It used to be so simple. The history of Christian origins was straightforward. Two thousand years ago, so the story goes, Jesus preached, gathered together disciples, and eventually founded a church. Jesus himself was betrayed by one of his own, Judas. He was tried, convicted, and crucified. Astonishingly, he was resurrected from the dead, and many witnesses claimed to have seen this surprising event. His followers—the apostles—responded and began to spread the word about Jesus, initially in Jerusalem and surrounding areas. In time, Paul became part of the movement, proclaiming that through Jesus’ death and resurrection, all could be saved in Christ. This message resounded throughout the Roman world, and the movement attracted many Gentile members, flourishing well beyond anyone’s expectations.
According to what I’ll call the Conventional Model of Christian Origins, that’s how the early church developed. It’s a straightforward chronological model: from Jesus to church to Paul to phenomenal success. This is the impression that the remarkable Book of Acts created some forty or so years after the death of Paul and James. Written in the late first or early second century by the same author who wrote the Gospel of Luke, the Book of Acts described how the early Christian movement became multinational.1 After the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, under the vigorous impetus of Paul, this new religious enterprise moved out of Jerusalem into other countries—into modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Cyprus, and Italy. Acts portrayed Christianity as friendly to Roman values, positioning it so effectively that ultimately it would become the official religion of the Mediterranean world. That outcome, of course, would require some three hundred years. There were many organizational as well as theological details to work out— especially articulating the precise nature of the relationship between Jesus and God, as well as the human and divine natures within the person of Jesus. More than any other work in the New Testament, however, Acts provided the link between Jesus and a church growing exponentially under the genius of Paul’s leadership.
The arrangement of the books of the New Testament supports this Conventional Model of Christian Origins. As we have noted, the documents in the New Testament are not presented in the order in which they were written. We first encounter the four gospels, which present the mission and message of Jesus, even though all four were written after Paul’s death in the early 60s. This upfront placement conveys the false impression that everyone knew of Jesus’ life, teachings, practices, and doings. Then we come to Acts, the fifth book in the New Testament, which focuses on the thirty years after Jesus’ death. It shows how the message spread throughout the Roman Empire, and it ends with Paul in the capital city itself, Rome. Only after these five books do we come across Paul’s letters, even though they represent the earliest Christian writings. Chronologically they should appear first in the New Testament.
This strategic ordering of the documents, with the later gospels and Acts coming before the earlier letters of Paul, creates a very important effect. It cradles Paul within the setting of Jesus’ message and early church expansion. We see easily and quickly how he fits into the overall picture and how his efforts contribute to astounding success in terms of Gentile converts. Within this framework, it does not readily occur to us to raise critical questions concerning the actual linkage between Paul and Jesus.
It’s a brilliant arrangement that dovetails with Acts’ account of how early Christianity developed. The order of the New Testament documents and the alleged history presented in the Book of Acts conspire to give us the impression that the religion was transmitted from Jesus through Paul to us today. This became the dominant model of early Christian origins. It is commonly taught, and it has entered the popular imagination as the model of Christian origins.
But what if history didn’t unfold this way?
The neat and tidy Conventional Model has undergone intense scrutiny as we come to know more about Christian origins thanks to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic writings.2 Both sets of documents have made us much more aware of the diversity of Judaisms and Christianities that existed in the first century A.D. The Conventional Model now seems a faulty version of history, and a newer model of Christian origins is emerging.
For one thing, Jesus didn’t establish a church: he announced the Kingdom of God as a radical alternative to the Pax Romana. As scholars probed these far-from-simple stories, the Kingdom of God began to look less and less like a structured church with leadership, sacred texts, places of meeting, and rituals. The parables emphasized right behavior—being prepared for the coming Kingdom, acting in a kind and compassionate manner, seeking out the alienated and welcoming them into family, and valuing membership in the Kingdom above all else. So the claim that Jesus had come to found a church now appears somewhat questionable.
Nor did the parables focus on Jesus himself, other than as teacher, preacher, and teller of stories. That is, they did not erect an elaborate belief system about Jesus as a condition of membership in the Kingdom. The parables of Jesus do not reinforce the need for such beliefs as his preexistence, special virgin birth, divinity, role as crucified Christ, or savior of all humanity. This highly elaborate ideological superstructure is missing from the parables of the Kingdom. Instead, Jesus is the intriguing teller of tales, proclaiming a Kingdom of God that would occur soon, sweeping away Roman rule with its Hellenizing tendencies.
In fact, the parables talked a lot more about what the hearer had to do to be a member of the Kingdom of God than what was to be believed. We have seen how the parable of the Talents focused on the need for making the most of what one has been given. The parable of the Great Judgment showed that those who are redeemed are those who have provided food, drink, or clothing to others or who have welcomed strangers, treated the sick, or visited those in prison. Right actions are what counts in the Kingdom, not right beliefs.
So the institution of a structured church and complex belief systems about the person of Jesus are not vindicated by a critical study of the parables.3 Consequently this aspect of the Conventional Model has been thrown into question: What if Jesus did not come to establish a “church”? How did we get from Jesus of the 20s to what we have today: Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, Evangelical, Coptic, Armenian, and many other forms of Christianity?
