The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth….
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth….
When he established the heavens I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep….
Then I was beside him, like a master worker;
And I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.
In a book of Jewish tradition not found in the canon of the Hebrew Bible (but included in the Apocrypha), called the Wisdom of Solomon, we learn the following about Wisdom:
She is a breath of the power of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty….
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness….
She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well….
For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God,
and an associate in his works. (Wisdom of Solomon 7–8)
Here we have a figure who was preexistent with God, who perfectly reflects God, who was used by God to create the world. This, for Wells, sounds a good deal like what we find in a passage celebrating Christ in one of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament:
For he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for all things were created in him—things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and all things subsist in him. And he is the head of the body, the church, he who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that he might be preeminent in all things. Because in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell and, through him, to reconcile all things to himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross, whether things on earth or in the heavens. (Colossians 1:15–20)
This passage, which Wells points out is very similar to the Philippians hymn, which we just considered (Philippians 2:6–11), portrays Christ as the Wisdom of God, the image of God himself who created all things, who comes to earth and dies for the sake of reconciling all things back to God. In Wells’s view, the idea that Christ was crucified came to Paul as he reflected on the traditions of Wisdom that he inherited through the Jewish traditions. Before Paul, “some Christians…did not share his view that Jesus was crucified.” But in the Wisdom of Solomon we hear of the wise man who suffered a “shameful death” (see Wisdom of Solomon 2:12–20). “It may well have been musing on such a passage that led Paul (or a precursor) to the idea, so characteristic of his theology, that Christ suffered the most shameful death of all.”20
The key point for Wells, however, is that Paul explicitly calls Christ the “Wisdom of God” in 1 Corinthians 1:23–24: “We preach Christ crucified, which is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles; but to those who are called, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” And later in the same book Paul says, “We speak wisdom to those who are mature, but it is a wisdom not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. But we speak a wisdom of God that has been revealed in a mystery, which God foreknew before the ages unto our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:6–8).
According to Wells, then, Paul held to the view that Wisdom had become incarnate in Christ. The myth of Christ as Wisdom made incarnate was eventually historicized—that is, made into a real, historical, human being—when the Gospels were written toward the end of the first century.
Despite the inherent intrigue of this proposal, it is, I am afraid, riddled with problems, which may be why most other mythicists have not latched on to it. For one thing, while it is true that Paul calls Jesus the Wisdom of God in 1 Corinthians, this is not the normal way that he refers to him and is certainly not the way he first thought of him. There is no reason to privilege this conception over the many others that can be found in Paul. Within this passage alone, for example, Paul calls Jesus both the “Christ” and the “power of God.” Why should we think that Paul (or his predecessor) first imagined Christ to be incarnate Wisdom—especially since he does not call Jesus this anywhere else in his writings? And what does he call him? Typically, he calls him Christ. This, not Wisdom, was Paul’s earliest understanding of Jesus upon his conversion.
Paul calls Christ the wisdom of God in the Corinthians passage because he is trying to make a specific point, that the crucifixion of the messiah is a stumbling block for Jews and foolish for Gentiles. We have already seen the reason Jews stumbled over the claim that the messiah was crucified: this was not at all what was supposed to happen to the messiah. But for Paul, rather than showing that Christ was “weak” when he was crucified, the cross shows forth God’s true “power.” So too Gentiles thought that the idea of an executed criminal as the revealer of God was ridiculous. But for Paul it was, by contrast, a sign of God’s “wisdom.” That is why Jesus is the wisdom of God, not because he is an embodiment of the Jewish traditions about the Wisdom figure.
Moreover, it is important to note how Paul phrases this entire passage: his emphasis throughout is precisely on “Christ” and his crucifixion. This is an important point because Wells himself admits that the Jewish traditions about Wisdom include no reference to Wisdom ever being or becoming the messiah. There is no way to move, then, from the idea that God’s Wisdom became incarnate to the notion that this one was specifically the messiah. It is quite easy, however, to move in the other direction. If Christ was crucified—the main point Paul makes about him—it may seem to be “foolish,” but God’s ways are not ours, and for God this evident foolishness is in fact “wisdom.” Paul, in other words, did not start out as a Christian thinking that Wisdom had become incarnate; he started out thinking that Christ had been crucified.
It should not be objected—as Wells does—that the poetic passage in Colossians that I quoted at length shows that Paul understood Christ as Wisdom incarnate. There is a fatal objection to this view. Paul almost certainly did not write the letter to the Colossians. It is one of the forgeries in Paul’s name, written after his death, as critical scholars have recognized for a very long time.21 And to argue that the passage derives from a pre-Pauline tradition is problematic. Colossians is post-Pauline, so on what grounds can we say that a passage in it is pre-Pauline?
