What Saint Paul Really Said, NT Wright (Eerdmans, 1997)

An excerpt from the last chapter entitled Paul, Jesus and Christian Origins. The citation starts from the heading From Jesus to Paul—and Beyond (p. 178) and ends with the closing of the book (p. 183). It addressed the question put forth in the previous paragraph: ‘What is the relation between Paul, Jesus and the origins of Christianity?’

It all depends, of course, not just on what you make of Paul but on what you make of Jesus. I have written at length on this topic elsewhere, most recently in Jesus and the Victory of God.⁵ In the light of that, it should be clear where the discussion has to start.

If we are to locate both Jesus and Paul within the world of first-century Judaism, within the turbulent theological and political movements and expectations of the time (and if we are not then we should admit that we know very little about either of them) then we must face the fact that neither of them was teaching a timeless system of religion or ethics, or even a timeless message about how human beings are saved. Both of them believed themselves to be actors within the drama staged by Israel’s God in fulfillment of his long purposes. Both, in other words, breathed the air of Jewish eschatology.

It will not do, therefore, to line up ‘Jesus’ key concepts’ and ‘Paul’s key concepts’ and play them off against one another. It will not do to point out that Jesus talked about repentance and the coming kingdom, while Paul talked about justification by faith. It misses the point to even show (though this can be done quite easily) that these two, when set into context and translated into terms of one another, belong extremely close together. The point is that Jesus believed himself to be called to a particular role in the eschatological drama; and so did Paul. The real question is, what were those roles, and how might they relate?

I have argued elsewhere that Jesus believed himself called to be the one through whom God’s strange purposes for Israel would reach their ordained climax. He announced to Israel that the long-awaited kingdom had arrived. He celebrated it with all who would join him, welcoming them into table-fellowship and assuring them that their sins were forgiven. But the kingdom would not look like Jesus’ contemporaries had imagined. It would not endorse their particular agendas. Particularly, it would not underwrite the agendas of those who were bent on ‘zeal’, on forcing upon Israel a hard and exclusive piety, an all-or-nothing stand for God, Torah, Land and Temple that would commit Israel to a war of liberation against Rome. Jesus warned that to take this route would result in huge, unmitigated disaster; and that this disaster, if Israel brought it down upon her own head, would have to be seen as the wrath of Israel’s God against his people. Such action would mean that the perpetrators had translated their vocation to be the light of the world into a vocation to be the judges of the world. Those who judged would themselves be judged. Those who took the sword would perish with the sword. Those who turned the Temple into a den of brigands would only have themselves to blame when the Temple itself was torn down, so that not one stone was left upon another.

But Jesus did not remain as a spectator, commenting on this passage of events from the outside. He came to the centre of the stage, not just metaphorically, but literally, in his entry to Jerusalem and his Temple-action. His dramatic action symbolized his belief that he was called to be the Messiah, the one through whom Israel’s destiny would be realized. (We need, perhaps, to remind ourselves that within a hundred years or so of Jesus there were at least a dozen others who believed themselves to be the Messiah). He had authority over the Temple. The house of God might be destroyed, but he would be vindicated. Yet, as he clearly knew, by his symbolic action he was calling down upon himself the fate he had predicted for the Temple. He would suffer as so many Jewish martyrs had suffered, handed over to the pagans for slaughter. Yet, conscious of his vocation, he enacted another great symbol: the new exodus, the great liberation, encoded in a final Passover meal with his followers. He would draw on to himself the coming cataclysm, thus making a way through, whereby the encroaching evil would be defeated, Israel would be liberated, and the saving purpose of Israel’s God for the whole world might at last be realized.

As he trod this road, Jesus was conscious of a deeper vocation even than that of Messiah. Israel’s greatest hope was that YHWH, her God, would return to her in person, coming to Zion as judge and redeemer. In Jesus’ last great journey to Jerusalem, in his action in the Temple and the Upper Room, he dramatically symbolized that return. It looks as though he intended to enact and embody that which, in Israel’s scriptures, YHWH had said he would do in person. There could be no greater claim; yet the claim, though stupendous, only made sense within, could only be made from within, the context of the first-century Jewish world that bounded all Jesus’ thoughts and actions. He went to his death believing that the hopes and fears of Israel and the world would thereby be drawn together once and for all. This would be the great event, the culmination of Israel’s history, the redemption, the new exodus. This was how the kingdom would come.

Like any Jewish martyr of the period, Jesus believed firmly that if he died in obedience to the will of God he would be vindicated by being raised from the dead. Unlike other martyrs, he seems to have believed that, since what he was doing was special, climactic, the one-off moment of Israel’s salvation, his resurrection would come without delay. He would be raised ‘on the third day’. Like other things Jesus believed, this makes perfect, though startling, sense within the worldview of a fist-century Jew aware of a vocation to be the means through which God would do for his people at last that which he had always promised.

It should be clear from all this that if Paul had simply trotted out, parrot-fashion, every line of Jesus’ teaching – if he had repeated the parables, if he had tried to do again what Jesus did in announcing and inaugurating the kingdom – he would not have been endorsing Jesus, as an appropriate and loyal follower should. He would have been denying him. Someone who copies exactly what a would-be Messiah does is himself trying to be a Messiah; which means denying the earlier claim. When we see the entire sequence within the context of Jewish eschatology, we are forced to realize that for Paul to be a loyal ‘servant of Jesus Christ’, as he describes himself, could never mean that Paul would repeat Jesus’ unique, one-off announcement of the kingdom to his fellow Jews. What we are looking for is not a parallelism between two abstract messages. It is the appropriate continuity between two people living, and conscious of living, at different points in the eschatological timetable.

