This assertion of course will not escape unchallenged. It is almost universally admitted that 1 Cor. May there not then have been other things just as prominent in Paul's teaching which are not mentioned at all? Even then the difficulties of the historian are not overcome. It will not do to say that in this passage Paul is giving no report of what he said to Peter, but is expounding his own views to the Galatians. But the fact is plain to any sympathetic reader. You may wonder, in what sense is Jesus’ command a, commandment? quite so harsh as the English word derived from it; it means the "playing of a part" and so here the concealment of true convictions. His love was costly and caring. The redeemer whom he proclaimed was one of his own contemporaries, a Jew who had lived but a few years before and had died the death of a criminal. What are the boundaries of visible Christian unity? The chief witness to the transcendent conception of Jesus as divine Redeemer is quite unconscious of introducing anything new; indeed he expressly calls attention to the harmony of his proclamation with that of the intimate friends of Jesus. That is what Paul means when he says that he received his gospel directly from the risen Christ. The train will run only if you put your faith in God’s Word. contains the tradition of the Jerusalem Church with regard to the death and resurrection of Jesus. But closer examination discloses points of agreement. xiv. They milked the Jewish people of their money in order to line their own pockets. 4 he mentions the burial of Jesus as having formed a part of his fundamental missionary preaching; and he also gives in the same connection an extended list of appearances of the risen Christ. Copyright, Steven J. Cole, 2014, All Rights Reserved. What Jesus really gave him near Damascus was not so much the facts as a new interpretation of the facts. It is evidently the same kind of knowledge which is excluded in both cases. It must always be remembered that Paul blames Peter not for false opinions, but for "hypocrisy"—that is, for concealment of true opinions. He instructed His disciples to shake the dust off their feet and move on if people rejected them and their message (Matt. By looking at Jesus’ example, I have to say, “Not necessarily.” While He loved all people, He did not give His time equally to all. The prejudices of the reader have triumphed here over all exegetical principles; a vague modernism has been attributed to the sternest, as well as most merciful, Prophet who ever walked upon earth. Many biblical scholars and lay Christians have noted that Jesus preached almost exclusively about the kingdom of heaven, while Paul highlighted justification by … I am 'boasting^ or defending myself only in order that you may not be deceived by the opponent who comes to you. The Judaizers were to be refuted from the lips of the very authorities to whom they appealed. But the same characteristics appear everywhere in Paul. Every refusal to love, which is the essence of every sin, received its full and just compensation from the Son of … Jesus was the Messiah, but was He not the Jewish Messiah, would He not bring about the triumph of the chosen people? We have seen two of the sayings of Jesus already from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (11:22-24). 1-10 affords no support to the theory of Baur, the latter part of the same chapter (Gal. Whatever may be thought of the Book of Acts as a whole, the twelfth chapter is recognized as embodying primitive tradition. Other redeemers, in the pagan religion of the time, were protected from such questions; they were protected by the mists of antiquity; investigations about them were obviously out of 1 J. Weiss, Das alt est e Evangeluim, 1903, pp. natural element.1 Mere literary criticism will not accomplish the task; for even the earliest sources which can be distinguished in the Gospels seem to lift Jesus above the level of ordinary humanity and present Him not merely as an example for faith but also as the object of faith.2 Even in the earliest sources, therefore, the historian must distinguish genuine tradition from dogmatic accretions; he must separate the natural from the supernatural, the believable from the unbelievable; he must seek to remove from the genuine figure of the Galilean prophet the tawdry ornamentation which has been hung about him by naive and unintelligent admirers. of Jesus, but the founder of a new religion. Paul had abundant opportunity for acquainting himself with the words and deeds of Jesus. When He found that the people were devoted to sin, and that He alone was fighting God's battle, He came to regard Himself as God's chosen instrument in the establishment of the Kingdom. But he was also the apostle of love. If He was only a teacher, then Paul was no true follower of His. The mention of Andronicus and Junias in Rom. The fact is of enormous importance. In those two parables Jesus expressed His opposition to a religion of works, a religion which can open an account with God and seek to obtain salvation by merit.1 Salvation, according to Jesus, is a matter of God's free grace; it is something