3. The New Testament as history: is the story true?
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come; see the oxen kneel,
‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
Thomas Hardy’s poem expresses a very familiar hope. The New Testament story is so beautiful: can’t it also be true?
Despite the broad consensus in the Gospels about the outlines of the life of Jesus, the four evangelists disagree with each other on many points of fact (the philosophical and theological disagreements we shall come to later). Where in Judea did Jesus’ family come from? Who were his ancestors? Where was he born? Which miracles did he perform? What were the names of the twelve apostles? How many times did Jesus go up to Jerusalem? What happened at his trial? What happened at his resurrection? When and where did the risen Christ appear? There is major disagreement on all these points.
The first point is to ask what we mean by ‘true’. ‘Truth’ in the sense of ‘historical truth’, correspondence to the facts, is a key value for contemporary readers. But when we try to view the New Testament from the standpoint of the modern historian, we must realise that ‘history’ and ‘truth’ had very different meanings to the Gospel writers than they do to us. As Reza Aslan points out, ‘Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean when we say the word “history”. The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.’12 As Paul Beeching puts it in Awkward Reverence, ‘Gospels are not historical accounts … in the modern sense of history as a documented account of the past. Gospels are primarily preaching devices intended to preserve and strengthen the reader’s faith … they are not reports of historical events or accurate transcripts of ancient speech. To ask about the truth of Mark is akin to asking about the truth of Hamlet’.13
And if this is true of the Gospel writers, it is equally true of the early readers of the Gospels – those for whom they were written, and who shared the assumptions and conventions of the writers. ‘The readers of Luke’s gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality … they were less interested in what actually happened than in what it meant.’14
Here is a small illustration: apparently trivial, but actually very revealing. All four Gospels assert that at the end of his life, Jesus and his disciples make a triumphant entry into Jerusalem at the time of Passover – a time when the city was crowded, heaving with pilgrims in a high state of religious excitement. All four accounts specify that he rides in ‘on a donkey’. Since all four agree, we might put this down as a historical fact: an outward-facing ‘truth of correspondence’ – because it corresponds with reality – rather than an inward-facing ‘truth of meaning’, something that highlights the symbolic significance of the event. But one of the accounts goes a little further. Matthew writes that Jesus enters Jerusalem on two animals: ‘And they brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon’ (Matthew 21:7). This spectacular manoeuvre has survived all the editing and rewriting that every one of the Gospels has undergone: no scribe has seen fit to amend it. And this is for a very good reason. Whether or not Jesus actually entered Jerusalem astride a donkey (or astride two donkeys), the donkey is of vital importance because it connects Jesus to an Old Testament prophecy – one that only Matthew mentions, but all four evangelists certainly knew: ‘Behold, thy King cometh unto thee … lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass’ (Zechariah 9:9, italics added). The narrative connects Jesus with Zechariah’s prophecy (5th century BC) of a triumphant yet peaceful king of Israel who ‘shall speak peace to the heathen’ and whose dominion ‘shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth’ (Zechariah 9:10).
Casting Jesus as the fulfilment of that prophecy is a way of saying to the assembled pilgrims that their new king – peaceful, but all-powerful – has arrived. Matthew’s knowledge of the rhetoric of the Hebrew Bible was limited and he (unlike the other three evangelists) did not realise that Zechariah was using techniques of parallelism that go back through the Bible to Canaanite literature a thousand years before, whereby a phrase is repeated in a slightly different form for emphasis; in this case only one donkey is involved. But what makes this detail revealing is that it doesn’t matter whether Jesus actually rode a donkey (or two donkeys) on his way into Jerusalem. It didn’t matter to the Gospel writers, and it didn’t matter to their readers. What mattered to writer and reader alike is not the fact, but the symbol. The facts are subservient to the fulfilment of the prophecy.
With the donkey and its foal in mind, let us look at five areas where the Gospels contradict each other, and/or the facts of history as we know them: the birth of Jesus; the use of Old Testament texts as prophecies of the coming messiah; the part played by the Jews, and the Pharisees, in the Gospels; the trial of Jesus; and the predictions of the imminent end of the world. We shall end by setting Acts alongside the Epistles, and asking: was St Paul a reliable witness to the facts of his own life?
A virgin birth?
Two of the Gospels (Mark, the earliest, and John, the latest) have no mention of the early years: Jesus first appears as an adult about to be baptised by John the Baptist, and his mother is mentioned in a perfectly normal context along with his numerous brothers and sisters. But Matthew and Luke provide very detailed accounts of his miraculous birth and indeed of his ancestry, and these accounts do not fit well with each other.