Moreover, the Conventional Model ignores the significant role of James and his leadership in Jerusalem from the 30s to the early 60s. Why was he so overshadowed by Paul? We didn’t hear much about James ten or twenty years ago. Why has his story only now resurfaced?
Let’s back up for a moment, examine the situation in the 60s, and then see how the Book of Acts created an influential model for understanding early Christian origins.
As we discussed in the last chapter, there were two rival and parallel movements in the 60s: the Jesus Movement in Israel, and the Christ Movement in the Diaspora.4 They were not the same religion: one came from Jesus; the other came from from Paul. One was within Judaism; the other was not. One focused on the teachings of Jesus; the other focused on the figure of Christ.
We need to visualize these two movements like two rival baseball teams. The Los Angeles Angels and the Texas Rangers have different histories and ownership. They are different businesses, competing with each other. They share many things, however—an intense interest in the sport and business of baseball; a need to generate income; a striving for personal fitness and stamina on the part of the players; and a strong desire on the part of the organization to create revenue for players, owners, and shareholders. Nonetheless, while they have much in common, they remain competitors.
The Christ and Jesus Movements were like that—competing religions. They not only jostled with each other for members, they themselves also had different competitors. The Jesus Movement, for instance, had to vie with other forms of Judaism in Israel. This was not the competitive forum for the Christ Movement, however, which had a different sphere of operation. The Christ Movement strove for converts against Roman mystery religions while competing with Diaspora Judaism for the God-fearer segment of its congregations.
Moreover, as we have seen, there were significant differences between these two groups in terms of origins, beliefs, and practices. Not surprisingly, however, some of Paul’s terminology overlaps that of the Jesus Movement. He makes only a few references just to “Jesus.” Mostly he combines “Jesus” with titles such as “Christ” or “Lord” or both. So we have “Christ” or “Christ Jesus” or “Lord Jesus Christ.” We should not be misled by this wording into supposing that Paul has in mind the Jesus of the 20s who taught in the Galilee. Paul’s primary focus was on what the mystical Christ of experience had conveyed to and through him. That represented a distinctive source of information: direct encounter with the Christ. He received and conveyed a message no one in the Jesus Movement had ever heard or expressed. As a result, his beliefs differed as did his practices. Paul was at pains to emphasize how separate his movement was from the Jesus Movement. We should take him at his word. Most importantly, the two movements were not “branch operations” of one common enterprise.
We are familiar with other competing religions that have similar terminology. Judaism and Christianity today provide one example, with overlapping terminology in terms of covenant, Bible, Messiah, redemption, prophets, and so on. Yet Judaism and Christianity have separate places of worship, cherish different preferred writings, and maintain their own leadership.
Similarly, Islam has links to both Judaism and Christianity. Moses and Jesus, for example, are both revered prophets within the religion of Islam. Jews and Christians, as “People of the Book,” occupy a privileged position within its theology, and Abraham represents the common ancestor of all three monotheistic religions. Islam’s permissible foods, Halal dietary observances, are similar to some of the biblical kosher laws of Judaism. Islam, too, is an uncompromising monotheistic religion, as is Judaism. Islam, however, grew out of a separate revelation to Mohammed in the seventh century A.D. Mohammed heard things that the leaders of Christianity and Judaism did not hear. Islam developed its own literature, centers of study, places of worship, and clergy. So while Islam shares a significant overlap with its predecessors, it remains a separate religion, fiercely competing for members—especially with Christianity—in many places throughout the world.
Another example can be found within the American religious scene in the relationship between Mormonism and Christianity. The Mormons or Latter-day Saints had a separate revelation, which serves to distinguish this movement from Christianity. Mormonism emerged out of a distinctive religious vision to Joseph Smith, Jr. and the golden plates he discovered that provided the basis for the Book of Mormon. To some degree, Mormon terminology overlaps with that of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christianity. Because of their separate revelation, however, Mormons have heard things that Christian leaders have not. As a result, their beliefs and practices differ.
So it is not surprising that both the Jesus and Christ Movements shared overlapping terminology, and that it would have been confusing to outsiders. Each, however, maintained a separate infrastructure, leadership, and collection of favored writings. Moreover, by the midfirst century, these two religions faced vastly different problems. These are important to understanding the dynamics between the two rival movements.
Israel was in turmoil in the 60s, and this crippled the Jesus Movement. A ferocious conflict raged from 66 through to 73 or 74, being both a civil war as well as a war against Rome. Josephus told the painful story in The Jewish War, probably written shortly after the war, in the mid 70s. He rebuked the divisions that existed within Jewish society of the time and accused his countrymen of the same barbarism and butchery toward one another as the Romans exemplified toward them.5 He estimated that close to one hundred thousand were taken captive and over a million killed throughout the war. Not all the casualties were inflicted by the Romans. Many occurred through Jewish infighting as the different factions battled one another. It was a civil war as much as it was a war against the foreign occupiers.
During this conflict, the Jewish revolt in the Galilee was brutally suppressed by Roman legions. From there Roman troops swooped down the Jordan River valley, destroying Qumran, the headquarters of the Dead Sea Scroll community in 68. In Jerusalem, the revolt had driven out the occupying Roman garrison early in the conflict and lawless bands of thugs, Zealots, and many other factions patrolled the city, looting the Temple and its treasury and putting to death anyone suspected of harboring moderate sentiments. Just prior to 70, Roman troops, bent on revenge against the rebels, encircled Jerusalem. They crucified everyone—women and children as well as men— who tried to escape the city. The hills around Jerusalem were littered with grim reminders of this ruthless suppression. Finally, in 70, the city of Jerusalem itself was destroyed, along with the Temple. Even today, one can enter “Burnt House” in the Old City of Jerusalem and see evidence of this massive destruction. Belonging to a priestly family, this house has been excavated several stories below the current level of Jerusalem. Finds include a spear and the arm bone of a woman who was likely hiding from the occupying Romans. It is an eerie reminder of that awful time in Jewish history. Masada, the last stronghold of the Zealots, towering over the Dead Sea, was captured in the early 70s. There, Josephus tells us, the Roman legions surrounded the mesa-shaped fortress and built a causeway from the floor of the valley to the top of the mountain. He also reports that, sensing that the end was near, almost a thousand Zealot inhabitants of Masada preferred to commit suicide than surrender their freedom to Rome. That was the end of Jewish resistance toward Rome for decades.6
Shortly before this conflict, James, the brother of Jesus, was killed, in 62. Along with the immense disruption due to the siege of Jerusalem, its capture, and its destruction by the Romans, the execution of its bishop severely incapacitated the leadership of the Jesus Movement. While threatened from without by the rival Christ Movement gaining momentum in the Diaspora, it was hobbled at a crucial time in its history. One ancient church source indicates that the fledgling community escaped to Pella to the north and east, just below the Sea of Galilee in modern-day Jordan. Even if this tradition is correct, they appear to have returned to Jerusalem sometime later to elect Simeon as James’s successor as bishop of that city. Clearly the Jesus Movement suffered immensely during the violence of the 60s and was in decline. It was not in a position to exert its leadership.
By way of contrast, Paul’s Christ Movement caught on and spread rapidly. Capturing the God-fearer segment from synagogues was a highly successful maneuver. These spiritual seekers responded eagerly to Paul’s message that they could have all the benefits of Judaism without any of its obligations. It was an incredibly good deal. Paul succeeded wildly beyond anyone’s imagination.
So, in the 60s, there were a variety of religious choices: the Jesus Movement, other forms of Judaism, the Christ Movement, and various mystery religions. They saw themselves as distinctive. Yet we conflate the Christ and Jesus Movements. Conventionally we think of Paul as coming from Jesus. Some go so far as to put Paul on a pedestal, as the major leader within early Christianity, so much so that it becomes difficult to see James and his movement underneath what we might dub “the prism of Paul.”
So how did this come about? How did we gain the perception that the tradition flowed from Jesus through Paul into modern Christianity, to the virtual exclusion of James and his movement? Much of the obscurity of James and the Jesus Movement has to do with the model of Christian origins created by the Book of Acts in the early second century. It is this account that underlies the Conventional Model of Christian Origins we have inherited today. Simply put, the Book of Acts fuses together—at least on paper—two different religions into one common enterprise. In spite of being parallel, rival religions, Acts hooks the Christ Movement on to the Jesus Movement. It was a bold and radical invention.
The grafting had an important effect: it submerged the Jesus Movement under the Christ Movement. It used the Jesus Movement to gain legitimacy, as we shall see, but it smothered its contribution and perspective so effectively that we have a difficult time today seeing it and James at all. It’s buried under the weight of Paul. Thus Acts’ narrative shapes our visualization of early Christian roots. Because of the power of this model, we read back through the history of these times as if the Pauline Christ Movement went back to Jesus and not just to Paul himself.
Acts’ Model of Christian Origins proposes that we envisage early Christian history as follows. While Judaism was forging Rabbinic Judaism under the leadership of the Pharisees, simultaneously there were two early Christian movements. Each originated from Jesus. One movement was led by James, the other, by Paul. Acts also presents the view that mutual understanding existed between these two groups. By virtue of a decision by James at a Jerusalem conference, it was decreed that each movement, as part of one common enterprise, would focus on two jurisdictions. Paul and his group would constitute a mission to the Gentiles. James and his followers would address a Jewish constituency. That’s the author of Acts’ reconstruction of earlier history, some fifty to sixty years prior to his time of writing.
That’s what Acts proposed. It linked the Christ Movement to the Jesus Movement, and, through it, back to Jesus and biblical Judaism. Henceforth members of the Christ Movement could claim legitimacy. They had a mandate from a personage no less in stature than James, the head of the Jesus Movement, for what they were saying and doing. This is, however, fiction. It was designed to serve a particular need that had surfaced at the time Acts was written. Acts invented information about Paul and the Jerusalem leadership. By comparing what Acts said about Paul with what Paul said about himself, we can unravel the confusion. We can detect the creative hand of Acts in shaping his narrative.
