sacred meals were considered anticipatory of the messianic age to come. When the Messiah arrived, his followers expected to gather around his table in fellowship, with Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets joining them. Paul’s innovation, that one was thereby eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ in the form of bread and wine at the Eucharist or Holy Communion, has no parallels in any Jewish sources of the period. Three of our New Testament gospels record Jesus’ Last Supper, in which he tells his disciples over bread and wine: “This is my body,” and “This is my blood,” and in the gospel of John, Jesus speaks of “eating my flesh” and “drinking my blood.” These writers based their accounts of Jesus’ final meal on Paul, directly quoting what he had written in his letters almost word for word (Mark 14:22-25; Matthew 26:26-29; Luke 22:15-20; John 6:52-56; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26). This is one of the strongest indications that the New Testament gospels are essentially Pauline documents, with underlying elements of the earlier Jesus tradition.
As a Jew living in a Jewish culture, Jesus would have considered this sort of language about eating flesh and drinking blood, even taken symbolically, as utterly reprehensible, akin to magic or ritual cannibalism. Despite what Paul asserts, it is extremely improbable that Jesus ever said these words. They are Paul’s own interpretation of the meaning and significance of the Eucharist ceremony that he claims he received from the heavenly Christ by a revelation. For Paul eating bread and drinking wine was no simple memorial meal, but it was quite literally a “participation” in the spiritual body of the glorified heavenly Christ. This meal connected those who eat and drink through the Spirit with the embryonic nurturing life they needed as developing offspring of God (1 Corinthians 10:16). In contrast, as we will see, there is solid evidence that the Christians before Paul, and outside of his influence, celebrated a Eucharist with an entirely different understanding of the wine and the bread, one that reflects a practice much closer to what Jesus inaugurated at his Last Supper with his disciples. Fortunately, there are fragmented traces of this earlier view embedded in our New Testament gospels.
4. Already by Not Yet.
Paul operated with a strongly apocalyptic perspective that influenced all he said or did. He was quite sure that he and his followers would live to see the return of Christ from heaven. Life in the world would go on, but not for long. Everything was soon to be transformed. At the same time there was a sense in which everything continued as it was. As Paul tried to work out the practical ethical and social implications of these ideas, he pressed hard against the realities of time and history. Paul states emphatically that the “appointed times has grown very short,” and he advised his followers not to marry, begin a new business, or worry if they were slaves, since everything in the world was about to be turned upside down and all social relations were terminal. Right up until the end of his life he expected to live to see the great event—what he called the “Arrival” (Greek parousia)—the visible appearance of the heavenly Christ in the clouds of heaven to usher in the events of the final Judgment. He tried to inspire his followers to live as if the new spiritual transformation has already arrived, all the time knowing that its full realization was not yet. The tensions of life in the world, with its inarguable realities of sex and marriage, birth and death, and ethnic and social identities, were difficult to negotiate as if they no longer were operative. It was one thing to say that in Christ all such demarcations had passed, but it was quite another to try to live one’s life in a world that remained the same.
5. Under the Torah of Christ.
As a Jew Paul decisively turned his back on the Torah revelation given to Moses on Mount Sinai, with all of its laws, customs, and traditions. In other words, Paul abandoned his Judaism. He would have never put it that way, though, since what he advocated he called a new and true Judaism, making the first version obsolete. He maintained that the Torah had now been replaced and superseded by the new Torah of Christ (Galatians 3:23-26). He never denied that the one God of Israel, who had sent Jesus and glorified him as Son of God, had once spoken through Moses and the Prophets. What he insisted upon was that alongside the one God of Israel was an exalted heavenly Lord Jesus, to whom the whole cosmos would be in obeisance. He also believed that the new revelations he was receiving as the Thirteenth Apostle made anything that had gone before pale by contrast (2 Corinthians 3:7-9). For Paul there was no comparison between what the Torah of Moses promised the nation of Israel—physical blessings of prosperity, well-being, and peace—and the incomparable spiritual glory now promised to those destined to be part of the new cosmic heavenly family of glorified children of God. This process of cosmic birthing constituted a new spiritual “Israel,” a new covenant, and a new Torah, replacing the old.
What Paul proposed as a replacement of the Torah of Moses he called the Torah of Christ. It was not a legal code, written in stone or on parchment, but a manifestation of the Christ-Spirit in those who had been united with Jesus through baptism, both Jews and non-Jews. It was this agency of the Spirit that defined the new Israel and enabled the select group to have both the motivation and the power to struggle against “the flesh.” In contrast, the Law of Moses was powerless to actually deliver anyone from the power of sin that had its root in the flesh, since all it could do is define what was good. Paul put his own “life in the Spirit” forward as the model for his followers to imitate and was often disappointed in their seemingly inability to “walk in the Spirit,” since they failed to exhibit even the minimum standards of righteous behaviour.
