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According to a recent poll, a substantial majority of Americans who believe in the Christian God,
conservatives included do not believe in the resurrection of the body. They obviously have not read
Corinthians 15 lately. Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you
say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has
not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your
faith has been in vain. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If
Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. If for this life only,
we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
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Welcome my friends, pagans, and Presbyterians alike to this special edition of entitled
opinions, special in several respects. NEPA is away today, so we are going to be with you for the
next two hours until Stanford Baseball takes over the broadcast at 4.45 this afternoon,
preempting the usual time slot for entitled opinions. I have Thomas Shee and with me in the
studio this Easter Tuesday. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies here at Stanford.
Those of you who tuned in at the time know that Tom and I had a fascinating discussion about
the historical Jesus on this show about eight weeks ago. I promised a second installment with him,
indeed, many of you clamored for a second installment with him, so here we are ready to go
at it for an extended session in two parts. During the first hour we're going to talk about the
resurrection, in the second hour we're going to open things up and offer some entitled opinions about
the fate of Christianity in our times. But before we begin our conversation let me say that I've
never understood why Paul declares that the resurrection of Jesus necessarily entails a resurrection
for us all. He goes even further than that, if there is no resurrection of the dead,
then Christ has not been raised. If you believe in one, he must perform, believe in the other.
The resurrection of the body is the great and some would say insane promise of Christianity.
It's a profoundly human promise at that. Happiness outside of the body is very difficult for
human beings to imagine and impossible to desire. Even the beatified souls in Dante's paradise
anticipate with surplus of joy the resurrection of their flesh at the end of time. Their bliss is
incomplete until they recover in time what time has robbed them of. That is, their personal identities
which were bound up with their flesh. Here's how Dante in Patadizo 14 describes the disembodied
saints' desires for their bodies. One and the other choir of saints seemed to me so quick and keen to
say amen that they showed clearly how they longed for their dead bodies. Not only for themselves,
perhaps, but for their mothers, their fathers, and for the others dear to them before they became
eternal flames. Without our bodies, we can't recognize our loved ones in their individuality.
In that respect, all of us on earth, insofar as we are in our bodies, are more blessed than the saints
in Dante's heaven. Tomaso, welcome to the program.
Robir, Robir is good to be here. Thanks. Well, a few minutes late, but we're on track.
So for those listeners out there who didn't hear our first show or who may have forgotten the
substance of it, I would like to invite them to go to the web page of entitled opinions where
all our past shows are archived and listen to it, either directly on their computers or by
downloading the show onto a CD or else under their iPods from the iTunes music store where entitled
opinions can be downloaded for free. Tom, I can't summarize everything we talked about some weeks
ago, but basically we concentrated on the life of Jesus, what he preached, how he lived,
what claims he made about himself, and most importantly, what claims he did not make about himself.
As far as we can tell through the methods of historical and textual analysis that are available
to modern scholarship, it turns out that in all probability, Jesus did not see himself as the divine
son of God, that his message was not self-referential, that while he seemed to be influenced by the
apocalyptic preaching of someone like John the Baptist who believed in an imminent in-break of
the kingdom of God into history from outside of history, Jesus himself preached a somewhat different
message, namely, the kingdom of God had already arrived that it was slowly growing in people and in
groups provided those people radically changed their lives. You talk briefly at the end of the
last show, after how after Jesus died various stories and theories about who he really was began to
spread among his followers, such that by the time the first Christian scriptures were composed,
a few decades after his death, the very personhood of Jesus had undergone an expansive
transformation in the minds of his followers. In these decades, Jesus had become Christ.
In your view, this transformation, if I understand you correctly, created a fundamental disconnect
which exists to this day between traditional Christian faith and what we know about the historical
Jesus or the man you call "Jeshua." If you agree with this recap, Tom, is it fair to say that
for you, the very crux of the process that transformed Jesus into Christ is the story of his resurrection?
No, I don't agree. First of all, because there is no story of his resurrection at all.
Nothing like that appears in New Testament and in fact the word "resurrection" or any Greek
equivalent doesn't appear in the New Testament. So we have to define some terms here, I think.
