While Craig Evans was away to the SBL, I held down the fort at Acadia Divinity College (only because I couldn’t afford to go this year).

Anyway, I did a number of lectures of my own design, and there were some interesting things I stumbled across that I will pass on in the next little while on Deinde.

one lecture I gave in a class on Paul was having to do with the Jesus and Paul debate. There was one little interesting nugget that I found in Eusebius that sheds some light on this. I have done papers on this subject and read quite a bit and had not come across this before, so I hope it is worth sharing.

A very brief history on the issue. Paul barely talks about the historical Jesus, most recognize this. If we only had Paul, who represents the earliest stratum of Christian writing, there is a whole wack of things we would not know. Some scholars has taken this to assume that he actually didn’t know or care to know much about the historical Jesus and his studies. In tandem with this type of thinking we have the result stemming from Wrede in 1904 that Paul ought to be considered the second and more important founder of Christianity.

This perspective has some merit to it. Paul doesn’t seem to concerned in his letters to pass on Jesus tradition. Did he actually know much of it? I think part of the answer to this lies in our own perspective looking back 2000 years later. We are foolish to assume that Paul’s letters represent the totality of what he knew. We are hearing, as it were, a one-sided conversation. Not only that, but we did not hear the beginning of the conversation, nor the end of it. It is like watching the 6th sense but missing the first half an hour, and then the last 15 minutes.

While Paul only rarely says he is referring to the words of the Lord, we do still have a number of historical facts about Jesus which Paul incidentally lets slip. Despite that fact that Paul does not elaborate on them, they should be taken and dealt with very seriously by historical Jesus scholars. The following list I take from L. T. Johnson’s The Real Jesus:

• A Jew (Gal 4:4)
• Descendant of David (Rom 1:3)
• Ministry was primarily to Jews (Rom 15:8)
• Prayed to God as Abba (Gal 4:6)
• Jesus had a passover meal with his disciples which he interpreted in reference to his death (1Cor 5:7; 11)
• He underwent a trial (1Cor 2:8)
• Appeared before Pilate (1Tim 6:13)
• Jews were involved in his death (1Thess 2:14-16)
• He suffered (Rom 15:3)
• crucified (1 Cor. 1:23; 2 Cor. 13:4; Phil. 2:8; Gal. 3:1)
• buried (1 Cor. 15:4; Rom. 6:4)
• Resurrection and appearance after his death (1Cor 15)
• “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4)
• Had 12 disciples (1Cor 15:5)

Yes we are missing a lot, but Paul still provides us with some important corroboration. For instance, those who would want to argue that Jesus did not choose 12 disciples (and all the implications that entails) has to argue not only with the synoptics, but also the early stratum of Christian testimony which Paul represents.

Next, if we look at Paul it is pretty clear that he sees himself as passing on tradition that he has received. And what is more, he states that what he preaches is the same as what others preaches. Scholars who want to say the kerygma of Paul and the other apostles were very different needs to specifically repudiate what Paul says about himself and his message.

1. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures…..1 Cor 15:3ff.
2. For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread…….1 Cor 11:23
3. “Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.” (1 Cor 15:11)

There are other examples beyond the first two, but I think these will suffice. The last verse serves to show that Paul is claiming that he proclaims the same things others do.

Finally, we need to question where Paul did receive this tradition from. The most obvious and most touted example is Peter. We know that Paul spent at least 2 weeks with Peter as well as James.
“Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days” (Gal 1:18).
This establishes, by Paul’s own admission, a direct connection to the ministry of Jesus and one who would have been an ambassador of the Jesus tradition.
Was 2 weeks enough time for Paul to be thoroughly entrenched in Jesus tradition? Even I have my doubts. Undoubtedly he had other such visits with pillar apostles. But this question leads me to my final point, an interesting item from Eusebius.

