Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Greco-Roman Antiquity New Perspectives on The Lordship of Jesus, Judaism, and the “Truthiness” of Christianity, Part 4

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Conclusion: Relevance to Anglos

What lessons should crypto-Anglo White or Christian nationalists take away from the first-century Jesus movement?  First, notice that this movement emerged among a people in which the diaspora population outnumbered their co-ethnics in Judea.  In addition, both at home and in the dispersion, Jews were experiencing a spiritual identity crisis.  Perhaps Paul’s mission to resurrect the lost sheep of Israel has unexpected relevance to those of us who long for the restoration of the lost tribes of Greater Britain.[i]

Paul’s push for the resurrection of Israel presupposed a deep-seated, ancestral inseparability of ethnicity and religion.  That is to say that the family, the tribe, the nation can, jointly and severally, serve as the syngeneic medium through which the divine, God or the gods, expresses itself in the collective life of a people.  For his followers, the messianic myth of Jesus Christ incarnated the perfected telos of national Israel.  Today, it is impossible to imagine the renaissance of British race patriotism apart from the reunion of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity with an ancestral religion.  Such an ethnoreligious revival must develop both within the Anglo-Saxon diaspora and its ancestral homeland (where the native English and Celtic peoples are undergoing demographic replacement at the hands of a hostile plutocratic elite).

The sacred mythology of Jesus the Christ inspired Paul’s ethnoreligious movement.  The resurrection of British race patriotism, too, must draw on ancestral traditions of sacral kingship rooted in both history and Arthurian legend.  A counter-cultural ethnoreligious movement across the Anglosphere could summon into being our own long-awaited messiah, the Patriot King prophesied by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke during the Financial Revolution of the eighteenth century.[ii]

British race patriotism could find legitimate expression once again, not in the godless transnational corporate welfare states now mismanaging the Anglosphere, but through a patriot prince devoted to the spiritual welfare of the British peoples.  The modern counterpart of the first-century Jesus movement could emerge in the form of an Angelcynn Network of ekklesia.  Its members would work to secure the independence of the British monarchy in its constitutional role as defender of the faith.  The chief aim of the Angelcynn movement would be to re-consecrate the Crown as head of reformed Anglican churches throughout the Anglosphere, including the USA.  Clearly, King Charles III is unlikely to seek or accept such a role.  The goal must therefore be to shame some honourable man among his heirs and successors into defending the ethnoreligious identity and biocultural interests of the Anglo-Saxon peoples outside and apart from the governments of the historic White Commonwealth.

Such a movement would revise and reform, not reject, the Christian heritage of the Anglican church.  Rather, Jesus and Paul would recover their rightful place in the Angelcynn tradition.  As historical figures, Jesus and Paul would be honoured as Israelite ethnoreligious patriots.  They must also continue to be exalted for their divine agency in consummating the covenantal history of Israel.  Drawing inspiration from both, Anglo-Saxons world-wide could begin the process of exalting gods of our own.  It is long past time, for example, to “translate” Alfred the Great, recognizing him, at long last, as an English David, a Son of God in his own right, who modelled his English kingdom on Old Covenant Israel.

As a practical matter, such an ethnoreligious strategy means that “nationalists” such as Joel Davis and Stephen Wolfe (to name but two) must come out of the WASP closet.  In Australia, Joel Davis would no longer conceal his Anglo-Saxon identity under a White skin suit worn within a supposedly secular political space.  One might also hope that he would cease to profess a universalist Catholic faith altogether detached from his ethnic identity.  Stephen Wolfe, on the other hand, foreswears his ancestral WASP identity in favour of a civic-minded Americanism.  His inner faith, however, exalts the supernatural truths of a worn-out Augustinian metanarrative; his Lord Jesus is a cosmic Christ, sitting at the right hand of the Father in the heavenly City of God.  Like other members of the invisible race, Wolfe eschews both Whiteness and Anglo-Saxondom.  Here in the City of Man, he retains “Anglo-Protestantism” only because it is the “true religion” of creedal Christianity.  Every other earthly source of ethnoreligious identity is adiaphorous, a matter of indifference in the eyes of God.