Contrary to the Book of Acts, the Jesus Cover-Up Model of Christian Origins contends that we need to visualize Paul’s Christ Movement and James’s Jesus Movement as two different religions having separate origins. They were linked retroactively by the author of the Book of Acts, years after Paul and James died. It is not as if they both had a common origin in Jesus and then subsequently diverged. Rather they had separate origins and were then converged by Acts. Acts would like us to accept the view that two rival and parallel religions actually had a common origin. The author wants us to visualize the relationship between the Christ and Jesus Movements as similar to that which exists between Protestantism and Catholicism, or Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Each had common ancestry but eventually parted ways. That’s how the author of Acts sees the relationship, as two fronts to one united religion.
In fact, what Acts achieved was far more ambitious and innovative. In linking the Christ Movement to the Jesus Movement, what the writer of Acts has succeeded in doing is fusing together two separate religions. It’s as if he blended together two different movements—say, in contemporary terms, something like Islam and Christianity—in spite of their having different origins, beliefs, and practices. That’s the truly radical nature of Acts’ proposal. It joined together independent, separate movements into one united whole.
Let’s see the evidence for this. How did Acts create this synthesis?
The highly influential Book of Acts claims to trace the early development of the Christian movement. Its structure is straightforward. It focuses initially on the work of the leaders in Jerusalem—James, Peter, John and, some others. Then it switches to Paul, describing his “conversion” and outlining his career. This includes reports on his meetings with Jerusalem leaders as well as a summary of his various missionary trips throughout the Diaspora. It concludes with Paul’s eventual preaching in Rome in the early 60s. It would be very helpful if we could use the information presented in Acts to supplement Paul’s own account of his career and message. Some have gone this route.7
However, upon examination we find that Acts distorted what we know of Paul from Paul himself.8 It was not that the author of Acts just added detail: he contradicted what Paul himself clearly said. This represents a fictitious Paul, and that subterfuge provides the tip-off that there is a hidden agenda at work in Acts. It represents nothing less than a reinterpretation of the movement prior to his times. Let us trace how the author of Acts reworked the origins of Paul’s movement and attempted to legitimize Paul’s distinctive teachings and practices. It’s a tremendous tour de force. The effect of Acts’ endeavors was to put forward the illusion that Paul’s movement arose out of the religion originating with Jesus, when it clearly hadn’t. Why Acts concocted this connection we’ll explore in a subsequent section.
Acts created the linkage using three main strategies.
First of all, Acts radically reined in Paul’s independence. This writing provided marvelously creative details about Paul’s mystical experience on the road to Damascus. Acts tells us that immediately after this remarkable event, Paul went into the house of Ananias, a member of the Jesus Movement living there. Ananias healed and baptized him (Acts 9:10—19). Paul then preached in the synagogues in Damascus, arousing the anger of “the Jews,” and he narrowly escaped when “his disciples” caught wind of a plot on his life.
Some details here should set off alarm bells in the mind of a wary reader. Were there already members of the Jesus Movement so far from Jerusalem? Also, how was it that Paul already had disciples—where did they come from? Did Paul already have “a movement”? Moreover, would any member of the Jesus Movement have referred to the worshippers in synagogues as “the Jews”—as “other”—or was this a reflection of a much later stance, when the Christian community was separating from Judaism? A lot of things do not ring true in this account.
After this, Acts says, Paul went up to Jerusalem where Barnabas introduced him to “the apostles” (Acts 9:27). He moved about freely in Jerusalem, getting into a serious debate with “Hellenists”—that is, Greek-speaking Jews—who attempted to kill him. He was then rescued, taken down to the port city of Caesarea and packed off to his hometown of Tarsus. Why Paul aroused such anger is not made clear, especially when members of the Jesus Movement appear to have lived in harmony with other Jewish factions (except for the Sadducees). This represents an important clue that others recognized that Paul’s teachings differed from those of the Jesus Movement.
If we take Acts’ account as accurate, Paul immediately aligned himself with the Jesus Movement. In quick order he was baptized, preached in an antagonistic manner, escaped with the help of his disciples, and headed up to Jerusalem.
That’s not what Paul said happened, however. In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul stressed that after his remarkable experience, he “did not confer with any human being” (Galatians 1:16). There was no mention of an Ananias or other members of the Jesus Movement resident in Damascus. He made no mention of having his own disciples. Nor did he say that he preached in Jewish synagogues in Damascus. Moreover, Paul emphasized that he did not go up to Jerusalem to confer with leaders of the Jesus Movement. He said, instead, that he immediately went away “into Arabia” (Galatians 1:17), returning after a while to Damascus. Why he did so, or where he went in Arabia, we do not know. Legend associates him with the fabulous city of Petra, the headquarters of the wealthy Nabatean traders.
Then, three years later, Paul did go to Jerusalem for fifteen days, to visit Cephas (Peter) and James, but no others. After that, he went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, and we know nothing of this venture. For a recent high-profile “convert,” as Acts makes him out to be, this does not represent much contact with the Jerusalem leadership. Fourteen years later he mentions another visit to Jerusalem, along with Barnabas and Titus.9
Acts attributed the trouble Paul experienced in Damascus to a political issue, namely the animosity of “the Jews” of Damascus who wanted Paul arrested. This writing noted that Paul—at his own request—had originally been sent to Damascus by the pro-Roman high priest in Jerusalem to arrest certain of its citizens. This is an odd detail, for the high priest in Jerusalem would have had no authority over Jews living outside his jurisdiction. Moreover, the non-Roman Nabatean government authorities would not have taken kindly to this intrusion into their domestic affairs. These were not Roman subjects Paul was after, but citizens of Arabia, of which Damascus was a part. If Acts is to be believed, Paul was a bounty hunter—engaged in some unsavory scheme to abduct foreign nationals, to bring them forcibly to religious authorities in another country. Just not ethical or plausible.
