OTHER LETTERS OF PAUL
The letter (or letters) to Philippi, probably written some time around 60, or perhaps during the imprisonment in Rome in 61-3, takes the Theology of Paul a step further:
"Your attitude is to be the one that was in Prince Jesus, who when he possessed God's form did not consider being equal to God something he had to keep hold of; he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, and turned himself into what was the same as a human being; and once he found himself in human shape, he lowered himself so far as to submit obediently to death, and death on a cross.
"That is why God elevated him above everyone else and gave him the name that is greater than every other name, so that at the name "Jesus" every knee in heaven, on earth, and under the earth is to bend, and everyone's tongue is to acknowledge for God's glory that he is the slave of Prince Jesus.
"So, my friends, submit obediently, as you always do, not just when I am with you, but even more now that I am away; and work for your own rescue with fear and diffidence--because it is God who is active inside you, and who makes the choices and performs the acts that he sees fit."
Jesus is now acknowledged as the same as God; and somehow this divinity "emptied himself" into what was the same as a human being. He transformed himself into being human--so that we would be transformed into God? As I said, the hint was given in the letter to Rome. Is it stated more explicitly?
It sounds like it. The final step in the process is what we find in the letters to Colossae and Ephesus (which latter is, to me, obviously the letter to Laodicea referred to in the Colossian letter; it has no direction in the best manuscripts):
Here is the first version, in the letter to "Ephesus":
"God, the Father of our Master Prince Jesus, is to be blessed, because he has blessed us in the Prince with every spiritual blessing in the heights of heaven. This was what he gave us when he chose us in him before the world began to exist, so that we would be sacred and sinless before him in love; and when he had sonship to himself as his purpose for us from the beginning through Prince Jesus.
"This was the choice of his will, and it is what leads us to praise the glory of the gift he gave us in his Beloved, in whom we find release from captivity because of his blood. Our immorality is forgiven by the riches of his gift, which has also overflowed into us with complete wisdom and knowledge, because it has informed us of the secret of his will; that it was his pleasure, which he determined beforehand in the Prince, for things to work out so that when the time reached completion, everything in heaven and on earth would be brought together under one head in the Prince.
"He is the one in whom we have our inheritance, because of the plan which he formed from the beginning and is working out exactly as he chooses; so that we would be the first to put our hope in the Prince, for the praise of his glory. He is the one in whom you listened to the truth that was spoken in the report of the good news of your rescue; and he is the one in whom you believed and received the seal of the holy spirit he promised, who is the pledge of our inheritance, to be redeemed from his estate, for the praise of his glory."
And here is the rewrite in the letter to Colossae:
"And we pray for you, in every good deed you do, to be productive and increase in knowledge of God, and to grow strong in every sort of power by the might of his glory, so that you will be able to stand any kind of hardship and tolerate everything gladly, and thank the Father, who has made you fit to share the inheritance of the sacred people in the light.
"The Father was the one who extricated us from the power of darkness and moved us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, from whom we have forgiveness and removal of our sins. The Son is the visible counterpart of the invisible God and the first-born of the whole of creation, because everything in heaven and on earth was created in him; everything visible and invisible--Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers, everything--was created through him and for him; he himself exists before everything and everything has continued to exist in him.
"He is also the head of the body which is the community; he is its Principality--its ruler and source--the first-born of the dead people, so that he is to have the first place in everything; because God thought it proper for every fulfillment to be located in him, and for everything on earth and in heaven to be transformed by him and to him, as he made peace by shedding blood on his cross."
Not the most pellucid of all texts, and the only instance we have of Paul's actually rewriting a letter. Most of the time, he is clearly dictating just what comes to mind; but here he is carefully choosing his words, evidently to get across an extremely mysterious and radical idea. But the logic of the progression of Paul's thought is clear: The difference between the Old Treaty and the New is that we become one thing with Jesus--his very body--because of our sharing his life. But the life of Jesus is in fact the life of YHWH; and therefore, in Jesus, we are divinized; we are transformed into YHWH and are divine as well as human, because Jesus has given us the gift of being simultaneously divine and human, like him, whose life we share. And the world is also transformed along with us, in some way. This is not pantheism; it is a special favor of God bestowed on those he chooses, who "put on the livery of Prince Jesus." There is only one God, who is a spirit; the world is not a part of this God; he has had to transform us to himself in order to do this; and he did it through the crucifixion.
This at least leaves open the possibility that this union with God--this identification with him--would not have occurred had the crucifixion not occurred, because
"as Scripture says, 'What God has prepared for those who love him is something no eye has seen or ear heard, something that has not entered man's heart.' And God has disclosed this to us through his Spirit."
as he says in Chapter 2 of the first letter to Corinth. No one would have desired it, because no one would have been able to envision actually becoming God; it is a reward, if you will, because of the punishment for mankind's sin. Eternal companionship with God in the person of Jesus is one thing; eternal identification with God in Jesus is something entirely different.
One interesting little confirmation of the identification with the crucifixion occurs in the first chapter of the letter to Colossae:
"I am happy now in what I am going through for you; I am in my own flesh putting the finishing touches on the Prince's suffering for that body of his which is the community."
So our own suffering "completes," as it were, the suffering of Jesus. If our thesis is true, this is because our rejection of Jesus which led to the crucifixion means that the crucifixion does its work of redeeming us by our uniting of ourselves to it in our own suffering.
Interestingly, then, the attempt to find out whether we can trust the texts by examining the earliest documents reveals that the Good News about Jesus was originally not at all what Jesus said, but what he was and what happened to him and therefore to us. And it does look as if, in Paul's mind at least, the "meaningfulness" of these factual events is that we become identified with Jesus, and therefore identified with his death by our own suffering.
