Paul and Jesus

In contrast to Adam, Paul believed that Christ, before he was born as the human Jesus, existed from the beginning in the form of God, and had equality with God.¹¹ Whether Paul understood Jesus as a created being or one eternally existing with God, he never says. Paul does, however, believe that Christ was an agent in the creation in the world, and that he gave up the riches of his heavenly status, taking on the form of a mortal man:

Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Corinthians 8:6)

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that you through his poverty might become rich. (2 Corinthians 8:9)

The writer of the letter of Colossians, likely writing a decade or more after Paul’s death, possibly made use of some earlier material from Paul, particularly on this topic. Here is how he fills out the description of Christ before his human birth, something Paul himself does not elaborate in the letters we have from him:

He [Christ] is the image of the unseen God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15–17)

It seems reasonable to assume Paul had something like this in mind.¹² Christ would have been the very first of God’s creation, put over everything else, whether the invisible angelic hosts, or the visible things on the earth. The letter of Hebrews, which was also written after Paul, but probably influenced by his thinking, says that Christ was the one “through whom God created the world” (Hebrews 1:2). But all this was before the human being Jesus existed.

According to Paul, by emptying himself and being born of a woman as a flesh-and-blood mortal we know as Jesus, and then showing his willingness to be obedient to God by suffering to the point of death on a cross, Jesus was raised from the dead by God. His resurrection was a victory over sin and its resulting process—death. As we have seen, according to Paul, Jesus was not merely a “man of dust” restored to mortal life, but one transformed into a “man of heaven,” whom God exalted above every other created being in the universe. He becomes the first “man of dust,” ever transformed into heavenly immortality and glory, inaugurating the process of salvation for others who would follow his example of obedience and suffering.

By becoming like the first Adam, Jesus has paved the way for a group of second or last Adams, that is, a new genus of heavenly beings, transformed from dust to Spirit as he had been. Paul explains this to the Corinthians:

The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:47–49)

Paul explains that the first Adam, of the dust, was an earthly parallel to the last Adam, who becomes a life-giving Spirit. “It is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual.” Adam and Eve were made in the image and likeness of God in the very beginning: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). However, they were perishable physical models or prototypes, reflecting the image and likeness of God, but made of dust and thus subject to death. Since they greedily grasped at their potential to be “equal to God,” they were banished from his presence. When Christ was born in human likeness, taking on the form of a man, he represented a potential reversal of the process, in which one who bears the image of the man of dust could undergo the glory and transformation to immortality.

Even though Paul’s language here can sound symbolic, analogical, and even mythological to our modern ears, for him the process of bringing about the birth of this new family of heavenly beings was as real as the air he breathed and the ground he walked upon. After all, he believed that he was the chief agent God had chosen to reveal the Announcement of the mystery to all nations. He also believed the time he had to complete his mission was quite short. He was driven night and day by the visions and revelations that he believed he had received from Christ. At any moment he expected to look up to the sky and see Christ there, come to initiate with unimaginable power and glory the final stages of human history.

A HEAVENLY KINGDOM