What did you mean by "resurrection"? Whatever Paul was referring to when you use that word in the
English translation that I was quoting from. Yes, you were quoting actually a translation from the
Latin when you use the word "resurrection." The word doesn't exist in the Greek and I think that's
an important point. I'm not playing games here. I think that most of the discussion of the Easter event
is based on category mistakes. People trying to prove the unprovable because it's not the point,
or what we sometimes call "ignorazzio-elenchi," just not getting the point and proving something
else very different. So before we even engage in a discussion of what Easter is about, we'll have to
kind of clarify some of the things that it's not about. You mentioned or alluded to the
discussions today about what would Jesus do? What did Jesus say? We know more about what Jesus
didn't do and didn't say, although in the popular imagination, people think that he didn't
said all sorts of things. For example, people think that Yeshua, that was his Aramaic name,
came back to life on Easter Sunday morning and the New Testament affirms that he did not come back
to life. He did not exit his tomb and none of the so-called events post-mortem events of Easter and
following as recorded in the Gospels ever took place as they're recorded. That is to say the angels
talking to women in the tomb. Jesus appearing to the women first of all and then later on to
the other disciples. Jesus finally ascending into heaven 40 days after his resurrection. No,
none of those things ever took place because the Gospel is not recounting historical events when he
gives those narratives at the end of the four Gospels. Well, this is why we're having the second
installment of our show, Tom. I think I mentioned in the opening remarks that it took a long time,
I don't know exactly how long for this historical individual name Jesus to assume all the
trappings of divinity that the church associates him with. So I think that the stories and the Gospels,
whether they're true or not, do place a very heavy emphasis burden on the Easter story about what
happened on that Sunday morning. So I don't know how you want to proceed if you want to talk about what
we know did not happen before we get into how it was later reinterpreted. You know, I'm going to leave
that to you. Okay, I would like to say first all that even though I've said things that may be shocking to
certain traditional imaginations about Easter, I do speak as a believing and practicing Roman
Catholic Christian, but I've also dedicated a good part of my life to what we might call the science
of religion to understanding what actually happened in history and how the communities of Christians
have interpreted Yeshua over the years. So you can be both a believer and a scientist that is to
say someone who believes in Easter, but not in the fanciful constructions of Easter that appear
here and there. Secondly, the Gospels would be exactly the wrong place to begin because as you know,
they are later arriving documents in the first century CE and we have earlier documents and
traditions long before those and yet in the popular imagination, people think that the Gospels are
historical accounts that were sort of printed up soon after the events and are accurate descriptions
of the events. Okay, are you having a couple of your headphones? Are you hearing a little bit of
echo? A little bit of echo. I can't do anything about that somehow. Not a problem. This is what
happens sometimes in studio A when we're not a problem. I want to say that most of the culture wars that go on
about, let us say, resurrection within Christianity are really creepiness. Actually, you know,
the analogy of the word "cretan" is "claitian." It refers to people who are uneducated Christians in the
actually in the valleys of Switzerland. It's a Swiss French word, so it doesn't refer to
"cretan" from the island of Crete, but "claitianna who have not been properly informed about their faith."
And a lot of the culture wars about resurrection, let's say, within the Christian fold between
fundamentalists and others, are based on very bad readings by Christians themselves of their own
doctrines. And gullible scientists and men and women of reason take those gullible readings
literally. And unfortunately, it's easy to dismiss the straw man of these Christian literalisms.
That's the debate that goes on between fundamentalists and informed Christians right now throughout
the Christian fold. Well, these are issues that we can discuss in the second hour, Tom. I said
we're going to open it up in the second hour. If you don't mind, why don't we look to what
are we know to be the earliest Christian scriptures of the New Testament? Well, okay, I would propose
that we try to test cases, first of all, that would be, I think, more concrete ways. Let me pose
two questions to you. If ascension is part of the Easter event, all those miraculous events
allegedly that took place between Easter Sunday morning and 40 days after. Let's first talk about
how Jesus ascended into heaven. Extraordinary thing is that such a dramatic event is that is
recorded in only one gospel, the gospel of Luke. It doesn't appear in Matthew or Mark or John.
I don't know if there are on vacation that day or they just didn't get the email, but to have missed
the ascension is to have missed something important. You don't think that would be important.
Well, I think you were talking about the resurrected body of Jesus. Where did it go, Rob?
I quoted from St. Paul who did it's about the resurrection as something that he was firmly
existentially committed to as a belief. What I'd like to know is where it came from, what put this
Paul's mind, can we reconstruct the events as empirically as we can from the moment of the death of
Jesus to how these interpretations of his personhood started to evolve?
Reconstruct the events. There were no events after he died. The last event in Yeshua's life is his
death and the next historical event. Tell the story of the way you want to tell it so that we can
that's what I was doing. It started. If ascension took place 40 days after Jesus's death or did it?
According to Luke's gospel, it took place on Easter Sunday itself. It's an Easter event
and it involved his body, but Luke seems to not care one way or the other whether the ascension
took place 40 days later or the day of Yeshua's resurrection. We've got a problem there.