6. The Battle of the Apostles. Paul understood his own role as an apostle, “last but not least,” as he put it, as the essential and pivotal element in God’s cosmic plan to bring about the salvation of the world through Christ. Though he expressed grief over his former life as an opponent and persecutor of the Jesus movement, stressing that he was unworthy even to be an apostle, he nonetheless believed that his call to be an apostle was a singular and extraordinary event (1 Corinthians 15:9-10). Unlike the other apostles, who had been chosen by Jesus at the beginning of his preaching in Galilee, Paul believed that he had been set apart and called before he was even born—while still in his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). Given this perspective one might conclude that rather than being last, Paul was chosen before all the others. His “conversion,” then, would just be a matter of God determining the time was right to reveal Paul as an apostle. As Paul puts it: God chose to “reveal his Son to me” (Galatians 1:16). This places him in a rather extraordinary position with reference to the original apostles, since he understood that his singular position as the “Thirteenth Apostle” was to take the message about Christ to the non-Jewish world. This special mission, he believed, was essential for him to complete before the end of the age could arrive. Just as Christ was sent to his own people, the Jewish nation, to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, Paul as a kind of “second Christ,” was commissioned to go to the entire world (Romans 15:8-9). He believed that his specific role as an “apostle to the Gentiles” had been prophesied by Isaiah and that he, as a Suffering Servant, along with Christ, would also pour out his blood as an offering, and thus “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering” (Philippians 2:17; Colossians 1:24; Isaiah 49:1-6). Here Paul clearly believes that his own suffering, added to that of Jesus, was needed to fulfil God’s universal plan.
Paul’s relationship with the original apostles was sporadic and minimal. He is emphatic about this point, swearing with an oath to his followers that the gospel message he received directly from Christ came as a heavenly revelation and was not in any way derived from consulting with, or receiving authority from, the original Jerusalem apostles (Galatians 1:16-18). Paul spoke of the Jerusalem leadership sarcastically, referring to James, Peter, and John as the “so-called pillars,” and “those reputed to be somebody,” but adds, “what they are means nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6,9). At the same time he insisted that they gave him the right hand of fellowship and wished him well in his mission. It is possible that the leaders in Jerusalem had initially reached some sort of “live and let live” working agreement with Paul. His work, which was almost exclusively with non-Jews, would not interfere with their own preaching to Jews.
Sometime in the mid to late 50s A.D., Paul made a clear and decisive break with the Jerusalem establishment. In one of his last writings, an embedded fragment of a letter now found in 2 Corinthians, he declares “I am not the least inferior to these super-apostles,” and ends up calling them “false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:5, 13). He had also become terribly bitter against his fellow Jewish Christians who maintained their Jewish faith: “Look out for the dogs, look out for the evil-workers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh,” sarcastically referring to the practice of circumcision (Philippians 3:2). Tradition has it that Paul ended up in prison in Rome alone, with few supporters (2 Timothy 4:16).
Most scholars have interpreted this bitterly denunciatory language as directed against a group of unnamed Jewish opponents, not the Jerusalem apostles. I think this is mistaken. The radical nature of the break that took place between Paul and the original apostles is so threatening to our most basic assumptions about Christian origins that it is easy to think that it just can’t be true, but the evidence is there. Unfortunately, outside of Paul’s letters there is little in the New Testament to document it further. After all, the entire New Testament canon is largely a post-Paul and pro-Paul production. But Paul himself provides his side of the story and that is more than enough to reconstruct what happened. Fortunately a few additional sources outside the New Testament writings have survived that support what we can construct as the other side of the story. We will discuss these in the final chapter. They provide us with solid evidence of just how bitter and sharp the break between the Jerusalem apostles and Paul became.
If some of the elements of this brief overview of my analysis of Paul seem strange and unfamiliar to readers, that should be no surprise. Paul proved too radical, too apocalyptic, and too controversial even for the emerging Church in the second through the fourth centuries. He was domesticated, first by the author of Acts, as I have noted, but subsequently by letters written in his name, purporting to be from his hand, that are found in the New Testament. Paul was appropriated as a hero, a courageous preacher, and a martyr, who was responsible for taking the gospel beyond the Jewish world, but the radical content of his message, and his view of his unique calling and mission, were lost to subsequent generations of Christians. What Paul most expected to happen never came about and his grand vision of the imminent transformation of the world, and his pivotal role therein, utterly failed. The Paul who was appropriated over the centuries was a theological Paul, particularly as understood by Augustine and Luther. Paul was removed from his historical context and recast in terms of the great doctrines of Christianity, namely, predestination, justification by grace through faith, reconciliation, redemption, sanctification, and eternal life. The ethical teachings of Paul also had a practical and enduring legacy, from his incomparable celebration of the primacy of love in 1 Corinthians 13, to his views of women, sexuality and marriage, divorce, and other social issues. The thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament make up nearly one-quarter of the New Testament and they are the primary documents that have shaped the course of Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Protestant Christianity.
Jesus will always be the center of Christianity, but the “Jesus” who most influenced history was the “Jesus Christ” of Paul, not the historical figure of Jesus. There is a double irony here. Paul became the most influential defining figure for later Christianity, even beyond the historical Jesus, but he is also a man waiting to be discovered, even after nearly two thousand years. Paul transformed Jesus himself, with his message of messianic kingdom of justice and peace on earth, to the symbol of a religion of otherworldly salvation in a heavenly world. Recovering the authentic Paul, as he was in his own time, and from his own words, is my task in this book. All of us, whether Christian or not, whether wittingly or unwittingly, are heirs of Paul, since the parameters of Christ and his heavenly kingdom created by Paul were what shaped Christian civilization.