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March 4 - March 19, 2018
Jesus had been born during the reign of the emperor Augustus (r. 31 BCE–14 CE), who had brought peace to a war-weary world by defeating rival Roman warlords and declaring himself sole ruler of the Roman Empire.
But the Pax Romana was enforced pitilessly by an army that was the most efficient killing machine the world had yet seen; the slightest resistance met with wholesale slaughter.
One of the most terrible things about crucifixion was that the victim was denied a decent burial, a disgrace that was insupportable in the ancient world in a way that is difficult for modern people to appreciate. The victim was usually left alive to be torn apart by carrion crows.
But from a very early date, Jesus’s followers were convinced that Jesus had been buried in a respectable tomb, and, later, the authors of the four gospels developed an elaborate story to explain how his disciples had persuaded the Roman authorities to permit this.5 This was a crucial element in the earliest Christian tradition.6
Jesus’s atrocious death would be central to the religious and political vision of Saul of Tarsus, the first extant Christian author.
Jesus’s demonstration in the temple was not, as is often assumed, a plea for a more spiritual form of worship. As he rampaged through the money changers’ stalls, he quoted the Hebrew prophets who had harsh words for those who were punctilious in their devotions but ignored the plight of the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. For nearly five hundred years, Judea had been ruled by one empire after another, and the temple, the holiest place in the Jewish world, had become an instrument of imperial control.
At Qumran, beside the Dead Sea, Jewish sectarians were so disgusted with this corruption of their most sacred institutions that they had withdrawn from mainstream society, convinced that God would soon destroy the temple and replace it with a purified shrine not made by human hands.
In Israel, ritual immersion had long signified not only a moral purification but also a social commitment to justice. “Your hands are covered with blood,” the prophet Isaiah had told the ruling class of Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. “Wash, make yourselves clean. Take your wrongdoing out of my sight. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.”10
After their baptism, all Jesus’s followers would later cry aloud that they too had become children of God and members of a community where everybody lived as equals. 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.
Crowds thronged around him, just as they had come to John, to hear his startling message: “The Kingdom of God has already arrived.”15 Its coming was not scheduled in a remote future; the Spirit, the active presence of God, was evident now in Jesus’s miracles of healing.
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. Living in one of the most violent periods of Jewish history, so terrible that it seemed like the End of Days, the evangelists struggled to make sense of the hideous death toll, the massive devastation, and the widespread suffering and bereavement.
Unlike the canonical gospels, Q did not tell the story of Jesus’s life but was simply a collection of his sayings. In Q, therefore, we have a source that may bring us closer to what Jesus told the troubled people of Galilee.
At the heart of this proto-gospel is the Kingdom of God.20 This was not a fiery apocalypse descending from on high but essentially a revolution in community relations.
To make the Kingdom a reality in the desperate conditions in which they lived, people must behave as if the Kingdom had already come.
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:
There was nothing novel in Jesus’s teaching. The ancient laws of Israel had urged exactly this kind of self-help and mutual aid.
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
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 in return.
This interdependence and mutual sharing was both a Way of Salvation and a Way of Survival.31
All the great spiritual traditions have insisted that what holds us back from enlightenment is selfishness and egotism; they have also said that a practical concern for everybody (not simply those who belong to your own class or those you find congenial) was the test of true spirituality.
In ancient times, the Hebrew term messhiah had applied to anyone—a king, priest, or prophet—who had been doused with oil in a ceremony that appointed him to a divinely ordained task. But when Israel came under imperial rule, the title began to acquire a wholly new significance, as people looked forward to a different kind of king, a son of David endowed with righteousness and understanding, 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.”38
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. They continued their mission but seem to have disappeared during the mayhem of the Jewish War.
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—failings that God had punished with political catastrophe.
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. In fact, as I followed in his footsteps during the filming, I grew not only to admire but also to feel a strong affinity with this difficult, brilliant, and vulnerable man.
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.
Hating Paul seems more important than a just assessment of his work. In fact, as recent research has made clear, Paul took a radical stance on such issues in a way that makes him extremely relevant today. First, scholars such as Richard A. Horsley, Dieter Georgi, and Neil Elliott have shown that, like Jesus, Paul was a lifelong opponent of the structural injustice of the Roman Empire.
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.
His famous experience on the road to Damascus was in large part a discovery that the laws that separated Jews from gentiles—laws that he had championed and promoted all his life—had been abrogated by God. Like Jesus, he would always insist that in the Kingdom of God, everybody must be allowed to eat at the same table.
In The First Christian, I relied heavily on the Acts of the Apostles, traditionally believed to have been written by St. Luke, the third evangelist. 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
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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.
And despite the legends that have accrued over the centuries, we do not know in any detail how or when he died.
Note: It 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.
Overnight Jesus, the man, had been forever transformed. After seeing him standing at God’s right hand, his disciples had immediately begun to search the scriptures to help them understand what God had done for him.
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.
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.”
With truly remarkable speed, the titles “lord” (kyrios in Greek), “son of man,” and “son of God” were attributed to Jesus, the Messiah, the Christos, and used routinely by all New Testament authors.
The emperors respected the antiquity and morality of Israelite religion and had granted Jewish communities a degree of autonomy in the Greco-Roman cities.
To counter this, some Greek-speaking Jews had developed a militant diaspora consciousness that they called ioudaismos, a defiant assertion of ancestral tradition combined with a determination to preserve a distinctly Jewish identity and forestall any political threat to their community—resorting to violence, if necessary.
Reading between the lines of Luke’s narrative, we can see that the Seven may have been leaders of a separate “Hellene” congregation in the Jesus movement who conducted their own preaching missions and were already reaching out to the gentile world.
In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther would claim that Paul had agonized about his inability to fulfill all the “works of the law,” but there is no sign of this in Paul’s letters.
Where some Jews, distressed by the political crises of Roman occupation and excessive taxation, either turned to charismatic teachers like John the Baptist or engaged in other forms of nonviolent protest, others believed that these disasters were God’s punishment for their failure to observe the Torah. They concluded that instead of defying the Roman authorities and endangering the Jewish community, it was better to devote themselves to observing the commandments stringently, trusting that God would ultimately reward their fidelity. Only thus could they hasten the Messianic Age in which God
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He seems, however, to have had no problem with the Twelve and the Judean followers of Jesus, who were more loyal to ancestral tradition. According to Luke, far from denouncing the cult, like Stephen, they worshipped together every day in the temple.22 Indeed, the revered Pharisee Gamaliel, whose views were more liberal than Paul’s, is said to have advised the Sanhedrin to leave the Jesus movement alone: If it was of human origin, it would break up of its own accord like other recent protest groups.
But above all, Paul was scandalized by the outrageous idea of a crucified Messiah.24 How could a convicted criminal possibly restore the dignity and liberty of Israel?
The Torah was adamant that such a man was hopelessly polluted: “If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and you hang him on a gibbet, his body must not remain on the tree overnight; you must bury him the same day, for the one who has been hanged is accursed of God, and you must not defile the land that Yahweh your God has given you.”
To imagine that these desecrated remains had been raised to the right hand of God was abhorrent, unthinkable, and blasphemous.
As Luke explained, this was “a time of persecution for the congregation in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered over the country district of Judea and Samaria.”
Thirty years later, at the beginning of the Jewish War against Rome, all the Jews of Damascus would be rounded up on a blanket charge of sedition, herded into the gymnasium, and slaughtered within an hour.
