In the documentary called, The God who Wasnt There, Brian Flemming tries to argue against the existence of the historical Jesus. I wouldnt recommend watching it because I felt like I lost an hour of my life watching it. But there was one interesting claim made towards the beginning. The church apparently seems to have forgotten about Jesus for 30 years, then Paul wrote about Him as some celestial figure with no earthly existence. Now right off the bat, we can see problems with this because we are talking about a primarily oral culture, so we shouldnt expect them to write much down for a while. But heres something else that I find interesting. In his book A Marginal Jew, John Meier points out several times that the apostle Paul alludes back to sayings of and traditions about Jesus in 1 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 7:10-11, for example, Paul cites Jesus teaching that you cant get divorced unless your spouse cheats on you. This can be found in Mark 10:11-12, Matthew 5:32, and Luke 16:18. Paul also talks about what Jesus said as He instituted the Lords Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, which is also found in the Synoptic Gospels. And finally, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:14 that Jesus said that those proclaiming the Gospel (missionaries) should get their living for it, which is also found in Matthew 10:10 and Luke 10:7. Now whats interesting about this? Meier gives us three things to think about: Paul alluded to Jesus sayings in passing, expected the Corinthians to know them and accept them as normative, and could appeal at times to precise teachings of Jesus that he himself had received after his conversion (1 Corinthians 11:23, 15:3). Whats Meiers conclusion from this? This was probably a very small subset of a pool of tradition about what Jesus said and did already in circulation. We see instances of other traditions that Paul alludes to in passages like Jesus descent from David in Romans 1:3 and Jesus immediate ministry being to the Jews in Romans 15:8 (see Mark 7:24-30, Matthew 15:21-28, Matthew 10:5-6). Whats interesting here is that Paul had never been to Rome (Romans 1:9-12, 15:22-24). These traditions were already there. Whats also interesting is that when we compare what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:6-9 with 7:10-11 and with 7:12-16, we see Paul make distinctions between his own recommendations (a concession, not a command), what Jesus said (not I, but the Lord), and his own apostolic commands (I, not the Lord). This shows that Paul had a habit of being careful in what he was attributing to Jesus. He was not going to lie by passing his own sayings back onto the lips of Jesus. So I think that the claim made in that documentary (which again, I think you will waste your time watching) is simply naive. Paul not only refers to these sayings attributed to Jesus and traditions about Him that we also find in the Gospels, but this material was not news to his audiences. Paul was drawing from traditions already in circulation about Him (which he carefully distinguished from his own teachings) and that churches he had never been to, much less planted, already knew. There isnt much beyond the deity, atoning death, and bodily resurrection that Paul gives us about the historical Jesus, but this is what we do get. And its pretty clear that Paul isnt giving us anything new. And I think its also safe to say that our Gospels in the New Testament also had much tradition that Paul didnt cite when they composed their own Gospels.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 04:54:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015