Transcription
Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor or Prefect of Judea, in April 30 CE. As best as we can determine, it was not until seven years after Jesus' death, around 37 CE, that Paul reported his initial apparition of Christ, whom he identified with Jesus raised from the dead. When challenged for his credentials, he asked 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). This means 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, referring to him by his Aramaic name, Cephas, 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 50 CE. 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 surprises many; it is one of the key factors in understanding Paul and his message. This chronology suggests 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 that developed independently of Jesus' original apostles and followers, with minimal contact with anyone who had known Jesus.
Many important clues are hiding in plain sight; much depends on one's assumptions about what is seen or unseen, noted or simply overlooked. The differences between these two Christianities are considerable when Paul is placed in this context. A completely new and fascinating picture emerges, allowing us 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 CE, and they are firsthand accounts. They are our best witnesses to the true state of affairs between Paul and the original apostles.
For Paul, this separation and independence from the earthly Jesus 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 came through a revelation of the Heavenly Christ (Galatians 1:11-12). He insisted that his second trip to Jerusalem, around 50 CE, was not a summons from the leaders in Jerusalem, as if he were their inferior, as some of his opponents had claimed. He stated that he went there by revelation, meaning Jesus told him to go.
Paul referred to the three leaders of the Jerusalem Church, James, Peter, and John, sarcastically as the so-called pillars of the Church, adding that what they are means nothing to him (Galatians 2:6, 9). Although he calls himself the least and the last, he keenly makes 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 15:9-12; 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 contrasts the period when people knew Jesus "according to the flesh" 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, as 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" (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," indicating that his usage is proprietary and inclusive (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 quite revolutionary; it means that the entire history of early Christianity, as commonly understood, must be reconsidered. The standard Sunday school or catechetical view of Christian origins goes something like this: Jesus came to preach a New Covenant gospel that superseded the Jewish understanding of God and His plan for the salvation of 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 movement—arresting Christians to deliver them up for execution—became the thirteenth apostle, 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, the 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, despite a few initial issues that had to be worked out. Peter and Paul worked in supportive harmony, together in life and in death, laying the foundations for a universal Christian faith that has continued through the centuries. However, historians of early Christianity question such a harmonizing view, linking Jesus, His first apostles, and Paul. This perspective serves theological dogma more than historical truth. Defending such a portrait requires ignoring, downplaying, or denying 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 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 lived and died as a Jew, as did His earliest followers, nearly all of whom were Jewish. They continued to consider themselves 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 claims and gathered followers behind them. Like Jesus, they all, without exception, were executed by 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, making 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 betraying 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. Nonetheless, they imagine a practical, functional harmony between Paul and the original apostles. In this view, Paul and the apostles 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 break with those apostles, promoting and preaching views they found to be utterly reprehensible. Conversely, I believe 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 rock foundations of the Christian Church for 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 entirely a literary victory reinforced by an emerging theological orthodoxy backed by Roman political power after the time of the Emperor Constantine (306-337 CE). This consolidation was not achieved in Paul's lifetime, but it emerged with the dominance of Pauline writings within the New Testament canon, which became the standard of Christian orthodoxy. Even the order and arrangement of the New Testament books reflect the dominance of Paul's perspectives, gradually overshadowing alternative visions and voices, 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 alter of 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 had little to do with Paul. Paul's literary victory rested upon three pillars:
1. The Gospel of Mark, our earliest narrative of the career and death of Jesus, is heavily Pauline in its theological content.
2. The two-volume work of Luke-Acts, vastly expanded to culminate with the final scene of Paul preaching his gospel in Rome.
3. The six later letters written in Paul's name but after his lifetime offered a more domesticated Paul, pleasing the Church and muting his more radical message.
These six letters are Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. The master narrative of Paul's literary triumph is 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 believe his work dates to an earlier time. He ends his story with Paul under house arrest in Rome, neglecting to relate the story of Paul's death, which he surely knew. By doing this, he leaves the impression that his book dates to the time of Emperor Nero, when Paul was executed.
All this is a purposeful ploy. Traditionally, the work was attributed to Luke, a companion of Paul and a reported 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, who is named two additional times in later letters attributed to Paul but not written by him (Colossians 4:14; 2 Timothy 4:11). The 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 states 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 of Paul, eyewitnesses to many of the events in Acts, with access to documents they obtained from Paul. Scholars have generally dated Luke-Acts to the 90s CE, but a number of scholars have convincingly argued more recently for a date well into the second century CE.
The unabashed hero of the book of Acts is Paul, so much so that the work might more properly be named "The Acts of Paul," with only 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 he encounters. Acts is a remarkably pro-Roman book, and the author's implied context reflects a period many years after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, accompanied by 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 that 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, roughly from 30 to 60 CE. As such, despite the author's strong 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 had access to materials that date back to the days when James, the brother of Jesus, led the Jerusalem movement.
Even as he tries to mute James' influence, cracks in his presentation become apparent. 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. The portrait of Paul presented therein has become the dominant narrative. If people know anything about Paul, it is more than likely drawn from hearing about or reading the book of Acts. Our primary source for the story of the origins of the Christian Church was written by an anonymous devotee of Paul, decades removed from the events he reports to narrate. Is it possible that this anonymous author has unwittingly become 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 historical facts?
The author of Luke-Acts knew precisely what he was doing, and his deliberate obscuration 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 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.
Paul's 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 typical printed English New Testament, totaling 275 pages, yet the implications of what they say are far-reaching. When Paul 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 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). He zealously persecuted the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6; 1 Corinthians 15:9).
Sometime around 37 CE, Paul had a visionary experience, describing it as seeing Jesus, and he received from Him his gospel message and his call to be an apostle to the non-Jewish world (1 Corinthians 9:2; Galatians 1:1; 2:2). Paul was unmarried, at least during his career as an apostle (1 Corinthians 7:8; 15:9; Philippians 3:8). He worked as a manual laborer to support himself on his travels (1 Corinthians 4:12; 9:6-15; 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 we get Paul first and foremost in his own words.