Between Jesus and Paul: where did it all go right?

The relationship between Jesus and Paul is much disputed. You will often hear people say that Paul turned the generous, kind, and progressive religion of Jesus into a monstrous theological and ecclesiastical system from which we are still recovering. Or that Jesus died for our sins and Paul told everyone about it. And started churches. Or some other misconception.

I will argue here that the overlap between the two figures is slight, for good reason, but that they are nevertheless connected by a deeply biblical logic.

What prompted me to address the question was a blog post by James McGrath: “What Paul Knew About Jesus.” He is discussing an article in The New Yorker in which Adam Gopnik asks how Paul “remade human history.”

I don’t have access to Gopnik’s article, but I feel I should point out, before we go any further, that you can make history and you can rewrite history, but you cannot remake history. Once it’s made, it’s made.

That aside, history is very much the issue.

McGrath says this: “Paul did not think history would continue beyond his generation, before witnessing the final judgment and the arrival of God’s kingdom.”

I’m disappointed, James.

As I see it at least, neither Jesus nor Paul expected the world to end any time soon, if at all. Rather, they both expected history to play out with spectacular apocalyptic effect.

Jesus and history

For Jesus, history playing out meant that the Judeans or Jews would pursue a reckless course that would culminate, within a generation, in the disaster of the war against Rome.

There is nothing either historically or biblically remarkable about this. The Bible is, all the way through, the story of Israel’s troubled political existence in the midst of powerful nations through the ages. Or, as I put it recently: it is the “multifarious documentary witness of a historical community to its covenant life over time.”

Everything that Jesus says and does in the Synoptic Gospels presupposes the realistic historical horizon of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

• He announces that the kingdom of God is at hand—in other words, that the time is fast approaching when the God of Israel will intervene in dramatic and devastating fashion to put right all that is wrong in Israel.
• Like John the Baptist—and a long line of prophets before him—he calls Israel to repent in view of this coming intervention.
• He pronounces judgment on an “evil and adulterous generation” of Jews. They will suffer the judgment of Gehenna, which is not “hell” as we understand it, but the horror of the siege of Jerusalem and the slaughter of its citizens.
• He blesses the righteous in the land who will inherit the life of the age to come.
• His controversial association with the sick, demon-possessed, poor, and ostracised signals the fact that repentance, salvation, and renewal will happen mostly on the margins of Israel’s social-political existence.
• The exorcisms represent a temporary restoration of sanity and order, but Jesus knows very well that the expelled spirit will eventually return with “seven other spirits more evil than itself,” and the later self-destructive madness of Israel will be far worse than anything Jesus has to deal with (Lk. 11:24-26). Josephus confirms this (War 2.13.6).
• He gathers a group of poorly qualified disciples who will continue his prophetic ministry to Israel, on much the same terms, after his death.
• He warns the rich and powerful in Israel that their wealth, even if justly gained, will not save them from the catastrophe of the war.
• He speaks in parables (Matt. 13:13-15) because Isaiah was sent to say to stubborn, unrepentant Israel: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive”—until “cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, and the LORD removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land” (Is. 6:9, 11-12).
• Jesus identifies with Daniel’s “one like a son of man,” who represents the persecuted righteous in Israel and who will be vindicated before the throne of God and elevated to a position of authority over the nations.
• He understands that his suffering and death will be the means by which some part of Israel will be saved.
• His disciples will share in this vindication, kingdom, and glory at the parousia, when the true status of Israel’s crucified messiah will be revealed not only to Israel but also to the nations. They will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel throughout the coming ages (Matt. 19:28). There will be no need to judge Israel after the end of history, when there is no more sin and error.
• That is really as far as it goes.

Paul and Jesus and history

We don’t know whether the Pharisee Paul knew Jesus personally when he was active in Galilee and Judea, but Luke has him present at the stoning of Stephen not long after the crucifixion. So presumably he had heard Stephen’s fierce denunciation of a “stiff-necked people,” which always persecutes the prophets, and his affirmation that the Son of Man was now “standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:51-52, 56).

Not long after, he “saw” this Son of Man for himself—the heavenly Jesus who identified with the disciples whom Paul was persecuting (Acts 9:4-5).

So he came to understand that the recently executed Jesus had been appointed “Son of God in power” on the basis of his resurrection from the dead, and then had chosen Paul to make this new state of affairs—the impending régime change—known among the nations (Rom. 1:1-5; Gal. 1:16; cf. Acts 9:15, 20).