Matthew’s Gospel begins with a detailed genealogy for Jesus tracing him through his father Joseph right back to Abraham by way of King David. He then recounts a virgin birth preceded by an annunciation from the Angel Gabriel. The birth in Bethlehem is followed by a visit from the Wise Men, a warning from God to take flight into Egypt, Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents, and in due course a return from Egypt to a new village, Nazareth in Galilee. The story (as so often in Matthew) is constantly buttressed by references to the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies.
Luke begins with not one, but two miraculous conceptions. The first is that of John the Baptist, whose parents are barren and ‘well stricken in years’;a the second is that of Jesus himself. Both are announced by angels; in an added twist, the mothers are cousins (Luke 1:36) and meet before the babies are born, with the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth acknowledging Mary as ‘the mother of my Lord’ (1:43). The birth of Jesus takes place in Bethlehem. So far, so good. However, Luke goes on to give a different genealogy from Matthew (Luke 3:23–38) and a totally different explanation of why the family are in Bethlehem. According to Luke, the family originate in Nazareth (the village where they end up in Matthew’s account), but go to Bethlehem because they are required to do so for census purposes as it is ‘a city of David’ and Joseph is ‘of the house and lineage of David’. When they get there, there is ‘no room at the inn’ and Mary has to lay the baby Jesus ‘in a manger’, where he is visited by shepherds. There is no mention of stars, of Wise Men, or of Herod and the massacre of the little children, nor of the consequent need to take refuge in Egypt.
There is no possibility that these stories are ‘true’ in the sense of representing historical events. This is not because of the angels and the star – the miraculous bits. It is because the non-miraculous elements – the genealogies, the dates, the explanations, even the geography – are donkeys and foals, conveniently placed to meet a literary and symbolic need. The evidence for this is overwhelming and I will limit myself to a few examples.
First, genealogy. The people of Israel had a clear expectation that the new messiah must be born in the town of Bethlehem (Micah 5:2) and be descended from David. As we have seen, they also had a pretty low opinion of Galilee (see John 1:46, ‘Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?’).
Jesus is challenged on this point in John’s Gospel (John 7:41–52), and can’t give an adequate response; Mark makes no mention of it at all. Matthew and Luke, in different ways, set out to put things right. Matthew (1:1–17) gives Jesus a complete genealogy including David and Abraham – arranged in three groups of fourteen (David’s name has a special relationship with the number fourteen), and including women and Gentiles (which reflects the importance of both groups in the early Church). Luke, however, has a different genealogy: it includes David and Abraham, but otherwise follows a different route beyond Abraham right back to Adam, the first man and ‘Son of God’ (Luke 3:38). The point is that the genealogies are not matters of fact, but of meaning: they are there to show why Jesus fulfils a destiny, not to authenticate his birth certificate.
What of Bethlehem? Both Matthew and Luke have birth narratives, and both place the birth in Bethlehem: Matthew says that Mary and Joseph lived there, Luke says that they went there from Nazareth because of a Roman census that required everyone to go back to his town of origin. Both stories can’t be true, and in fact neither is. Luke’s references to Caesar Augustus and Quirinius, though plausible, are in fact historically wrong;15 moreover no Roman census required anything like this, as it would have paralysed the economy of any country where it was applied.
Matthew uses different devices to connect Jesus to the great traditions of the Hebrew Bible. He makes Herod kill the firstborn of Bethlehem, and sends the holy family to Egypt to escape death. (It is curious that in the long catalogue of cruelties associated with Herod there is no other mention of this incident.) The associations of miraculous birth, killing of the firstborn, and escape into and out of Egypt, elegantly link Jesus with Moses, who – like Jesus – brought his people out of captivity in … Egypt. The symbolism is magnificent: but the idea that a poor peasant family could make the long journey to and from Egypt, and then relocate to a wholly different part of Palestine, does not stand up to scrutiny.
There are three further points that emphasise the mythical, rather than historical, point of the virgin birth. The first is that only Matthew and Luke refer to it. No other New Testament writer does so – and that includes the Epistle of James, who as Jesus’ brother might be expected to speak with some authority on the subject. The second is that it is not integrated into the narrative of Matthew and Luke after those opening chapters: for example, despite the fact that Mary, mother of Jesus, is described as the cousin of John’s mother Elizabeth (Luke 1:36), when the two men meet as adults there is no indication in any of the Gospels that either knows the other. (The symbolic importance of the pre-birth meeting in Luke is to assert the superiority of Jesus over John – a much contested point at the time the Gospels were written.) In accounts dedicated to proving against all the counter-evidence that the crucified Jesus is the messiah promised by God, it seems rather odd that the most powerful, and indeed the unique card – his miraculous birth – is never subsequently played.