which God gives to whom He will. He wrote (1 Thess. He saw clearly what has seldom been seen with equal clearness since his day, that the historian must explain the transition not only from the historical Jesus to apostolic Christianity, but from apostolic Christianity to the Old Catholic Church. Christianity, according to Paul, is both a life and a doctrine—but logically the doctrine comes first. The divergences between Acts and Pauline Epistles are no more to be regarded as contradictions than are the divergences between various passages in the Epistles themselves; and at many points the historical work casts a flood of light upon the words of Paul. How may Jesus be known? In Colossians, indeed, it is more definitely set forth, and apparently in opposition to errorists who failed to recognize its full implications. Of course the words of Papias about Mark's connection with Peter naturally refer, at least in part, to a time later than the formative period of Paul's life. And they are similar in what they do not say despite the opposition of their countrymen. Inwardly, it is true, the early disciples were not simply devout Jews; they were really trusting for their salvation no longer to their observance of the Law but to Jesus their Saviour. Who was He then? 1-11 emphasizes the harmony of Paul's gospel with that of the original apostles, whom Christ had commissioned as directly and as truly as He had commissioned Paul. ii. 19, 20, where Paul certainly expresses the thought, "Bear with me, for you bear with my arrogant opponents only too well." 8ff. Even the liberal Jesus taught a doctrine of grace. He could have gone up to the feast with them (John 7:1-10), which would have meant several days of traveling together. He was correct in his central contention—Paul was no true disciple of the "liberal Jesus." On the contrary, Mark and John, it is now maintained, differ only in degree; Mark as well as John, even though it should be supposed that he does so less clearly and less consistently, presents a Jesus similar in important respects to the divine Redeemer of the Epistles of Paul.1. So it is also with the knowledge of Christ. Certain radical spirits are not afraid of the consequence; since the Jesus of the Gospels, they say, is a supernatural person, He is not a real person; no such person as this Jesus ever lived on earth. But just as Jesus obediently sacrificed Himself to go to the cross for our salvation, so we are obediently to sacrifice ourselves for others’ ultimate good. Of course, if the narrative in Acts be accepted as it stands, as it is being accepted more and more generally to-day, then the connection of Silas with the Jerusalem Church is firmly established. 26:31, 35, 56). Paul says not, "Even if we have known a Christ according to the flesh, we know such a Christ no longer," but, "Even if we have known Christ with a fleshly kind of knowledge, we know Him in such a way no longer." 1 For what follows, see, in addition to the paper mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, "History and Faith," in Princeton Theological Review, xiii, 1915, pp. vi. This conclusion is thought to be overthrown by two considerations. One interpretation, indeed, definitely excludes such an implication. But you can’t run the train on good feelings. The Judaizers, apparently, as well as Paul, recognized the alternative between Jesus Christ and man; like Paul they separated Jesus Christ from ordinary humanity and placed Him on the side of God. But you can’t bail out on the commandment to love others because you lack feelings for them. "For I delivered unto you among the first things," he says, "that which I also received." viii. They refused to pay taxes and they attacked and murdered government officials, especially the hated tax collectors. ii. Such a representation is refuted not only by what hqs just been said about the application of the term "Lord" to the historic Jesus, but also by the references of Paul to actual words and deeds of Jesus. The Church has always accepted the apostle Paul, not at all as a religious philosopher, but simply and solely as a witness to Jesus. Sometimes, indeed, that element is even made the determining factor in all of Jesus' teaching. Have you ever thought about the diversity among Jesus’ apostles? The natural conclusion is that Paul was a true disciple of the real Jesus. Everywhere the Jesus that they present is most strikingly similar to the Christ of Paul; but nowhere—not even where Jesus is made to teach the redemptive significance of His death (Mk. The religion of Paul, in other words, is a religion of redemption. For even if the original apostles differed fundamentally from Paul, the difference concerned only the place of the Mosaic Law in the Christian economy, and did not concern the Pauline conception of the person of Christ. Thus the resurrection appearances and the institution of the Lord's Supper, despite the fact that they were absolutely fundamental in Paul's teaching, appear each only once in the Epistles. Both in Jesus and in Paul, finally, the coming of the Kingdom means joy as well as judgment. Would not all the peoples of the earth come to do obeisance to Israel by submitting to Israel's Law? But our love for one another should conspicuously cross divisions that we see in the world. 