Part One:

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

Around the year 107, the Christian bishop of Antioch made a last, doleful journey. Under military escort Ignatius travelled by land from Antioch to Rome, where in its brutal arena he was to die a martyr's death. Along the way he wrote to several Christian communities.

To the Trallians he said: "Close your ears then if anyone preaches to you without speaking of Jesus Christ. Christ was of David's line. He was the son of Mary; he was really born, ate and drank, was really persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was really crucified....He was also truly raised from the dead."

But there is something very curious about the occurrence of such ideas in Ignatius' letters. Let's leave the Gospels aside for now, except to say that there is no good reason to date any of them before the late first century, and look at the remaining corpus of surviving Christian writings to Ignatius' time.

The above chart includes the genuine letters of Paul, written in the 50s; letters written later in the first century under his name: Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians; and the three Pastorals (1 & 2 Timothy & Titus) dated to the second century; other New Testament epistles: James, Hebrews, Jude, 1 & 2 Peter, 1, 2 & 3 John; and Revelation. Also included are non-canonical writings: 1 Clement, the Didache (later called The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), the letters of Ignatius, and the Epistle of Barnabas. The dates of many of these documents, all originally written in Greek, are difficult to fix and are here only approximate.

Several times in his letters Ignatius stresses his belief in Jesus as the son of Mary, as a man who had lived at the time of Herod, who had suffered and died under Pontius Pilate. Every Christian would agree that these are essential elements of the Gospel story, along with the portrayal of Jesus as an ethical teacher, as a worker of miracles, an apocalyptic preacher of the coming Kingdom of God. And yet when we step outside those Gospels into the much more rarefied atmosphere of the first century epistles, we encounter a huge puzzle.

Before Ignatius, not a single reference to Pontius Pilate, Jesus' executioner, is to be found. Ignatius is also the first to mention Mary; Joseph, Jesus' father, nowhere appears. The earliest reference to Jesus as any kind of a teacher comes in 1 Clement, just before Ignatius, who himself seems curiously unaware of any of Jesus' teachings. To find the first indication of Jesus as a miracle worker, we must move beyond Ignatius to the Epistle of Barnabas. Other notable elements of the Gospel story are equally hard to find.

This strange silence on the Gospel Jesus which pervades almost a century of Christian correspondence cries out for explanation. It cannot be dismissed as some inconsequential quirk, or by the blithe observation made by New Testament scholarship that early Christian writers "show no interest" in the earthly life of Jesus. Something is going on here. In Part One, we are going to take a close look at this "Conspiracy of Silence" to which Paul and every other Christian writer of the first century seems to be a party.

Christianity was allegedly born within Judaism, whose basic theological tenet was: God is One. The ultimate blasphemy for a Jew would have been to associate any man with God. Yet what did those first Christians do? They seemingly took someone regarded as a crucified criminal and turned him into the Son of God and Savior of the world. They gave him titles and roles formerly reserved for God alone. They made him pre-existent: sharing divinity with God in heaven before the world was made. Nor was this something that evolved over time. All this highly spiritual and mythological thinking is the very earliest expression we find about Jesus.

And yet there is a resounding silence in Paul and the other first century writers. We might call it "The Missing Equation." Nowhere does anyone state that this Son of God and Savior, this cosmic Christ they are all talking about, was the man Jesus of Nazareth, recently put to death in Judea. Nowhere is there any defence of this outlandish, blasphemous proposition, the first necessary element (presumably) in the Christian message: that a recent man was God.

Such a defence would have been required even for gentile listeners. The Greeks and Romans had their own religious philosophies (to be looked at in greater detail in Part Two), which included the idea of a divine Son, of an intermediary between God and the world, but such spiritual concepts had never been equated with a human being.

By contrast, look at the Acts of the Apostles, which a number of critical scholars (John Knox, J. T. Townsend, Burton Mack, J. C. O'Neill) judge was written well into the second century. (See Reader Feedback Set 17.) In chapter 2, Peter is represented as speaking to the Jews like this: "Men of Israel, hear my words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God..." And he goes on to preach about this Jesus, whom "God has made both Lord and Christ."

Here is the equation missing in the first century epistles. It starts with the human Jesus and declares him to have been divine or made divine. Paul and other early writers, however, seem to speak solely of a divine Christ. He is the starting point, a kind of given, and is never identified with a recent human being. Spiritual beliefs are stated about this divine Christ and Son of God. Paul believes in a Son of God, not that anyone was the Son of God.

1 Corinthians 8:6, for example, says: "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom all being comes; and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came to be and we through him." In the same letter, Paul recites the gospel he preached (15:3-4): "That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures." Why would the equation of this divine Savior with the recent Jesus of Nazareth not be a necessary and natural part of at least some of the faith declarations or even simple arguments and discussions we find in all the first century epistles? It is notably missing in 1 Corinthians 1:18f, where Paul is defending God's wisdom and the apparent folly of Christian doctrine, yet he feels no necessity to include a defence of the folly that a human being has been elevated to divinity. I will leave the reader to peruse other passages, such as Philippians 2:6-11, Colossians 1:15-20, the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and so on, and to ask where is the recent Jesus of Nazareth in all this, the man who had supposedly walked the very earth which these writers too had trod, in many cases within their own lifetimes.

Consider another great silence: on the teachings of Jesus. The first century epistles regularly give moral maxims, sayings, admonitions, which in the Gospels are spoken by Jesus, without ever attributing them to him. The well-known "Love Your Neighbor," originally from Leviticus, is quoted in James, the Didache, and three times in Paul, yet none of them points out that Jesus had made this a centerpiece of his own teaching. Both Paul (1 Thessalonians 4:9) and the writer of 1 John even attribute such love commands to God, not Jesus!