The third point is quite a shocking one. It hangs on two Hebrew words – ‘aalmah’ meaning ‘young woman’, and ‘betulah’ meaning ‘virgin’. The virgin birth described in the New Testament, result of a conception without sexual activity, takes its inspiration from the famous lines in Isaiah 7:14, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’. As it happens this is not a messianic prophecy but a political one: the prophet, writing in the 7th century BC, is assuring King Ahaz that his enemies will soon be cast down (‘the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings’, Isaiah 7:16). But the accounts in Matthew and Luke take it to be messianic and treat the birth as a fulfilment of that prophecy, and a virgin birth has entered the dogma of virtually all Christian churches (with the honourable exception of the Unitarians).
Bible scholars have known for well over a century that the word ‘virgin’ is a mis-translation. The version of the Bible that the Greek-speaking Matthew and Luke referred to was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible carried out around 180–150 BC. In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word is translated as ‘parthenos’, or virgin. But that translation is mistaken. The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 is ‘aalmah’ (young woman), not ‘betulah’ (virgin). Isaiah makes no mention of a virgin, or of a miraculous birth: he simply says that a young woman will have a baby. The Septuagint is in error. This is perhaps surprising, rather than shocking. What is shocking is that after a brief flurry of ‘young women’, a number of American Bible editions – for example the 2001 ‘English Standard Version’, reprinted in England in 2002 – have deliberately reverted to using the word ‘virgin’.16
We should note at this point that what I have written here, though uncomfortable for those who take a literal view of Bible truth,b would not be taken as a criticism by Matthew and Luke. They would have been perfectly well aware that the plausible narratives that they had put together were not ‘historical’ in the modern sense. They would not have thought of this as ‘real’ history, as correspondence to fact. For them it was correspondence to truth – a story that revealed the reality behind the facts, the meaning behind the façade. As Paul Beeching puts it, ‘Contrary to the impression many preachers leave with their hearers, [the] New Testament was a product of the church, rather than the reverse’.17
Does the Old Testament predict a crucified messiah?
It is a principle of the New Testament that it seeks to build on the Old and to represent the Old Testament as predicting, or ‘prefiguring’, events in the New. The primary way in which it does this is through the device of ‘fulfilment’: we constantly encounter formulae such as, ‘That it might be accomplished as it was foretold in the Scriptures … As it is written in the prophet Isaiah … All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet … The Son of Man goeth as it is written of him’. This use of ‘prooftexts’ (Old Testament verses or stories that are used as prophecies or ‘proof’ of events in the New) runs through the Gospels; the virgin birth (as we have seen), the miracles, the rising again on the third day, and overwhelmingly the idea of a messiah – all these are constantly explained as fulfilments of something predicted by the Old Testament prophets. And they are equally important in Acts and the Epistles; lengthy discourses (for example, Acts 2:25–36, 7:51–53, 8:32–35) are devoted to showing how the Hebrew Bible foretells the events of Jesus’ life, and in particular the idea of a suffering, crucified, and resurrected messiah.
There are many kinds of messiah in the Hebrew Bible, but unfortunately the crucified and resurrected messiah is not one of them. The scholarship of the evangelists was very incomplete, and their knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, though passionate, very faulty: Reza Aslan refers to Simon Peter (and subsequently Stephen) ‘displaying the reckless confidence of one unschooled and uninitiated in the scriptures’ when they speak of the way Jesus fulfils Old Testament predictions.18 Paul Beeching rather delightfully goes even further: ‘Along with the Jewish teachers of their day, the evangelists feel free to wrench any passage they wish from the Hebrew or the Septuagint Greek scripture and to use it as a prophecy fulfilled in their narrative. In fact they will go further and misquote scripture or distort it to make their point. If college students were to do what the evangelists do, we would fail them.’19 Beeching’s point is particularly evident when it comes to the status of Jesus as messiah. This is broadcast all over the New Testament, and supported by claims that the suffering and risen messiah is foretold in the Scriptures. But he isn’t. As Aslan points out: 20 ‘In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints at his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.’c
What is particularly important is not what we think in the 20th century, but what the contemporaries of Paul (and Jesus) would have thought. And we can be very confident, despite the best efforts of the evangelists and the writers of the Epistles, that their contemporaries did not expect either a crucified, or a reborn, messiah. The only thing that might have impressed their Jewish audience was the miraculous birth – and that is the one thing that Peter, Stephen, Paul, and all the preachers in the first generation after Jesus (that is, before the Gospels were written) never mention.
Jewish opposition to Jesus?
A dominant theme in all four evangelists, and in the Acts of the Apostles, is the assertion that certain elements of Jewish society and politics resisted, undermined, and in the end actually killed Jesus.