Jesus believed it was his vocation to bring Israel’s history to its climax. Paul believed, in consequence of that belief and as part of his own special vocation, that he was himself now called to announce to the whole world that Israel’s history had been brought to its climax in that way. When Paul announced the Gospel to the Gentile world, therefore, he was deliberately and consciously implementing the achievement of Jesus. He was, as he himself said, building on the foundation, not laying another one (1 Corinthians 3:11). He was not ‘founding a separate religion’. He was not inventing a new ethical system. He was not perpetrating a timeless scheme of salvation, a new mystery-religion divorced from the real, human Jesus of Nazareth. He was calling the world to allegiance to its rightful Lord, the Jewish Messiah now exalted as the Jewish Messiah was supposed to be. A new mystery religion, focused on a mythical ‘lord’, would not have threatened anyone in the Greek or Roman world. ‘Another king’, the human Jesus whose claims cut directly across those of Caesar, did.

This reminds us that neither for Jesus nor for Paul was the message, the announcement, a matter merely of ‘religion’. The post-enlightenment box into which ‘religion’ has been slotted, whether by those determined to make religion irrelevant to real life or by those determined to protect religion from the ravages of real life, has nothing to do with the worldview of a first-century Jew believing that Israel’s God, the creator, was taking his power and reigning. Jesus was not announcing ‘a new religion’; nor was Paul. Nor was the Judaism whose expectation both were affirming a matter of ‘religion’ only. Of course (lest ears be so dull that they translate what I am saying into its opposite) – of course the proclamation of Jesus, and the gospel announcement of Paul, addressed human beings with a challenge and a summons, a warning and an offer, which went down to the very depths of human experience, into the far recesses of the heart, awakening parts which other messages could not reach. But they did this, not because they were about ‘religion’ as divorced from the rest of life, but because the claim of Israel always was, the message of Jesus always was, and the announcement of Paul always was, that the human race was to be shown, invited to, summoned into, and enabled to discover the true way of being human, the way to reflect the very image of God himself in every aspect of life, and with every fibre of one’s being. If that is what you mean by ‘religion’, so be it. Jesus and Paul thought of it as Life, as being human, as being the children of God.

When all this is said and done, it should be comparatively easy to work through the actions and message of Jesus, and the agenda and letters of Paul, and to show that there is between them, not (of course) a one-for-one correspondence, but a coherence, an appropriate correlation, an integration that allows fully for the radically different perspective of each. Jesus was bringing Israel’s history to its climax; Paul was living in the light of that climax. Jesus was narrowly focused on the sharp-edged, single task; Paul was celebrating the success of that task, and discovering its fruits in a thousand different ways ands settings. Jesus believed he had to go the incredibly risky route of acting and speaking in such a way as to imply that he was embodying the judging and saving action of YHWH himself; Paul wrote of Jesus in such a way as to claim that Jesus was indeed the embodiment of the one God of Jewish monotheism.

No doubt there are dozens of different details to be examined carefully if the question off Jesus and Paul is to be sewn up in all its particulars. To go further into the question at this point is unnecessary; it has been done so well. So recently, by David Wenham in his book Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity⁶ that it would be tedious to traverse the same ground again. Despite the popular impression, there are in fact a good many echoes of the actual saying of Jesus in the letters of Paul, though here again, Paul has not been a slavish repeater of tradition so much as faithful rethinker of the rich material he has heard, using it in fresh ways for his own very different context. What matters, far above any attempts to place Jesus and Paul one on each side of a theological see-saw and make them balance out, is to grasp the truth that grasped them both: that in their day, and through their agency—the one as focus, the other as pointer—the one living and true God had acted climactically and decisively to liberate Israel and the world, and to establish his kingdom of love, the kingdom through which the world would be brought out of the long winter of sin and death and would taste at last the fruits of the Age to come.

Paul, of course, believed that he was living in the very early days of spring. Almost all the ice and snow still remained to be melted. Looking at the world nearly two thousand years later, one may suggest that we have got no further (in Northern Hemisphere terms!) than March at the latest. Some places have felt real sunshine, have seen flowers and blossoms which show that winter is really over. Other places remain icebound. Some places experienced early blooms, but the snow has covered them again. Part of the point of the new age, it seems, is that it doesn’t conform to a timetable like the natural seasons. The creation, after all, is to be set free from its timetables of life and death, its bondage to decay. But, as Paul insists in the same passage where he asserts that great hope, this will happen though the witness, the holiness, the suffering, the prayer, and finally the resurrection of those in whose hearts God has already brought about ‘the first-fruits of the Spirit’ (Romans 8:18-27). So, as he says in another great passage of hope, ‘be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord; since you know that, in the Lord, your labour is not in vain’ (1 Corinthians 15:58). That, as Paul well knew, is the appropriate attitude and activity for those who, whether suffering or celebrating, live in the period between the triumph of Calvary and Easter and the day when God will be in all.

5. N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 1996.

6. David Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity, 1995.

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What Saint Paul Really Said, NT Wright, Eerdmans 1997