His Luke interested in history. You wanted the historical events or is he interested in theology?
Probably theology, not history. And if Matthew can say that people were resurrected before Jesus was
resurrected, historical events again to the year after, namely on Friday at the moment of his death,
all the Jews who were the Holy Jews of Jerusalem were resurrected before Jesus. What does that
mean? That means that you had a resurrection before Jesus' resurrection. So if Paul is
existentially committed to the resurrection, we've got a number of problems here.
Now what are they? First of all, the word resurrection doesn't appear in the New Testament.
What's the word? The Awakening. So we don't believe in the New Testament.
What do you think is out the difference for us? Well, the resurrection would mean
Mel Gibson's view of coming up off a slab and walking out the door of a tomb. That's the popular
imagination of resurrection. Paul proclaimed something that could not be seen, was not seen,
and could only be believed in. A supernatural ascension of Yeshua from his cross to God's right hand
without any historical events. So what I'm trying to do, and perhaps it makes you or your listeners
uncomfortable, is to radically shut the door on interpretations of historical events and Yeshua's
post-mortem life that led to anything like the notion of coming out of a tomb, a resurrection in your sense.
Well, I don't know what word to use Tom. We agreed before we came on today that we were going to
talk about the resurrection. You didn't tell me you were going to spring the semantic problems on me.
So I'll use any word you want to use as long as you can share with our listeners the specific
expertise that you bring the bear on the topic. Well, the usual reading of the events of Easter are
resurrection appearances and the faith of the disciples. In the popular imagination, Yeshua
gets out of his tomb, eventually appears to his disciples, women first, men later, and then
inspires faith in them that he has somehow triumphed over death. The acronym for that might be
RAF, resurrection first, appearances second, faith third. But it seems to work exactly the opposite way.
And that's why I never said that I would come and talk about resurrection, that it would only
talk about Easter, because resurrection is a falsification of the meaning of Easter.
We have only one account, one personal autobiographical account of an appearance of Yeshua to a believer,
actually doing unbeliever first. And that's Paul's account of his own appearance from the
resurrected, as you would say, Yeshua. That's not found in the Acts of the Apostles. The dramatic
scene at Damascus where he finds himself all over the ground, he's not knocked off a horse's,
you will know. It's got a module invented that. In the three accounts, in the Acts of the Apostles,
Paul, these are stories invented by Luke, but Paul himself gives a first-person account
of what it was to receive a resurrection appearance. That's the first piece of information that we
have of what an appearance is. And it took place, it's written down around 54 CE in the Epistle
to the Galatians chapter 1. And Paul very undermatically simply says, God revealed His Son in me,
and the Greek word is apocolypsis. God performed an interior apocalypse or revelation to Paul.
No drama, no empty tomb, no knocked off the horse, just an insight that Yeshua was constituted as
God's Messiah. If appearance comes first, not resurrection, but appearance comes first. Then we have to
interpret the language of Easter, whether it's going to be resurrection or awakening or anything
else that you want in terms of that appearance. That's why I was insisting on that point.
So no, I don't want to talk about resurrection. I want to talk about what it is to have an Easter
experience and then define some sort of language to express it, of which resurrection is not the first,
not the normative language, not the only language and certainly not the best language.
So how would you like to say something more about Paul and his story of how
Christ appeared to him as one out of time, but how he understood the reawakening. Sure.
And the first of all, what we're doing is keeping the Gospels off the table. We're not discussing
them. They are later writhing, very imaginative, utterly important texts that were written
between 40 and 70 years after the death of Yeshua. So we'll leave those off to the side.
And we're dealing only with texts that were written in the 50s, that is to say some 20 years after
Yeshua had died. Paul could not have understood, could not have had his apocalyptic vision, unless
he were living in an apocalyptic world, an apocalyptic worldview. And he saw in the death of Yeshua
the end of an old age of sin and the beginning of a messianic era that would transform this world
into a new heaven and a new earth as the book of Revelation eventually says.
Without understanding that apocalyptic context, the expectation of a dramatic
in-break from God, which in this case was the reversal of the death of Yeshua into a triumph,
we wouldn't be able to understand what Paul meant when he said the appearance to him was an
upper-collepcee, a revelation from God. So that's the context that we have to first put things into.
I'm trying to locate Paul vis-a-vis the gospels, which we've put off the table. Paul never
tells a story about an empty tomb. Never tells a story about dramatic appearances of Yeshua in the
upper room, but people, especially fundamentals, have chosen to read those back into the days after
Yeshua's death, read them back into the gospels, which of course are later than Paul, and therefore
to give us the, if you will, beautiful narratives of Easter that have nothing to do with historical fact.
