It would take several very thick volumes to detail the ways in which the Gospel accounts of Jesus and the teachings of Paul in his existing correspondence converge and complement one another. It would take several more volumes of equal thickness to discuss the philosophical and theological understandings of who Jesus was, how he was understood by his earliest followers, and how that understanding morphed as time and place and circumstance and language changed. In fact, those volumes have been written, and constitute the vast corpus of Christian theology from the Bible to contemporary works. I shall focus my attention here on the writings of Anglican Bishop and New Testament scholar Nicholas Thomas Wright, who is working on a multi-volume study of early Christian and Jewish literature and the origins of the Christian faith. Although some of his suggestions are, to put it mildly, controversial (the Fourth Gospel was written by the Apostle John) his approach in his repudiation of recent New Testament and theological approaches to these questions applies a combination of historical humility and good old common sense.
Some general comments, then, and even those will take more space than I might wish.
First, the common contemporary (for the past one hundred years or so) understanding that Paul was not interested in the message of Jesus and therefore distorts Christian teaching ignores something so simple it is easily missed - Paul is the earliest Christian teacher whose writings are still in existence; even the Gospels as written documents are later by almost a generation. As such, had there been serious disagreement between what the Gospel writers wanted to say about the tradition of Jesus and what Paul was teaching as he traveled the Mediterranean there surely would be some record of it somewhere. In fact, there is none. Even the later, non-canonical writings of Justin Martyr, Ignatius of Antioch, and Clement of Alexandria follow the route of Paul, dealing with programmatical questions rather than the substantive issues of the teachings of Jesus. Rather than showing a cleavege between the teachings of Jesus and Paul, this would show that, in fact, the teachings of Jesus were non-controversial and above any question.
Paul was writing to various churches for a variety of reasons - church practice was not in line with common practice in Corinth; the church was suffering some sort of persecution in Phillipi; Paul was introducing himself to the Roman church prior to a visit; Paul was defending his authority to teach and preach after it was questioned by teachers in Galatia - and that he never mentions the teachings of Jesus, rather than showing he didn't care about them, shows that they were accepted for what they were. Had Paul wanted to, he could have written all sorts of things that run counter to what Jesus taught, but there is nothing in Paul to suggest he ever thought about doing so.
As to the whole question of Jesus' identity - what has been traditionally called the doctrine of the two natures, i.e., Jesus was fully divine and fully human - while the explanations became ever more convoluted and involved all sorts of metaphysical gymnastics that are irrelevant to a non-metaphysical age, the basic theme is the same today as it was 2000 years ago: God loved this creation. Through human acts, a rift was driven between God and creation, and humanity no longer could fulfill its divine ordination to be a caretaker of this creation. No propitiation could suffice to set this relationship right except for divine action. Such was God's love for creation that God was willing to fully invest a human person in order that through the life and death of this person, the final power of death - the ultimate enemy - could be broken. The resurrection story is not some coda attached to Jesus' life by those who came later, but the central fact of his presence and ministry. It provides the authority to all he taught, all he did, all he suffered.
Even contemporary New Testament scholars, as Wright shows in abundance in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, are uncomfortable with the resurrection narratives because, to be blunt, they don't believe them. Not only do they not believe them, they do not see how any thinking person can accept them for anything other than metaphors for some spiritual experience followers of Jesus had (following the NT scholar Rudolf Bultmann). Part of the problem with such a reading misses a point Wright makes emphatically throughout the work noted above - resurrection was no more plausible to first century A.D. residents of the Roman Empire than it is to early-21st century residents of the American Empire. As Wright further notes, in a look at first and second century comments by Roman authorities, more than anything else the early Christians shared a devotion to the resurrection that was unshakeable, even under torture. Rather than renounce this teaching, they suffered horrible pain, and many were put to death. As condescending and demeaning as Richard Dawkins and other critics of contemporary Christianity, these Romans were amazed that anyone could hold beliefs that were, to say the least, unbelievable.
Part of the problem in the (mostly fake) Jesus-Paul controversy is a streak of Romantic primitivism that believes, without justification and on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that there exists some pure unsullied message of Jesus to which, if we could only return, the Church could rescue itself from its two thousand year history of metaphysical nonsense and political and theological repression. Such primitivism ignores the truth that there is no such thing as an uninterpreted life and uninterpreted message. It assumes that all persons at all times and all places can hear certain words and understand them in the same way. It assumes also that we live our lives moment by moment, without recourse to any narrative structure, and that others do the same. Alas and alack, both these assumptions are wrong. The primitivists forget not only that all wordws need some sort of interpretation, but all lives do so as well. We may not be aware of it; we may even argue strenuously against such an idea. That does not make it any less true.
There is no "pure, simple message of Jesus" existing somewhere to which the Church must or should turn in order to appease its contemporary critics. How would such an appeasement satisfy those who are unwilling to accept the heart of the Gospel message about a God whose love is shown through suffering, exclusion, and a horrible God-forsaken death as a failed political agitator? As Paul wrote, the cross is a stumbling block to the wise because they refuse to accept what is, on its face unacceptable.
This very long post hardly does justice to a topic that is well worth further treatment. The specific context in which was brought up - gays in the church - I will try to treat later.
Virtual Tin Cup
