Paul and Jesus

In the following chapter we will see the radical implications of these shared spiritual experiences. For Paul, being “united with Christ” was not merely a metaphor expressing solidarity and unity of faith but an experiential reality that he and his followers relied upon as evidence of their salvation. As we will see, baptism was not merely a symbolic water purification ritual but a means to achieve direct possession of the Spirit of Christ. Those so united with Christ, through being possessed of his Spirit, became one spiritual “body” with him and were spiritually sustained by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ through the Eucharistic meal of bread and wine. This transformation of the Jewish rituals of water purification and the blessing of God for bread and wine took Paul and his followers far afield from the practices of Jesus and his first followers and would have been viewed as shockingly pagan by James and the leaders of the Jerusalem church.

SIX

A MYSTICAL UNION

WITH CHRIST

What does it mean to be “in Christ”? I don’t mean believing in Jesus in the sense of having faith in Christ, but literally being in Christ. The phrase might be familiar to readers of the New Testament or to churchgoers, but what does it mean and where did it come from? The Hebrew Bible speaks often about believing and trusting in God, but never about being in God, and Jews don’t talk about being in Abraham, Moses, or any of the Prophets.¹

The phrase “in Christ” belongs exclusively to the thought world of Paul and he uses it more than fifty times in his genuine letters.² It is never used in the New Testament Gospels, either by Jesus or anyone talking about Jesus. That alone should give us pause. No matter how familiar the phrase might be, or what we think we might understand about it, we need to first hear the words of Paul in the context in which he uses them. As we will see, Paul’s concept of being in Christ is a key to understanding his view of what it meant to be a Christian.³ It is the underpinning of his teaching about God creating a new heavenly family of glorified Spirit-beings and it forms the basis of the experiences he and his followers were convinced showed that they were dealing directly with Christ as a living Spirit-being.

I have often thought of my task as a historian as trying to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It is all too easy to think that we understand some aspect of the past when in reality we are more likely looking through the tint of our modern assumptions. If we can distance ourselves in order to see the ways in which the past is strange to us, then we have a chance to understand it in a new and more authentic way.

One of my professors in graduate school at the University of Chicago once said to us, “If you had a time machine and traveled back to Greece in the first century A.D., dropping in to observe a gathering of a cell group of Paul’s followers meeting in Corinth, don’t assume you would have even the slightest idea of what was going on.” At that time I thought he was exaggerating for effect but my decades of research in the history of ancient religions has convinced me that his was an understatement.

He was referring not so much to obvious language and cultural barriers as to his contention that we have largely missed Paul’s strangeness. It is easy to assume, based on our familiarity with modern forms of Christianity, that earliest Christianity would have some basic resemblance to what we know today; maybe not pews, pulpits, and stained glass windows, but surely the essential content of the worship services. This might be the case for Christianity in the fourth or fifth century, when the liturgy, creeds, and certain patterns of language were taking a more definitive shape—at least in the pockets of Christianity that Rome controlled. But it would be decidedly untrue for Paul’s time. Paul’s Christianity can be understood only against the worlds of mysticism, magic, miracles, prophecy, and the supernatural manifestations of the spiritual world—both angelic and demonic—so alien to our modern scientific worldview. At the very core of these religious experiences of Paul and his followers were his two great innovations, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which he introduced in wholly new form to his wing of the Jesus movement.

BEING IN CHRIST

For Paul the heavenly cosmic Christ is no longer the historical figure Jesus. He speaks of having “faith in Jesus” a few times but he never speaks of being in Jesus, only of being in Christ.⁴ The distinction is neither accidental nor academic, but indeed essential to his understanding of how the process of cosmic salvation works.

The man Jesus, born of a woman, as a flesh-and-blood mortal human being, Paul calls “Christ according to the flesh”: