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July 12 - September 6, 2020
WHILE JERUSALEM WAS celebrating Passover c. 30 CE, Pontius Pilate, Roman governor of Judea, ordered the crucifixion of a peasant from the tiny hamlet of Nazareth in Galilee. Passover was nearly always an explosive time in the Holy City, where Roman rule was bitterly resented.
In about 28 CE, huge crowds had flocked from Judea, Jerusalem, and the surrounding countryside to listen to the fiery preaching of John the Baptist beside the River Jordan. Clad in rough camel’s hair that recalled the garb of the prophet Elijah, John had urged them to undergo baptism as a token of repentance to hasten the coming of the Kingdom that God would establish to displace the wicked rulers of this age. This was no purely spiritual message.
Israel, ritual immersion had long signified not only a moral purification but also a social commitment to justice.
But John offered baptism not merely to an elite group but also to the common people. When these impoverished, indebted folk asked him what they should do, he told them to share what little they had with those who were even worse off—an ethic that would become central to Jesus’s movement:
The Spirit would be crucial to this early movement; it was not a separate divine being, of course, but a term used by Jews to denote the presence and power of God in human life.
the Spirit, the active presence of God, was evident now in Jesus’s miracles of healing. Everywhere he looked, he saw people pushed to the limit, abused, and crushed.
Jesus’s parables, we see a society in which rich and poor are separated by an impassable gulf; where people are desperate for loans, heavily indebted, and preyed upon by unscrupulous landlords; and
It is almost impossible to construct an accurate picture of the historical Jesus. Paul, writing twenty years after Jesus’s death, is the earliest extant Christian writer, but he tells us next to nothing about Jesus’s earthly life. The four canonical gospels were written much later—Mark in the late 60s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s and 90s, and John c. 100, all four deeply affected by the Jewish War (66–73 CE) that resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.
Scholars have noted that Matthew and Luke both based their accounts not only on Mark’s narrative but also on another text that has not survived, which they quoted almost verbatim. Scholars call this lost gospel “Q,” from the German quelle (“source”). We do not know exactly when it was written, but because it does not refer at all to the Jewish War, it was probably put together in Galilee sometime before 66 and may even have been committed to writing as early as the 50s, at the same time Paul was dictating his own letters to the scribe. Unlike the canonical gospels, Q did not tell the story of
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people set up an alternative society that approximated more closely to the principles of God recorded in Jewish law, they could hasten the moment when God intervened to change the human condition. In the Kingdom, God would be sole ruler,
To make the Kingdom a reality in the desperate conditions in which they lived, people must behave as if the Kingdom had already come.
It was a politically explosive message: In the Kingdom the first would be last and the last first.
The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer of the Kingdom, uttered by people who could only hope to have enough food for one day at a time, who were terrified of falling into debt and being hauled to the tribunal that would confiscate their small holdings:
Father—Holy be Your Name!—may your empire come! Give us each day our daily bread; And forgive us our debts, for we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into trial.
There was nothing novel in Jesus’s teaching. The ancient laws of Israel had urged exactly this kind of self-help and mutual aid.
Jesus dispatched his disciples—fishermen, despised tax collectors, and farmers—to implement this program in the Galilean villages. It was in effect a practical declaration of independence. His followers need not become serfs, laboring for the enrichment of others; they could simply take themselves out of the system and create an alternative economy, surviving by sharing whatever they had.29
When they arrived in a village, Jesus told them, they must knock on a door and wish the householder peace; if he was kind enough to admit them, they must stay in that house, working with their hosts and “sharing their food and drink: for the worker deserves his pay . . . When you enter a town and you are made welcome, eat the food provided for you, heal the sick there, and say: ‘The Kingdom of God has come upon you.’”30 The Kingdom became present whenever somebody had the compassion to admit a needy stranger to his home, when that stranger received food from another and then offered something
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They were thus achieving the selfless state of mind that others have sought in yoga, the aim of which is to extract the “I” from our thinking and behavior—the self-obsession that limits our humanity and holds us back from the transcendence known variously as Brahman, Dao, Nirvana, or God.
Roman Palestine, anyone who followed him had to be prepared for the ordeal of the cross.33 His teachings were difficult: Not everybody wanted to love his enemies, turn his back on his family, if necessary, and leave the dead to bury the dead.34
The crucifixion could have spelled the end of the Jesus movement. But some members of Jesus’s inner circle, who seem to have fled Jerusalem and returned to Galilee after his arrest, had startling visions in which they saw his broken, bleeding body raised to new life, standing, vindicated, at the right hand of God’s throne in the highest place in Heaven. This, they concluded, meant that God had designated Jesus as the Messhiah, the “anointed” descendant of King David who would establish God’s Kingdom and inaugurate a reign of justice.
In the past, prophets had usually been aristocrats attached to the royal court, but now the Spirit was inspiring humble members of society—fishermen, carpenters, artisans, and peasants—to inform their fellow Israelites that Jesus, the Messiah, would soon return to inaugurate God’s Kingdom.
who would restore Israel’s lost dignity. According to the Psalms of Solomon, the Anointed One would liberate the Jewish people, expose corrupt officials, drive all foreign sinners out of the land, and reign in Jerusalem, which would once again become a holy city, attracting nations “from the ends of the earth.”
This was, of course, potentially seditious; it would be even more subversive if the man revered as the Christ had been executed by a Roman governor.
Q mentions neither Jesus’s death nor his resurrection; perhaps the Q community could not bear to think about his crucifixion and either did not know about the resurrection appearances or disapproved of them.
