Confessing Evangelical

Interesting discussion over at iMonk and in the Boar's Head Tavern on the question of why St Paul has so little to say about the earthly life, ministry and teachings of Jesus.

I always feel a little uneasy when this sort of discussion comes up, because so many people have sought to drive a wedge between Jesus and St Paul - to try to get at the "real teachings" of Jesus the wandering Galilean preacher, before that nasty old S(i)t(h) Paul came along and turned a simple faith of good works and general niceness into some dogmatic religion of absolutes.

For anyone who still has any sympathy with that suggestion, I recommend reading CS Lewis's introduction to JB Phillips "Letters to Young Churches", in which Lewis points out that this is precisely the wrong way round ("All the most terrifying texts come from the mouth of our Lord: all the texts on which we can base such warrant as we have for hoping that all men will be saved come from St Paul"), before going on to observe that:

In the earlier history of every rebellion there is a stage at which you do not yet attack the King in person. You say: "The King is all right. It is his ministers who are wrong. They misrepresent him and corrupt all his plans – which, I’m sure, are good plans if only the ministers would let them take effect." And the first victory consists in beheading a few ministers: only at the later stage do you go on and behead the King himself.

In the same way, the nineteenth-century attack on St. Paul was really only a stage in the revolt against Christ. Men were not ready in large numbers to attack Christ himself. They made the normal first move - that of attacking one of his principal ministers. Everything they disliked about Christianity was therefore attributed to St Paul.

It was unfortunate that their case could not impress anyone who had really read the gospels and the epistles with attention: but apparently few people had, and so the first victory was won. St. Paul was impeached and banished and the world went on to the next step – the attack on the King himself.

But, that said, the iMonk's question is still a legitimate and interesting one. I can't claim any scholarly expertise to answer this one, but a couple of thoughts did occur to me based on the first couple of lectures on Romans by (no groaning at the back there!) NT Wright, which I was listening to yesterday. (You should count yourselves lucky I couldn't find an NT Wright angle to Revenge of the Sith.)

Two points from these lectures that seem particularly relevant to this question are:

1. The nature of St Paul's extant writings

As Wright points out, we don't have St Paul's statement of his systematic theology; we don't have his diaries; we don't have his own projection of what his words would mean to us today. We have letters written to churches in particular situations: churches that had, in many cases, been founded by St Paul, but even if they hadn't, someone had founded them. These were all existing churches.

In the course of the apostolic preaching that led to the foundation of the first churches, it is likely that the person, life and teachings of Jesus would have featured more highly than in the letters: the argument being that the four Gospels then represent a written record of what had previously been taught orally, and now needed to be committed to paper before the original witnesses died.

The letters, on the other hand, generally address only those points that needed to be addressed by those means: areas where churches were in dispute, or were falling into error. It may be that the absence of references to Jesus' life and ministry tells us nothing more than that these were not doubted or disputed to any significant extent within the early church.

2. The place of Jesus in the teachings of St Paul

However, another reason for the absence of references, might be that, for St Paul, the earthly life and ministry of Jesus were relatively unimportant compared with His death and resurrection.

Wright argues that the importance of the Damascus Road experience for St Paul was not that it taught him to seek to be justified by faith rather than by works; not even that it showed him that he had been wrong about Jesus, and that Jesus had in fact risen from the dead; but that it demonstrated to Paul that God had done for Jesus in history what He had promised to do for Israel at the end of history.

The resurrection of Jesus proved that He was the one in whom God's purposes for the nation of Israel had been fulfilled: that He was Israel personified; that he was the Messiah. The resurrection of the righteous was expected to take place at the end of the age, but the resurrection of Jesus showed that the new age had now arrived, in a way that overlapped with the old age rather than being a sudden, one-off transition as had previously been expected.

But this led Paul to draw one very important conclusion. According to the OT prophets. one of the characteristics of the new age, the coming of God's kingdom at the end of history, was that this was the time when the Gentiles would finally be blessed, and brought into God's kingdom in fulfilment of God's promise to Abraham that "in you all the nations of the earth will be blessed".

But if the new age had now arrived, in the person of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, then that meant that the time for the salvation of the Gentiles had also arrived. Hence this led St Paul to his particular ministry as the apostle to the Gentiles, and the insistence throughout his ministry on the complete inclusion in the church of both Jew and Gentile on an equal basis: namely, by faith in the God who had raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

So any absence of references to Jesus' life and ministry in St Paul's writings has to be set in the context of Paul's constant, burning desire to proclaim to Jews, Gentiles and "the new race" of Christians that the death and resurrection of Jesus had ushered in the new age in which the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile had finally been smashed.

That doesn't fully answer iMonk's question, but I hope it at least helps establish a context in which the absence of references to Jesus' life, ministry and teachings is less disturbing than it might sometimes be made to appear.