As a spiritual diet, this is thin gruel indeed.  Looking instead to the original Jesus movement for inspiration, WASPs can and must rise from the dead.  We desperately need a messianic new covenant Angelcynnism.  Come, Patriot King.  Come!

[i] The idea of Greater Britain dates from the mid- to late nineteenth century at the peak of British imperialism.  Historians now look back upon the Greater Britain project as a failed utopian vision.  Could a Greater Britain really rise from the dead, like the first-century idea of Israel, within an Anglo-Saxon diaspora under the thumb of the transnational corporate welfare state?  As one might expect, recent scholarship provides ample grounds for pessimism.  See, Sir John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005) [Original Edition, 1891]; John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945 (London: Routledge, 1994); and two books by Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and idem., Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

[ii] See, “The Idea of a Patriot King,” in David Armitage, (ed.) Bolingbroke: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217-294.

Thoughts on Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow

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All it takes is one look at this picture to know why America cannot tolerate Russia.  No wonder that great American patriot George H.W. Bush betook himself to Kiev when the Soviet Union was collapsing and, appearing on a balcony overlooking the Maiden, urged Ukrainians to stay in the Soviet Union.

Very different from the American policy now that Russia is no longer Communist.

And the history of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the site of this picture, a picture so wounding and offensive to the leadership of the USA shows how right George Herbert Walker Bush, former head of the CIA, was when he tried to save the Soviet Union.

Here is the full disgusting history (to Bush and others like him) of the church:

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was totally obliterated by the Bolsheviks.

The Communists would not allow the priests to take a single icon with them.  Every single thing was destroyed.  The gold was melted down – 20 tons of it.  And to pour salt in the wounds, the non-Russians running the Soviet government earmarked every penny from the sale of the gold to the dispossession and extermination of the Kulaks, the most intelligent and industrious of the Russian peasants, the “Kulaks.”

A really nice dysgenic touch!  And very much to the taste of the American establishment even way back then.  The New York Times‘ reporter in the Soviet Union enthusiastically supported the collectivization and that newspaper informed us that the story of a famine in the Soviet Union was just a lie fabricated by reactionary anti-communists.

The fact that the Cathedral was dedicated to two Russian military heroes, one of whom was one of the greatest White racial heroes of all time, must have really incurred the wrath of the Bolsheviks. (St. Alexander Nevsky, who defeated the Teutonic Knights, and St. Dmitri Donskoy who defeated the Yellow Peril in the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, breaking Russia free of the Mongol Yoke.  The Russian Orthodox Church canonized both of these military leaders, something modern Xianity in America would never, never do.)

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was the first church rebuilt by the Russian Orthodox Church after the fall of the Soviet State and the Communist Party. In the midst of abject poverty and economic chaos one out of every ten citizens of Moscow donated to rebuild the Cathedral.

America cannot stand for such things.

America will not tolerate such actions.  They are contrary to everything America stands for.

These people and their city need the Dresden medicine.

Moscow must be levelled and Russia destroyed.

Then Americans can be proud of their country and the values it stands for.

Once again, America will have saved civilization and protected freedom.

So sayeth the secular saints Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and The New York Times…and they are authoritative in our national epistemology.

I walked through the restored Cathedral in a state of exaltation.  I wish my Russian tutor who first told me the story of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior — when it had been converted into a swimming pool — could have lived to see it.

Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Greco-Roman Antiquity New Perspectives on The Lordship of Jesus, Judaism, and the “Truthiness” of Christianity, Part Three

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The “Truthiness” of Christianity 

In short, Miller “challenges the classic conception of what many regard as the most sacred narrative of Western civilization, namely, that the New Testament stories of Jesus’ resurrection provided alleged histories variously achieving credibility among their earliest readers.”  Instead, he provides “the first truly coherent case that the earliest Christians comprehended the resurrection narratives of the New Testament as instances within a larger conventional rubric commonly recognized as fictive in modality.”  Modern scholarship, by contrast, mistakenly assumes that these texts were intended to present “a credible, albeit extraordinary account of an historical miracle.”  On that assumption, one may then approach the question “from one of two polarized loci: (1) with a faith-based interest in honoring (defending) the most sacred tenet of Christianity; (2) with an atheistic interest to disprove the claims of orthodox Christian doctrine.”  Both positions are unsound.  The first thesis mistakenly supposes that gospel writers proposed the resurrection of Jesus as a historical reality; the second, antithetical, possibility is that the narrative was peddled as an early Christian hoax.  In dialectical terms, Miller advances an “authentic synthesis (tertium quid): the early Christians exalted the leader of their movement through the standard literary protocols of their day, namely, through the fictive, narrative embellishment of divine translation.”[i]