The treatment of the Jews in the New Testament is unremittingly hostile. The evangelists constantly complain that the Jewish establishment gangs up on Jesus both in Galilee and in the Temple in Jerusalem, where there are a number of attempts to challenge and humiliate Jesus and even to betray him to the Romans (see for example the famous question about Caesar’s image on the coin). Luke (20:20) speaks of ‘spies’ sent by teachers of the Law and the chief priests; the accounts in Matthew 22:15–22 and Mark 12:13–17 describe the questioners as ‘Pharisees and Herodians’. And John goes even further, writing on occasion as if the Jews were an alien community: at one point (John 6:4) he explains that the Passover is ‘a feast of the Jews’! As we shall see, this hostility reaches a point where ‘the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft, and put him to death’ (Mark 14:1).
This hostility is rather peculiar for a variety of reasons. First, Jesus and all the apostles are themselves Jews. Second, Jesus unhesitatingly quotes and approves the Hebrew Bible – ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled’ (Matthew 5:17–18). (Calling this address ‘the Sermon on the Mount’ connects it with the Old Testament account of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.) Third, the evangelists lump together supposed enemies of Jesus – for example, scribes and Pharisees – who would be very unlikely to get on or have a common cause (see above). Indeed, as E.P. Sanders puts it, ‘Pharisees did not organise themselves into groups to spend their Sabbaths in Galilean cornfields in the hope of catching someone transgressing (Mark 2:23ff), nor is it credible that scribes and Pharisees made a special trip to Galilee from Jerusalem to inspect the hands of Jesus’ disciples (Mark 7:2)’.21 Fourth, the Pharisees in Luke’s Gospel actually help Jesus by trying to persuade him to escape when threatened (Luke 13:31). And finally, the post-Jesus Church continued to use Jerusalem as its headquarters, and the Temple as its place of worship, throughout the period from Jesus’ death in the early 30s right through to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
Accounts of Jewish opposition to Jesus come to a frightening climax in the events leading up to and including the trial, and it is to this that we now turn.
What do we know about the trial of Jesus?
All four Gospel narratives have a broad framework in common. The main events, spread over a packed 24 hours, are:
Christian religions see this as a coherent story that could plausibly report real events. But closer analysis casts much of this into question. Four writers – Geza Vermes, Robin Lane Fox, E.J. Bickerman, and Paula Fredriksen – have given this particular attention.
Geza Vermes (author of the seminal Jesus the Jew, 1973) draws attention to the difference between the timing given by the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), and that reported by John. The Synoptics place the Last Supper on the Friday night preceding the Passover, which gives it a powerful and beautiful symbolic force. On that Passover evening Jews slaughter a lamb in memory of the slaughter of Pharaoh’s firstborn (Exodus 12:1–14) and God’s rescue of his people from Egypt, making Jesus a symbolic lamb, slain to purchase the rescue of his people from a symbolic Egypt of sin and exile from God.
The first difficulty is with the Last Supper itself. The phrases, ‘Take, eat, this is my body … This is my blood … Drink ye all of it’ (Matthew 26:26 and 27) would be unexpected – not to say rather queasy – for a Jewish audience. The idea of the ritual slaughtering and eating of the god is very familiar in the pagan world, notably in Mithraism, but completely unknown in the Hebrew world of the time, and indeed very antithetical to everything the Bible commands: the whole process of kosher killing that controls Jewish dietary laws to this day (Leviticus 17:10–16) is designed to ensure that Jews never have to consume blood.d
The second difficulty is with the timing, and with what follows on from that timing. The three Synoptics – placing the Last Supper on the eve of Passover – then have Jesus arrested in the garden of Gethsemane and brought in front of the Sanhedrin, the court of 71 Jewish elders, in the small hours of the following morning, the early hours of Passover itself. The Sanhedrin question Jesus thoroughly and sentence him to death, but as the Romans did not allow the Jewish authorities to carry out the death penalty, these authorities send Jesus on to Herod with a request that he will question him, find him guilty, and execute him.
There are three problems about this. One is that the Jewish court procedure recorded by the Synoptics was nothing like the standard procedure laid down for such trials in Jewish documents of the time, which involved a thorough process of checking witness statements and verifying accusations, and which mandated a 24-hour ‘cooling-off period’ between judgement and execution.