For the Twelve, however, the death of Jesus was not something to be glossed over, because it had saving power. In Judaism, a martyr was said to have died for the “sins” of Israel. This did not mean the personal faults of individual Israelites but the failure of the people as a whole to observe the divine commandments and carry out their social responsibilities—fail...
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So after their life-changing visions, the Twelve left Galilee and returned to Jerusalem, where, according to the prophets, the Messiah would inaugurate the new era.
an urban setting that was quite alien to these uprooted peasants, they tried to reproduce the alternative communities Jesus had established in the villages of Galilee: The whole community of believers was united in heart and soul. Not one of them claimed any possessions as his own; everything was held in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and all were held in high esteem. There was never a needy person among them, because those who had property in land or houses would sell it, bring the proceeds of the sale and lay them at the feet of the
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The Twelve also began to preach to Greek-speaking immigrants from the diaspora, who had settled in Jerusalem to live a more authentic Jewish life. One of these diaspora Jews was Paul,
published my first book about Paul in 1983, at the very beginning of my career. The First Christian accompanied a six-part television series,
the beginning of this project, I had thought that this was my chance to show how Paul had damaged Christianity and ruined the original, loving teaching of Jesus. Paul is an apostle whom many love to hate; he has been castigated as a misogynist, a supporter of slavery, a virulent authoritarian, and bitterly hostile to Jews and Judaism. When I started to study his writings in a first-century context, however, it did not take me long to realize that this was an untenable view.
One of the first things I discovered was that Paul did not write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. Only seven of them are judged by scholars to be authentic: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans.
known as the Deutero-Pauline letters—were written in his name after his death, some as late as the second century.
These posthumous epistles tried to rein Paul in and make his radical teachings more acceptable to the Greco-Roman world. It was these later writers who insisted that women be subservient to their husbands and that slaves must obey their masters.
Interestingly some feminist theologians find this argument a cop-out; they seem to feel a strong need to blame Paul for the long tradition of Christian misogyny.
like Jesus, Paul was a lifelong opponent of the structural injustice of the Roman Empire.
In the premodern world, all civilizations without exception were based on a surplus of agricultural produce, which was forcibly extracted from the peasantry who were made to live at subsistence level. Thus for five thousand years, about 90 percent of the population was reduced to serfdom in order to support a small privileged class of aristocrats and their retainers.
Today Paul would probably have been a fierce critic of the global market we have created in which there is such a huge imbalance of wealth and power.
Second, all his life Paul struggled to transcend the barriers of ethnicity, class, and gender that, sadly, are still socially divisive in the twenty-first century.
Like Jesus, he would always insist that in the Kingdom of God, everybody must be allowed to eat at the same table.
Jesus continuously and provocatively ate dinner with “sinners,” touched those who were ritually impure and contagiously sick, crossed social boundaries, and consorted with people despised by the establishment.
But Acts is no longer regarded as historically reliable. Luke certainly had access to some authentic traditions, but as he could have been writing as late as the second century, he did not always understand them. He also had an entirely different agenda from Paul. Writing after the Jewish War against Rome, which had resulted in the tragic destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, he was anxious to show that the Jesus movement did not share the widespread Jewish hostility to Rome.
In this book, therefore, I rely mainly on Paul’s seven authentic letters. There is a great deal that will always remain obscure: We will never learn whether Paul, who made a point of emphasizing his single status, was ever married. We know nothing about his childhood or education, have no details about the five occasions when he was flogged in synagogues, his three shipwrecks (including a night and a day when he was adrift on the open sea), the time he was stoned, or his dangerous encounters with brigands.42
is not accurate to speak of early Christianity as a separate religious tradition. Until well into the second century, it was regarded both by outsiders and members of the Jesus movement as a sect within Judaism. Jesus’s followers would not begin to call themselves “Christians” until the end of the first century, and the term “Christianity” occurs only three times in the New Testament.
LUKE’S ACCOUNT of the descent of the Spirit on the Jewish festival of Pentecost may not be historically reliable but it certainly expresses the tumultuous character of the early Jesus movement.
Filled with the Spirit, they began to speak in different languages and rushed outside to address a crowd of Jewish pilgrims from all over the diaspora, each one of whom heard them speaking in his native tongue.
These men, he explained, were simply filled with the Spirit of God. This was how the prophet Joel had described the Last Days, which had been set in motion by Jesus, a man revealed to Israel by miracles, portents, and signs.
David’s prophecy in the psalm that begins: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’”2 Israel must now acknowledge the crucified Jesus as Lord and Messiah; if people repented, were baptized, and separated themselves from “this crooked age,” they too would receive the Spirit and share Jesus’s victory.3
From a very early date they meditated on Psalm 110, which Peter quoted to the crowd. In ancient Israel, this had been sung during the coronation ceremony in the temple, when the newly anointed king, a descendant of David, had been elevated to near-divine status and made a member of the Divine Council of heavenly beings. Another psalm proclaimed that at his coronation the king had been adopted by Yahweh: “You are my son, today I have become your father.”4
Again, the title “son of man” brought to mind the vision of the prophet Daniel, who had seen a mysterious figure “like a son of man” coming to the aid of Israel on the clouds of Heaven: “On him was conferred sovereignty, glory, and kingship, and men of all peoples, languages, and nations became his servants.”
The Pentecost story suggests that the gospel had an immediate appeal for Greek-speaking Jews from the diaspora, many of whom joined the community of Jesus’s followers. First-century Jerusalem was a cosmopolitan city. Devout Jews came from all over the world to worship in the temple, though they tended to form their own synagogues where they could pray in Greek rather than in Hebrew or the Aramaic dialect used in Judea.8 Some
