The Men Who Were Honest to Jesus and What They Did

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Preface

Putting Christianity on one side for a moment, the question is, what exactly was the message from God that his companions understood Jesus had delivered – the message Saul was hired to stop them passing on? This book is concerned with the years between the crucifixion of Jesus and the revelation to Saul of Tarsus – the gap years.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, you will know that for some years now New Testament scholars have been pursuing what they sometimes refer to as the Quest of the Historical Jesus. The trouble with the Quest is that it got off on the wrong foot. It began when New Testament scholarship was still regarded by many as the handmaid of the Church. Society changes. Handmaids are no longer. Unfortunately, scholarship still does not appear to be fully emancipated. So much by way of excuse for a short book.

The companions of Jesus knew him in the last months of his life. If they were honest to Jesus, they might be able to tell us something about the gap years, if about nothing else. They deserve to be taken seriously.

As it turns out, facts are there to be found – not many, but enough to illuminate the dimly lit vestibule of church history.

CHAPTER 1

The time capsule

If you dig down, you will find a time capsule hidden in the foundations of every Christian church. The capsule contains a fragment of an old letter. Scholars tell us that a number of letters attributed to the Apostle Paul in the New Testament were not actually written by him, but they all agree that this letter is genuine. The letter is apparently written to Paul’s converts in Galatia. The name Galatia could mean one of two areas. In the nature of these things, there is a degree of scholarly disagreement as to whom the letter was actually sent – not that it matters a row of beans to whom it was sent – everyone agrees that the letter was sent and received by those intended to receive it. It was what Paul actually wrote that was important anyway. Translated from the Greek by one group of competent scholars the fragment reads like this:

‘For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.’ 1

The Greek does not say ‘brothers and sisters’; the word used means ‘brothers’, pure and simple. Translators feel free to take a number of liberties with the Greek in order (as they understand the world) to make it intelligible. There is no difficulty in translating the substance of what Paul writes. To make his position clear, Paul goes out of his way to add, in the same chapter of his letter, words which are translated by the same group as:

‘In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!’2

Scholars tell us that a zealot like Paul would have regarded it as unacceptable to take the name of God in vain. No one doubts that.

To a plain man it is plain enough what Paul was trying to make plain to people whom he had met and whom (later in the same letter) in his exasperation he addressed as ‘you stupid Galatians’.3 Paul did not, repeat not, get his gospel from any human source. Full stop.

In the same letter Paul writes:

‘You have heard what my manner of life was when I was still a practising Jew: how savagely I persecuted the church of God, and tried to destroy it;’4

Neither Saul of Tarsus, nor his employers, can have been under any illusion that he was being employed to persecute the companions of Jesus for promoting Paul’s gospel, which had, at the time when the terms of Saul’s employment were negotiated, not yet been revealed to him.

It could hardly be clearer that Saul was not summoned from Tarsus to persecute the companions of Jesus for promoting Paul’s gospel. But what was it exactly that he was persecuting them for? It is a teasing question. Some may feel that it is a great pity that Paul has raised it.

Those who prepared the NRSV use the imperfect tense ‘was persecuting’ to convey the sense of the Greek that the savage persecution went on for some time. Paul is in no doubt that his correspondents knew that he had been a persecutor of those who followed Jesus and had given up the job. It follows that Paul recognized that his anastrophé in Judaism, his turning upside down, his conversion, was widely known in the Jewish community. People talked about it; they had an opinion about it. Some asked, what could you expect, if you got a man from Tarsus to do the job?; others said, no, the High Priests could not know how widely the rot had spread and could not be sure that anyone closer than Tarsus was not already contaminated.

Paul’s gospel – a practical solution to a problem in the workplace

Everyone in the movement knew that Paul, in his earlier life, was trying to destroy the church of God. They knew that he had become involved with it through doing his job as persecutor. It follows that everybody knew that Paul’s gospel was his response to a problem, which he had come across at work. Paul’s gospel was his solution to a practical problem – he had run, head on, into some of the companions of Jesus.

Not in the Hebrew Scriptures

After meeting some of the companions of Jesus, Paul stopped persecuting them and went away to sort out his life. He turned for help to the Hebrew Scriptures. He found there references to a messiah. He found there also a hope of resurrection. But he did not find his gospel there, for the risen Christ, who is at the heart of his gospel, is not prefigured in the Hebrew Scriptures. In them resurrection was connected with the restoration of God’s people, Israel. In them resurrection was connected with the new bodily life of God’s people, which it was expected that God would bring about in the future at the end of ‘the present age’. It is clear from a study of them that resurrection was not something that was liable to happen to an individual, that is, nobody thought that any individual had been resurrected in the past, or expected that any individual would be resurrected in the future before the remainder of God’s people were resurrected at the end of the present age.5 Paul’s gospel was his personal solution to a practical problem.

Self-verification

Having satisfied himself about Jesus, the problem Paul always faced after his ‘conversion’ was that everybody knew that, far from having actually met Jesus, Paul had tried to destroy those who had met him. The risen Christ was part of his solution to his problems; a further part was the ability of the risen Christ to communicate with people on Earth; and the decisive part was that the solution verified itself.

Paul as a witness to facts about Jesus

Paul never met Jesus and had not the faintest idea what it was like to meet Jesus. Paul had a thesis about Jesus. As someone who had met one or two people who had met Jesus, Paul’s special contribution to the movement was his thesis. The word ‘gospel’ is itself Paulspeak. At the other end of the spectrum, Paul was, without question, the ultimate authority on what he himself had experienced.

Believers

People at the time who met and followed Paul believed that, when Paul wrote the message in the capsule, he was telling the truth. As Paul put the matter in one of his letters, he had staked his life on his gospel being true. So did his followers. There is no doubt that Paul believed what he taught and that those who met him thought that he had the truth in him.

They bet their lives that he was telling the truth. They only had his word for it.

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1    Galatians 1.11-12.

2    Galatians 1.20.

3    Galatians 3.1 (NEB)

4    Galatians 1.13 (NEB).

5    NT Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, SPCK, London, 2003, 205.

CHAPTER 2

Once upon a time

Things change. Nobody nowadays is under any obligation to believe a word Paul has written. At the same time, if you cannot bring yourself to believe what your own primary witness says on oath, it would be unrealistic to expect anybody else to believe anything that he says either. The Church is no longer content to take Paul’s word for it that its faith originated in a revelation. It has a new (revised) testament. It claims that Jesus himself arrived at Paul’s conclusions way back, when Saul was still in Tarsus, and went to considerable trouble to try to teach his companions what he had divined. As Paul’s evidence makes clear beyond contradiction, that was not the case. The Church nowadays finds authority for its preferred view of things in three or four documents, the earliest of which by some years it calls the gospel of Mark. Regrettably, Mark’s purpose in writing his gospel was to contradict Paul and falsify history on this point about origins.

It can readily be seen that faith has a strong portfolio of fabricated history.

The closest analogies to the gospel of Mark are the historical plays of Shakespeare. Mark took the names of historical personages from the recent past, gave those persons new characters to suit his theatrical requirements and set them to acting out a romance in which together, under the guidance of Jesus, they anticipate Paul’s theological conclusions. That all the leading