PAUL'S EARLIEST LETTERS
The first documents of the New Treaty, then, were the letters of Paul. Let us examine these to see what they reveal about Jesus.
The First Letter to the people of Thessalonica was, from indications within the letter itself, written shortly after Paul left Athens for Corinth on his second missionary journey, which would put it somewhere around A. D. 51, or (if Jesus died in the late 20's or early 30's, as seems most probable) around twenty to twenty-five years after the crucifixion.
Let us establish the context of this letter, first of all. It was written to people who had only just heard about Jesus, and to people who had been pagans in the Roman empire. It would be very difficult for such people to regard a crucified person as a hero, because crucifixion, among other things, was a way of killing people which was regarded more as disgraceful than as painful: the person was hanged stark naked on the cross, for everyone to laugh at. We have Hebrews alluding to this when it mentions "Jesus, the front-runner and winner, who for the joy that was placed before him endured the cross and made nothing of disgrace." Paul also says in the first letter to Corinth, "our proclamation deals with the Prince hanging on a cross, which is shocking to the Judeans and ridiculous to the Greeks." Finally, the reports of the crucifixion stress the fact that the people were making fun of Jesus as he hung before them. There is not much emphasis on pain here, but on how degrading the whole thing was--and Paul, in both the letters to Galatia and Corinth, considers this aspect of the crucifixion to be a serious obstacle to people's belief in Jesus. Evidently, from those letters, there were other preachers who were soft-pedaling this aspect of the good news, and therefore, in Paul's mind distorting the essence of why people should believe in Jesus in the first place.
One other aspect of the context of the letters is that the pagans were not averse to looking on human beings as gods. Augustus was worshiped even during his lifetime and was regarded by this time as a god; and, if Acts is to be believed, even Paul and Barnabas were worshiped for a while in Lycaonia--but after they had performed a sudden cure on a cripple. So we must keep in mind that a miracle-worker (or even a magician) would be looked on as a god by the pagans of the time, though certainly not by a Jew. This, however, would tend to be countered by the disgrace connected with the crucifixion, because it would imply fraud.
Would this mean that there would be a tendency to invent miracle-worker stories about Jesus on the part of the early preachers, in order to get him accepted among the pagans? The problem with this is that what it would tend to do is have Jesus regarded as another in the pantheon of divinities or semi-divinities; and in the early Christian communities, at least, with a good part of their population Jewish (Acts seems to report that even Paul went first to the Jews of the areas he entered), this divinization--or better, this sort of divinization--would be directly counter either to Jesus as a kind of modern-day Socrates or Jesus as the prophesied Jewish Prince. There would be nothing distinctive about him if he were simply another magician who had been caught making extravagant claims for himself.
Finally, note that we are less than thirty years after the death of Jesus at the writing of this letter, nowhere near enough time for legends to have arisen about someone who was already greatly admired for other reasons. That is, if Jesus was the sage, who because of some injustice was crucified, the focus would for quite some time would be on what he said and why the crucifixion was unjust, and only later, after he had been accepted as a hero who died for his convictions, would the miracle-worker stories be added to bolster his reputation.
The only grounds for early stories of miracles would be a deliberate attempt to divinize him on the part of those who wished him worshiped as a god. This might work among the pagans, as I said, and therefore would have been attempted among them but not among the Jews, because that would be the quickest way to ensure that there would be no Jewish converts. Further, one could expect, in this case, a concerted effort on the part of those who knew him to correct this distortion of him into a pagan god or demigod--because that would detract from what the true message about him was about, which, if he was the sage, would be his wisdom, and if he was the Prince, the fact that he was picked by YHWH as the true successor to David.
This, then, is the context of the letter. Now what does it say to these recent converts? In the first chapter, we find this:
"Your faith in God has gone everywhere, so that we really do not need to say anything; the people we come to already have heard from you about how we made a visit to you, how you turned to God from worshiping idols, how you became slaves of the real God who is alive, and how you are waiting for his son Jesus to come from heaven and raise the dead and save us from the punishment that is coming."
There is nothing about Jesus the sage, first of all. Secondly, we find a remark about being weaned away from "worshiping idols" and learning about the "real God who is alive," (the Jewish YHWH, of course), but then "waiting for his son Jesus to come from heaven and raise the dead" and so on.
That is clearly Jesus the miracle-worker, and even Jesus the divinized, but divinized in the Jewish context, precisely not as one of the pagan gods. That this was not well received among even the pagans is clear from what immediately follows in chapter 2:
"We had, as you realize, suffered a great deal and been made fools of in Philippi; but we found courage in God and spoke up, and reported God's good news to you, in spite of the struggle it was. That was because what we do on your behalf does not come from a mistake, or from hypocrisy or fraud; we deliver the good news to you in the same form that God found that we deserved having it entrusted to us; we say what pleases the God who tests our hearts, not what men find attractive.
"What we have said has never been to make people feel good, as you know; and God knows that it has never been a cloak for greed. We have never cared about what people think of us, either when we were with you or anyone else, though we could have demanded respect as emissaries of the Prince."