Nor is it clear why the high priest would want to abduct those “who belonged to the Way” (Acts 9:2). Or even why he would have agreed with Paul’s request to undertake this mission in the first place. The only issue between the Sadducean high priest and the Jesus Movement had to do with belief in resurrection. That was no different, however, than the issue between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. If the high priest wished to stamp out those who believed in resurrection, he did not need to concentrate all his efforts on one tiny sect so far from its center in a different political jurisdiction. He could have tackled a larger faction, the Pharisees, right on his doorstep in Jerusalem and elsewhere throughout the land. Or he could have picked on the Essenes. Or, for that matter, he could have harassed the members of the Jesus Movement resident in Jerusalem, within blocks from the Temple and the high priest’s own residence. Why send Paul on a wild goose chase to hunt down a minuscule minority outside his religious and political jurisdiction?
Once again, the details provided by Acts simply do not ring true.
Paul himself located his mystical experience in Damascus but did not explain the reason for this journey. He was more concerned to emphasize that through this experience “God was pleased to reveal his son in [to] me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles” (Galatians 1:15—16).
So we have two differing and contradictory perspectives: Paul’s and Acts’. The differences are dramatic. Paul distanced himself from the Jesus Movement leaders. Acts put him squarely in their midst soon after his experience near Damascus. Moreover, Paul emphasized that the message he preached came directly from the mystical Christ who he believed was revealed “in” him (Galatians 1:16), not through any human agency. That was very important to Paul—the immediacy of his knowledge of the Christ. Unlike what Paul said he did following his experience, the Book of Acts has him trotting up to Jerusalem immediately. Finally, Acts wanted to create the impression of a linkage right from the get-go. The only trouble is, Paul himself says it didn’t happen that way at all.
Acts is clearly inventing history in order to create the desired association. But there is more revisionist history in the making, as we shall shortly discover.
Second, Acts invented the Jerusalem Conference to legitimize Paul’s distinctive teachings and practices. The writer of Acts had a problem. After linking Paul to the Jesus Movement immediately after his Damascus experience, he now had to account for Paul’s distinctive teachings and practices with respect to Torah observance. He would have known how contentious and infuriating these were to leaders like James and others within the inner circle in Jerusalem. His issue was how to link a non-Torah-observant movement with one that was. That synthesis would be no mean feat; passions ran high over Torah obligations since so much was at stake. Acts’ solution was truly ingenious: it created authorization for Paul’s position.
As Paul tells it, there was no significant relationship between his movement and that of the Jesus group in Jerusalem. Some fourteen or seventeen years after his dramatic mystical experience, Paul says that he visited the leaders of the Jesus Movement. They conferred “behind closed doors,” sharing their respective messages. The upshot of these conversations was a handshake and an agreement to operate in two different jurisdictions—his, among Gentiles; theirs, among Jews. They represented two different operations. They requested that Paul “remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10). For Paul, that constituted the only linkage: to take up collections to help those less fortunate financially. It is not as if there is one common movement under one leader, with two prongs— one to the Jews and one to the Gentiles. So, as Paul described the situation, he was not “under” anyone, least of all James in Jerusalem.
The picture in Acts 15, however, is vastly different. In this account, when Paul goes to Jerusalem, it is apparent that many members of the Jesus Movement there were insistent that the Torah be observed, even for Gentile members (Acts 15:1). Paul, it seems, was widely believed—correctly, as it turns out—to be teaching otherwise, that Torah observance was not required. What he said could easily be interpreted as applying to everyone, Jew or Gentile. In Acts’ account, Paul was hauled before James and the leaders in Jerusalem. This is the scene that represents the famous Jerusalem Conference. Paul was “on the carpet” for his views. Peter was there, too, and he spoke. James, however, decided the issue, proposing a dual structure for the movement (Acts 15:13—21). According to the account in Acts, James decreed that Jewish members of the Jesus movement would continue to obey all the rules and laws of Torah. On the other hand, Gentile members of the movement would have a lesser obligation. They would be required to observe only the Seven Noahide Laws incumbent on all humanity, not the full Torah required of Jewish members.
These requirements represented much stronger obligations than simply “remembering the poor,” as Paul would have it. The key point to notice, however, is that the device of the Jerusalem Conference bound the Christ Movement to the Jesus Movement as an integral part of a larger mission. It was this conference that created the impression that both movements worked harmoniously, hand in hand, each with the other, but having separate jurisdictions.
A common enterprise with a two-prong mission: that’s the image Acts painted for us. Stemming from Jesus, we have James and Paul, each with their respective mandate—one to the Jews and one to the Gentiles. The big news, however, was that it generated legitimacy for the Christ Movement, being supported and authorized by no less a person than James and the leadership in Jerusalem. This is the model Acts would have us accept, with all the differences between the Jesus and Christ Movements glossed over. This act of historical revisionism fashioned the picture we tend to use today.