Well, so I'll ask you, what do you believe in when you, if you believe in the resurrection?
The question of the relationship between belief and what we know historically is one that I would
prefer to postpone to the second hour if we get there. Sure. Because my understanding is that we
were going to make a concerted effort to try to reconstruct the process by which a historical
individual name Jesus became Christ. And I thought, "Well, we're on the way, Robert, with Paul."
And I would be happy to keep the gospels off the table. "No, no, we'll get to them eventually."
All right. Well, here's, you wrote a book, the first coming, how the kingdom of God
became Christianity that came out in the 80s. And I know that we don't want to talk about the gospels,
but this is not really what you're talking about. You're talking about stories. You're trying to
reconstruct what may have happened around the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shortly following
his death, events for which there are no written records. And let me quote you to our audience
here from the first coming, page 138. In the first decades after Jesus' death, the theory claims,
believers made pilgrimages to Jesus' grave, quote, very early in the morning on the first day of
the week, presumably on what we now call Easter, but perhaps even more frequently. At the tomb,
they would hear a story about women who came there after the crucifixion, found the tomb open and
encountered an apocalyptic messenger who announced that Jesus had been assumed in the God's
eschatological future. The pilgrimage reached his climax when the liturgical storyteller proclaimed,
he has been raised and then pointed to the tomb. He is not here, see the place where they laid him.
The pilgrims trip to the tomb to quote, seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified and quote,
was meant to end with the insight that the journey had in a sense been fruitless.
For why should they seek the living among the dead? This is something that you write where you're
reconstructing what you say that some scholars have speculated that this story was part of a
liturgical celebration that took place annually or perhaps even more frequently around Jesus' tomb.
And that presumably is constructed on solid methodological inquiries about what would have been
the earliest moral sources for the idea that Jesus somehow escaped from the tomb or escaped the
clutches of death. Is it likely that something along these lines were the first sort of
liturgical phenomena which laid a foundation for the stories of Jesus' reawakening that further,
than further embroidered and elaborated? Yes, it is quite possible. It's not my own hypothesis,
but belongs to another scholar whom I cite and footnote there. There were various ways of dealing
with the death of Yeshua and the Jerusalem tradition represented by women finding an empty tomb
is not the Pauline tradition. Paul's probably comes from Syria, maybe Antioch.
It is one local tradition or celebration of the triumph of Yeshua. It's the one that has become
normative in Christianity, but it was not the earliest one. It's not the earliest one in the
scriptures. That's belongs to Paul and belongs to a very different tradition. The Jerusalem
traditions valorized the women, you notice. Paul never mentions women going to an empty tomb. So we
got two different ways and there were no doubt multiple ways that people dealt with the death of
Yeshua. So if we back up for a second into how they read that death historically, again, this is my
hypothesis, but I think it's grounded as best we can grounded in good exegesis by which you mean
biblical scholarship of the New Testament. Probably the first reaction to the death of Yeshua
in April of 30 CE was a sense of tragedy. It was a historical accident. It was not planned. It
just happened this young man, this prophetic voice, is all of a sudden snuffed out by the empire.
Soon, however, religious interpretations were given to it. The tragic accident has been reversed by
God and the stone that the builders rejected has been made the cornerstone. This is perhaps the
earliest interpretation of Yeshua's death. Again, there's no talk about an empty tomb. Presumably,
if God rescued Yeshua from the clutches of death, as you put it, he did that right from the cross
without any need of waiting three days and then taking Yeshua out of the tomb. So from tragedy to
tragic reversal, from tragedy in the third step to a planned tragedy, now you reaching the full
blown apocalyptic interpretation of Yeshua's death that God had intended for someone to die. This
is found in Luke's Gospel. The angel recounts it in the tomb. Intended that someone should die,
so as to end the apocalyptic age of sin, to end the old age of sin and introduce the new
messianic age. And fourthly, the death of Yeshua, unfortunately, was read as a blood
atonement to appease the vengeance of God. Therefore, it's not only planned by God, but also
demanded by God as retribution, if you will, pay back for the sins of humankind.
It's in that second moment, the reversal of the death of Yeshua, that you get the notion of
agaritha, agariceus, not resurrection, but awakening. That was a turn that goes back even to the book of
Daniel 175 BCE. The just people who have fallen asleep, the martyrs, Yeshua is one of those,
will be awakened into a new life. It's not coming back to life. That's the way the Gospels
tend to portray it, corpse walking around Jerusalem. No, it was the entrance into a new life,
and awakening into a new life. A second term that was used for that was exaltation.