So Paul here is saying that his preaching was openly and honestly what he thought was true, in spite of the fact that it brought him ridicule and disgrace. He was writing this from Corinth just after his disastrous experience with the sophisticates of Athens, so the wound would have been opened once again. If Jesus was a wise man, then Paul, you would think, would have learned his lesson, and would have stopped trying to make him out to be a divinity at this early stage of preaching. It seems definitely to have been counter-productive, on the face of it, at least. Of course, his preaching is explainable if he can't help saying what he says, because he is reporting what he thinks are facts. He says he regards himself as an emissary of the Prince, not as someone who is telling about the sayings of an unjustly treated wise man.
Nor did this bring peace and joy among the people he preached to. He was writing, in fact, because their belief had unleashed a persecution against them.
"And this is why we never stop thanking God, because when you listened to what we said about God, you did not accept it as human talk, but for what it really is: words God is saying as he acts within you when you believe. And so you became like God's communities in Judea, in Jesus the Prince, because you have had happen to you from your countrymen the same thing that they suffered from the Judeans, the ones who killed Master Jesus and the prophets and kept hounding us--and instead of pleasing God, and in direct opposition to all the people, they kept us from speaking to the gentiles so they could be saved."
Apparently the pagans were treating the Thessalonians just as badly as the Jews treated the Judean converts.
Note the brief reference to the crucifixion. It is not to the crucifixion as such, but simply to the fact that Jesus, like the prophets, was killed by the "Judeans." There is a hint here of the injustice done to the admirable person, that Jesus was killed, like the prophets, for preaching something that the Jews found unacceptable. This, as I said, is what you would expect if Jesus were another Socrates; but he is called "the Prince" here, in the same sentence. From the wording of this point of the letter, it is not clear whether Paul is saying that Jesus was killed because of what he said, or because of his claim to be the Prince.
But then when Paul mentions the words of Jesus, what does he say (Chapter 4)?
"So there is only one thing left, brothers and sisters, for us to ask you. Please, in the name of Master Jesus, behave and be pleasing to God as you heard us explain to you--behave as you have been behaving, only more so.
"You know what the orders were that we gave you from Master Jesus. This is God's will for you, and your holiness: for you to keep away from sexual wrongs, for each of you to know how to keep possession of his organism in holiness and honor, and not let desire rule him as the pagans and those who do not know God do, and to know how not to be in competition with or take advantage of his brother or sister in what he does; the Master will make you pay for all of this, as we told you before and made very clear. God called you to holiness, not uncleanness; and anyone who pays no attention to these rules is not ignoring a man; he is ignoring God, who is bestowing on you his holy spirit."
These are not enigmatic statements of the sage. In fact, we don't find this sort of thing in the Reports; it is pretty straightforward natural-law ethics, and, interestingly enough, emphatically sexual ethics.
Right after this, Paul reports something else that he claims Jesus said:
"But I do want to say something, brothers and sisters, about those who have fallen asleep, so you will not be grieving like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and came back to life; and God will do the same thing for those who have fallen asleep with Jesus; he will bring them back with him.
"And we tell you this as something that the Master has said: those of us who are left alive when the Master comes out of seclusion will have no advantage over the ones who have fallen asleep; because the Master himself, when the call comes--at the voice of the archangel and the sound of God's trumpet--will come down from heaven; and then those who died in the Prince will come back to life first, and afterwards those of us who are left alive will be lifted up with them into the clouds to meet the Master in the air; and then we will be forever with the Master in this way. So encourage each other with what I have just said."
Here we have a clear statement of the Resurrection as something "we believe." And the purpose of the belief in the Resurrection is the assurance that "God will do the same thing for those who have fallen asleep with Jesus; he will bring them back with him." And "the Master" (presumably Jesus, though the term was also the ordinary way to refer to YHWH) is supposed to have said that when he "comes out of seclusion" (appears among us again, but a term used also for someone who has been incognito and who returns publicly) he will come down from heaven, and so on.
So this first letter is all about the "Christ of faith," not the wise sage. Jesus is pictured as the Son of God, as having died and come back to life, as bringing the dead back to life and as coming down from heaven to do so. Paul is also very aware of the pagan notions of divinity and is deliberately trying to distance himself from them; so the miraculous dimension of what he is doing was not an attempt to turn Jesus into a kind of Hercules.
Far, then, from having legends grow up around Jesus to reinforce the profundity of his teachings, we find nothing about the profound teachings and only the miracles as proving, not the truth of what Jesus said, but the alleged fact that his return to life signals a return to life of the dead who believe in him (meaning apparently who believe that this in fact happened).
I went into this detail here to stress the fact that this earliest document gives no comfort whatever to those who hold the wise-guru hypothesis. It is exactly the opposite of what you would expect from that hypothesis, and just what you would expect if the historical Jesus was in fact the miracle-worker who came back to life.
The second letter to Thessalonica does not add anything to this. Again we find nothing about the wise sayings of Jesus, nor any attempt to show how unjust his condemnation was. We find encouragement in the persecution with promises of the vengeance of God at that reappearance of Jesus, a reiteration that no one knows when it will happen (there had apparently been a letter allegedly from Paul that indicated that it was imminent, which was the occasion for this corrective letter), and the mysterious prophesy about the "anarchist" who is to appear before the end and deceive everyone.
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