When Hebrews talks of the "voice" of Christ today (1:2f, 2:11, 3:7, 10:5), why is it all from the Old Testament? When Paul, in Romans 8:26, says that "we do not know how we are to pray," does this mean he is unaware that Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer to his disciples? When the writer of 1 Peter urges, "do not repay wrong with wrong, but retaliate with blessing," has he forgotten Jesus' "turn the other cheek"? Romans 12 and 13 is a litany of Christian ethics, as is the Epistle of James and parts of the "Two Ways" instruction in the Didache and Epistle of Barnabas; but though many of these precepts correspond to Jesus' Gospel teachings, not a single glance is made in his direction. Such examples could be multiplied by the dozen.

In passing, it must be noted that those "words of the Lord" which Paul puts forward as guides to certain practices in his Christian communities (1 Corinthians 7:10 and 9:14) are not from any record of earthly pronouncements by Jesus. It is a recognized feature of the early Christian movement that charismatic preachers like Paul believed themselves to be in direct communication with the spiritual Christ in heaven, receiving from him instruction and inspiration. (See R. Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, p.127; Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence, p.87, n.7; Werner Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel, p.206.)

Christianity and certain Jewish sects believed that the end of the world and the establishment of God's Kingdom was at hand. Paul tells his readers: "the time we live in will not last long," and "you know the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night." But can Paul be truly unaware that Jesus himself had made almost identical apocalyptic predictions, as recorded in passages like Mark 13:30 and Matthew 24:42? He shows no sign of it. He and others seem similarly ignorant of Jesus' stance in regard to the cleanness of foods, on the question of keeping the whole of the Jewish Law, on the issue of preaching to the gentiles, even in situations where they are engaged in bitter debate over such issues.

Nor is there any reference in the epistles to Jesus as the Son of Man, despite the fact that the Gospels are full of this favorite self-designation of Jesus. This apocalyptic figure, taken from the Book of Daniel (7:13), appears in a cluster of Christian and Jewish sectarian documents in the latter first century, including the Gospels, where Jesus declares himself to be the one who will arrive at the End-time on the clouds of heaven to judge the world and establish the Kingdom. It seems inconceivable that Paul, with all his preoccupation about the imminent End (see 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18, for example) would either be unaware of Jesus' declared role as the Son of Man, or choose to ignore it.

But the silence extends beyond individual pronouncements to Jesus' ministry as a whole, and it is nowhere more startling than in Romans 10. Paul is anxious to show that the Jews have no excuse for failing to believe in Christ and gaining salvation, for they have heard the good news about him from appointed messengers like Paul himself. And he contrasts the unresponsive Jews with the gentiles who welcomed it. But surely Paul has left out the glaringly obvious. For the Jews—or at least some of them—had supposedly rejected that message from the very lips of Jesus himself, whereas the gentiles had believed second-hand. In verse 18 Paul asks dramatically: "But can it be they never heard it (i.e., the message)?" How could he fail to highlight his countrymen's spurning of Jesus' very own person? Yet all he refers to are apostles like himself who have "preached to the ends of the earth."

Then in Romans 11, Paul goes on to compound this silence by describing the extent of Israel's rejection, wherein he quotes Elijah's words from 1 Kings about the Jews' alleged habit (a largely unfounded myth) of killing their own prophets. Yet Paul fails to add to this record the culminating atrocity of the killing of the Son of God himself. (For 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, see Part Two.)

This is a recurring feature of Paul's letters: he totally ignores Jesus' recent career and places the focus of revelation and salvation entirely upon the missionary movement of which he is the prominent member (as he sees it). The pseudo-Pauline letters do this, too.

Read passages like Romans 16:25-27, Colossians 1:25-27, Ephesians 3:5-10 and ask yourself where is Jesus' role in disclosing God's long-hidden secret and plan for salvation? Why, in 2 Corinthians 5:18, is it Paul who has been given the ministry of reconciliation between man and God, and not Jesus in his ministry? (The cryptic and ubiquitous little phrase "in / through Christ" which Paul often inserts in passages like this hardly encompasses such a meaning, and I will be talking about what it does mean in Part Two.)

Paul's view of the present period leading up to the end of the world seems to take no account of the recent activity of Jesus on earth. He gives us no "interregnum," no period between Christ's death and resurrection, and his future Coming. Passages in Romans 8 (18-25) and 13 (11-12), and especially 2 Corinthians 6:2 ("Now [referring to his own work] has the day of deliverance dawned"), envision no impingement of Jesus' recent career on the progression from the old age to the new; rather, it is Paul's own present activity which is an integral part of this process. Nor does he ever address the question which would have reflected popular expectation: Why did the actual coming of the Messiah not in itself produce the arrival of the Kingdom? In the epistles, Christ's anticipated Coming at the End-time is never spoken of as a "return" or second Coming; the impression conveyed is that this will be his first appearance in person on earth. (For Hebrews 9:28, see Epilogue of Supplementary Article No. 9: A Sacrifice in Heaven.)

No first century epistle mentions that Jesus performed miracles. In some cases the silence is striking. Both Colossians and Ephesians view Jesus as the Savior whose death has rescued mankind from the demonic powers who were believed to pervade the world, causing sin, disease and misfortune. But not even in these letters is there any mention of the healing miracles that the Gospels are full of, those exorcisms which would have shown that Jesus had conquered such demons even while he was on earth.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is anxious to convince his readers that humans can be resurrected from the dead. Why then does he not point to any traditions that Jesus himself had raised several people from the dead? Where is Lazarus?

