Paul and Jesus

This is very much akin to the Greek notion of the ineffable God manifest in the lower world as the “Word” or Logos, which was an integral part of Platonic and Stoic cosmology. The Logos idea was appropriated by the Jewish philosopher Philo, a contemporary of Paul, to deal with passages in the Hebrew Bible that seem to refer to these two Yahwehs, an upper and a lower. In the New Testament the gospel of John adopts the Logos idea wholesale, but makes the shocking assertion that “the Logos became flesh,” referring to the birth of Jesus (John 1:1, 14).⁸ This is akin to Paul’s view of the preexistent Christ, in the form of God, who emptied himself and was born of a woman.

Paul says little more about the preexistent Christ as a manifestation of Yahweh other than that he was present in the days of Moses. Paul is focused entirely on the other end of history, the termination of what he calls “this present evil age” (Galatians 1:14). What Jesus represents to Paul is one thing and one thing only—the cosmic, preexistent Christ being “born of a woman,” as a flesh-and-blood mortal human being now transformed to a life-giving Spirit. This is what drove Paul and excited him most. For him it explained the Genesis creation itself and accounted for all the subsequent “blood, sweat, and tears” of the human story. Humans were created to become Gods! “This slight, momentary affliction” was preparing them for an “eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh, the One God of Israel, had declared: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God and there is no other . . . To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear (Isaiah 45:22–23). Paul quotes this precise phrase from Isaiah but now significantly adds: “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11). Christ as the newly exalted Lord of the cosmos is the functional equivalent of Yahweh.⁹

As lofty and esoteric as these concepts might be, Paul and his followers believed that their experiences of Christ were real and direct. The mystical rites of baptism and eating the Lord’s Supper were their means of uniting with Christ and being possessed by his Spirit.

IMAGINING PAULINE BAPTISM

Paul invented Christian baptism. Along with the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist, it has proven to be his most enduring contribution to Christianity. For Paul these were not merely symbolic acts, but mystical rites that were efficacious in bringing about union with Christ’s Spirit.

I say Paul invented baptism because, so far as we know, none of the apostles was ever baptized in the name of Christ. They did indeed practice a form of baptism for their followers, but it was not the “baptism into Christ” that Paul taught, as we will see, but a continuation of the baptism taught by John the Baptizer.

When we first read of baptism in the New Testament it is from John the Baptizer, who told the crowds that flocked to the banks of the Jordan River to repent of their sins since the kingdom of God had drawn very near. The arrival of God’s kingdom meant God’s wrathful judgment, so John’s was a “baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” to prepare one for the impending apocalypse (Mark 1:4). John the Baptizer was considered an important enough threat that he came to the attention of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, who had him killed. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, mentions John, explaining that he was so popular with the people that Herod feared his preaching might lead to an uprising. Josephus comments on John’s practice of baptism, explaining that it was a “consecration of the body implying that the soul was already cleansed by right behavior.”¹⁰

Various rites of ritual purification requiring immersion in water were common in Judaism but John’s baptism was something different since it was connected to repentance and forgiveness of sins.¹¹ To be baptized by John was to respond to his apocalyptic call to be part of a special group who had dedicated themselves to live righteously at the end of days. The apocalyptic community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, usually identified as the Essenes, had a similar practice of initiating members into their exclusive community through a ceremony involving water immersion.¹²