The Non-Pauline Epistles
The epistles of the New Testament are chock-full of references to a human Jesus, who really lived and died by crucifixion. There is no need to provide a detailed analysis here; I can simply cite some of the outstanding passages in books that were written by a range of authors, none of whom knew each other’s works or the writings of the Gospels.
Among the writings that circulated under the name of Paul are a number that Paul did not actually write.10 One of them is the letter of 1 Timothy, which records the tradition known from so many of our other sources: “I command you before the God who makes all things alive and Christ Jesus, the one who, bearing his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession…” (6:13). We do not know who this author was; we only know that he was not Paul and that he shows no evidence of knowing our Gospels. But he confirms one of the central claims of these other works.
Paul was not the only author imitated by later writers. Peter too probably did not write either book that bears his name in the New Testament.11 It is quite clear that both of these other authors maintained that Jesus was a real, living human being. I begin with several passages from the book known as 1 Peter, which again shows no familiarity with our Gospels:
For you were called to this end, because Christ suffered for you, leaving an example for you that you might follow in his steps, who did not commit sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth, who when reviled did not revile in return, while suffering uttered no threat, but trusted the one who judges righteously, who bore our sins in his body on the tree, in order that dying to sin we might live to righteousness, for by his wounds we were healed. (2:21–24)
For Christ died for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God, having put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit. (3:18)
Since Christ suffered in the flesh, you also be armed with the same thought. (4:1)
And so I admonish the elders among you, I who am a fellow elder and witness of the sufferings of Christ…. (5:1)
The fact that these lines were not really written by Peter are immaterial for my purposes here. Once again we have independent testimony to the life (in the flesh) of Jesus and his very tangible death. More emphatic is 2 Peter, another writing forged in Peter’s name, which does not show clear evidence of any familiarity with the Gospels but clearly knows the tradition recorded in them of the experience of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration:
For not by following sophistic myths have we made known to you the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of the majesty of that one. For when we received honor and glory from God the Father and the voice was brought to him by the magnificent glory, “this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” we heard this voice that was brought from heaven to him, for we were on the holy mountain. (1:16–18)
Somewhat earlier than 2 Peter, probably sometime near the end of the first century, comes the treatise of 1 John, wrongly attributed in the tradition to Jesus’s disciple John the son of Zebedee. The anonymous author of this treatise did not write the Gospel of John, but there are good reasons for thinking that he knew of it and that he lived in the same community that produced the Gospel. In any event, this author too is quite emphatic that when Jesus appeared on earth he was a real human who could be felt, handled, heard, and seen:
What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the world of life. And the life was made manifest, and we saw and we bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal live which was with the Father and has been manifest to us. What we saw and heard we proclaim also to you, that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1:1–4)
Even the book of Revelation, with all its bizarre imagery and fantastic apocalyptic views, understands that Jesus was a real historical figure. For this author he was one who “lived” and who “died” (1:18). Like the Gospel of John, but not dependent on it, this book, written by a different author, portrays Jesus as the “lamb who was slain” for salvation (5:6). Quite apart from the theological spin he puts on Jesus’s death, the fact that matters for us in this context is that he too provides independent witness to the Christian tradition of a real Jesus.
As my final example I can turn to the letter of the Hebrews, a book that was written anonymously but was eventually accepted into the canon of the New Testament by church fathers who thought, incorrectly, that it had been produced by Paul. The book is not dependent on the letters of Paul and shows no evidence of any familiarity with the Gospels. And yet it contains numerous references to the life of the historical Jesus. The following are simply some of the key passages to consider:
Jesus appeared in “these last days” (1:2).
God spoke through him (that is, in his proclamation; 1:2).
He “made a purification for sins” (that is, he died a bloody death; 1:3).
He was told by God, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you,” and was called “son of God” by the Father (1:5).
He was the first to proclaim salvation (2:3).
God bore witness to him and/or his followers through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the spirit (2:4).
He tasted death “apart from God” (that is, apart from any divine solace; 2:9).
He was made perfect by suffering (2:10).
He partook of flesh and blood (2:14).
He was like his brothers (the Jews? all people?) in all respects (2:17).
He was tempted (2:18) in every way but without sin (4:15).
He was faithful to God (3:2).
He offered up prayers and loud cries and tears to be saved from death (presumably before his crucifixion; 5:7).
He learned obedience by suffering (5:8).
He was crucified (6:5; 12:2).
He was descended from the tribe of Judah (7:14).
He taught, about God: “You have not desired or taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (10:8).
He said, “I have come to do your will” (10:9).
He suffered “outside the gate” (that is, outside Jerusalem; 13:12).
He endured abuse (13:13).