In several letters Paul deals with accusations by certain unnamed rivals that he is not a legitimate apostle. Even Peter and James dispute his authority to do certain things. Can we believe that in such situations no one would ever have used the argument that Paul had not been an actual follower of Jesus, whereas others had? Paul never discusses the point. In fact, he claims (1 Cor. 9:1 and 15:8) that he has "seen" the Lord, just as Peter and everyone else have. This is an obvious reference to visions, one of the standard modes of religious revelation in this period. And as Paul's "seeing" of the Lord is acknowledged to have been a visionary one, his comparison of himself with the other apostles suggests that their contact with Jesus was of the same nature: through visions.

And how could Paul, in Galatians 2:6, dismiss with such disdain those who had been the very followers of Jesus himself on earth? But in granting them no special status he is not alone. The word "disciple(s)" does not appear in the epistles, and concept of "apostle" in early Christian writings is a broad one, meaning simply a preacher of the message (i.e., the "gospel") about the Christ. It never applies to a select group of Twelve who supposedly possessed special authority arising from their apostleship to Jesus while he was on earth. (It is far from clear what "the Twelve" in 1 Corinthians 15:5 refers to, since Paul lists Peter and "the apostles" separately. The term appears nowhere else in the epistles.)

Nor is there any concept of apostolic tradition in the first century writers, no idea of teachings or authority passed on in a chain going back to the original Apostles and Jesus himself. Instead, everything is from the Spirit, meaning direct revelation from God, with each group claiming that the Spirit they have received is the genuine one and reflects the true gospel. This is the basis of Paul's claim against his rivals in 2 Corinthians 11:4. The writer of 1 John, in his declaration (4:1f) that the Son of God has come in the flesh, draws on no apostolic tradition, on no historical record, but must claim validity for his own Spirit, as opposed to the Satan-inspired false spirit of the dissidents. In chapter 5, he declares that it is God's testimony through the Spirit which produces faith in the Son, not several decades of Christian preaching going back to Jesus himself. How could this writer in the community of John, which later produced the Fourth Gospel, say (5:11) that it is God who has revealed eternal life, and ignore all those memorable sayings of Jesus like "I am the resurrection and the life" which that Gospel so richly records?

As for Jesus' great appointment of Peter as the "rock" upon which his church is to be built, no one in the first century (including the writers of 1 and 2 Peter) ever quotes it or uses it in the frequent debates over authority.

The agency of all recent activity seems to be God, not Jesus. Paul speaks of "the gospel of God," "God's message". It is God appealing and calling to the Christian believer. 2 Corinthians 5:18 tells us that "from first to last this has been the work of God" (New English Bible translation). In Romans 1:19 the void is startling. Paul declares: "All that may be known of God by men...God himself has disclosed to them." Did Jesus not disclose God, were God's attributes not visible in Jesus? How could any Christian—as so many do—express himself in this fashion?

A few secondary omissions also deserve mention. No first century epistle, even when discussing Christian baptism, ever mentions either Jesus' own baptism or the figure of John the Baptist. Paul has much to say about the meaning of baptism (as in Romans 1:1-6), but he never compares its elements with Jesus' own experience by the Jordan. 1 Clement 17:1 speaks of those who heralded the Messiah's coming, but includes only Elijah, Elisha and Ezekiel. The arch-betrayer Judas never appears, not even in a passage like Hebrews 12:15 where the author, in cautioning against the poisonous member in the community's midst, offers the figure of Esau as an example, who "sold his inheritance for a single meal." Surely selling the Son of God for thirty pieces of silver would have been a far more dramatic comparison!

Hebrews also contains (9:20f) a stunning silence on Jesus' establishment of the Christian Eucharist. The writer is comparing the old covenant with the new, but not even the quoted words of Moses at the former's inauguration: "this is the blood of the covenant which God has enjoined upon you," can entice him to mention that Jesus had established the new covenant at a Last Supper, using almost identical words, as Mark 14:24 and parallels record. He goes further in chapter 13 when he adamantly declares that Christians do not eat a sacrificial meal. The Didache 9 presents a eucharist which is solely a thanksgiving meal to God, with no sacramental significance and no establishment by Jesus.

This leaves us with 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Paul's declaration about Jesus' words at what he calls the Lord's Supper. I will address this in Part Two, as well as a few spots in various epistles which seem to come ambiguously close to referring to a life for Christ.

I have done little more than scratch the surface of this "Conspiracy of Silence" found in the first century epistles. But I'd like to conclude by looking at one glaring omission which no one, to my knowledge, has yet remarked on.

Where are the holy places?

In all the Christian writers of the first century, in all the devotion they display about Christ and the new faith, not one of them expresses the slightest desire to see the birthplace of Jesus, to visit Nazareth his home town, the sites of his preaching, the upper room where he held his Last Supper, the tomb: where he was buried and rose from the dead. These places are never mentioned. Most of all, there is not a hint of pilgrimage to Calvary itself, where humanity's salvation was consummated. How could such a place not have been turned into a shrine?

Even Paul, this man so emotional, so full of insecurities, who declares (Philippians 3:10) that "all I care for is to know Christ, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings," even he seems immune to the lure of such places. Three years were to pass following his conversion before he made even a short visit to Jerusalem. And this—so he tells us in Galatians—was merely to "get to know" Peter; he was not to return there for another 14 years.