This account of Christian origins achieved several important strategic objectives. For one thing, it made it appear that Paul’s Christ Movement was part of the movement that originated with Jesus. As we shall see, this lineage was very important to the author of Acts. It also positioned Paul’s movement as an integral part of a larger enterprise, setting up a common infrastructure. More importantly, it had James validating and legitimizing Paul’s teachings and practices with respect to not observing Torah. Here was the smoking gun—the Jerusalem Conference was exactly what Acts needed to tie Paul into the Jesus Movement.
It is tempting to say that, for once, Acts got it right and that Paul minimized the story. The incident placed Paul in an unfavorable light, unlike most of Acts, and that might argue for its authenticity. Moreover the position on the part of James, if reported correctly, was consistent with the attitude of other Jewish leaders of the time. The Pharisees, for instance, would have held that Gentiles do not have to take on the full responsibility of Torah observance to be regarded as righteous or to achieve salvation. For them, following the Seven Noahide Laws was sufficient. They would not, of course, be Jews: they’d remain Gentiles. If, for some reason, they wished to be converted to Judaism, they could do so through male circumcision and immersion as well as agreeing to follow the law. But there was no necessity linked to salvation to do so. There was no question that the righteous of all the nations, who observe the Noahide laws faithfully, would have a share in the world to come. Redemption was not the issue at all. Thus the position of James would have been consistent with that of other Jewish leaders of the time, especially the views of the Pharisees. So perhaps Acts told the story correctly.
But that’s not the case. History didn’t unfold the way Acts told us it did. Let’s see why not.
There are significant problems with Acts’ version of history and its decisive Jerusalem Conference decree. Simply put, no one seems to know anything about it at all. That is truly amazing and it provides the all-important clue that it never even happened. It was Acts’ creative genius that invented this fiction. The Jerusalem Conference—if it were held at all—would have dated from the late 40s.10 Paul’s Letter to the Galatians was later, from the mid 50s.11 As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Paul had to deal with the issue of Torah observance. Other teachers had come into Paul’s part of the world, telling Paul’s Gentile converts in Galatia that they needed to observe the law.12 They may have been members of the Jesus Movement who shared the belief that Gentiles who wish to become part of the new movement within Judaism must observe Torah.
If an authoritative decision had been rendered by James only a few years earlier exempting Gentile converts from this requirement, then it is absolutely astonishing that Paul’s rival leaders did not know of it. Nor is it clear why they would be stepping into his jurisdiction—the mission to the Gentiles. Clearly whoever was disturbing the community in Galatia was completely unaware of this decree of James, the undisputed leader of the movement. They clearly thought that any new member must become Jewish first, observing all the requirements of Torah. That, of course, was simply waving a red flag in front of Paul. It was a position, however, espoused by the Jesus Movement.
When Paul responded to these opposing teachers, it is surprising that Paul did not seem to know of this Jerusalem Conference decree either. He did not refer to James’s authoritative pronouncement, which supposedly came only a few years earlier. That would have nipped the issue in the bud and settled the matter decisively. The Letter to the Galatians could have been considerably shorter: Paul could have referred them to the judgment of James. But he didn’t. Instead he resorted to convoluted arguments, misquoting and misapplying scripture in the process. A polite “remember James’s decree” would have sufficed and settled the matter.
It is as if the major decision of the supreme pontiff of the movement had come and gone without anyone knowing anything about it.
It probably never happened. The idea of a Jerusalem conference, presided over by the wise James, rendering decisions about Gentiles and Torah observance seems to have been a fantasy invented by the author of Acts. It represented a very important and imaginative move on the part of the author of the Book of Acts to graft Paul’s radical Christ Movement on to the original Jesus Movement. Without it, nothing would stick the one to the other. The Jerusalem Conference is the sole support giving legitimacy to the teachings and practices of the Christ Movement. If it never happened, then Acts’ synthesis crumbles to pieces.
There’s a third point of contrast between Acts and Paul himself. Acts exaggerated Paul’s Jewishness. Paul himself dismissed his Jewishness, and he denounced those who would uphold Torah requirements for Gentile members of the movement. He contended that they are perverting the message, spreading confusion, and that they are cursed. He satirically hoped that those who circumcise would suffer an accident and castrate themselves (Galatians 5:12). He said that those who follow the law have fallen away from grace (Galatians 5:4). He counted his former life in Judaism as “rubbish” (Philippians 3:8). He did not give any credence to the position that there might be another legitimate understanding of the new movement. In particular, he provided no support to those in the Jesus Movement who saw matters differently. He never acted as if there existed an alternate version of his gospel, namely, the Jesus Movement. For Paul, there was only one way of understanding the message: his way. He was absolutely consistent on this. There was one and only one correct way of understanding his religion. Every other religion, including Judaism, was simply wrong.
It would be difficult to imagine that, at the end of his life, Paul thought of himself as in any way Jewish. His teachings and practices were anything but. Not only his denial of Torah but also his portrait of the Christ would have been at odds with all forms of Judaism. This contrasts with James, who undoubtedly lived and died as a Jew, so much so that latter generations referred to him as James ha-Zaddik (James the Righteous).