In short, the idea that Jesus is in some sense God’s Wisdom stands on the margins of Paul’s thinking. It is certainly not the first thing that popped into his mind when he became a follower of Jesus. It was a later theological reflection. The first and primary thing that Paul came to think of Jesus was that he was the messiah, and a crucified messiah at that. This is the tradition about Jesus that we can trace back to the time even before Paul converted to be a follower of Jesus sometime around the year 32 or 33. The Christians who proclaimed this view did not originally think of Christ as incarnate Wisdom based on the books of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon. They thought of Christ as the one who had been crucified.
And this was not based on the reflection that a wise man was said to have died a “shameful death” in a passage of the Wisdom of Solomon, a book that did not become part of the Jewish scriptures. It was based on the fact that everyone knew that Jesus had been crucified. Those who believed he was the messiah therefore concluded that the messiah had been crucified. And as a result they redefined what it meant to be the messiah. It meant one who suffered for the sins of others. This view seemed ridiculous to most hearers. But the followers of Jesus argued that it was one of those paradoxical tr
uths that showed that God’s ways are not human ways and that what seems foolish to humans is wisdom for God. Once they began to make that claim, years after Paul had been converted, they began to press it even more and (possibly) came to think of Jesus as God’s Wisdom itself, the one through whom God made the world. But this was not the earliest belief of the Christians or of Paul.
Was Jesus an Unknown Jew Who Lived in Obscurity More Than a Century Before Paul?
G. A. WELLS HAS argued that Paul did not understand Jesus to be a real flesh-and-blood Jew who recently lived as a teacher in Palestine and was crucified by the Roman authorities in the recent past. Instead, Wells contends, Paul understood Jesus to have been a supernatural being who lived in utter obscurity some 150 years or so earlier, who was crucified not by the Romans but by the demonic forces in the world.22 In part Wells derives this view from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where, as we have just seen, he refers to God’s wisdom: “We speak a wisdom of God that is hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7–8).
The fact that the “rulers” did not grasp the hidden mystery of who Christ was shows that he lived in utter obscurity. He was not a well-known teacher. Moreover, for Wells, Paul gives no indication that Jesus lived in the recent past. Paul simply indicates, says Wells, that Jesus started to “appear” to people in the recent past, after his resurrection (appearing to Paul himself, for example). But that does not mean he had recently lived. On the contrary, even though Jesus was a descendant of King David, Paul gives “no indication in which of the many centuries between David and Paul” that Jesus lived.23 Wells argues that 1 Thessalonians 2:15 cannot be used to establish Paul’s views of a recent Jesus, when the text speaks of the Judeans “who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and are displeasing to both God and all humans.” In Wells’s view, this passage is an insertion into Paul’s letter, not something Paul himself wrote—a view that I discussed (and dismissed) earlier.
In short, for Paul, Jesus lived a completely unknown and obscure life over a century earlier. He was executed during the reign of the ruthless Jewish king Jannaeus (ruled 103–76 BCE), who was known to have crucified some eight hundred of his Jewish opponents. Paul knew nothing of Jesus’s life and did not care to know anything of his life. All he knew was that Jesus had now, in recent times, begun to appear to people, showing that he was alive again. Those who believed in him could be united with him by mystical baptism in light of the approaching end. It was twenty-five to thirty years after Paul that the story of Jesus began to be historicized into Gospel traditions, as eventually written down first by the Gospel of Mark.
For Wells, if Paul had thought Jesus had died recently, he surely would have mentioned something about a crucifixion in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. Indications that Paul did not think that Jesus had lived recently can be found in such passages as Colossians 1:15, which speaks of Christ as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” For Wells, “such passages do not read like allusions to a near-contemporary being.”24
There are numerous problems with this view. To begin with, as we have seen, Paul did not write the letter to the Colossians. It can scarcely be used to establish Paul’s views. But even if we thought that Paul wrote it, the passage in question says nothing at all about when Christ existed as a human, whether in the recent or the distant past. This is the kind of weak assertion that Wells typically makes. He provides no solid ground for thinking that Paul imagined Jesus to have lived in the remote past—certainly nothing to suggest that his life ended during the reign of King Jannaeus. The fact that Paul does not mention that Jesus died in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate is not in the least odd. What occasion did Paul have to mention something that everyone knew? That this was common knowledge should be clear from our Gospel sources, which did not begin to historicize Jesus two or three decades after Paul but spoke of the historical Jesus already by the early 30s, within at least a year of the traditional date of his death, before Paul was even converted, as we have seen.