Is it conceivable that Paul would not have wanted to run to the hill of Calvary, to prostrate himself on the sacred ground that bore the blood of his slain Lord? Surely he would have shared such an intense emotional experience with his readers. Would he not have been drawn to the Gethsemane garden, where Jesus was reported to have passed through the horror and the self-doubts that Paul himself had known? Would he not have gloried in standing before the empty tomb, the guarantee of his own resurrection? Is there indeed, in this wide land so recently filled with the presence of the Son of God, any holy place at all, any spot of ground where that presence still lingers, hallowed by the step, touch or word of Jesus of Nazareth? Neither Paul nor any other first century letter writer breathes a whisper of any such thing.

Nor do they breathe a word about relics associated with Jesus. Where are his clothes, the things he used in everyday life, the things he touched? Can we believe that items associated with him in his life on earth would not have been preserved, valued, clamored for among believers, just as things like this were produced and prized all through the Middle Ages? Why is it only in the fourth century that pieces of the "true cross" begin to surface?

New Testament scholars are quick to maintain that the "argument from silence" is an invalid one, but it surely becomes powerful when the silence is so pervasive, so perplexing. Why would writer after writer fail consistently to mention the very man who was the founder of their faith, the teacher of their ethics, the incarnation of the divine Christ they worshiped and looked to for salvation? Why would every Christian writer, in the highly polemical atmosphere during those early decades of the spread of the faith, fail to avail himself of the support for his position offered by the very words and deeds of the Son of God himself while he was on earth? What could possibly explain this puzzling, maddening, universal silence?

That question I will try to answer in Part Two: "Who Was Christ Jesus?"

Part Two:

WHO WAS CHRIST JESUS?

In Part One, I probed the mysterious silence about Jesus of Nazareth which lies at the heart of earliest Christianity. Neither his miracles nor his apocalyptic preaching, not the places or details of his birth, ministry or death, not his parents, his prosecutor, his herald, his betrayer, are ever mentioned by the first century Christian letter writers, and the ethical teachings which resemble his as recorded in the Gospels are never attributed to him. I called it, ironically, "A Conspiracy of Silence."

But if these silences mean anything (and it is impossible to accept the common scholarly rationalization that they reflect a universal "lack of interest" in the earthly life of Jesus by the first three generations of the Christian movement), then they ought to present their own integral picture. Can we derive from them a coherent, uniform concept of what earliest Christianity really was and what it believed in? Who was Paul's "Christ Jesus" if he was not the Jesus of Nazareth of the later Gospels?

First, we must understand the era to understand its ideas. After Alexander the Great conquered half the known earth in the late 4th century BCE, Greek language and culture (called Hellenism) inundated the whole eastern Mediterranean world; even the Jews, who always resisted assimilation, were not immune to its influence. Alexander's empire soon fragmented into warring mini-empires and eventually Rome rolled east and imposed its own absolute rule.

It was a troubled, often pessimistic time. Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists and others offered new moral and intellectual ways of coping with life and the unpredictable world. Understanding the ultimate Deity and establishing personal ethics were central concerns of all these movements. Wandering philosophers became a kind of popular clergy, frequenting the marketplace and people's homes. Healing gods, Oriental mysticism, a whole paraphernalia of magic and astrology were added to the pot to cope with another dimension to the world's distress: the vast panoply of unseen spirits and demons and forces of fate which were now believed to pervade the very atmosphere men and women moved in, harassing and crippling their lives. The buzzword was personal "salvation." And for the growing number who believed it could not be achieved in the world, it became salvation from the world. Redeeming the individual grew into a Hellenistic industry.

Many looked upon the Jews as providing a high moral and monotheistic standard, and gentiles flocked to Judaism in varying degrees of conversion. But even here there were strong currents of pessimism. For centuries the Jews as a nation had looked for salvation from a long succession of conquerors, until many had become convinced that only violent divine intervention would bring about the establishment of God's Kingdom and their own destined elevation to dominion over the nations of the earth. Such views were held by a mosaic of sectarian groups, each regarding itself as an elect, which flourished on the fringes of "mainstream" Judaism (Temple and Pharisees). Christianity in its early manifestations belonged to this melange of sects, comprised of a mix of gentiles and Jews, driven by an intense apocalyptic expectation of the coming end or transformation of the world.

Among both Jew and pagan there was a slide away from rationalism and a turning to personal revelation as the only source for knowledge about God and the ways to salvation. Mysticism, visionary inspiration, marvellous spiritual practices, became the seedbed of new faiths and sects. And no one possessed a richer hothouse for all this than the Jews, in their unparalleled collection of sacred writings, from whose pages could be lifted newly-perceived truths about God and ultimate realities.

Onto such a stage in the middle decades of the first century, into what one scholar has called "a seething mass of sects and salvation cults" (John Dillon, The Middle Platonists, p.396) stepped the apostles of a new movement. In Galatians 1:16 Paul says: "God chose to reveal his Son in me, and through me to preach him to the gentiles." Paul claims he is the instrument of God's revelation. He preaches the Son, the newly-disclosed means of salvation offered to Jew and gentile alike. But is this Son a recent historical man? Has he been revealed to the world through his own life and ministry? No, for as we saw in Part One, neither Paul nor any other early Christian letter writer presents us with such an idea.

Rather, the Son is a spiritual concept, just as God himself is, and every other deity of the day. None of them are founded on historical figures. The existence of this divine Son has hitherto been unknown; he has been a secret, a "mystery" hidden with God in heaven (e.g., Romans 16:25-27, Colossians 2:2). Information about this Son has been imbedded in scripture. Only in this final age has God himself (through his Spirit) inspired apostles like Paul to learn—from scripture and visionary experiences—about his Son and what he had done for humanity's salvation. And this Son was soon to arrive from heaven, at the imminent end of the present world.