In sum, according to this unknown author, based on oral traditions that he had heard, Jesus was a real man who lived in the past, a flesh-and-blood human being, a Jew from the line of Judah who was tempted like all other people, suffered in obedience to God, and was crucified, dying without any solace that God could have provided. Here again is an independent witness to the life and death of Jesus. Thus we have not only the seven independent Gospel witnesses for knowing that Jesus existed; we have also the speeches of Acts, some of which are rooted in early Palestinian traditions, the narrative of Acts, the epistles of the New Testament, and three church fathers—all of them evidently independent of one another.12
The Witness of Paul
THE APOSTLE PAUL IS our earliest surviving Christian author of any kind. Many readers of the Bible assume that the Gospels were the first books of the New Testament to be written since they appear first in the New Testament and discuss the life of Jesus, who obviously started it all. But Paul was writing some years before the Gospels. His first letter (1 Thessalonians) is usually dated to 49 CE; his last (Romans?) to some twelve or thirteen years after that. It is commonly said among mythicists that Paul does not speak about the historical man Jesus and has no understanding of the historical man Jesus. This simply is not true, as an examination of his writings shows full well. Apparently one reason mythicists want to make this claim is precisely that Paul is our earliest available witness, writing within twenty years of the traditional date of Jesus’s death. If Paul knew nothing about the historical Jesus, then maybe he did not exist. A second reason for the claim is related: mythicists want to argue that Paul, rather than thinking of Jesus as a human who lived a few years earlier, believed in a kind
of mythical Christ, who had no real historical existence but was a divine being pure and simple, like the dying and rising gods allegedly worshipped by pagans. I will be dealing with that view in chapter 7. For now I want to look at the evidence that Paul understood Jesus to be a historical figure, a Jew who lived, taught, and was crucified at the instigation of Jewish opposition.
One way that some mythicists have gotten around the problem that this, our earliest Christian source, refers to the historical Jesus in several places is by claiming that these references to Jesus were not originally in Paul’s writings but were inserted by later Christian scribes who wanted Paul’s readers to think that he referred to the historical Jesus. This approach to Paul can be thought of as historical reconstruction based on the principle of convenience. If historical evidence proves inconvenient to one’s views, then simply claim that the evidence does not exist, and suddenly you’re right.
The Life of Jesus in Paul
The reality is that, convenient or not, Paul speaks about Jesus, assumes that he really lived, that he was a Jewish teacher, and that he died by crucifixion. The following are the major things that Paul says about the life of Jesus.
First, Paul indicates unequivocally that Jesus really was born, as a human, and that in his human existence he was a Jew. This he states in Galatians 4:4: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his son, born from a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law….” This statement also indicates that Jesus’s mission was to Jews, a point borne out in another letter of Paul’s, in Romans 15:8: “For I say that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show the truthfulness of God, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs.” This claim that Jesus’s ministry was to and for Jews, to fulfill what was promised in the scriptures, hints at one of the most important points Paul makes about Jesus, that he was in fact the Jewish messiah. So firmly rooted in Paul is this belief in Jesus as the messiah that the phrase Jesus Christ, which means “Jesus the messiah” (since the Greek word Christ is a literal translation of the Hebrew word messiah), is exceedingly common in Paul, as is the reversed sequence Christ Jesus, and the simple term Christ is used as an appellative. In other words, Paul was so convinced that Jesus was the Jewish messiah that he used the term Christ (messiah) as one of Jesus’s actual names.
That in part is why Paul insisted that Jesus was a physical descendant of David. It was widely thought that the “son of David” would be the future ruler of the Jews; for Paul, that was Jesus. We have already seen the key passage in Romans 1:3–4, where Paul refers to “the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh.” Jesus, then, was a fleshly being, even if he was God’s son, and he was one of David’s physical descendants.
When Jesus was born, he naturally came into a family. We have seen that Paul obliquely mentions Jesus’s mother when he indicates that he was “born of a woman.” In another place he mentions the brothers of Jesus, who after Jesus’s death became missionaries along with their wives. This Paul states in 1 Corinthians 9:5, where he is pointing out that he too should have the right to take along a spouse on his missionary journeys but chooses not to do so (because, as he indicated two chapters earlier, he was not married): “Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” It should not be thought here that Paul is referring to “brothers of the Lord” in some kind of spiritual sense, in that in Christ all men are brothers. If that were what he meant, then the rest of the statement would make no sense because it would mean that the apostles themselves and even Cephas (Peter) were not the “spiritual brothers” of the Lord since they are differentiated from those who are brothers. And so interpreters are virtually unified in thinking that Paul means Jesus’s actual brothers.