The second is that it would have been completely impossible for the Sanhedrin to meet on that Passover eve and morning. It was utterly forbidden for such a court to meet on any Sabbath, but least of all on the Passover Sabbath.22 And even if an exception had been made, it would have been impossible to get the elders together in one place because of their heavy commitments to their Passover duties in the Temple – duties that had exercised them for a number of days beforehand and would continue to occupy them throughout that day. (Imagine assembling the full Council of Cardinals, or the entire Synod of Bishops, on Easter morning and without any prior notice.) As Vermes judiciously puts it, ‘the timing of the events in the Synoptic Gospels is quasi impossible’.23
And the third problem is simply this: the offence that Jesus was accused of, and that seemingly caused the high priest to rend his clothes and cry blasphemy, was not an offence, and not a blasphemy. As Paula Fredriksen remarks: ‘We have ample record in Josephus of other self-proclaimed messianic figures in the period leading up to and including the revolt; later, we have the example of Bar Kokhba … nowhere are the claims seen as blasphemous’.24 Moreover, if it had been blasphemous, there was a recognised punishment for that particular crime, namely stoning – which, as we see from Acts 7:57–60, the Jewish authorities had permission to carry out and did indeed exercise. There would be no reason to hand over the culprit to another authority.
Does John’s Gospel help us here? Oddly enough (given that much of John is clearly much more removed from gritty reality than the Synoptics), John’s account of the events leading up to the trial is much more plausible, and has led many commentators to believe that the author was indeed ‘[the disciple] whom Jesus loved’ (John 13:23). John puts the Last Supper and the crucifixion a day earlier, so that the meal and the arrest are not in the holy time of Passover. His ‘trial’ narrative is also very different: no meeting of the 71 members of the Sanhedrin, but instead two encounters with the key individuals who bridged between Jews and Romans – Annas, former high priest, and Caiaphas, current high priest and son-in-law of Annas – and whose role required them to keep the peace (John 18:13, 24). At these encounters there is no mention of blasphemy: Jesus is simply passed like a parcel from Annas, who binds him, to Caiaphas, and on to Pilate. Pilate comes out and asks the Jews (who to avoid impurity on the eve of the Passover may not enter the Praetorium) what is the charge, and again they make no mention of blasphemy, but instead accuse Jesus of being ‘a criminal’.25
The account in John gets us off a number of hooks. However, John follows the Synoptics in depicting Pilate as a benevolent man forced by the Jews to have Jesus crucified; and he, like them, reports the story of the mob choosing Barabbas over Jesus. The option to make a choice is not reported elsewhere, but we could allow it as a one-off. A more serious problem is the way Pilate is described. Vermes in particular questions the picture painted by the Synoptics and by John of Pontius Pilate as a thoughtful, inquiring judge whose reluctance to convict Jesus is such a feature of the narrative. Vermes points out that this is certainly not the Pilate of history, a governor renowned – even by Roman standards – for his high-handed and insensitive treatment of the Jews and for his random brutality. Both Josephus and Tacitus single out Pilate as deliberately provocative to the Jews, and Philo writing around 41 AD speaks of Pilate’s ‘vindictiveness and furious temper’ and describes him as ‘naturally inflexible, a blend of self-will and relentlessness’, a man whose conduct as governor was characterised by ‘briberies, insults, robberies, outrages and wanton injuries, executions without trial constantly repeated, ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty’. Indeed Josephus records that Pilate handed out so many beatings and crucifixions that in 37 AD he was recalled to Rome, forced to account for his behaviour, and moved to another post.
Behind all these doubts about Pilate is a yet more serious challenge: would Jesus, seen by the Romans as a minor figure in a long line of Jewish fanatics, have come before Pilate at all? Crucifixion was a commonplace punishment for any kind of political offence; Jesus had been arrested by a small group of soldiers or temple guards and was not a mighty warlord or a serious military challenge; there would have been many hapless men awaiting execution on that morning, and no reason why Jesus should have been singled out even to see Pilate, let alone for the most important man in Jerusalem (and one known as a violent bully) to spend a substantial part of his busy morning trying to reverse the sentence of a minor political prisoner. If John’s account is right, unofficial condemnation by Annas and Caiaphas would have been perfectly adequate for Pilate: he knew that they were ready to work closely and pragmatically with the Roman authorities and were as keen as he was to avoid trouble at Passover (‘Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people’, John 18:14). As Reza Aslan brutally but honestly puts it, ‘Jesus was executed by the Roman state for the crime of sedition … one can dismiss the theatrical trial before Pilate as pure fantasy’.26
So where does this leave us? We can finish with five conclusions.
The trial of Jesus, as presented by all four evangelists, is one of the most extraordinary, dramatic, and moving stories ever written. But that does not make it true.
How long did the Gospel writers expect that the world would last?