Acts, however, enhanced Paul’s Jewishness. Paul, it claimed, had been brought up in Jerusalem as a student of Gamaliel, the leading Pharisaic teacher of his time, and strictly educated in Torah. Paul himself was much more modest, just noting in passing that he was a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5). He never claimed more than that, even when his credentials were on the line and he needed all the support he could muster. By claiming to have been a Pharisee, Paul may have meant only that of all the Jewish movements of the time, he sympathized with them the most, at least at one stage of his life. It did not imply formal training.
Many members of the Jesus Movement came out of the Pharisaic party within Judaism without arousing any antagonism from other Pharisees (Acts 15:5). The great Pharisaic leader Gamaliel defended members of the Jesus Movement when Peter was brought before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:34—39). Josephus noted that a group of “reasonable” or “equitable” people, most likely the Pharisees, took great offense when the Sadducean high priest had James killed.13
Acts stretches believability to the absolute limit when it presented Paul defending himself before Roman authorities by saying “I worship the God of our ancestors, believing everything laid down according to the law or written in the prophets” (Acts 24:14). That is hard to picture from someone who penned the vicious anti-Torah Letter to the Galatians. At best, Paul is lying. More realistically, the author of Acts, many years later, inserted words into Paul’s mouth—words the Paul of history could never have uttered with a straight face.
Acts’ insistence on Paul’s Jewishness is highly overblown, and Paul’s self-assessment is much more accurate. He had a Jewish background and came to lead a movement that was anything but. He was a Jewish dropout.
What can we conclude from all this? Simply that the Book of Acts invented history. We know that the Book of Acts represents an unreliable source for information about Paul. Acts contradicts what we know of Paul from his own writings. Acts’ Paul is a later creation that serves the author of Acts’ purposes well. It is not, however, a reflection of the historical Paul. It is, rather, the Paul the author of Acts needed to invent to support the linkage between the two movements. We should look to Paul’s own writings if we wish to grasp the Paul of history. Paul took every opportunity to separate his movement, his message, and his career from that of the Jesus Movement. Paths did cross, and when they did, as with an incident with a member of the Jesus Movement, Peter, Paul pressed his religious commitments. There was no indication from Paul that there existed another perspective or that another arm of the movement might have differing practices.
What we know of Paul, then, is from Paul himself, and his “authentic Paul” is vastly different from Acts’ “revisionist Paul.” Therefore, we cannot use the Book of Acts to supplement Paul’s own account of his career and message. We simply have no way of knowing what additional information is fictional and what is historically accurate.
Most importantly, we cannot use Acts to say with confidence that the Christ and Jesus Movements simply represent two differing views of one common enterprise. Because Acts creates a different Paul than the real one revealed in his letters, we know that Acts has a hidden agenda—and we can now recognize what that is. The author of Acts is at pains to demonstrate that both Paul’s movement and James’s were part and parcel of one religious impetus stemming from Jesus himself.
In both his gospel and the Book of Acts, Luke was writing for a Roman audience, trying to impress upon them that the movement was a religion fit for the Roman Empire. But he had a problem. This was a new religion on the scene, bereft of noble ancestry. But noble ancestry is precisely what the religion needed if it were to succeed on the Roman stage. In linking the Gentile Christ Movement through the Jesus Movement back to Jesus and biblical Judaism, he was creating an impeccable heritage for this new religion. It had the virtue of antiquity, a prized Roman virtue. With this historical legitimacy, the author of the Book of Acts positioned the new religion as one that possessed an impressive pedigree, going back into the history of Israel, back to David, Moses, Abraham—even back to the first human, Adam.
He was also grounding the Christ of Paul in an actual historical being, Jesus, through the Jesus Movement. In reading Paul’s letters, it is surprising how little is made of anything that comes from the Jesus of history. There is not much in Paul’s writing that would give us grounds for thinking that Jesus had anything important to say. As we have noted, Paul disclosed only that Jesus was born, was Jewish, and died. Moreover, he did not ground his own message in the teachings, observances, or sayings that come from the religion of Jesus. There are no parables, no Lord’s Prayer, or no Sermon on the Mount. There is nothing that would reflect the relationship one would expect from a disciple of a rabbi. There is just what Paul says he got mystically from the Christ whom he claims reveals himself in him. Devoid of linkage to the Jesus Movement and to Judaism generally, Paul’s Christ Movement would have appeared suspiciously like a Hellenistic mystery religion—and this may be an impression Luke was attempting to avoid.
Acts’ great achievement was this: it created a highly influential model for understanding Christian origins. We have seen how it accomplished this—by asserting Paul’s close contact with the Jesus Movement immediately after his remarkable Damascus experience, by glossing over key differences in belief, by legitimizing his position on non Torah observance through the Jerusalem Conference, and by enhancing his Jewishness. The author of Acts wanted us to visualize a common connection, and that is tremendously important for him. We see only the common connection. That’s what we are intended to see. We’re supposed to imagine that from ancient roots in Judaism, the religion of Jesus and that led by James validated and authorized Paul’s Christ Movement and the growth of the church. We—and the Romans before us—are supposed to appreciate the wonderful ancestry of this religion. That is what Acts had to create if the new religion were to gain a sympathetic hearing around the Roman Empire. Acts’ synthesis was tremendously successful. The leaders of the Christ Movement and Proto-Orthodoxy could all stand up and take pride in its ancestral roots (all the while, of course, rejecting its main tenets). Romans, not knowing the history, would be impressed with such an ancient movement that had entered their world. It was also successful in that this account shapes our perceptions and authorizes us to see the New Testament through the eyes of Paul.
