Paul and Jesus

Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh. For we are the true circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh—though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. (Philippians 3:2–7)

At this point sometime in the early 60s A.D., Paul goes silent on us. We have nothing else directly from his hand. So far we have drawn our evidence of Paul’s bitter and irrevocable repudiation of the Jerusalem leadership from his letters alone. Whether there was ever any direct confrontation between Paul and Peter after this point we cannot be sure. Strangely, the account in Acts also ends abruptly with Paul’s imprisonment in Rome, as if nothing happened thereafter. Assuming that Luke-Acts was written at least as late as the end of the first century, we have a minimum of four decades of complete silence. Why are the deaths of Paul, Peter, and even James, all killed in the early 60s A.D., not heroically recounted in Acts to fill out the story of the beginnings of early Christianity? There has to be a reason for this silence. For our answer we have to turn to sources beyond the New Testament.

THE JESUS LEGACY

We have very few sources that tell us what happened with the Jewish-Christians who were connected to Jerusalem after the death of James in A.D. 62. As we have seen, the literary victory of Paul, whose ideas dominate the writings of the New Testament, is fairly complete. The Q source and the letter of James provide two exceptions. Among the earliest Christian writings by those usually called the “Apostolic Fathers,” only the Didache lacks Paul’s influence. The rest, including the letters of Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, the Shepherd of Hermas, and Barnabas, are wholly in harmony with a Pauline perspective and decidedly anti-Jewish in outlook. In other words, Paul’s gospel, so far as it was understood, won the day. Christians increasingly began to make the point explicitly that they were not Jewish and had nothing in common with Judaism. It was a victory of ideas as well as numbers since Gentiles quickly outnumbered Jews among the various Christian communities that began to spring up all over the Roman Empire into the second century A.D. Christian communities at Rome, Alexandria, Carthage, Ephesus, and Antioch, five central urban areas of the Roman Empire, began to dominate the Christian landscape. Greek language, philosophy, and culture prevailed in these Hellenistic–Roman Christian communities. The “Old Testament” was retained, but only in a Greek translation with the additional books of the “Apocrypha” added to what had been the Hebrew Bible.

There was also a political and military side to the triumph of Paul. Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem were devastated by two successive revolts against Rome (A.D. 66–73 and 132–35). Both Vespasian and Hadrian, the emperors who presided successively over these two Roman victories, instituted harsh measures against Jews in the Land of Israel and throughout the empire. Hundreds of thousands had been killed or taken away into slavery. The homeland was devastated and the capital of Jerusalem with its magnificent Temple was in ruins. It was increasingly unpopular to be Jewish or to identify with Jewish causes.

Tradition tells us that the Jerusalem-based Jewish-Christians, led by Simon, the successor of James, also of the dynastic bloodline of Jesus’ Davidic family, fled northeast into Transjordan, settling in areas around Pella and the district of Basan just before the outbreak of the First Jewish Revolt. We have no precise records of what happened to them, and we should probably not imagine them to be a solidly monolithic group with a central organization and agenda. What seems to have happened is that the movement scattered, and to some extent shattered, left without power or influence in the West, where Paul’s Gentile churches were thriving. As a result, their Jewish-Christian perspectives played little to no part in influencing what went into the New Testament. By the second and third centuries A.D., remnants of their movement appear to be divided into various sects and factions, variously named in our sources Ebionites, Nazoreans, Elkesaites, Cerinthians, and Symmachians.⁹ Unfortunately, most of what we know about these groups comes from orthodox Pauline Christian writers from the West who were eager to expose all forms of Jewish Christianity as heresy.