• “The names of the apostles of our Saviour are known to every one from the Gospels.188 But there exists no catalogue of the seventy disciples.189 Barnabas, indeed, is said to have been one of them, of whom the Acts of the apostles makes mention in various places” (Hist. Eccl. 1.12.1)
• “But Clement in the sixth book of his Hypotyposes writes thus: “For they say that Peter and James and John after the ascension of our Saviour, as if also preferred by our Lord, strove not after honor, but chose James the Just bishop of Jerusalem. But the same writer, in the seventh book of the same work, relates also the following things concerning him: “The Lord after his resurrection imparted knowledge to James the Just and to John and Peter, and they imparted it to the rest of the apostles, and the rest of the apostles to the seventy, of whom Barnabas was one.” (Hist. Eccl. 2.1.3-4)

I am no Eusebius scholar, nor am I overly knowledgeable about Clement. We cannot find strong confirmation about this, but neither can we casually dismiss it. If this is true, then we have a much stronger connection between the teaching and ministry of Jesus and the apostle Paul — Barnabas. If he was one of the 70 and a companion of Paul for a length of time, then we now have an even stronger connection between Jesus tradition and the apostle Paul.

Even if we want to be safe and rule out Clement’s teaching on Barnabas, we have enough in Acts to establish Barnabas as a connection to Jesus tradition for Paul. Barnabas seems to have been a disciple of the apostles, and as such would have received Jesus tradition from them. I think the role of Barnabas has been underestimated in this debate.

Finally, we still are ultimately left with the issue of Paul showing little concern for directly quoting Jesus or relating information about him. I think we have sufficient evidence for showing solid connections between Paul and the eyewitnesses to the life and teachings of Jesus. I also think it is a safe bet to assume that Paul passed this information on. I wager that the passing on of the Jesus tradition was a foundational aspect of Paul’s missionary endeavor. When Paul or Peter or whoever planted a church, they made a concerted effort to pass on the Jesus tradition.

With these things in mind, I’ll close with a quote from James Dunn. It is an excellent article that I recommend to any who are interested in this topic.

“In both cases (OT & Jesus tradition) what we are actually witnessing is the language of community discourse. We must imagine Christians who were steeped in the language and thought forms of the (Jewish) scriptures (the only scriptures they had), and who had been deeply impressed, their whole lives transformed and shaped afresh by the message of Jesus. In communities bonded by such common experience and language there is a whole level of discourse which consists of allusion and echo. It is the very fact that allusions are sufficient for much effective communication which provides and strengthens the bond; recognition of the allusion/echo is what attests effective membership of the group. Who has never belonged to a community where “in-jokes” and code allusions or abbreviations both facilitated communication between members of the group and left outsiders at best able to function only on the surface of the exchange without recognizing implications and ramifications obvious to the insiders? A community which can communicate only by citing explicit chapter and verse has no depth to it. And the same assuredly applies in the case of early Christian communities’ store of Jesus tradition. In other words, what we find in the Pauline paraenesis in terms of echoes of/allusions to the Jesus tradition is just what we would expect. It would be surprising were it otherwise. The traditions of Jesus, no doubt well taught by the first Christian apostles and teachers, would have been treasured, meditated on, given prominent place in the reshaping of life and conduct consequent upon baptism. Such traditions would have entered into their own thinking and quite quickly have begun to shape their own language as well as their lives, and so also to shape their discourse one with another….. Here, then, emerges a surprising answer to our question, “Why was Jesus not cited explicitly as authority for the exhortations which drew on the Jesus tradition?” The answer is that to force, as it were, the web of allusion and echo into the open may strengthen the explicit authority of a particular exhortation, but it also weakens the bonding effect of the web of shared discourse. In communities of shared discourse allusions can be all the more effective because they trigger off wider associations and communal memories whose emotive resonance gives added motivation to the looked for response. In short, in each case (Old Testament, church tradition, and Jesus tradition), and particularly in the case of the Jesus tradition whose form was not yet finally fixed, what we see before us in passages like those discussed above is evidence of the Jesus tradition shaping Pauline paraenesis at the level of his own thought processes, and no doubt intended by him to be recognized as derived from or indebted to the common memory of what Jesus had said and done—a celebration and re-affirmation by means of their common discourse of their shared indebtedness to their common Lord.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 7:04 pm by Danny Zacharias and is filed under Jesus and Paul, apostle Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.