1-11. The truth is, it never occurred to Paul to regard the bare facts about Jesus as constituting a "gospel"; it never even occurred to Paul to reflect upon all the sources of information about the facts. Imitation of Christ (1 Thess. And John is the only one called, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:1, 23). But his gospel was grounded upon the resurrection of Christ. The most obvious answer to that question is that the religion of Paul was based upon Jesus. xiv. Is it to be supposed that Barnabas, who had lived at Jerusalem, proclaimed Jesus as Saviour without telling in detail what sort of person Jesus had been, and what He had said and done? The First Epistle to the Corinthians is a magnificent refutation of such a caricature. x. As Pharisees they welcomed the coming of the Messiah, but they did not understand the teaching of this Messiah. The plain fact remains that if imitation of Jesus had been central in the life of Paul, as it is central, for example, in modern liberalism, then the Epistles would be full of the words and deeds of Jesus. Some pastors are accustomed to say the same thing no matter what questions are laid before them; they can only enunciate general principles without applying them to special problems; they are incapable of special friendships and incapable of analyzing actual situations. As a matter of fact, however, the obscurities of that verse are not hopeless, and rightly interpreted the verse contains no hint of a primitive conception of Jesus different from that which was proclaimed by Paul. He chose Simon the Zealot. Paul was not indifferent to ordinary knowledge of his fellow-men. But this interpretation is, of course, quite impossible, since Paul certainly recognized Peter and John as genuine apostles and James the brother of the Lord as a man of real authority in the Church. Despite the numerous monographs on "Jesus and Paul," Wrede was entirely correct. What then was the true relation between Paul and Jesus? In that case, the relative pronoun is no doubt to be taken with the words "Andronicus and Junias" rather than with the word "apostles"; and two details are mentioned: (1) that Andronicus and Junias had a good reputation among the apostles, and (2) that they were converted earlier than Paul. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul delivers to the church in Corinth one of the most remarkable, yet challenging pieces of prose on the subject of true love. The peculiarities of the passage may perhaps be due partly to the fact that Paul is here using catchwords of his adversaries. And what was central in Paul was certainly not the imitation of Jesus. ii. Love means being committed to the other person’s highest good. There is to such students, as Heitmiiller says, something almost uncanny about Jesus.1 And the difficulty is not removed by putting the genesis of the Messianic consciousness late in Jesus' life. The verb is in the present tense—"if thou being a Jew livest as do the Gentiles and not as do the Jews." It is almost universally admitted that 1 Cor. They were great, but their greatness had absolutely nothing to do with his authority; for they added nothing to him. "Not by man but by Jesus Christ," Paul says at the beginning of Galatians. And certainly the Judaizers were superficial. Details, therefore, like the generous act of Barnabas in selling a field and devoting the proceeds to the needs of the brethren, are thought to constitute the solid tradition with which the author of Acts is operating. According to this interpretation, which has much to be said in its favor, Paul refutes the opponents and their arrogant claims of bringing something superior to Paul's message, by a reference to the obvious fact that there is only one Jesus. When is it not only right, but necessary, to divide from erring or sinning Christians. end of the world, and is thus regarded as unsuitable for a permanent world order. The problem is a moral and psychological problem. This hypothesis not only accepts the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, but in one direction at least it even exaggerates the implications of that consciousness. But what was the testimony of his contemporaries? So the main idea of our text is fairly simple to state, but impossible to live out consistently apart from the power of the Holy Spirit: Jesus commands us to love one another even as He loved us. i. The way the church got its start was another sad example of Christians violating Jesus’ command to love one another. tions, and as far removed as possible from anything that primitive Palestinian Christianity might conceivably have been. "If they had another Jesus," Paul says, "then they might claim to bring you something that I did not bring. This use of the Apocalpse was soon abandoned even by Baur's own disciples. However, Paul repetitiously claimed he was an apostle. So when Paul first has to defend his doctrine of the exclusive and supreme importance of Christ, he defends it not