I apologize for labouring the point; but in my experience of teaching, and also in public debate, not least media debate, about Jesus and Paul, I have been made aware again and again that within our post-Enlightenment world the pressure to resist the covenantal and apocalyptic framework for both Jesus and Paul-- the pressure more or less, to de-Judaize both of them, or to allow only one of them to be "Jewish" and then only within a post-Enlightenment version of what "Judaism" might be--this pressure has been intense, and conversely the pressure to treat them both as abstract religious teachers, or as parallel preachers of a doctrine of salvation, has been as enormous as it is insidious. It is the default mode into which our culture slips when faced with the whole topic. It isn't the case that there is a range of options out there in contemporary public discourse. Rather, the minute we stop applying the pressure for a genuine first-century framework of covenant, apocalyptic and so on people's minds automatically flip back into this abstract mode. "but surely," they say, even after a careful explanation to the contrary, "but surely Paul had some very different ideas from Jesus?"--with the constant implication that this relativizes Paul, that this means we can appeal over Paul's head to Jesus himself, which usually means a Jesus reconstructed according to one to the post-Enlightenment Procrustean beds currently available from all good bookshops.
I have argued elsewhere that Jesus believed himself to be bringing to its great climax, its great denouement, the long story of YHWH and Israel, which was the focal point of the long story of the creator and the world. I have proposed that he believed himself to be embodying both the vocation of the faithful Israel and the return of YHWH to Zion, drawing on to himself not only the destiny of God's true Servant but, if we can put it like this, the destiny of God himself. All this would be a very odd, not to say an embarrassingly weird, thing for a post-Enlightenment person to believe about Jesus--though we ought to point out that the great thinkers who invented the concept of the Enlightenment in the first place really do seem to have thought that world history was turning a new corner with their own work, leaving behind superstition and ignorance and stepping at last into the bright light of scientific, technological, political and philosophical modernity. The Enlightenment, in fact, offered an alternative eschatology to that of Jesus and Paul: world history didn't after all reach its climax with the death and resurrection of the Messiah, but with Voltaire, Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson. The guillotine, not the cross, provided the redemptive violence around which the world turned. No wonder thinkers within this framework of thought found it hard to see Jesus within his genuinely first-century Jewish world, and to understand the way in which Paul was explicitly honouring Jesus by not saying and doing the same things but by pointing people back to Jesus' own unique achievement.
How does this work out in terms of the respective roles which Jesus and Paul each believed themselves to be playing? It isn't even that Jesus believed himself to have a specific role in the purpose of God and that Paul simply thought that people like himself ought to tell people about Jesus. Paul, too, believed himself to have a special, unique role within the overall purposes of Israel's God, the world's creator; and that role was precisely not to bring Israel's history to climax--that had been done in the death and resurrection of the Messiah--but rather to perform the next unique task within an implicit apocalyptic timetable, namely to call the nations, urgently to loyal submission to the one who had now been enthroned as Lord of the world. Paul believed that it was his task to call into being, by proclaiming Jesus as Lord, the worldwide community in which ethnic divisions would be abolished and a new family created as a sign to the watching world that Jesus was its rightful Lord and that new creation had been launched and would one day come to full flower. That points us forward to the specific apostolic tasks which Paul set himself, to which I shall turn in a moment. But let me apply this to three major areas where the normal paradigm has raised problems; the kingdom of God, justification and ethics.
Part of the answer must be that Jesus was addressing a Jewish world in which 'kingdom of God', 'reign of God', the notion that only God must be king, was one of the most exciting and dangerous slogans. People had died in recent memory because of this slogan and the attempt to put it into practice. Galilee and Judaea were full of young men who were eager to take upon themselves the yoke of the kingdom, that is, to work for the holy revolution against the western imperial power, whatever it cost. (The overtones of our contemporary world are not accidental.) They were drawing on the centuries-old tradition of psalms and prophets, living within the narrative world generated, as the earlier chapters of this book have indicated, out of that matrix of creation and covenant, apocalyptic and messianism, the world in which Israel stood proud, at least in theory, against paganism, its idolatries and its empires. Jesus was living within that world, too, but was offering a radically different construal of what it should mean, what the true God wanted it to mean, and what, focused upon himself and his work, it was now beginning to mean. Much of his kingdom-teaching was located within his work of healing and feasting, of doing the kingdom in fresh ways; and his many kingdom-parables were ways of saying, this not something else, is what God's kingdom is all about . Within the political and cultural climate of the time, to say that one was embracing the kingdom-vision but doing it significantly differently was hugely risky. Parables and symbolic actions were the natural best ways of doing it.
Paul knew all about that world, but it was not the world in which he was called to work. This does not mean that he swapped a Jewish message for a Gentile or Hellenistic one. Rather, he announced a still very Jewish message, namely the message that Israel's crucified and risen Messiah was the true Lord of the world, to a world which was not telling, and living by, Jewish-style kingdom-of-God stories. There would have been no point in Paul standing up in the market place in Philippi and saying, "I'll tell what the kingdom of God is really like." That wasn't what people in Philippi were talking about, or eager for. But standing up and saying, "Let me tell you the true gospel of the real Lord of the world"--that would have all kinds of resonances which I explored in Chapter 4. For Paul, then "kingdom of God" had become part of the package of how to explain what Jesus had already accomplished through his death and resurrection, the accomplishment which now had to be implemented.