And that's the word that appears in Philippians chapter 2, again, a very early Aramaic,
second level interpretation of the death of Yeshua. No empty tomb, no Easter Sunday, but a direct rescue
of Yeshua from the cross. Third way of that it was metaphorically described was anostasis,
making him stand up on his feet. And that way there is yet a third, none of these normative ways
of describing a belief that Christians have, that they were Jewish believers at this time,
had about God's rescuing of Yeshua. No resurrection. Instead, exaltation, awakening, standing back
up on his feet in an eschatological way. And the interesting thing about Easter is how those rich
metaphors get reduced to the trivial banal notion of resurrection of something coming off a slab,
walking out of tomb, and scaring the stalks off the disciples.
Well, where does Paul fit into the sequence? What does Paul mean when he says,
"If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has
not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain."
First question, where does Paul fit in that force folds those four steps of interpreting the death
of Yeshua? He fits in stage three, seeing the death as planned by God from all time as a way of
reversing the old age of sin and introducing the new apocalyptic age of grace. The second
question that you ask about the disbelief and resurrection on the part of the Corinthians, that's
first Corinthians 15, deals with the Christian communities who were seeing people die before Yeshua
returned from heaven as promised. So they were doubting that their own grandmothers might be
part of this salvation. And Paul had to say, "There is a final awakening of us all, including great
grandmother. And if you don't believe in that, then how could you possibly believe that Yeshua was awakened?"
So he's using that despair, if you will, or that doubt about grandma's reawakening as a way of saying,
"If you don't believe that she's going to be part of the Eschaton, then this apocalypse,
then you probably don't believe that Yeshua initiated the apocalypse with his own, with God's
own awakening of him in the year 30 CE." So that's how we get to that second point. Can I ask if it's out of the
the sequence and we don't have to discuss it, but for Paul the reawakening was not just some spiritual
salvation of life after death in soul, the way someone like Plato would have imagined the immortality
of the soul far more radically for Paul it was a reawakening of the body. And he calls it a spiritual
body perhaps rather than an earthly body, but nevertheless he's fair to say that he was committed to
the notion that this reawakening or resurrection as it's commonly translated was something that
was going to involve the body. When we use the word body in as regards Paul in First Corinthians,
we have a problem of two radically different anthropologies coming together in that text. Paul was
using a Hebrew or a Jewish anthropology. We often read back into it a platonic Greek anthropology,
which sees the human being somehow divided between body and soul by body. We mean the meat on
the bones and by soul we mean some sort of immortal intellectual, original principle that animates
that body. Or Plato, the death of the body is the release of the soul to its former life, its future
life of immortality. Paul does not mean that when he says "Soma" in First Corinthians 15.
The Greek word "Soma" is translating the Hebrew notion not of the body, the corpse, the 300 cubic
inches of meat that we've got. It means the whole entire person. So it's not contrasted with soul.
Soul is part of "Soma" or Paul's Jewish anthropology. So what he promises is that the whole human
being will enter into God's blessing. Whether or not what kind of body it will have,
well I have fingernails, I have genitals, well I have hair, he says "You fool, I can't tell you
that he uses that word fool." I can't tell you that all I can tell you is that the whole person
will be part of God's blessing. What Paul contrasts is "Sarks and pneuma" that is to say
flesh and spirit. The "Soma" when it's under the powers of Satan is "Sarks," the Greek word meaning
"Flesh." And again it doesn't mean meat. It means a whole person turned against God. That whole person
or "Soma" when it's under God's blessing is "A Soma Neomatikon," one that is filled with the spirit.
So there's a different anthropology operating here and we would really be working across purposes
if we try to answer your question in terms of whether this physical entity that I am will have a
different form after my reawakening. So when I quoted Dante and Padadiz are the
I think it's quite interesting that for Dante, one of the lures of resurrection, the reason these
the out-of-fight saints in heaven are looking forward to the moment when they put on their earthly
flesh again is so that they can precisely be recognized as individuals, presumably your mother, your
father, the loved ones, need that kind of marker. So perhaps there's something there and when you talk
about Paul, understanding the resurrection of something that involves the whole person, that there is a
marker, an identity marker there that is somehow associated with the body or the Soma in the larger
sense. Paul's interests don't go in that direction. I can understand why Dante would, I can understand
why rabbis of the first century also. rabbis of the actually later than the first century debated
whether I'd come back with my freckles, whether I'd come back with that work that I've got,
whether I'd come back in a better body, in a better age, a better younger age, etc.