If we remove Gospel associations from our minds, we find that this is exactly what Paul and the others are telling us. God is revealing Christ (as in the Galatians quote above), apostles inspired by God's Spirit are preaching him, believers are responding through faith. Ephesians 3:4-5 shows us the main elements of the new drama. "The mystery about Christ, which in former generations was not revealed to men [not even by Jesus himself, apparently], is now disclosed to dedicated apostles and prophets through the Spirit [by divine revelation]." God's Spirit, the divine power which inspires men like Paul, is the engine of the new revelation. All knowledge comes through this Spirit, with no suggestion that anything has been received from an historical Jesus and his ministry. (Part One dealt with Paul's few "words of the Lord", perceived communications from the spiritual Christ in heaven.)

The words of the first century writers never speak of Jesus' arrival or life on earth. Rather, they speak of his revelation, of his manifestation by God. 1 Peter 1:20 says: "Predestined from the foundation of the world, (Christ) was manifested for your sake in these last times." Here the writer uses the Greek word "phaneroo", meaning to manifest or reveal. Romans 3:25 says: "God set him forth (Christ Jesus) as a means of atonement by his blood, effective through faith." Here Paul uses a verb which, in this context, means "to declare publicly," reveal to public light. God is revealing Christ and the atonement he has made available to those who believe. Other passages, like Romans 16:25-27, Colossians 1:26 and 2:2, Titus 1:2-3, contain similar statements about the current unveiling of long-hidden divine secrets, and the careful eye that reads them can see that no room has been made for any recent life and work of Jesus.

It is God and scripture which Paul regards as the source of his inspiration and knowledge. Look at Romans 1:1-4. Paul has been called into the service of preaching the gospel. And note how this gospel is described. First it was announced beforehand in scripture by God's prophets. It is the gospel, Paul's message about the Christ, that has been announced in scripture, not Christ's life itself. Second, that gospel is not any that Jesus preached; rather, it is God's gospel, and it is about his Son. Again, all this is the language of revelation. Data like that in verses 3 and 4 of Romans 1 (to be addressed later) are part of what is being revealed, and this information has been found in scripture, which God's Spirit has inspired men like Paul to read in a new, "correct" way. Compare 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, which points squarely to scripture as the source of Paul's doctrines about the Christ. (The phrase "according to the scriptures," while traditionally interpreted as meaning 'in fulfillment of the scriptures,' can instead entail the meaning of 'as the scriptures tell us' or 'as we learn from the scriptures.')

Paul and other Christian preachers are offering salvation, but it is through a Christ who is a spiritual channel to God and one who has performed a redemptive act (the "atonement by his blood") in a mythical setting. We will look at both the medium and the act in a moment, but that act is not part of what has happened in the present time. Rather, the present is when the benefits available from this act are being revealed and applied: the forgiveness of sin and the guarantee of resurrection, "effective through faith" in the gospel. All this is the universal manner of expression in first century Christian epistles, and even beyond; one that ignores any recent career of Jesus and focuses all attention on those appointed to carry God's newly-disclosed message.

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At the core of that message lies the Son. Christianity was in the process of creating for the Western world the ultimate, lasting reflection of the central religious concept of the Hellenistic age. This we must now consider.

Monotheism was the possession not only of the Jews, but of much of Greek philosophy. Ancient thinking had arrived at an ultimate high God who had created and governed the universe. But a problem had to be faced. As such a God was made ever more lofty, more perfect, he also became more transcendent. Any form of contact with the inferior world of matter was deemed inappropriate and indeed impossible, and so the idea arose that any relationship between God and the world had to take place through some form of intermediary.

The Greek solution was the Logos, a kind of subsidiary god or divine force, an emanation of the Deity. In the most influential school of thinking, Platonism, the Logos was the image of God in perceivable form and a model for creation. He revealed the otherwise inaccessible, ultimate God, and through him—or it, since the Logos was more an abstract than a personal being—God acted upon the world. We know of Hellenistic religious sects based on the Logos. (See the little Address to the Greeks, originally attributed to Justin Martyr.)

The Jewish God never became quite so inaccessible, but knowledge of him and of his Law was thought to have been brought to the world by a part of himself called "Wisdom." This figure (it was a 'she') evolved almost into a divine being herself, an agent of creation and salvation with her own myths about coming to earth—though not in any physical incarnation. (See Proverbs 1 and 8-9, Baruch 3-4, Ecclesiasticus 24 and The Wisdom of Solomon.) In fact, many parts of the ancient world seem to have developed the concept of an intermediary divine figure coming to earth to bring knowledge and salvation, but details of such myths, especially for pre-Christian periods, are sketchy and much debated.

Out of this rich soil of ideas arose Christianity, a product of both Jewish and Greek philosophy. Its concept of Jesus the "Son" grew out of ideas like personified Wisdom (with a sex change), leavened with the Greek Logos, and amalgamated with the more personal and human figure of traditional Messiah expectation. Christianity made its Christ (the Greek word for Messiah) into a heavenly figure who could be related to, though he is intimately tied to God himself. Unlike Wisdom or the Logos, however, the Christian Savior was envisioned to have undergone self-sacrifice.

We can now gain a clearer understanding of Paul's Christ Jesus and the sphere of his activity. The pseudo-Pauline 2 Timothy tells us (1:9) that God (!) has saved us through his grace, "which was given to us in Christ Jesus in eternal times."

There are two key phrases here. First, the term "in Christ" (or sometimes "through Christ") which Paul and others use over a hundred times throughout the epistles: it can hardly bear on its slender back the sweeping meaning some scholars try to give it, namely as a kind of compact reference to Jesus' life, ministry, death and resurrection. Check its use in other passages, like Ephesians 1:4, 2 Corinthians 3:14, and especially Titus 3:6: "(God) sent down the Spirit upon us plentifully through Jesus Christ our Savior."

