Beginnings Part 4

Beginnings, Part 4 : Bishop +Roger continues his latest series of essays exploring the origin of early Christianity from the time of the Apostles, throught the Post Apostolic period and beyond. If you have any comments on this essay, pro or anti I would love to hear from you . Ring me on 01225702436 or email tyfurog@aol.com

Paul, like Jesus, was Jewish – fiercely so if we are to believe the stories of his persecution of the followers of ‘The Way’. Although it is said that we have almost more information about Paul than we have about Jesus it is still very little. Most of it comes from comments or hints dropped in his letters, and the rest comes from ’Luke’s’ Acts of the Apostles much of which is about Paul’s activities in expanding the Church, but some of which disagrees with Paul’s own statements in his letters.

It seems likely that Paul wrote most of the letters attributed to him, though some are now considered to be written under his name by others who sought to give their writing his authority. (The question of attribution and authority of biblical writings is a major subject in itself, and may be considered in future essays) These are 1&2 Tim, Titus, Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians, though the academicians are still in dispute about some of these.

However, of the twentyseven New Testament books, thirteen claim to be of Paul’s authorship. If we discount the disputed epistles we still have seven letters, all of which were written to churches founded by Paul, mainly to explain some matter of controversy or dispute, so we can extrapolate the basis of Paul’s thought (which commentators have been doing in vast and wearying numbers ever since they were written!).

Paul has very little to say about the life and teaching of Jesus. He is quite certain that he has had a personal and true revelation from the resurrected Jesus, and that his interpretations of Jesus’ mission, based on this revelation, is more true and correct than any other, even if made by people like the Twelve who had actually lived with Jesus. So far as we know Paul never met Jesus in His lifetime.

Paul is quite clear that the whole point of Jesus’ existence in this world was to act as a redeemer, i.e. to free people from the effects of their sins to make them ‘right ‘ with God, and that he did this by accepting his crucifixion, and even more importantly by rising from the dead. Indeed Paul goes so far as to assert that if Jesus has not risen then we have nothing to hope for (1Cor; 15-19).

This is clearly an extrapolation from the Jewish practice of scapegoating where a goat was symbolically caused to take on the sins of the people and then sent into the desert to die, taking the demerits of those sins with it.

Paul also saw that for the faith to flourish, and to be true to his interpretation, it must go out from the small Jewish sect that it was into the wider world. For this to happen the Law, the rule of Jewish life and relationship with God, would have to be altered. In fact, said Paul, it has been altered by the rising of the anointed one (Christ in anglicized Greek), and therefore anyone can join without being burdened by the more than six hundred rules of the Law, of which male circumcision and kosher eating were the greatest stumbling blocks to the Gentiles.

This was too much for the Jerusalem Church (and it also disagreed with a reported saying of Jesus, which later appeared at Matt5: 18) and there were great quarrels with Paul who would not budge from what he saw as the truth of his private revelation from the risen Lord.

Life became hard for Paul. The Jews and the Jewish faction in nascent Christianity would have nothing to do with him and often delated him to the authorities as a disturber of the peace, for which he sometimes received severe punishments, though his Roman citizenship protected him to some extent, and he was never loath to call on it.

Eventually it enabled him to have his case heard in Rome by the Emperor, where he was kept under house arrest and eventually, it is believed, was executed, how or when or for what reason is not recorded.

In setting up his churches Paul apparently called on what he had learned from the Christians of Damascus, and possibly those of the Jewish diaspora in Nabatea. There is very little information about how the churches functioned at this early time, but it seems that there was a meal on the day after Shabbat, i.e. Sunday, at the end of which some bread and wine were distributed in commemoration of Jesus’ last supper ( It is important to remember that there were no written gospels at this time. Paul’s letters are the earliest ‘Christian’ writings that we have, the first written around 50CE).

The earliest quote of the consecration prayers are in 1Cor 11; 24, which, in the previous verse, Paul clearly states was given to him in his vision. This reported vision was then offered as historic when quoted in the gospels which were written later. We do not know if the wording used was in common use at the agape feast of loving brother/sisterhood on Sundays before Paul wrote of it.

The disturbing question here is that Paul was a Jew, with all the Jewish feelings about blood (the most taboo subject since the Law was given), and yet he happily wrote more than once of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. Even today I have had good Christians tell me that they worry that this is too much like cannibalism. However, at the time that Paul was writing, the eating of the flesh and blood of sacrifice was common in the Mystery cults which abounded in the Greek influenced circum Mediterranean lands, though the flesh and blood were often substituted with bread and wine, and so in what came to be known in the Romano-Greek world as the Christian mysteries (a term still used at the beginning of the Roman Mass) this would not have been in any way anathema to the gentiles to whom Paul was preaching.

By the end of the first century of Christianity a book called The Didache or The Teaching of the Apostles was widely in circulation. Although still very Jewish in feel this book gave information about church functions, who was entitled to do them and how, and information about baptisms etcetera. By this time also the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were available as were many other gospels, but there was no New Testament yet available and each church took and read the gospels which appealed to them, and some of the epistles as well no doubt.

We will consider further developments in the next essay

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