Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (29 page)

Yet, for Paul, there is no room whatsoever for debating the role of the Law of Moses
in the new community. Not only does Paul reject the primacy of Jewish law, he refers
to it as a “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on a stone tablet” that must be
superseded by “a ministry of the Spirit come in glory” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). He calls
his fellow believers who continue to practice circumcision—the quintessential mark
of the nation of Israel—“dogs and evildoers” who “mutilate the flesh” (Philippians
3:2). These are startling statements for a former Pharisee to make. But for Paul they
reflect the truth about Jesus that he feels he alone recognizes, which is that “Christ
is the end of the Torah” (Romans 10:4).

Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders
of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all,
Jesus claimed to have come to fulfill the Law of Moses, not to abolish it. Far from
rejecting the law, Jesus continually strove to expand and intensify it. Where the
law commands, “thou shall not kill,” Jesus added, “if you are angry with your brother
or sister you are liable to [the same]
judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Where the law states, “thou shall not commit adultery,”
Jesus extended it to include “everyone who looks at a woman with lust” (Matthew 5:28).
Jesus may have disagreed with the scribes and scholars over the correct interpretation
of the law, particularly when it came to such matters as the prohibition against working
on the Sabbath. But he never rejected the law. On the contrary, Jesus warned that
“whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so,
will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19).

One would think that Jesus’s admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of
Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with
anything “Jesus-in-the-flesh” may or may not have said. In fact, Paul shows no interest
at all in the historical Jesus. There is almost no trace of Jesus of Nazareth in any
of his letters. With the exception of the crucifixion and the Last Supper, which he
transforms from a narrative into a liturgical formula, Paul does not narrate a single
event from Jesus’s life. Nor does Paul ever actually quote Jesus’s words (again, with
the exception of his rendering of the Eucharistic formula: “This is my body …”). Actually,
Paul sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. Compare what Paul writes in his epistle
to the Romans—“everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans
10:13)—to what Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord
Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21).

Paul’s lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued,
to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the
simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care. He repeatedly
boasts that he has not learned about Jesus either from the apostles or from anyone
else who may have known him. “But when it pleased God … to reveal his son to me, so
that I might preach him to the gentiles, I did not confer with anyone, nor did I go
up to Jerusalem
[to ask permission of] the apostles before me,” Paul boasts. “Instead, I went directly
to Arabia, and then again to Damascus” (Galatians 1:15–17).

Only after three years of preaching a message that Paul insists he received not from
any human being (by which he quite obviously means James and the apostles), but directly
from Jesus, did he deign to visit the men and women in Jerusalem who had actually
known the man Paul professed as Lord (Galatians 1:12).

Why does Paul go to such lengths not only to break free from the authority of the
leaders in Jerusalem, but to denigrate and dismiss them as irrelevant or worse? Because
Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought,
that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly
get away with preaching them. What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his
contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality.
Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable
to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’
dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations
of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a
completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making:
Christ
.

Although “Christ” is technically the Greek word for “messiah,” that is not how Paul
employs the term. He does not endow Christ with any of the connotations attached to
the term “messiah” in the Hebrew Scriptures. He never speaks of Jesus as “the anointed
of Israel.” Paul may have recognized Jesus as a descendant of King David, but he does
not look to the scriptures to argue that Jesus was the Davidic liberator the Jews
had been awaiting. He ignores all the messianic prophecies that the gospels would
rely on many years later to prove that Jesus was the Jewish messiah (when Paul does
look to the Hebrew prophets—for instance, Isaiah’s prophecy about the root of Jesse
who will one day serve as “a light to the
gentiles” (11:10)—he thinks the prophets are predicting
him
, not Jesus). Most tellingly, unlike the gospel writers (save for John, of course),
Paul does not call Jesus
the Christ
(
Yesus ho Xristos
), as though Christ were his title. Rather, Paul calls him “Jesus Christ,” or just
“Christ,” as if it were his surname. This is an extremely unusual formulation whose
closest parallel is in the way Roman emperors adopted “Caesar” as a cognomen, as in
Caesar Augustus.

Paul’s Christ is not even human, though he has taken on the likeness of one (Philippians
2:7). He is a cosmic being who existed before time. He is the first of God’s creations,
through whom the rest of creation was formed (1 Corinthians 8:6). He is God’s begotten
son, God’s
physical
progeny (Romans 8:3). He is the new Adam, born not of dust but of heaven. Yet while
the first Adam became a living being, “the Last Adam,” as Paul calls Christ, has become
“a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45–47). Christ is, in short, a comprehensively
new being. But he is not unique. He is merely the first of his kind: “the first-born
among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). All those who believe in Christ, as Paul does—those
who accept Paul’s teachings about him—can become one with him in a mystical union
(1 Corinthians 6:17). Through their belief, their bodies will be transformed into
the glorious body of Christ (Philippians 3:20–21). They will join him in spirit and
share in his likeness, which, as Paul reminds his followers, is the likeness of God
(Romans 8:29). Hence, as “heirs of God and fellow heirs of Christ,” believers can
also become divine beings (Romans 8:17). They can become like Christ in his death
(Philippians 3:10)—that is, divine and eternal—tasked with the responsibility of judging
alongside him the whole of humanity, as well as the angels in heaven (1 Corinthians
6:2–3).