It should be obvious that a sincere, honest response to Miller’s investigation by Christian nationalists such as Stephen Wolfe will demand “a fearless, rational, unwavering commitment to the pursuit of truth.”[ii]  Unfortunately, Christians, generally, appear ill-equipped to meet this intellectual challenge.  Faith-driven presentations of the gospel resurrection tales seem historically plausible only so long as one’s audience knows nothing of their classical literary provenance.  The quarantine protecting the New Testament resurrection stories from exposure to their ancient cultural analogues is unlikely to be lifted anytime soon.

Given Wolfe’s personal preference for the work of older theologians, he has been isolated from critical currents in contemporary New Testament scholarship.  On social media, Wolfe has expressed admiration for the work of the early twentieth-century Orthodox Presbyterian scholar, J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937).  My guess is that Machen has influenced Wolfe’s understanding of the twin “supernatural truths” which upon which his case for Christian nationalism is grounded: “Jesus is Lord” and “Christianity is the true religion.”  In 1921 Machen published a study entitled The Origins of Paul’s Religion.  There, he argued that the truth of Christianity was to be found in a study of its origins.  Machen acknowledged Jesus as the Founder of Christianity but, because He Himself wrote nothing and “the record of his words and deeds is the work of others,” Machen turned to the testimony of Paul as “a fixed starting point in all controversy.”  As Paul was such a central figure in the early history of the Jesus movement, Machen was confident that if one could “explain the religion of Paul … you have solved the problem of the origin of Christianity.”[iii]

Gresham Machen

According to Machen, the religion of Paul “was something new.”  His mission to the Gentiles “was not merely one manifestation of the progress of oriental religion, and it was not merely a continuation of the pre-Christian mission of the Jews.”  Certainly, “the possession of an ancient and authoritative Book” was “one of the chief attractions of Judaism to the world of that day.”  Authority in religion was in short supply.  Paradoxically, however, “if the privileges of the Old Testament were to be secured … the authority of the Book had to be set aside.  The character of a national religion was … too indelibly stamped upon the religion of Israel.”  At best, Gentile converts could “only be admitted into the outer circle around the true household of God.”  For Paul, Machen declares, Gentile freedom (i.e., from the law) “was a matter of principle.”  This principle had, of course, been “anticipated by the Founder of Christianity, by Jesus Himself.”  But, if so, the doctrine of Gentile freedom was based “upon what Jesus had done, not upon what Jesus, at least during His earthly life, had said.”  It was unclear what He intended with respect to the universality of the gospel.  The “instances in which He extended His ministry to Gentiles are expressly designated in the Gospels as exceptional.”  Certainly, as far as his disciples were concerned, “Gentile freedom, and the abolition of special Jewish privileges, had not been clearly established by the words of the Master.”  This meant that there was “still need for the epoch-making work of Paul.”[iv]

Machen contends that Paul’s distinctive achievement was not the geographical expansion of the Church.  Seas or mountains were not “really standing in the way of the Gentile mission.”  Instead, it was “the great barrier of religious principle.”  Paul “overcame the principle of Jewish particularism in the only way in which it could be overcome; he overcame principle by principle.”  The real apostle to the Gentiles, Machen believed, was Paul the theologian, not Paul the practical missionary.  It was his achievement to exhibit “the temporary character of the Old Testament” by enriching the historical, logical, and intellectual understanding of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Consequently, “Gentile freedom, and the freedom of the entire Christian Church for all time, was assured.”[v]