against conservative disciples, who could appeal either with or without reason to the original apostles, but against gnostic speculation. For even if the original apostles differed fundamentally from Paul, the difference concerned only the place of the Mosaic Law in the Christian economy, and did not concern the Pauline conception of the person of Christ. “Jesus said to him, ‘“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and great commandment. In 2 Cor. 17:17; 23:1-39; Acts 13:6-12). Imitation of Christ (1 Thess. Gal. The natural man according to Paul does not understand the true significance of the words and deeds of his fellow-men; he does not use them to attest spiritual facts. The conference between Paul and the Jerusalem leaders, described in Gal. What can these words mean, it is asked, except that ordinary information about Jesus, dealing with the details of His earthly life, the kind of information that one man can obtain of another by sight and hearing, has become valueless for the Christian? That is what Paul means when he says that he received his gospel directly from the risen Christ. Such a representation of the conference would have cast despite upon all the work which he had done before, and would have made it necessary for him in the future to prove constantly against all Judaizers and other opponents his agreement with the Jerusalem authorities. But since, unfortunately for them, there is of course only one Jesus, and since I made that Jesus fully known to you, they cannot maintain any superiority." It may be a question why he did not draw upon the fund more frequently; but at any rate, the fund was there. It must always be remembered that the Epistles do not contain the missionary preaching of Paul; they are addressed to Christians, in whose case much of the primary instruction had already been given. But how about Jesus? He might have appeared in anger, to destroy him for his unspeakable sin. Yet the historian is asked to believe that Paul submitted tamely, without a word of protest, to the presentation of a purely human Jesus. The caboose represents feelings. But they were important, not as an end in themselves, but as a means to an end. When Paul says that the Kingdom of God is "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost," he is like Jesus not merely in word but in the whole spirit of the message; Jesus also proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom as a "gospel.". Thus 2 Cor. ? A very few may make the summit of Everest, but no one lives up there. x-xiii, though these chapters contain perhaps the bitterest polemic to be found anywhere in the Pauline Epistles, there is no trace of any defense of the Pauline conception of the person of Christ. The tax-collectors had sold their souls to Rome. 6; 1 Cor. If Paul received information from the eyewitnesses about what Jesus said and did on the night of the betrayal, we can be sure that he remembered the information and remembered where he had got it. As it is, the "other Jesus" of the Judaizers existed only in their own inordinate claims. How should we apply it? No doubt the higher knowledge of Christ of which Paul is speaking is not limited to this spiritual use of ordinary sources of information; no doubt there is also a direct intercourse between the believer and the risen Lord. But in Paul just as in Jesus the lofty term "Father" is reserved for a more intimate relationship. xv. ix. In 2 Cor. That account is inserted in the Epistles only because of certain abuses which had happened to arise at Corinth. Paul had really given to the Corinthians the whole Jesus, the whole Spirit, and the whole gospel. Thus if Paul be compared with the Jesus of the Gospels, there is full agreement between the two. But the form, it is maintained, is a matter of indifference to us, and it was not really essential to Jesus; what was really essential was Jesus' consciousness of nearness to God. But suppose Baur were right about the point which has just been discussed; suppose even the most impossible admissions be made; suppose it be granted that the original apostles differed fundamentally from Paul. He does not mean that when he drew near to Damascus on that memorable day he knew none of the facts about Jesus; he does not mean that after that day his knowledge of the facts was not enriched by intercourse with Jesus' friends. Paul regarded Jesus as a Redeemer. The world can understand when churches divide along racial lines. Apparently, that was the loving thing to do, since Jesus never would have commanded them not to love their enemies (Matt. v. 16. It must always be remembered that the Epistles of Paul are addressed to special needs of the churches. The natural man may acquire a certain knowledge of Christ; he may learn what Christ said and did and what were the worldly circumstances of His life. Yet in 1 Cor. In no case is anything said about a conception of Jesus really differing from that of Paul. How shall such agreement be explained? But if Paul regarded himself, and was regarded by the original apostles, as a true disciple of Jesus, how did he obtain the necessary knowledge of Jesus' life?