But that was not Paul's concern. We can read that back if we want and Dante chose to take a
high medieval view of the body and make a glorious poem of it, but it's not Paul's concern,
that's all that I can say. Paul didn't know what you were going to come back with,
warts or not. Jerry Falwell knows Pat Robertson knows Thomas Aquinas knows, but Paul didn't.
Does Paul's theory of redemption or atonement through the death of Jesus? Does that have
he's now perfectly consistent with his Jewish upbringing and theology? Is there or is some people
of psychotride that psychoanalyze Paul by saying that when you are such an intense persecutor
of people as he was, there's something, there's some fascination about the enemy, which then can
a strange reversal be taken over and the convert becomes all the more
fanatically embracing of that which he was earlier, the persecutor of.
But clearly he turns the Christ event into the crux of a fundamental transformation in man's
relationship to God. Yes, I think that's true. And what is it about the Christ event that
what did Paul see in it that made him believe that an old, the old Adam had died and there's
a new order of creation now at hand? It's difficult to understand that without the context
that he was already preformed by and in. Paul believed that all of history from creation to the end
was divided into two ages, the age dominated by sin and death ever since the fall of Adam
and the future, the coming Messianic age in which was God was going to pour forth his spirit and his
blessings on the Jewish people and through them on the Gentiles, perhaps, through a Messianic blessing.
Now that's the context within within which Paul, the Pharisee already lives. He's already expecting
such a turn of events. John the Baptist is an example of someone at that time who was expecting
a radical turn of events. Yes, it was surprises everybody if I could put it that way. By turning that
apocalyptic crash and burn scenario, there's going to be a great break in history. God will appear
that Gentiles will be killed or chased out of the promised land and God will bring back
his paradise, if you will, under the domination of a Messiah, under the leadership of a Messiah.
All of that is what Paul had in mind already. What we need is the link that connects that to the death
of this criminal, this impure, because Yeshua was richly impure by being crucified. How does Paul
connect his pre-existing apocalyptic framework with the event of Yeshua? That's the real issue
and scholars are intensely working on this now. I think a lot has to do with his experience of the
community in Damascus. He saw among the richly impure believers in Yeshua, Jews Gentiles together.
He saw that God could live among what he thought was trash, that is to say people who are simply
excluded from God's purview and God's grace, whatever experience took place in Damascus.
And in his reflections upon that community in Damascus, Paul was transformed into seeing
this as the Messianic community. That led him to read back that the death of Yeshua, this criminal
on a cross, you have to realize that once you're crucified, I don't care if you're the best
observant Jew in Jerusalem at the time, you are richly impure. How could God ever make that person
his mashiach, his Messiah? Paul is transformed by his community experience to re-reading the
death of Yeshua as the way that the age is turned. Now it's a complicated affair and I wouldn't
pretend to say that all scholars have a unified story on this, but to go from that to the notion of
Yeshua's death being a blood atonement, the way fundamental is today and even fundamental is Catholics
believe. In other words, that God sort of had to look at his watch and make sure that Jesus suffered
all three hours to the last drop of blood before his vengeance would be appeased.
He's of course theologically ridiculous and I certainly would not want to have anything to do with
a divinity like that. This is a later-riving, very later-riving notion that is not to be found in Paul.
When Paul says that God made Yeshua, He lost Terri on, that is to say the blood smeared on the
arch of the covenant between the two carobine, what he's talking about is God's life mingled with
human life. It has nothing to do with blood atonement. That would be a long story to go into, but Paul
is not a blood atonement, if you will. He has at least eight different metaphors. Well, what that
change of the ages was with the death and the vindication of Yeshua from freedom to new creation, etc.
And the idea of blood atonement is simply not part of that. There's a big controversy between
Paul and Jesus' brother, James, who was ahead of the church in Jerusalem concerning whether the
Gentiles should, whether they would have to convert to Judaism in order to become Christian or
whether practically speaking, they would have to be circumcised. And Paul is very
very adamant. And it could even be quite nasty towards James, for James' insistence that circumcision
be a precondition for becoming a Christian. What was that debate all about?
It's a powerful debate indeed and Simon, whose nickname is Kefas, or rock, Simon Peter,
was on James' side for much of that debate. And we read about it in the epistle to the Galatians.