Machen declares that, by convincing others, Jews, and Gentiles alike, that Jesus is Lord, Paul compelled the religion of Israel to go forth “with a really good conscience to the spiritual conquest of the world.”  Henceforth, “when Christian missionaries used the word ‘Lord’ of Jesus, their hearers knew at once what they meant.  They knew at once that Jesus occupied a place which is occupied only by God.”  In the final chapter of his book, Machen defends “the historical character of the Pauline message.”  The religion of Paul, he concludes, “was rooted in an event … the redemptive work of Christ in his death and resurrection.”  It was based on “an account of something that had happened … only a few years previously.”  The facts of that event, the death and resurrection of Jesus, “could be established by adequate testimony,” Machen writes.  Moreover, “the eyewitnesses could be questioned, and Paul appeals to the eyewitnesses in detail” (cf., 1 Cor. 15:3-8).  He staked everything on the truth of what he said about Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and resurrection.  Machen poses the issue in uncompromising terms: If Paul’s account of that event “was true, the origin of Paulinism is explained; if it was not true, the Church is based upon an inexplicable error.”[vi]

Richard C. Miller’s mimetic criticism of the gospel resurrection narratives presents defenders of Machen’s Christian apologetic, such as Stephen Wolfe, with a stark choice.  If the Resurrection of Jesus was, as a matter of fact, just one among many classical fictive narratives of divine translation, in what sense (if at all) can one still proclaim that “Jesus is Lord” and that “Christianity is the true religion?”  Neither Paul’s nor Machen’s appeal to “eyewitness” testimony will be sufficient to close the case.  That possibility has been foreclosed by Miller’s detailed examination of the “eyewitness” tradition that became “the political protocol in the consecration of those most supremely honored in Roman government” during the Julio-Claudian dynasty.[vii]

The legendary example of Julius Proculus, the alleged “eyewitness” to the post-mortem appearance of Romulus, contributed to the “senatorial tradition of the eyewitness to the apotheosis of the Roman emperors” between 27 BC and 284 AD.  The chief historians of the period typically devoted considerable space to the tale.  The “senators (as an act of consecration), plebes, and successors assigned glory and deification to a deceased emperor through the process of formal “eyewitness” testimony to the monarch’s translation.”  For example, following the death of Caesar Augustus, “the Roman senators carried an effigy of his body in grand procession to the Campus Martius, the location where Romulus achieved apotheosis.”  In accordance with the structured requirements of the translation fable, this “public funeral did not involve the actual corpse of the emperor, but a substituted wax effigy.”  According to tradition, “the witnesses must not find any charred bones, once the pyric flames have gone their course.”  The scenario also provided for a prominent eyewitness “who took oath that he had seen the form of the Emperor on its way to heaven, after he had been reduced to ashes.”[viii]

One suspects, however, that Anglo-Protestant evangelicals are unlikely to be impressed by such scholarly skepticism as to the historicity of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.  Faith-based conservative evangelicals still condemn as a “heretic” any supposed Christian questioning—what Stephen Wolfe might call the “supernatural truth” of—the futurist eschatology outlined in various creeds.  Accordingly, Pastor Douglas Wilson (whose Canon Press publishes Wolfe’s book on Christian nationalism) recently joined many other religious leaders in signing an open letter which calls upon Gary DeMar (head of the American Vision ministry) to recant his alleged refusal to affirm “the future, bodily, and glorious return of Christ, a future, physical, and general resurrection of the dead, the final judgement of all men, “and the tactile reality of the eternal state.”  DeMar was accused of denying “critical elements of the Christian faith” by declining to label full preterism as “heretical”[ix] (preterists hold that all of God’s promises to Old Covenant were fulfilled at the time of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD).[x]

But what is “truth?”  A correspondence theory of truth holds that a statement “is true if it corresponds to the facts; and, conversely, if it corresponds to the facts, it is true.”  It would be difficult to maintain that any of the propositions put to Gary DeMar by his critics satisfies a correspondence theory of truth.  On the other hand, the scholarly field of “mimetic criticism” lends credibility to a coherence theory of truth.  Here, truth is defined “as a relation not between statement and fact, but between one statement and another.”  On this view, “no actual statement … is made in isolation: they all depend upon certain presuppositions or conditions and are made against a background of these.”[xi]  A practitioner of mimetic criticism such as Richard C. Miller might agree, therefore, that it is true that Romulus, Caesar Augustus, and Jesus Christ were all resurrected (or translated) from the dead through exaltation to divine status.  But would Wolfe or Pastor Wilson concede that Jesus’ resurrection, along with the Second Coming of Christ, are truths anchored, not in history as it happened, but in the realm of myth, legend, or fiction?  If not, creedal Christianity is characterized, at best, less by its demonstrable “truth” than by its “truthiness.”