Such references do not speak of the recent physical presence of Jesus of Nazareth on earth. Instead, Christ—the divine, heavenly Son—is now present on earth, in a mystical sense, embodied in the new faith movement and interacting with his believers. Like Wisdom and the Logos, he is the spiritual medium ("in" or "through Christ") through which God is revealing himself and doing his work in the world. "In Christ" can also refer to the mystical union which Paul envisions between the believer and Christ, as in 2 Corinthians 5:17.

But where and when had this intermediary Son performed the redeeming act itself?

Christ's self-sacrificing death was located "in times eternal," or "before the beginning of time" (pro chronon aionion). This is the second key phrase in 2 Timothy 1:9 and elsewhere. What is presently being revealed is something that had already taken place outside the normal realm of time and space. This could be envisioned as either in the primordial time of myth, or, as current Platonic philosophy would have put it, in the higher eternal world of ideas, of which this earthly world, with its ever-changing matter and evolving time, is only a transient, imperfect copy (more on this later). The benefits of Christ's redemptive act lay in the present, through God's revelation of it in the new missionary movement, but the act itself had taken place in a higher world of divine realities, in a timeless order, not on earth or in history. It had all happened in the sphere of God, it was all part of his "mystery." The blood sacrifice, even seeming biographical details like Romans 1:3-4, belong in this dimension.

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Such ideas are, to us, strange and even alien, but they were an integral part of the mythological thinking of the ancient world. To obtain a better insight into them, we will draw a comparison between Christianity and another prominent religious expression of the Graeco-Roman world of its time. It will also help us to understand the evolution of the idea of Christ's sacrificial redemption (though this will not be fully answered until Part Three.)

By the first century CE the Empire had several popular salvation cults known as the "mysteries," each with its own savior god or goddess, such as Osiris, Attis and Mithras. There has been a seesaw debate over when these cults became fully formed and how much they may have influenced Christian ideas, but the root versions of the Greek mysteries go back to those of Eleusis (near Athens) and of the Greek god Dionysos, in the first half of the first millennium BCE. At the very least we can say that Christianity in many of its aspects was a Jewish-oriented expression of this widespread religious phenomenon.

Each of these savior gods had in some way overcome death, or performed some act whose effects guaranteed for the initiate a happy afterlife. Christianity's savior god, Christ Jesus, had undergone death and been resurrected as a redeeming act (1 Corinthians 15:3-4), giving promising of resurrection and eternal life to the believer. This guarantee involved another feature of ancient world thinking, closely related to Platonism: the idea that things and events on earth had their parallels in heaven; this included divine figures who served as paradigms for earthly human counterparts. What the former underwent in the spiritual realm reflected the experiences and determined the destinies of those who were linked to them on earth. For example, the original "one like a son of man" in Daniel's vision (7:13-14) received power and dominion over the earth from God, and this guaranteed that his human counterpart, the saints or elect of Israel, were destined to receive these things when God's Kingdom was established on earth. Christianity's Son, too, was a paradigm: Christ's experiences of suffering and death mirrored those of humans, but his exaltation would similarly be paralleled by their own exaltation. As Romans 6:5 declares: "We shall be united with Christ in a resurrection like his."

Savior gods also conferred certain benefits in the present world. They provided protection from the demon spirits and fates; Christ's devotees, too, claimed this for him (see Colossians and Ephesians). Rites of initiation in the mysteries, which included types of baptism, conferred rebirth and brought the initiate into a special relationship with the god or goddess. In Paul's baptism, the convert died to his present life and rose to a new one; of this new state, Paul says: "We are in Christ and Christ is in us."

Some of the savior gods had instituted sacraments: Mithras, after slaying the bull as a salvific blood sacrifice, had dined with the sun god, and this supper became the Mithraic cultic meal, similar to elements of the Christian Eucharist. Here, then, is the meaning of 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. Paul is not referring to any historical Last Supper, but rather to the origin myth attached to the Christian sacred meal (at least in Paul's circle). The words are probably Paul's personal version of things, since he clearly identifies it as revealed knowledge, "from the Lord," not passed-on tradition through apostolic channels. The spiritual Christ himself, in a mythical time and place (including "at night"), had established this Supper and spoken the words about his body and blood that gave the meal its present meaning. The frequent translation "arrested" or "betrayed" in verse 23 is governed by the later Gospel story. The literal meaning of the Greek word is "to hand over" or "deliver up," a term commonly used in the context of martyrdom; it has no trouble fitting the context of myth. It can hardly mean "betrayed" in Romans 8:32 where God is the agent, or in Ephesians 5:2 where Jesus surrenders himself.

All this is not to say that there could be no differences between the ideas and rituals of the mysteries and those of Christianity, if only because they arose from different cultural milieus. The Greeks, for example, had no desire to be resurrected in the flesh; they generally found the idea repugnant, and salvation after death was a question of the pure soul freeing itself from the impurity of matter and rejoining the divine in the eternal world. There was no need for their gods to be resurrected in the same way Jesus was. However, it should be noted that earliest Christianity conceived of Jesus only as raised in the spirit, exalted to heaven immediately after death (eg, Philippians 2:9, 1 Peter 3:18, Hebrews 10:12, etc.). A bodily sojourn on earth with the Apostles came only with the Gospels. Indeed, the whole Easter event as the Gospels portray it is missing from the first century epistles.