It's complicated. Paul's experience that makes him a believer in he was always a Jew, and he
always wanted to remain a Jew, that made him a messianic Jew believing in Yeshua as the mushy
of God. That conversion experience happens within the community at Damascus and in his reflections
upon that later, as he says he goes into the desert and reflects upon it. The core of the
experience is that God's grace, God's messianic grace is not restricted just to the children of Abraham.
But he is open to all. Now that wasn't just Paul's idea. There were notions in second-temple
Judaism of the Messiah being the light to the Gentiles, that the Messiah would also include in some
way Gentiles and is a matter of fact. In the diaspora, Gentiles were entering synagogues, listening up to
Jewish preaching and becoming themselves either Jews or friends of Jews. They were becoming
observant Jews without circumcision. Paul was saying that the messianic blessing, the same
Jewish messianic blessing, is for all those who believe in this coming in this new age,
brought by the death and triumph of Yeshua. And that was soon to culminate in the return of God
to this earth to recreate this earth is a new heaven and a new earth. So when he goes back to
Jerusalem, he enters into a debate with those Judah-isings messianists to say no, the doorway in to
the messianic blessing is circumcision and observance of Kashrut and other elements of Jewish law.
So Paul thinks he has an agreement with James and Simon that works fine for Jewish messianists,
but for Gentile messianists who come on board, it's not necessary. Simon apparently goes back on
this agreement when he visits Paul in Antioch and insists that Jews and Christians be separated. Paul
blows up in his letter to the Galatians that won't work, that won't do. And in fact,
dedicates his own life, his own missionary life to bringing both Jew and Gentile together.
As he says in Galatians 4, there is no longer a difference between in one of his most radical
statements, male and female, slave and free Jew and Gentile. In other words, he's abolishing
those ritual purity distinctions that were so much a part of Second Temple Judaism.
Doesn't he say it in that letter where he says, and those circumcisers, sometimes I wish that
the knife would slip. Oh, he's very, very angry at those who would insist that God's blessing
is restricted only to the children of Abraham. He sees it as opening on the message for of Paul,
which becomes eventually the Christian message is that the, the, and the effect it's represented in
Mark and Matthew's, um, a passion narrative, the veil of the temple is torn from top to bottom.
Not as a way of saying that Judaism doesn't count it. It's a way of saying that the message,
the messianic blessing that Judaism has led us to, as he says, like a pedagaunt, like a tutor,
is now open to everyone. How about something on, about the letter in the spirit in Paul, if you,
if you don't mind, because he speaks about the circumcision of the heart is, as opposed to the
literal circumcision of the penis. He says that the letter killeth, but the spirit give it life,
and, you know, the King James translation of it, is, is there something about this understanding of
the spiritual truth of the, um, the Christ event that we should say something about. Oh, no doubt,
and there's so much that could be said. Unfortunately, a lot that has been said has said
that Judaism and Christianity against each other, as if Judaism were nothing but, uh, law abiding,
without charity, without love, without grace. No, uh, that has been one of the great dividers,
I think, between, uh, Judaism and its younger sister and brother, the Christian tradition,
the spirit that Paul is talking about, the plnama is precisely the spirit of God that has
come down, if you will, through the tradition of Judaism. Paul is simply saying that that is now
open to us all, and we wouldn't want to simply, uh, keep, um, restrict the power of the spirit
to Torah observance. Paul, if he had a son, no doubt, would have had him circumcised. Paul would
been happy, no doubt, to observe, uh, Kashruth and other, uh, Jewish, uh, traditions. That wasn't the
point he was anti-Jewish. Paul simply said that the gift that we have as Jews is now open to all.
Now, how that got played out over the centuries is a somewhat sad story we have to admit.
Um, and but I think that today with our rereading of the meaning of Yeshua, of the meaning of
Christology in the first century, we're able to see perhaps for the first time, in a long time,
the possibility of reconnecting with the, the rabbinic Jewish, uh, period of the first second century,
and not set Yeshua, the Jewish, uh, prophet and sage of Galilee over against the Judaism that he was
a part of, and never meant to leave. I mean, Yeshua had no intention of founding the Roman Catholic
church or Christianity at all. He simply wanted to be a faithful Jew gathering together,
His own people in what he thought were this time of change and opportunity in break of God's kingdom.