What then about "justification by faith"? Why is this so important for Paul but not, is seems, for Jesus? There is of course a lone passage in Luke's gospel, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, where Jesus says that "This man went down to his house justified rather than the other". But this is hardly, as it stands, a statement of the mainstream Protestant doctrine of justification or of the rather different Pauline one. It is a straightforward Jewish statement, corresponding for instance to Judah's statement about Tamar, after his immorality and hypocrisy have been exposed ("she is in the right, rather than me"): one is in the right, the other is in the wrong. There is an implicit court case going on, and the verdict is going in favour of one person rather than the other.
The implicit court case is of course important in Paul's world of thought, as I have suggested, but once again we meet the question of context and task. The doctrine of justification by faith, from Galatians through Philippians to Romans, was never about how people were to be converted, how someone might become a Christian, but about how one could tell in the present, who God's true people were--and hence who one's family were, who were the people with whom one should as a matter of family love and loyalty, sit down and eat. This question was central to much Judaism of the time, with different groups defining themselves this way and that, in particular by various interpretation of Torah. We can already see the roots of this redefinition of God's people in Jesus' ministry, not simply when the language of justification is fleetingly used as in Luke 18, but at many other moments like Mark 3.31-35 (the redefinition of family) and Luke 15.1-2 (why does Jesus eat with tax-collectors and sinners?). But Jesus never faced, for the reason already given, the question of how one would know that Gentiles were to be full members God's people. The closest he comes is at moments like Matthew 8.11 ("many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven"), but the questions which were so pressing for Paul are simply not on the agenda. This is cognate with the fact that Jesus said nothing whatever about circumcision--a point which, as I have argued elsewhere, is a good indication that the early church did not, despite the proposal of the older form-criticism, make up "words of the Lord" to fit their immediate needs. Circumcision was one of the fiercest controversies in the early church, and the Jesus of the gospels says nothing about it. But it was precisely in that contest, the entry of Gentiles into God's people and the question of whether they had to be circumcised or whether they could be full members as they were, that Paul developed his doctrine of justification by faith, to meet (in other words) a situation which for good reasons, Jesus had not himself faced. It is ironic that some within the 'old perspective on Paul, by continuing to promote the wrong view of justification as conversion, as the moment of personal salvation and coming to faith rather than God's declaration about faith, have reinforced as well a polarization between Jesus and Paul which a more historically grounded and theologically astute reading can and must avoid.
[Third], what about ethics? There is a well-known aspect of the Jesus/Paul problem which goes like this: granted that Paul occasionally quotes sayings of Jesus (for example, on divorce), and sometimes seems to be alluding to other gospel traditions without actually saying he's doing so, why does he do this so infrequently If Jesus had taught certain things, why shouldn't Paul have referred to them when they were relevant to his wrok, as they often were?
The answer is again to do with context, but goes a step further into the question of what Paul thought he was going (which thus projects us into the middle section of this chapter). We cannot here address the question of which Jesus-traditions Paul may actually have known, and the reason why he may not have known some others. We should not be bullied into accepting the argument that Jesus could not have said anything negative about the Law (as, for instance, in Mark 7) because if he had Paul would not have face the problem he did in Galatians 2. That is to flatten out two very different situations on the lines I have indicated. In particular, I would respectfully suggest that only someone completely divorced from the real life of actual church communities could suppose that once something definitive had been said by a recognized authority there would from that moment on be no further disputes or puzzles on the subject. But the key thing, which emerges again and again in Paul's writing, is that he wants to teach his churches not just how to behave but why to behave like that. Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day; teach someone to fish and you feed them for life. Give someone a hand-me-down ethical maxim, and, provided they bow to its authority, they will steer a straight course on that subject alone. Teach someone to think through, from first principles, what it means to live in the new age inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus and in the power of the Spirit, and you equip them not only for that particular topic but for every other question they may meet. This is the kind of thing Paul is doing again and again. Only if we are bent on flattening Jesus and Paul out into "teachers of religion and ethics", rather than people who believed that God was at last fulfilling his promises and launching his new age upon the world, will we think otherwise.
What I claim to have done in principle, in sketching a portrait of Paul in this book, is to carve out a pathway to a nuanced and satisfying historical integration, complete with full appropriate differentiation, of the respective and very different work of Jesus and of Paul. They were not intending to do the same sort of thing, not because they were at loggerheads but because they were at one in the basic vision which generated their very different vocations. Understand that unity, and that differentiation, remains a central and vital task of understanding the New Testament and early Christianity.
Very interesting article Aruanan...good for a second read as well...thank you.
CW
You and I and all Christians understand that. It is the Paulians who preach the gospel of Paul. Now I have some problems with the text of your quote, inasmuch as we have terms like "Jesus believed himself to be...", but generally speaking, we are in accord that Paul was a bishop of the Church and that he taught Christianity and enforced it upon the parishes and communities of which he had charge.