In this post, I continue to look at the Religions Wiki that deals with the Jesus Myth, this time specifically the section Epistles genuinely written by Paul.
I am not really going to deal with the claim that Paul only wrote seven of the epistles. I find this is often used for shock value toward conservative Christians. “If the church was wrong about those epistles falsely attributed to Paul, what else were they wrong about? Or deceptive about.”
I’m actually not convinced that Paul’s involvement is limited to the seven epistles. I believe there is going to be some interesting conversations coming up soon about this. But I am happy to work with the seven “genuine” epistles.
Did Paul Believe Jesus Was Only a Heavenly Spirit?
A frequent claim is that Paul only believed in a Jesus that was a heavenly spirit and not as an actual human being. The first thing I will say is that Paul is writing post-ascension, so after the time the church believed that Jesus had returned to heaven. So Paul speaks of Jesus in heavenly terms because Jesus was in heaven when he was writing. Same reason Christians today speak of Jesus as being in heaven.
Even so, Paul did not assume that Jesus had always been in heaven and never a human. In Romans 1:3, he speaks of Jesus being a descendant of David, according to the flesh. In Galatians 4:4, Paul speak of Jesus as born of a woman. These verses show that Paul believed that Jesus was a human who lived on earth.
Was Paul Silent on the Historical Jesus?
I must confess that I am tired of the claim that Paul never speaks of Jesus as a historical figure, never quoting him or referring to his actions. It is simply not true.
One of the errors that the author of this article makes is misunderstanding what Paul says about receiving his gospel by revelation alone and how that fits with the traditions he refers to in 1 Corinthians.
Yes Paul did receive his gospel from a revelation of Jesus, something he is especially clear about in Galatians. But what does Paul mean by that? The gospel is the truth of Jesus as the Son of God, his death and resurrection, how Jesus reconciles us to God. It does not mean that Paul never learned traditions from the other apostles.
We should not imagine Paul sitting around with the apostles and when they start talking about Jesus that he puts his fingers in his ears because he wanted only what Jesus directly told him. The passages in 1 Corinthians 11 and 15 are earlier Christian traditions that he passed on to the Corinthians. Nothing about those passages suggest that they were given to him by revelation.
And regarding Paul’s other supposed silence on Jesus, I would like to point you to this article I wrote for the McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry.
I would like to respond to one more odd claim in this article.
Why did the Apostles who met Paul accept him as an Apostle? Only because Paul had equal credentials as receiving revelations. If Paul had no personal experience compared to other teachers who had, Paul’s teaching would be been distrusted. Therefore, no one claimed to have had personal experience of Jesus.
That is a pretty wild claim. Let’s break it down logically.
- Paul was accepted by the other apostles because he had the same kind of revelations.
- If Paul had no personal experience of Jesus and the others had, Paul would have been distruted.
- Therefore, no one had personal experiences, and all of the apostles were limited to spiritual revelations.
The first point is simply asserted. While Acts tells us how Paul was brought into the church, we are never told the process of Paul being seen as one of the apostles. Acts only tells us the qualifications for being one of the Twelve (which is not the same as being an apostle), which was being a part of the group since the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry.
The second point is actually very important. The reason that most of Paul’s epistles start with an assertion of his apostleship is that there were people in the church who did not accept Paul, because he had not met the pre-resurrection Jesus. This was a real challenge for Paul.
The conclusion is built on faulty premises. Paul would have said that he had a personal experience of Jesus, even if it was different from that of the other apostles. There is no reason to think that anyone in the early church thought the apostles knew Jesus only by revelation.
So far, the best thing about this Wiki article is how clear it presents the bizarre Jesus Myth hermeneutic.