But how could all this redeeming activity by savior gods, in both the mysteries and Christianity, be thought of as taking place "in the world," or even "in flesh," yet not at a specific historical time and location? This, of course, is the nature of myth, but it depends on certain views of the world held by the ancients.

One of these saw no rigid distinction between the natural and the supernatural. The two blended into one another. The earth was but one layer of a tiered system that progressed from base matter where humans lived to the purely spirit level where God dwelled. The spheres between the two contained other parts of the "world," populated by classes of angels, spirits and demons. This view was especially prevalent in Jewish apocalyptic thought, which saw various figures and activities involved in the coming end of the world as located in these layers above the earth.

Nor did time function the same way at all levels. In the 4th century the Roman philosopher Sallustius put his view this way: "All of this did not happen at any one time, but always is so...the story of Attis represents an eternal cosmic process, not an isolated event of the past."

Here we have crossed over into a somewhat different line of thinking from the continuous layered universe just described. The way Sallustius put things is essentially Platonic: what is perceived by contemplation and revelation on earth is only an imperfect reflection of eternal truths and spiritual processes in the upper world of ultimate reality. Various early Christian writers show different blendings of the Platonic and layered universes, and all of it was constructed over the ancient foundation of a more primitive myth-making view, one found around the world. This view placed divine figures and processes in a dim, primordial past: here the gods had planned and established things which gave meaning to present-day beliefs and practices, and from this "sacred past" humans drew benefits and even redemption. All these ideas contributed to the myths of the era in which Christianity was born.

For the average pagan and Jew, the bulk of the workings of the universe went on in the vast unseen spiritual realm (the "genuine" part of the universe) which began at the lowest level of the "air" and extended ever upward through the various layers of heaven. Here a savior god like Mithras could slay a bull, Attis could be castrated, and Christ could be hung on a tree by "the god of that world," meaning Satan (see the Ascension of Isaiah 9:14). The plainest interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews 9:11-14 is that Christ's sacrifice took place in a non-earthly setting and a spiritual time; 8:4 virtually tells us that he had never been on earth. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:44-49 and elsewhere can speak of Christ as "man" (anthropos), but he is the ideal, heavenly man (a widespread type of idea in the ancient world, including Philo: see Supplementary Article No. 8: Christ as "Man"), whose spiritual "body" provides the prototype for the heavenly body Christians will receive at their resurrection. For minds like Paul's, such higher world counterparts had as real an existence as the flesh and blood human beings around them on earth.

It is in much the same sense that Paul, in Romans 1 and Galatians 4, declares Christ to have been "of David's stock," born under the Law. The source of such statements is scripture, not historical tradition. The sacred writings were seen as providing a picture of the spiritual world, the realities in heaven. Since the spiritual Christ was now identified with the Messiah, all scriptural passages presumed to be about the Messiah had to be applied to him, even if understood in a mythical or Platonic sense. Several references predicted that the Messiah would be descended from David: thus Romans 1:3 (and elsewhere). Note that 1:2 points unequivocally to scripture as the source of this doctrine. (As does 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 for the source of Jesus' death and resurrection.) Isaiah 7:14, to give another example, supposedly spoke of the Messiah as born of a young woman, and so Paul in Galatians 4:4 tells us that Christ was "born of woman". (Note that he never gives the name of Mary, or anything about this "woman." Nor does he identify the time or place of this "birth".) The mysteries may not have had the same range of sacred writings to supply their own details, but the savior god myths contained equally human-like elements which were understood entirely in a mythical setting. Dionysos too had been born in a cave of a woman.

"Born of woman" is a lot like another phrase used almost universally of the activities of Christ: "in flesh" (en sarki, kata sarka). It may actually mean little more than "in the sphere of the flesh" or "in relation to the flesh." In his divine form and habitat a god could not suffer, and so he had to take on some semblance to humanity (eg, Philippians 2:8, Romans 8:3); his saving act had to be a "blood" sacrifice (e.g., Hebrews 9:22) because the ancient world saw this as the basic means of communion between man and Deity; and it all had to be done within humanity's territory. But the latter could still be within those lower spiritual dimensions above the earth which acted upon the material world. And in fact this is precisely what Paul reveals. In 1 Corinthians 2:8 he tells us who crucified Jesus. Is it Pilate, the Romans, the Jews? No, it is "the rulers of this age (who) crucified the Lord of glory." Many scholars agree that he is referring not to temporal rulers but to the spirit and demonic forces—"powers and authorities" was the standard term— which inhabited the lower celestial spheres, part of the territory of "flesh." (See Paul Ellingworth, A Translator's Handbook for 1 Corinthians, p.46: "A majority of scholars think that supernatural powers are intended here." These include S. G. F. Brandon, C. K. Barrett, Jean Hering, Paula Fredriksen, S. D. F. Salmond, and it also included Ignatius and Marcion.) Colossians 2:15 can hardly refer to any historical event on Calvary.

It was in such spiritual, mythological dimensions that Paul's Christ Jesus had been 'taken on a body' (cf. Hebrews 10:5) and performed his act of redemption. Such was the timeless secret which God had hidden for long ages and only recently revealed to visionaries like Paul. And it was all to be discovered in scripture, or at least in the new way of reading it. It is very difficult for us to get our minds around this kind of "mythical thinking," because in our scientific and literal age we simply have no equivalent. This is perhaps the major stumbling block to an understanding and acceptance of the Jesus-as-myth theory. (For a comprehensive discussion of this area, including a detailed examination of passages like Romans 1:1-4 and Galatians 4:4-6, see Supplementary Article No. 8, Christ as "Man".)