For Paul, history playing out meant that the dominant religious culture of the Greeks, characterised by the ubiquitous statues of the gods, would be swept away.

It didn’t need the world to end for this to happen. It was the way of empires and civilisations to come and go.

So everything Paul said and did presupposed the eschatological horizon of a coming judgment on the Greek-Roman world—and, I would add, it is meaningful for us just for that reason.

• He shared Jesus’ pessimistic assessment of the fate of his people. They were “vessels of wrath set aside for destruction” (Rom. 9:22*). Paul’s God was not more angry about the current behaviour of the Jews than Jesus’ God was. Both of Paul and Jesus shared the stark perspective of the Old Testament prophets in this respect.
• Jesus’ practical programme was of little interest to Paul, however, because he was not doing what Jesus did.
• He proclaimed a heavenly Lord to Jews and pagans across the Greek-Roman world, one whose future reign was being anticipated in the shared faith and practice of Jewish and gentile believers. He was the prophetic herald—in the mould of Isaiah’s servant of YHWH—of this good news to the nations (cf. Acts 13:47; Is. 49:1-6).
• Paul believed that the proclamation of the name of Jesus among the gentiles would sooner or later bring about a profound political-religious realignment of the world encompassed by his mission. The nations from Syria to Spain would turn from their idols to “serve the living and true God” (1 Thess. 1:9-10) and would confess one Lord over their political lives in place of the “many lords” of the existing heavenly and earthly hierarchies.
• The proclamation was backed up by the dynamic activity of the eschatological Spirit of God. The Spirit gave them conviction and unity and inspired Christ-like endurance and hope.
• Paul understood that Jesus had died for the sins of Israel, with atoning effect, and that this had nullified the Jewish Law for the eschatological purpose. Jesus had not died for the sins of gentiles, in that regard; they were included on the strength of their belief and the subsequent experience of the same Spirit.
• Paul didn’t make followers of Jesus because Jesus was not there any more to be followed. You don’t follow an enthroned king, you are governed by him. Instead, he called people to be conformed for now to the image of the suffering and vindicated Christ. This was at the heart of what it meant to be church in this transitional moment. They were eschatological communities of hope that would bear the brunt of Jewish and pagan opposition until the new age dawned.
• The main difference between Jesus and Paul was this: Jesus lived and died for the renewal of Israel ahead of the catastrophe of the war against Rome; Paul believed that the renewal of Israel in this implausible and controversial manner—in the strange wisdom of God—would bring about the “conversion” of the dominant pagan civilisation (Rom. 15:8-12). It took longer than he would have liked, but it happened.
• Paul’s best hope for his own people was that the war would bring them to their senses (Rom. 11:25-27): in its aftermath, they would repent of their defiance and recognise the divine authority given to the messiah Jesus. As it turned out, the hope was misplaced.

Paul and the dominant religious and cultural architecture of the West

So I don’t share McGrath’s quite sharp objection to Gopnik’s assertion that “Paul turned the heresy of a tiny sect of Messianic Jews into the dominant religious and cultural architecture of the West for the next couple of thousand years.”

Yes, Paul’s mission involved “calling uncircumcised Gentiles to join that messianic sect and to submit to the God of Israel and the appointed and anointed Davidic king, Jesus.” But Paul had a decisive, controlling, “eschatological” outcome in view. The converts from paganism in Thessalonica now served the one God of Israel instead of the many gods of the ancient world, but they were also waiting for Jesus to deliver them “from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:9-10).

That was the whole point of believing for these Greeks—to escape the judgment that was coming on their civilisation (cf. Acts 17:29-31).

But biblically speaking, God judges in order to put something new in its place, and in this case the something new is a monotheistic political-religious order in which Jesus is acclaimed as Lord by the nations qua nations:

And again Isaiah says, There will be the root of Jesse and the one arising to rule nations, in him nations will hope. May the God of the hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, in order that you may abound in the hope in power of the Holy Spirit. (Rom. 15:12-13*)

The hope in which these believing gentiles abounded was precisely the hope, boldly communicated in the apostolic message, that they would at some future point be ruled by a crucified messiah from the Jews (cf. 9:4-5).

There we have the deeply biblical logic—and it doesn’t require a final judgment.

Given the vision of profound civilisational transformation, then, it does not seem to me so far-fetched to suppose that the “religious and cultural architecture” of western Christendom was the proper product of Paul’s mission, even if he didn’t think it through in detail—any more than Jesus thought through what would follow the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

But they knew that history would keep unfolding, as it continues to do today.