But historical reality was different.
The fusion Acts created is suspect. Acts distorted known information and grafted one movement onto another, without regard for strong differences in origin, beliefs, and practices. The Jesus Movement people remained unconvinced. They continued their separate observances, undeterred by the growing popularity of the Christ cult. They did not accept the amalgamation. We should not imagine that, as a result of Acts, there suddenly appeared joint congregations, common celebrations, socializing, and intermarriage, or a unified administrative center. They retained separate infrastructures—congregations of the Christ Movement versus assemblies of the Jesus Movement—each operating independently. The linkage was simply on paper, for the benefit of the Christ Movement members who could now regale Romans with stories of an ancient heritage and authoritative mandate.
Instead of Acts’ model, a newer understanding of Christian origins is developing. The Jesus Cover-Up Thesis advances the view that there were four separate, parallel religions that sprang up in the first-century Middle East. Two stemmed from biblical Judaism. These included Rabbinic Judaism, led by the Pharisees and the sages who after 70 had to reconstruct Judaism. The other child of biblical Judaism was the Jesus Movement, inspired by its Jewish teacher Jesus, Torah-observant and messianic in nature. There were, however, two other religions that did not derive from biblical Judaism. One was the Gnostic Movement with its emphasis on “the living Jesus” who provided a saving knowledge to humans trapped in this dreadful world. The other one was Paul’s Christ Movement, which, from its inception, constituted a religion outside Judaism.
So, according to the Jesus Cover-Up Thesis, we have four independent religions, each operating separately, competing with one another, and acting as rivals. In particular, the Christ Movement was never linked with the Jesus Movement, as Acts would have it. Two of these four religions eventually disappeared: the Jesus and the Gnostic movements. But two did succeed. Rabbinic Judaism became modern Judaism, and Paul’s Christ Movement evolved into Christianity.
By contrast, Acts converged two separate religions and fused them into one common enterprise, at least on paper. Acts’ synthesis was a literary creation, not a description of sociological reality. Two religions, each having separate origins, beliefs, and practices, were deliberately linked by the author of Acts for Roman consumption, but, “on the ground,” they remained separate. Looking back, we can recognize how effective Acts’ Model of Christian Origins was. We live with the legacy of this model today without realizing that Acts merged two disparate movements. The beliefs and practices of the Jesus Movement became obscured by Acts’ creative history, for it privileged Paul’s view as the dominant one through which to view early Christian origins. The teachings of Paul about the Christ became fused with memories of James and the Jesus Movement, but the latter were well hidden.
This was the place where the Christ of Paul’s personal experience became substituted for the Jesus of history: the Christ for Jesus, beliefs about the Christ for the teachings of Jesus, the religion of Paul for that of Jesus. Acts gave validity to Paul’s inspiration and to the figure around whom he had built his death and resurrection theology. All this was accomplished allegedly with the consent of Jesus’ earliest followers.
This synthesis also allowed later Christians to supplement Paul’s letters with various gospels that were being written by the Christifying segment of the early church. These include gospels like Luke and John. The latter makes strong claims about the person of Jesus—all the “I am” statements are typically found in this gospel: “I am the Good Shepherd,” “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” and so forth. We should not imagine that gospels represent independent sources. They are the creations of actual communities. Just as the Christ Movement created their own, the Gnostic and Jesus Movements fashioned theirs.
Thus there was not one common body of literature on which to draw or one neutral set of texts that could be used to judge what was authentic Christianity. The Jesus Movement people and Ebionites used a version of the Gospel of Matthew. But they shunned the virgin birth story and rejected Paul’s letters and such Christified gospels as Luke and John. Similarly, the Gnostics preferred their own materials, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of the Savior, the Apocryphon of John, and many other writings now known to us from the scrolls discovered some sixty years ago.
The gospel writings did not create the church. Rather these influential documents are the church’s creation—and not the church as a whole but only one faction within the early Christian clustering of communities. The present New Testament reflects the writings preferred by the Proto-Orthodox, the heirs of Paul’s Christ Movement. It excludes the literature emanating from other groups, the Gnostics or the Ebionites, for instance. So the New Testament does not represent an unbiased or neutral collection of early Christian writings. We have a circular loop: the Proto-Orthodox producing and authenticating its writings; these writings, in turn, validating the Proto-Orthodox.
What we have in Christianity today is Paulinity. It is the religion envisaged and vigorously promoted by Paul and given a respectable history by the Book of Acts. It is a Hellenized religion about a Gentile Christ, a cosmic redeemer, and it is through that perspective that the later gospels are read. It is not the religion of the Jewish Jesus, the Messiah claimant and proclaimer of a Kingdom of God. That religion—the religion of the Jesus Movement and the Ebionites— eventually died out.