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There are a few passages in the epistles which seem to speak of a recent coming of Christ, as in Galatians 3 and 4. But in 3:23 and 25 Paul stresses it is "faith" that has arrived in the present, while verse 24, despite a common misleading translation (as in the NEB), is literally "leading us to Christ," which can mean to faith in him. In 3:19, it is the gentiles who belong to Christ (verse 29) that are in mind. In any event, references to the sending or coming of Christ should be taken in the sense of the present-day revelation of Christ by God. (In the case of Galatians 4:4-6, verse 6 specifies that it is the "spirit" of the Son that has been sent into the hearts of believers.) Early Christians saw the spiritual Christ as having arrived in a real way, active in the world and speaking through themselves. This is certainly the sense of passages like 1 John 5:20, "We know that the Son of God is come," and Hebrews 9:11 and 26.

And probably Ephesians 2:17, which is especially interesting: "And coming, he (Christ) announced the good news..." But what was the content of that news? Instead of taking the opportunity to refer to some of Jesus' Gospel teachings, the writer quotes Isaiah. All the first century documents, as well as some later ones like the Epistle of Barnabas, show that the only source of information about Jesus was scripture. 1 Peter 2:22-23, with its description of Christ's exemplary sufferings, simply summarizes parts of Isaiah 53. (Cf. 1 Clement 16.) Scripture is not the prophecy of the Christ event, but its embodiment. The Son inhabits the spiritual world of the scriptures, God's window on the unseen true reality.

The reference to Pontius Pilate in 1 Timothy 6:13 comes in a set of "Pastoral" epistles which are almost universally judged by critical scholars to be a product of the second century, and not by Paul. Mention of Pilate could therefore be a reflection of the developing idea of an historical Jesus. It may be contemporary with or a little later than Ignatius, who is the first writer outside the Gospels to maintain that Jesus died under Pilate. However, this passing reference is also a possible candidate for interpolation (later insertion). More than one scholar has pointed out that there are problems in its fit with the context, and there are many indications within the Pastorals that they are still dealing with a non-historical Christ. (See the Appendix to Supplementary Article No. 3: Who Crucified Jesus? for an examination of the dating of the Pastorals and the question of 1 Timothy 6:13.)

Another, more obvious interpolation is 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, the only reference to the Jews' guilt in killing Jesus to be found in Paul or anywhere else in the New Testament epistles. The great majority of critical scholars agree that it comes from a later time because it contains an unmistakable allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem (a later event), and because it is foreign to the way Paul elsewhere expresses himself toward his countrymen. (On this question, see Who Crucified Jesus? and Reader Feedback Set 19.)

Finally, from Galatians 1:19 comes the tradition that James was the sibling of Jesus, whereas the phrase "brother of the Lord" could instead refer to James' pre-eminent position as head of the Jerusalem brotherhood. Apostles everywhere (e.g., Sosthenes in 1 Corinthians 1:1) were called "brother," and the 500 who received a vision of the spiritual Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:6 were hardly all related to Jesus. The phrase in Philippians 1:14, "brothers in the Lord," is a strong indication of what sort of meaning the Galatians phrase entails. On the other hand, it is not impossible that the phrase began as a marginal gloss, subsequently inserted into the text. Some later copyist, perhaps when a second century Pauline corpus was being formed and after James' sibling relationship to the new historical Jesus had been established, may have wished to ensure that the reader would realize that Paul was referring to James the Just and not James the Gospel apostle. (For a fuller discussion of this verse, see Reader Feedback Set 3.)

Before  proceeding to the Gospels in Part Three, one question must be answered. Where and how did Christianity begin? The traditional view, of course, is that it began in Jerusalem among the Twelve Apostles in response to Jesus' death and resurrection. But this is untenable, and not just because of a lack of any historical Jesus.

Within a handful of years of Jesus' supposed death, we find Christian communities all over the eastern Mediterranean, their founders unknown. Rome had Jewish Christians no later than the 40s, and a later churchman ("Ambrosiaster" in the 4th century) remarked that the Romans had believed in Christ even without benefit of preaching by the Apostles. Paul could not possibly account for all the Christian centers across the Empire; many were in existence before he got there. Nor does he convey much sense of a vigorous and widespread missionary activity on the part of the Jerusalem circle around Peter and James. (That comes only with Acts.)

A form of Christian faith later declared heretical, Gnosticism, preceded the establishment of orthodox beliefs and churches in whole areas like northern Syria and Egypt. Indeed, the sheer variety of Christian expression and competitiveness in the first century, as revealed in documents both inside and outside the New Testament, is inexplicable if it all proceeded from a single missionary movement beginning from a single source. We find a profusion of radically different rituals, doctrines and interpretations of Jesus and his redeeming role; some even have a Jesus who does not undergo death and resurrection.

Paul meets rivals at every turn who are interfering with his work, whose views he is trying to combat. The "false apostles" he rails against in 2 Corinthians 10 and 11 are "proclaiming another Jesus" and they are certainly not from Peter's group (See Supplementary Article No. 1: Apollos of Alexandria and the Early Christian Apostolate). Where do they all come from and where do they get their ideas?

The answer seems inevitable: Christianity was born in a thousand places, in the broad fertile soil of Hellenistic Judaism. It sprang up in many independent communities and sects, expressing itself in a great variety of doctrines. We see this variety in everything from Paul to the writings of the so-called community of John, from the unique Epistle to the Hebrews to non-canonical documents like the Odes of Solomon and a profusion of gnostic texts. It was all an expression of the new religious philosophy of the Son, and it generated an apostolic movement fueled by visionary inspiration and a study of scripture, impelled by the conviction that God's Kingdom was at hand.