Bible critics trying to sift the original wheat from the subsequent chaff have come up with a wonderful phrase: the criterion of embarrassment. This refers to parts of the Gospel that Christians wish weren’t there – items that are simply embarrassing. The early Church would have loved to airbrush out of history the fact that John the Baptist baptised Jesus, suggesting that Jesus required the blessing of John and not the other way round; that Jesus came from Galilee; that he kept very disreputable company in the shape of publicans, sinners, and fallen women (‘publicans’ were Jews who collected tax on behalf of the Roman government, thus collaborating with the enemy to oppress their own people); that he repeatedly affirmed that his message was to Jews and not to Gentiles; that the future apostle Paul was part of the mob that killed Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Worse still, the Church had to cope with Jesus being conceived out of wedlock, and killed on a cross. How do we know that these are ‘facts’? Well, they are certainly embarrassing, which suggests that if the Church did include them, it is probably because it had to – because they were too widely known to be glossed over – rather than because it wanted to. Their very inconsistency with other elements of the Bible makes them more, rather than less credible.
All three Synoptics, and many of the writers of the Epistles, stated that the world would end, and Jesus come again, within their own lifetime. All the evidence is that Jesus believed this too. This is also somewhat embarrassing!
The belief in an approaching end is made clear by Jesus himself in the Gospels. From his opening proclamation at the very start of his preaching (‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’, Mark 1:15), right through to his final preaching in Jerusalem, he is consistent that the last days are at hand.e This is particularly pointed in the Last Supper: ‘But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom’ (Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:18). If we are to take the Gospel in any way as a historical record, we cannot get away from the fact that Jesus believed in the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God on earth.
This belief gives to the Gospels (particularly to Mark) and to the Epistles (particularly those written by Paul) their characteristic urgency and pace. The writers are men in a hurry, as shown by their simple and unadorned style, without time for fancy phrasing and fine words. Disciples should avoid all earthly commitments because the world will not last long enough to fulfil them. There is no time to lose! Don’t get distracted! Don’t waste time getting married or burying the dead! Don’t mess around making money! Live righteously! Watch and wake! Like Boy Scouts, it was the duty of Christians to be prepared, for the end could come at any time.
The same faith in the imminent and triumphant return of Jesus is also confidently stated by Paul in his Letters, written from the 40s AD onwards: ‘The time is short … the fashion [form] of this world passeth away … The night is far spent, the day is at hand’ (1 Corinthians 7:29 and 31, Romans 13:12. See also Romans 16:20 and Philippians 4:5). So keen is the anticipation that Paul in his very first letter finds himself in difficulty trying to explain why some of the faithful had been allowed to die before the return of Jesus (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18).
Even the Epistle of James, probably written down by a follower in the 80s from sermons delivered before James was martyred in 62 AD, shows the same faith and the same urgency: ‘Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts; for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door’ (James 5:8–9).
Not to put too fine a point on it, the writers of the Synoptic Gospels were wrong. And if they were wrong – so was Jesus.
Did St Paul invent Christianity?
St Paul played such an important role in the spread of the early Church that we can pretty safely say that Christianity would not exist without him. But did he follow Christ’s teaching – or invent it?
The story of Paul’s life is extensively recounted in Acts, where we are told that he was born as Saul in Tarsus, now part of Turkey. According to Acts, he became a Pharisee, a group of intense, thoughtful readers and practitioners of the Torah. At some point he moved to Jerusalem to study under the Jewish teacher Gamaliel and we first hear of him only months after the death of Jesus, at the stoning of the first Christian martyr Stephen: ‘and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul’ (Acts 7:58). Saul then starts to persecute the members of the early Church (8:3) and asks permission to take the fight to Damascus (9:1–2). On the way, Acts recounts how Saul undergoes the famous ‘road to Damascus’ experience: ‘And suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”’ (9:3–4). Saul arises blind. Led into Damascus, he is healed by the disciple Ananias and – now renamed (Acts 13:9) with the Greek name of Paul, or ‘the little one’ – starts an equally energetic programme of promoting and spreading the Christian faith he had formerly so opposed.
This would be remarkable in itself, but Paul’s contribution to Christianity is only just starting. His letters (it is thought that at least seven of the 21 are wholly or partly by him)f are the earliest statement of the beliefs and practices that guided the early Church, written at a time when there was no such thing as ‘orthodoxy’ and when it was becoming essential to set out a core set of values both to standardise the different centres of the new faith, and to set it off from paganism on the one hand, and the faith of the Jews on the other. Paul died in Rome at some point in the mid-60s AD: at the time of his death not a single one of the Gospels we have now had been written.