Paul’s portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it
has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright
bizarre to Jesus’s Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean into a divine,
preexistent, literal son of God whose death and resurrection
launch a new genus of eternal beings responsible for judging the world has no basis
in any writings about Jesus that are even remotely contemporary with Paul’s (a firm
indication that Paul’s Christ was likely his own creation). Nothing like what Paul
envisions exists in the
Q
source material, which was compiled around the same time that Paul was writing his
letters. Paul’s Christ is certainly not the Son of Man who appears in Mark’s gospel,
written just a few years after Paul’s death. Nowhere in the gospels of Matthew and
Luke—composed between 90 and 100
C.E
.—is Jesus ever considered the literal son of God. Both gospels employ the term “Son
of God” exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title,
not a description. It is only in the last of the canonized gospels, the gospel of
John, written sometime between 100 and 120
C.E
., that Paul’s vision of Jesus as Christ—the eternal
logos
, the only begotten son of God—can be found. Of course, by then, nearly half a decade
after the destruction of Jerusalem, Christianity was already a thoroughly Romanized
religion, and Paul’s Christ had long obliterated any last trace of the Jewish messiah
in Jesus. During the decade of the fifties, however, when Paul is writing his letters,
his conception of Jesus as Christ would have been shocking and plainly heretical,
which is why, around 57
C.E
., James and the apostles demand that Paul come to Jerusalem to answer for his deviant
teachings.

This would not be Paul’s first appearance before the movement’s leaders. As he mentions
in his letter to the Galatians, he initially met the apostles on a visit to the holy
city three years after his conversion, around 40
C.E
., when he came face-to-face with Peter and James. The two leaders were apparently
thrilled that “the one who had been persecuting us is now proclaiming the message
of faith he once tried to destroy” (Galatians 1:23). They glorified God because of
Paul and sent him on his way to preach the message of Jesus in the regions of Syria
and Cilicia, giving him as his companion and keeper a Jewish convert and close confidant
of James named Barnabas.

Paul’s second trip to Jerusalem took place about a decade later, sometime around 50
C.E
., and was far less cordial than the first. He had been summoned to appear before
a meeting of the Apostolic Council to defend his self-designated role as missionary
to the gentiles (Paul insists he was not summoned to Jerusalem but went of his own
accord because Jesus told him to). With his companion Barnabas and an uncircumcised
Greek convert named Titus by his side, Paul stood before James, Peter, John, and the
elders of the Jerusalem assembly to strongly defend the message he had been proclaiming
to the gentiles.

Luke, writing about this meeting some forty or fifty years later, paints a picture
of perfect harmony between Paul and the council’s members, with Peter himself standing
up for Paul and taking his side. According to Luke, James, in his capacity as leader
of the Jerusalem assembly and head of the Apostolic Council, blessed Paul’s teachings,
decreeing that thenceforth gentiles would be welcomed into the community without having
to follow the Law of Moses, so long as they “abstain from things polluted by idols,
from prostitution, from [eating] things that have been strangled, and from blood”
(Acts 15:1–21). Luke’s description of the meeting is an obvious ploy to legitimate
Paul’s ministry by stamping it with the approval of none other than “the brother of
the Lord.” However, Paul’s own account of the Apostolic Council, written in a letter
to the Galatians not long after it had taken place, paints a completely different
picture of what happened in Jerusalem.

Paul claims that he was ambushed at the Apostolic Council by a group of “false believers”
(those still accepting the primacy of the Temple and Torah) who had been secretly
spying on him and his ministry. Although Paul reveals little detail about the meeting,
he cannot mask his rage at the treatment he says he received at the hands of “the
supposedly acknowledged leaders” of the church: James, Peter, and John. Paul says
he “refused to submit to them, not even for a minute,” as neither they, nor their
opinion of his ministry, made any difference to him whatsoever (Galatians 2:1–10).

Whatever took place during the Apostolic Council, it appears that the meeting concluded
with a promise by James, the leader of the Jerusalem assembly, not to compel Paul’s
gentile followers to be circumcised. Yet what happened soon afterward indicates that
he and James were far from reconciled: almost immediately after Paul left Jerusalem,
James began sending his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in Galatia, Corinth,
Philippi, and most other places where Paul had built a following, in order to correct
Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus.

Paul was incensed by these delegations, which he viewed, correctly, as a threat to
his authority. Almost all of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament were written after
the Apostolic Council and are addressed to congregations that had been visited by
these representatives from Jerusalem (Paul’s first letter, to the Thessalonians, was
written between 48 and 50
C.E
.; his last letter, to the Romans, was written around 56
C.E
.). That is why these letters devote so much space to defending Paul’s status as an
apostle, touting his direct connection to Jesus, and railing against the leaders in
Jerusalem who, “disguising themselves as apostles of Christ,” are, in Paul’s view,
actually servants of Satan who have bewitched Paul’s followers (Corinthians 11:13–15).

Nevertheless, James’s delegations seem to have had an impact, for Paul repeatedly
lambastes his congregations for abandoning him: “I am amazed at how quickly you have
deserted the one who called you” (Galatians 1:6). He implores his followers not to
listen to these delegations, or to anyone else for that matter, but only to him: “If
anyone else preaches a gospel contrary to the gospel you received [from me], let him
be damned” (Galatians 1:9). Even if that gospel comes “from an angel in heaven,” Paul
writes, his congregations should ignore it (Galatians 1:8). Instead, they should obey
Paul and only Paul: “Be imitators of
me
, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).

Feeling bitter and no longer tethered to the authority of James and the apostles in
Jerusalem (“Whatever they are makes no difference
to me”), Paul spent the next few years freely expounding his doctrine of Jesus as
Christ. Whether James and the apostles in Jerusalem were fully aware of Paul’s activities
during this period is debatable. After all, Paul was writing his letters in Greek,
a language neither James nor the apostles could read. Moreover, Barnabas, James’s
sole link to Paul, had abandoned him soon after the Apostolic Council for reasons
that are unclear (though it bears mentioning that Barnabas was a Levite and as such
would probably have been a strict observer of Jewish law). Regardless, by the year
57
C.E
., the rumors about Paul’s teachings could no longer be ignored. And so, once again,
he is summoned to Jerusalem to answer for himself.