We know the names of some of Jesus’s brothers from our early Gospel traditions. The Gospel of Mark names them as James, Joses, Judas, and Simon (6:3). It also indicates that Jesus had sisters, though these are not named. As it turns out, in one place Paul also names one of the brothers of Jesus, and it is none other than James, also mentioned by Mark. This is in one of the most disputed passages discussed by mythicists, and I will reserve a full treatment for the next chapter. The comment comes in Galatians 1:18–19, one of those rare autobiographical statements of Paul in which he reflects back on his life and indicates what he did after his conversion: “Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to consult with Cephas. And I remained with him for fifteen days. I did not see any of the other apostles except James, the brother of the Lord. What I am writing to you, I tell you before God, I am not lying!”
When Paul swears he is not lying, I generally believe him. During those fifteen days he saw Cephas and James and no one else. Here again James cannot simply be a “brother” of Jesus the way any other Christian was since his being a brother is what differentiates him from Cephas, as I will explain yet more fully in the next chapter. At this point it is enough to know that Paul knew that Jesus had brothers and that one of them was James, a personal acquaintance of his.
Paul also appears to know that Jesus had twelve disciples, or perhaps it is better to say that Paul knows of a close-knit group of disciples of Jesus who were called “the twelve.” I phrase it this way because some scholars think that what mattered was not the actual number of this group but the symbolic number attached to them. That Paul knew of them is shown by his statement concerning the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection, where he indicates that after Jesus was raised on the third day, “he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:5). It is not necessary to conclude that Cephas was not one of the twelve himself; Paul may simply be saying that first there was an appearance to Peter and then to the entire group. It is interesting that he calls them “the twelve” in this context since according to both Matthew and the book of Acts the disciple Judas Iscariot, one of this inner circle, had already defected and in fact died (by hanging in Matthew, by falling headlong and bursting in Acts). The fact that Paul speaks of “the twelve” as having seen Jesus at the resurrection means either that he does not know the stories about Judas (as was possibly true of Mark and John as well) or, as I have suggested, that the name “the twelve” was attached to this group as a group, even when one of them was no longer with them.
Paul knows that Jesus was a teacher because he quotes several of his sayings. I will deal with these in a moment. For now it is worth noting that two of the sayings of Jesus that Paul quotes were delivered, he tells us, at the Last Supper on the very night that Jesus was handed over to the authorities to face his fate.
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was handed over took bread, and after giving thanks he broke it and said, “This is my body that is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, whenever you drink, in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:22–24)
When Paul says that he “received” this tradition “from the Lord,” he appears to mean that somehow—in a revelation?—the truthfulness of the account was confirmed to him by God, or Jesus, himself. But the terminology of “received” and “delivered,” as often noted by scholars, is the kind of language commonly used in Jewish circles to refer to traditions that are handed on from one teacher to the next. In this case, we have a tradition about Jesus’s Last Supper, which Paul obviously knows about. The scene that he describes is very close to the description of the event in the Gospel of Luke (with some key differences); it is less similar to Matthew and Mark.
One point I will stress in a later chapter is that Paul emphasizes that this event happened “on the night in which he was handed over.” Traditionally this phrase is translated as “on the night in which he was betrayed” and is taken to indicate that he is referring to the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. The problem with this translation is that
the word Paul uses here does not mean “betray” but “hand over,” and he uses it in other passages to refer to what God did when he “handed over” his son to his fate, as in Romans 8:31–32: “If God is for us, who is against us? The one who did not spare his own son, but handed him over for all of us, how will he not with him freely give us all things?” This is the same Greek word: handed over.
So Paul probably is not referring to the betrayal of Judas in the passage about the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:22–24. But he is clearly referring to a historical event. It is important to note that he indicates this scene happened at night. This is not some vague mythological reference but a concrete historical one. Paul knows that Jesus had a Last Supper with his disciples in which he predicted his approaching death, the very night he was handed over to the authorities.
Moreover, Paul thinks that Jesus was killed at the instigation of “the Jews.” This is indicated in a passage that is much disputed—in this instance, not just among mythicists. In 1 Thessalonians Paul narrates a number of wrongful doings of his Jewish opponents who live in Judea:
Be imitators, brothers, of the churches of God that are in Judea in Christ Jesus, because you yourselves suffer the same things by your own fellow citizens as they do by the Jews (or the Judeans), who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and persecuted us, and are not pleasing to God and to all people, who forbade us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved, in order to fill up the full measure of their sins always. But wrath has come upon them at last. (1 Thessalonians 2:14–16)
It is this last sentence that has caused interpreters problems. What could Paul mean that the wrath of God has finally come upon the Jews (or Judeans)? That would seem to make sense if Paul were writing in the years after the destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans, that is, after 70 CE. But it seems to make less sense when this letter was actually written, around 49 CE. For that reason a number of scholars have argued that this entire passage has been inserted into 1 Thessalonians and that Paul therefore did not write it. In this view some Christian scribe, copying the letter after the destruction of Jerusalem, added it.
Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Page 12
