DAILY BEAST: Christians all over the world celebrate the birth of Jesus while neglecting the Apostle Paul’s role as the founder of the religion everyone practices today. Scholar James D. Tabor, the author of Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, on the more radical Christ…
Historians have spent the past 175 years in a “quest for the historical Jesus” and the results, though always less than we would wish, are quite impressive. By carefully comparing the various layers of our New Testament Gospels, as well as other recently discovered texts such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Didache, a generally consistent message that can reliably be traced back to Jesus has emerged. What we have is not the Christ of Paul and the Christian creeds but a Jewish Jesus who proclaimed the imminence of the “reign of God,” calling for a radical overturn of societal structures of power, whether based on political power, wealth, class, or gender. This is the Jesus who pronounced blessings on the poor, the hungry, and the persecuted, and curses upon those with wealth, comfort, and power—while calling for “turning the other cheek,” loving one’s enemies, and doing to others as you would do to yourself. This is the Jesus who summarized true religion as loving God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself. This is the Jesus who rebukes a devotee with the retort, “Why do you call me good, there is one who is good, God?”…
In contrast, the theological elements in these Gospels that stem from a later theological perspective stand in stark contrast—whether the Christmas narratives of the virgin birth, Christian baptism in the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” or eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist. Without Paul and his vision-based understanding of Christ it is unlikely that anything resembling Christianity would have ever emerged from the original followers of Jesus. The letter of James, the brother of Jesus, tucked into the back of the New Testament, is one of our only surviving documents… (more)
