Paul and Jesus

From now on, therefore, we regard no one [of our group] according to the flesh, even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him such no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5:16–17)

This old way of remembering Jesus has now passed. That is why, in all of Paul’s letters, he tells his converts nothing about the life of Jesus on earth. This is quite remarkable. Paul relates nothing of Jesus’ birth, that he was from Galilee, that he was baptized by John the Baptizer, that he preached that the kingdom of God was near, healed the sick, and worked miracles. Paul never quotes directly a single teaching of Jesus. It is possible, but not certain, that he alludes to two or three sayings of Jesus, but even these are uncertain.⁵ Paul could summarize Jesus’ entire life and teachings in a single sentence: God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, who died for sins and was raised from the dead. That is it.

As Paul tells the Corinthians, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). As we have seen, the “Gospel” for Paul was not the message that Jesus preached, or anything Jesus taught, but rather the message of what the man Jesus had become—the firstborn of the new cosmic family. This was Paul’s “Gospel”—his secret Announcement.

Paul believed that Christ had transcended his mortal human identity to become the firstborn Son of the new creation, a second or last Adam, and so the man Jesus is no more. Paul prefers the term “Christ,” using it over a hundred and fifty times, almost as if it is a new proper name replacing Jesus. The phrase “the Lord,” referring to Christ, he uses over a hundred times. Another hundred times in his letters he uses combinations such as “Jesus Christ” or “the Lord Jesus Christ.” The single name Jesus occurs only eleven times.

This reflects and reinforces his view that the revelations he has received from the heavenly Christ are far superior to anything anyone received from the earthly Jesus. Also, since the process of salvation involves the human Jesus becoming a glorified Adam of the new creation, it made no sense to Paul to dwell on a past that is fading away when a much more glorious present has already been inaugurated. This perspective, as we will see, has applications to everything he teaches, including social relations, ethical norms, and his understanding of the place of the Torah, or Law of Moses, in the Plan of God. But most important, it shaped the contours of this new form of Christianity for the next nineteen hundred years, a Christianity wholly oriented to salvation in the heavenly world, in sharp contrast to the movement Jesus the Jewish Messiah had inspired with its emphasis on a kingdom of peace and justice on earth.

As we saw in the previous chapter, Paul says that it was Christ, and not the human Jesus, who existed from the beginning of creation in the “form of God” but then subsequently emptied himself, being born in the likeness of a mortal human being (Philippians 2:6–7). Paul makes the rather startling assertion that this cosmic Christ, ages before he was born as a human being, had manifested himself as Yahweh, the God of Israel! He does not dwell on this point, but he is quite clear about it. He refers particularly to the time of Moses, when the Israelites “saw” Yahweh as a mysterious cloud-fire pillar: “And Yahweh went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light, that they might go by day and by night” (Exodus 13:21).

Paul says that the God who led the Israelites through the Red Sea and in their desert wanderings for forty years, the one they called the Rock, was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4; Deuteronomy 32:4, 18). He does not explain the particulars of his view, but the idea that there was an “upper” Yahweh, who remains unseen, sometimes called “God Most High,” as well as a “lower” manifestation of that same God, called the “messenger Yahweh,” who appears from time to time in human history in a visible manner on earth, was common in various forms of Judaism of Paul’s time.⁶ This lower Yahweh is not flesh and blood, even though in some of the stories he seems to “materialize,” but when he appears he is then “taken up” or in one case he just disappears in a flame of fire.⁷