And there is something much more important than that. As we shall see, it seems likely that Jesus saw his mission as uniquely to Jews. Paul, after much reflection and some intellectual gymnastics, felt that the approaching end of the world required a mission to the Gentiles also – and he saw himself as the man to conduct that mission. There were Jewish communities, one being in Paul’s birthplace Tarsus, right around the Mediterranean, and many Gentiles attended the weekly services in the synagogue. According to Acts, Paul set out to convert the Jews of the Diaspora, but did not turn away Gentiles, and Acts records time and again that the Gentiles of these cities were more responsive to his message than the Jews. Paul developed a complex theology of his own to justify this, which we need not concern ourselves with now. What is crucial is that by 60 AD, there were more Christians outside Palestine than in Palestine – and even more strikingly, more Gentile Christians than Jewish Christians. Why does this matter? Well, when the Romans responded to the Jewish bid for independence by flattening the Temple and the city of Jerusalem in 70 AD, they effectively wiped out the community of Jewish Christians centred on the Temple. Only the converts outside Palestine – overwhelmingly Gentile – were left.
So it is not far-fetched to call Paul the founder of Christianity: founder of much of its faith (notably the doctrine of the atonement), and founder of the early churches – in Syria, in Turkey, in Greece, and above all in Rome – that took on the faith in Jesus as Christ, anointed Saviour, and preserved it for future generations. If Paul had not firmly installed the religion of Christ in the world outside Palestine, there would not be a Christian Church in the world today.
Few would challenge that judgement, or deny Paul the respect that he deserves. He was an extraordinary man, very persuasive, highly original, and completely fearless. But like many remarkable men, he was not troubled by self-doubt. Before we accept uncritically everything he said, we should look closely at the evidence in the New Testament.
The first thing to say is that most people learn about Paul from Acts, written by the author of Luke. Unfortunately, as Paula Fredriksen puts it, ‘what little biographical information Paul does give us seems to fatally compromise, if not contradict, what we have from Luke’.27 Acts recounts that Paul studied in Jerusalem, actively persecuted the early followers of Christ in that city, and went straight back there to preach the Gospel after his conversion on the Damascus road. It further adds that he took the Gospel to the Gentiles only after his attempts to bring it to the Diaspora Jews had been rejected. Paul, on the other hand, says nothing of studying in Jerusalem, never mentions leading ‘persecutions’ there, and claims that after his conversion, rather than returning to Jerusalem, he moved to Arabia and then to Damascus – indeed, that three years after his conversion he was still ‘unknown by face’ to the churches of Judea (Galatians 1:13–24). Moreover he claims that he set out from the start to take the word to the Gentiles.
A notable example of the mismatch with Acts is the fact that in all his writings, Paul never once mentions the famous ‘road to Damascus’ conversion that is such a major and well known feature of Luke’s account!
The most likely explanation for this is also the simplest, namely that Luke, the author of Acts, writing 30 years or more after Paul’s death and 40 or 50 years after Paul wrote his letters, did not know of the existence of those letters, and had only idealised stories and hazy recollections to go on. At the time Luke wrote Acts (90–100 AD), each of Paul’s letters rested with its destination church: only later were they shared and collated. Just as Luke in his Gospel created a beautiful fiction to explain and contextualise the birth of Jesus, so Luke created in Acts a beautiful fiction to dramatise the thrilling exploits of Paul, the hero who took the faith of Jesus to the Gentiles and began the process of bringing Christianity to the Roman Empire.
So let us assume that Acts is in this respect at least a work of the imagination, and take our information directly from Paul himself as recorded in his Letters. My point here is not to enter a theological debate, but to point out how very personal Paul’s beliefs are – to the extent that they cannot in any way be derived from the Gospel accounts of what Jesus said and did. Very briefly, Paul believed that Jesus existed before the creation of the world (Philippians 2:6ff, 1 Corinthians 2:7 and 8:9, Galatians 4:4, Romans 8:3), that he came down from heaven to save the world, that his death on the cross redeemed us all (Jew and Gentile alike) from our sins, that when he returned – and Paul expected that to happen within his lifetime – we would all be resurrected with new and glorious bodies (1 Corinthians 15:51–52), and that there would be a final and stupendous battle, led by Jesus, against the massed forces of evil, in which good would triumph and usher in the reign of God.
If these seem familiar ideas, it is because they are just that; they have formed the backbone of Christianity since it was codified in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. Paul constantly asserts (for example Romans 1:2) that they were foretold in the Scriptures as well as communicated to him by Jesus. But as we have seen, there is nothing in the Old Testament, and very little in the New, to give any basis for these splendid inventions. Did Paul then make them up himself? We have to say that on the evidence we have, he did indeed, and quite unashamedly, carve out his own faith in glorious isolation. That isolation was not a necessity: had he gone to Jerusalem he could have consulted, not only the disciples of Jesus, but even the members of Jesus’ family – members who were the core of the Jerusalem church. James, the brother of Jesus, was the head of the Jerusalem church and almost certainly the author of the Epistle that bears his name. But Paul had no interest in this group. By his own account, he did not get in touch with them till three years after his conversion; he set off on his preaching tour without ‘doing his time’ in Palestine; he never anchors his theology by any references to those who knew Jesus.