So I would like to say, I'd like to ask, how do we get from all of this stuff in Paul
to the imaginative, popular imaginations of Easter Sunday? We haven't talked about that, but I
think that that's the problem, the crooks of the problem, uh, in the culture wars, if you will,
within Christianity, between fundamentalist Catholics and Catholics who know how to read the scripture,
fundamentalist, uh, Protestants and Protestants who know how to read the scripture. I think the first
affirmation of Easter faith is that Yeshua, Jesus is seriously dead, as seriously dead as my grand
parents, my great grandparents, and he did not come back to life. That's the affirmation of the
New Testament. That's what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 15 when he says he was buried. It means he
was really dead. And then he doesn't say he came back to life the way Lazarus did,
came back to life the way the son of the widow of nine came back to life. Yeshua never came back to
life. If he did come back to life, then your faith would be in vain because you wouldn't have
Easter, you'd have resurrection, as you call it, resuscitation, a new quartz walking around the earth
that had died before. Making that distinction, I think, is the real pawns, us in
norm, the bridge of jackasses. You either get across that bridge or you don't. If you don't get
across that bridge, you are left in the fundamentalism of Catholicism and Christianity about Easter.
Yeah, that's a strong interpretation. What does one do with all those moments in Paul where he is
taunting death and saying death, where is thy sting that we have no longer under the dominion of death,
that somehow again the Christ event has triumphed over death. Now that might not mean a literal
resurrection in body and a certainism, but it certainly does seem to suggest that death is not the
final destination either for Jesus or for those who die in his name. Okay, that's an affirmation of
faith on the part of an apocalyptic Jewish Christian. And you may share that affirmation, you may
share that faith, or you may not. I may not. That's right. That's right. That's what I'm saying.
The point is that he is not saying we've got the medical evidence on death, we've got the
evolutionary biological evidence on death. He says that it is part of his apocalyptic hope that
death is not the end because Yeshua, the first of what he calls the first fruits of all of those
who believe Yeshua has been rescued, has been awakened from death by God. So likewise will we and will
grandma, but that's an act of faith that is to say an act of hope. It shouldn't be read as anything
that we could track historically and by reason. One last question on Paul before we close the
hour, Tom. I understand that he was part of this apocalyptic tradition that he understood the
Christ's event in this larger narrative structure whereby it's related to Adam and so forth. And yet
there's a very strong karigma in Paul about the whole message of Jesus dissolving into love of one's
neighbor. And that doesn't seem particularly apocalyptic in focus. That if it's all about
loving one's neighbor here and now, it seems like the emphasis is much more here on the in the earthly
rather than on the transcendence on the salvation on my being rescued from death. Does that message
of neighborly love come to him through what he knew about Jesus is preaching or does it come to him
from somewhere else? Paul knew virtually nothing about Yeshua's preaching. It's extraordinary. He
never mentions a miracle. He rarely gives a word of Yeshua and if he does, it's something that he said he
received from revelation, not that he heard about the life of Yeshua. Paul is simply not interested
in the life of Yeshua. If he were, we would have had Christianity. But by inserting Yeshua into an
apocalyptic framework, he gave us in a sense or is one of those who gave us Christianity rather than
the message of Yeshua. Number two, I think it's a fairly big leap and would take a little bit of work
to go from Paul's first century apocalyptic view and his emphasis on love agape as the greatest virtue,
but still within an apocalyptic framework to that Hanaki and 19th century view that you articulated,
which is, oh, we just love each other in this world and everything will get along just fine. Paul,
I don't think holds to that kind of 19th century Catholic Protestant view, nor what I want to
reduce your remarks to that. Your remarks are about what do we do with Yeshua's message about the
kingdom of God being right here and Paul's apocalyptic message about the kingdom of God coming soon
in the future. And as we know now, much, much later in the future, 20 centuries after Paul's hope
that Yeshua would return soon has not taken place. There's a conflict there, if you will, between
the message of Yeshua and the message of Paul and the message of late 19th century Protestant
Christianity. But we still haven't figured out Robert, how we got to the stories of Easter.
Let me suggest this, that abiding, the abiding problem that could follow into our second hour of
conversation is the question of hermeneutics. How to read texts? And I think Christians are
some of the worst hermeneutics, at least in the popular imagination, they perform the worst
interpretations of these texts. So we'll do that coming right up. Stay tuned.
I don't see what you're looking to find in the smile on my face.
In my face, in my stay degree, I send what I need to make, on the main mystery.
In my face, I send what I need to make, on the main mystery.
Now someone could follow with the lowest centimeter of the mitten.
Let's say there's a little tool, in a whole country, but I see you too, man.
Man, I'm less than white.
I got it right over here, to pay for the night.
I got my people to hear, and they ever have to die.
I want a little bit too, very bad.
I'm not a little, I'm not a little.
There's nothing left, full of trees, nothing left, pay my mind, even bills.
But the good lawn will provide, I know what it was.
I'm not a little, I know what it was.