For our purposes, it is not terribly useful to go into the letters to Timothy and Titus, so let me finish this brief look at the texts of Paul by answering a possible objection a bit more fully. Paul claims that he is telling what he knows and has been told not only by Jesus himself but by those who saw him before he died. There are only two ways, as I said, in which he could say this if Jesus did not in fact come back to life from the grave: (1) he is lying, or (2) he is deluded.
Now what does Paul say himself that is relevant to this? Remember, a person who is not insane lies only if he has some reason for it: some gain in prestige or money or power of some sort. As to making money from his preaching, we find this in the second letter to Corinth:
"Then what's wrong with me? That I degraded myself--to dignify you--when I delivered the report of God's good news to you without charging for it? I was stealing from the other communities when I accepted support from them so I could serve you; and when I was with you and needed something, I didn't put a burden on anyone; anything I needed was met in full by the brothers and sisters who came from Macedonia. I was determined then, and I am determined now, not to impose on you. And as the Prince's truth is in me, there will be no silencing this claim I make, through the whole territory of Greece. And why? Because I don't love you? Ask God!
"Yes, and I'll keep doing what I'm doing now, to cut off any chance of making a claim to be like us on the part of anyone who is looking for an occasion to do it."
So the accusation against Paul, as the letter makes clear, was that he was defrauding the people by teaching his strange doctrine, apparently charging no one for it, but actually fleecing them indirectly. He answers that part somewhat later in the letter:
"And now I'm getting ready to visit you for the third time--and I'm still not going to charge you anything; I want you, not your money. Parents should provide for their children, not children for their parents; it gives me pleasure to spend for your souls until I have nothing left; but if I love you too much, you love me less.
"All right, maybe I haven't imposed on you financially myself; but from the beginning I've been a faker who swindled you out of your money. Oh really? Did I manage this swindle by someone I sent as my representative? I sent Titus and the other brother; was it Titus who swindled you? Don't we behave with the same spirit? Don't we walk on the same path?"
So it isn't money that motivates Paul. In fact, before he got help from the Macedonians, he supported himself by his trade as a tent-maker. Further, in the letter of Philippi from prison, he thanks those very Macedonians for their help, but says that he doesn't need it:
"It gave me great happiness in the Master that your concern for me blossomed again just now, the way you used to care for me, until I stopped giving you the chance. I'm not saying this because I needed what you did; I've learned to manage by myself no matter where I am; I know how to do without, and I know how to have more than I need. I am familiar with all of it: to have a full stomach and to go hungry, to have too much and not to have enough; I have strength for everything by the one who gives me power. Still, it was nice of you to do your part in my hardship.
"And you people in Philippi know that at the beginning of my reporting the good news, when I left Macedonia, you were the only community I let help me out in this business of giving and receiving; and that in Thessalonica you sent money I needed not once but twice. It isn't that what I want is the gift; what I care about is the profit you get and the interest it earns for you.
"You see, I have all I need--I have more than enough, now that I have received your gift from Epaphroditus; but it is a fragrant offering, a fitting sacrifice, acceptable to God."
Was it prestige or comfort? Listen to his litany of the kinds of things that happened to him in his preaching:
"But here I go being crazy; and I say that I can be as arrogant as the next man. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Israelites? So am I. Descendants of Abraham? So am I. The Prince's servants? This is the crazy man talking; I am more of one; I work a lot harder than they do, I've been in prison a lot more, I've been whipped many more times, and many times faced death; I got the "forty lashes minus one" from the Judeans five times, I've been beaten with rods three times, I was stoned once, I've been shipwrecked three times, and once spent a whole day and night in the water; most of the time, I'm traveling from one place to another, in danger from fording rivers, in danger from robbers, in danger from my own people, in danger from foreigners, facing the dangers you find in the city, the dangers you find in the country, the dangers in the ocean, the dangers from pseudo-brothers; most of the time I'm working hard, worn out and don't have enough sleep; I'm hungry and thirsty, and I've often gone without eating at all; and I've been cold and not had enough to wear; and besides these external troubles, there is the responsibility I carry every day, and my concern for all the communities. If anyone is weak, I am weak; if anyone has obstacles thrown in his way, I am enraged."
Further, the very reason that he is writing like this to Corinth is that he was drummed out of the community in disgrace because of the accusations against him. And the very last letter we have from him, while he was awaiting death, the second letter to Timothy, ends in this way:
"Alexander the coppersmith has done me a good deal of wrong. The Master will repay him for what he has done; but you watch out for him, because he was violently opposed to what we say.
"The first time I appeared in court, no one helped in my defense; they all deserted me; but I hope that this won't be held against them. Anyway, the Master stood by me and put strength into me, and helped me deliver the whole proclamation for all the pagans to hear; and he pulled me out of the lion's mouth.
"And the Master will keep saving me from any attempt to do me harm, and will rescue me for his kingdom in heaven, where there is glory for all the ages of ages. Amen.
"Give my regards to Prisca and Aquila, and the family of Onesiphorus. Erasmus stayed in Corinth, and I left Trophimus in Miletus, because he was ill.
"Eubolus, Pudens, Linus, Claudia, and all the brothers and sisters here send their regards.
"The Master be with your spirit."
If, then, he thought that he was going to win prestige or fame from this, he was a total fool. He was harassed all his life and ridiculed for what he was doing, and at the end everyone deserted him. True, he thought that he would win eternal glory from it; but that would happen only on the assumption that he believed what he was teaching. Hence, he could not be lying; and so if what he was reporting was untrue, the only alternative that is possible is that he was deluded.
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