There are solid reasons for thinking that Paul understood Jesus to have died recently. I can start with that basic confession of faith that Paul lays out in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, a confession that was passed along to him by those who came before, as he himself states: “For I delivered over to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve.”
Several points are worth emphasizing here. This ancient creed is a neatly balanced, poetical statement, with two halves. In both halves it makes a claim about Christ (he died; he was raised), indicates that the claim is “in accordance with the scriptures,” and then offers an empirical proof: that he died is proved by the fact that he was buried; that he was raised is proved by the fact that he appeared to Cephas (Peter) and then to the twelve (apostles).
The reason the passage is highly relevant to our discussion here is that Paul gives no indication at all that a hundred years or more passed between Jesus’s resurrection and his appearance to the apostles. Quite the contrary; to insert a century-long hiatus into the formulation seems to be a bizarre interpretive move. What in the statement could possibly make one inclined to do so? No, Paul is expressing a straight chronological sequence of events: Jesus died; he was buried; three days later he was raised; and he then appeared to the apostles.
In Wells’s view Jesus died over a century earlier and presumably was raised then, since Paul does say that the resurrection took place three days (not a century) after the death. But quite apart from this view being completely ungrounded and counterintuitive, it works precisely against the logic involved in Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus. For Wells, the fact that Jesus has started to appear to people now, a century later, shows to Paul that the end of the age is drawing to a close. But what is the logic in that? Why would the sudden appearance of a long-dead man show Paul anything other than that he was seeing things? By contrast, if the death and burial and resurrection and appearances were all recent, then Paul’s theological understanding of the resurrection makes perfect sense.
Paul’s theology in fact was very much based on the fact (for him it was a fact) that Jesus was raised, and raised quite recently (not that he simply started appearing recently). If you were to ask Christians today what the significance of the resurrection of Jesus was, you might get a wide range of answers, from the rather uninformed “you can’t keep a good man down” to the more sophisticated “it shows that he really was the Son of God.” If you were to ask the apostle Paul the question, he would give a response that almost no one today would give. For Paul, the fact that Jesus was (recently) raised from the dead shows clearly that the end of the age is imminent.
The logic is tied to the apocalyptic understanding of the resurrection that I described earlier in this chapter. Paul was a Jewish apocalypticist even before he became a follower of Jesus. As such, Paul believed that God would soon intervene in history, overthrow the forces of evil, and bring in a good kingdom on earth. In thinking this, Paul was much like all the other apocalypticists from the time that we know about, for example, the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of the various Jewish apocalypses. At this soon-to-arrive cataclysmic end of the age, a judgment would be rendered on all people, leading to judgment of some and condemnation of others. This would apply to both the living and the dead, at the future resurrection. The idea of the “resurrection of the dead” was an apocalyptic idea shared by a wide range of Jews, like Paul, even before he was converted. The key point is this: the resurrection was to happen at the end of this age.
For Paul, Jesus’s resurrection—this end-of-the-age event—showed that the end had already begun. That, as we saw, is why Pau
l calls Jesus the “firstfruits of the resurrection” in 1 Corinthians 15:20. After the farmer gathers the firstfruits on the first day of harvest, when does he gather the rest? Does he wait a hundred years? No, he goes out the next day. If Jesus is called the firstfruits of the resurrection it is because all the others who are dead will soon—very soon—be raised as well. We are living at the end of time.
The fact that Paul thinks of Jesus as the firstfruits shows beyond reasonable doubt that he thought the resurrection was a recent event. It is not that Jesus—killed a hundred or more years earlier—had started to appear to people (including “apostles” who never knew him) here at the end. It is that he has been raised here at the end. The culmination of the end is therefore imminent. That is why Paul intimates that he will be alive when Jesus returns (see 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18). The recent resurrection of God’s messiah is a clear indication that the end of all things is virtually here.
And so both the literary character of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 and the logic of Paul’s understanding of the resurrection show that he thought that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were recent events. I should stress that this is the view of all of our sources that deal with the matter at all. It is hard to believe that Paul would have such a radically different view from every other Christian of his day, as Wells suggests. That Jesus lived recently is affirmed not only in all four of our canonical Gospels (where, for example, he is associated with John the Baptist and is said to have been born during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, under the rulership of the Jewish king Herod, and so on); it is also the view of all of the Gospel sources—Q (which associates Jesus with John the Baptist), M, L—and of the non-Christian sources such as Josephus and Tacitus (who both mention Pilate). These sources, I should stress, are all independent of one another; some of them go back to Palestinian traditions that can readily be dated to 31 or 32 CE, just a year or so after the traditional date of Jesus’s death.
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