And why should he? He refers to himself (Galatians 1:1, 1 Corinthians 9:1) as ‘an apostle’ (that is, as one who is the equal of the Twelve), and as one who ‘neither received [the gospel] of man … but by the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 1: 11–12). Even more, he was set apart by God before he was born, and God revealed his son directly to him, meaning that it was not necessary for him to ‘confer with flesh and blood’ (Galatians 1: 15–16). In 2 Corinthians 11:5 and 22–23, Paul says that he is actually a better apostle than any of the others; as Reza Aslan puts it, ‘Paul does not consider himself the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the first apostle’.28
So Paul is free to create his own theology. What of the competition? He is not impressed. He is surprisingly and consistently rude about Peter, that ‘rock’ on which Jesus was supposedly to build his church, referring to him as ‘to be blamed’ and as a dissembler (Galatians 2:11 and 13). It is clear that Paul returned to Jerusalem around 50 AD to explain his teaching to the Jerusalem community. Luke gives a bland and harmonious account of this visit (Acts 15); by contrast, Paul’s account at the start of Galatians refers to ‘false brethren unawares [secretly] brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty’, assures his readers that he did not give in to them, ‘no, not for an hour’, and describes James and Peter as supposed leaders who in fact ‘added nothing to me’ (Galatians 2: 5–6). It is noteworthy that almost immediately after this meeting, the Jerusalem community started sending its own missionaries to the congregations that Paul had converted in order to correct Paul’s erroneous teachings; Paul’s subsequent writings are full of attempts to defend himself, his status, and his teachings against these ‘false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ’ whom he compares to Satan (2 Corinthians 11:13–15).
In the end Paul received a summons from Jerusalem about 57 AD that he could not refuse, and as recounted in Acts 21, he was forced by the real apostles to show his Jewish orthodoxy by submitting to a rite of purification in the Temple. In the early 60s Paul made his way to Rome to preach his message in the heart of the empire, but even Luke has to admit that he was not well received by the Jewish community there (Acts 28:25–28). This was probably because Peter was already there and had warned them off Paul. Tellingly, Paul’s letters make no mention of these humiliations!
What does all this tell us about the man who in effect founded the faith that is now called Christianity?
First, we know, from their behaviour over the 30 years after Jesus’ death, that the original apostles believed their mission was to Jews rather than to Gentiles. Paul’s Gentile mission was very much his own invention – as shown by the discomfort and opposition it aroused in those who were related to, or had known, Jesus.
Second, it shows the bitterness between Peter and Paul – supposedly twin pillars of the early Church.
Third, we find once again that it is impossible to accept New Testament writings as authoritative: Acts and the Letters of Paul contradict each other both in faith and in fact.
And fourth, we see that the theology that underpins all subsequent Christianity is primarily the creation of a man who had never known Jesus; who kept himself separate from those who had, and took pains not to enquire about their views; and who felt himself a better minister of Christ (2 Corinthians 11:5 and 23) than the twelve apostles that Jesus himself had chosen.
Footnotes
a. This is a common form of miraculous birth in the Bible: Abraham’s son Isaac, and the early hero Samuel, are born in similar circumstances.
b. Including Pope Benedict: see Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, 2012, pp. 51–7, and my review on amazon.co.uk.
c. Christians make much of a number of Old Testament texts – particularly the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah 53 – which likewise date from the 6th or 7th century BC and supposedly predict a gentle and suffering messiah. However, Isaiah 53:7 (‘he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth’) has also been held to represent Moses, Israel, the process of exile, the prophet Jeremiah, King Josiah, and King Jehoiachin. If the passage can bear such a broad interpretation it is hardly likely to have the narrow focus and predictive detail needed to make it prefigure the events of Jesus’ life. It would certainly not have been seen in this way by a 1st-century Jewish readership.
d. This lies behind the refusal of contemporary Jehovah’s Witnesses to accept blood transfusions, as they take it that both the Old and the New Testament forbid the ingestion of blood in any form.
e. ‘For the elect’s sake, whom he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days’ (Mark 13:20); ‘Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things [that is, the last days of the world] be done’ (Mark 13:30; see also Matthew 24:34, and Luke 21:32); ‘Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom’ (Matthew 16:28, Mark 9:1, Luke 9:27).
f. 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, 2 Corinthians, and Romans, probably in that order. Many scholars think that Colossians and 2 Thessalonians are also by him.