Was Paul a Jew, an Israelite, or a Christian?

It may still be, however, that the religion of Jesus and Paul was true in another, pragmatic, sense.  Miller hints at this issue when he observes that “the mythic dimensions of cultural stories, rather than being the mere arbitrary product of a supposed whimsical human imagination, arise out of the innate anthropological, psychic disposition of the peoples who produce and value them.”  In other words, myths “arise out of the subconsciously discerned survival and adaptive needs” of individuals and groups in relation to their “social and physical environment.[xii]  Robyn Faith Walsh more pointedly observes that Paul was “constructing a myth of origins for his audience.”  Many of his rhetorical strategies were “constituent of Paul’s larger project of religious and ethnopolitical group-making.”  She characterizes Paul as “a religious and ethnopolitical entrepreneur” for whom “ethnicity is not a blunt instrument; it is an authoritative frame for achieving cohesion among participants, and one that calls for a sense of shared mind and practice.”  Accordingly, Paul “proposes that God’s pneuma is intrinsically shared among his addressees, binding them together.”[xiii]  On a purely pragmatic view, Paul’s ethnotheology became true or false depending upon whether it worked.  Of course, any assessment of the degree of practical success achieved by Paul and the Jesus movement turns on our understanding of the goals they pursued.

Practitioners of mimetic criticism, such as Walsh, Miller, and Dennis R. MacDonald, locate New Testament writers within the discursive realm of Greco-Roman literature.[xiv]  They show that the work of Paul and the gospel writers functioned as a strategy for constructing new, or resurrecting old, social identities, aiming in the first instance at Hellenized Jews and God-fearing Gentiles in both Judea and, more broadly, throughout the Dispersion.  Other scholars have moved beyond literary analysis to examine the geopolitical breadth of the movement’s aims as well as the deep historical roots of its ethno-religious identity.  Together, both approaches effectively undermine J. Gresham Machen’s claim the “universalism of the gospel” was incarnate in both Jesus, whose redemptive work made possible the Gentile mission, and Paul, who discovered the true, theological significance of Gentile freedom.[xv]

Certainly, Machen found it difficult to deny that Jesus attached an ethnic identity to the God of Israel.  He conceded that Jesus’ disciples would not have been “obviously unfaithful to the teachings of Jesus if after He had been taken from them they continued to minister only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”[xvi]  Closer to our own day, another prominent Pauline scholar, James Dunn acknowledged that Jesus recognized the covenantal boundary around Judaism by “his choice of twelve to be his closest group of associates, with its obvious symbolism (12 = the twelve tribes)” and in “the picture of the final judgement in terms of the twelve judging the tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:28/Luke 22:30).”  But, like Machen, Dunn gives Paul credit for making clear the importance of “Gentile freedom.”  Paul brought the universal significance of the gospels into the light of day.  He taught that “faith in Christ is the climax of Jewish faith, it is no longer to be perceived as a specifically Jewish faith; faith should not be made to depend in any degree on the believer living as a Jew (judaizing).” [xvii]

But did Paul really refuse to require his Gentile converts to judaize as Dunn claims?  This raises an even more fundamental question: What were the goals of Paul and the Jesus movement?  Were Jesus and Paul on the same page with respect to those goals?  Jesus certainly looked forward eagerly to the imminent end of the age and the promised restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel.  He was not alone.  “Whether in the diaspora or (however defined) in the homeland,” restoration theology occupied a prominent place in the Jewish mind in the first century.  Diaspora Jews may have lived in pleasant and prosperous circumstances but they never “dropped traditional restoration eschatology in favor of a more positive perspective on the dispersion.”  In fact, educated Hellenistic Jews regularly portrayed diaspora as exile.  At the same time, most believed that “the diaspora would ultimately turn out for the best.”  Staples suggests that “exile and diaspora simultaneously serve[d] as punishment for sin and the means for redemption, the greater good brought out of redemptive chastisement.”[xviii]  Amidst such a tense but expectant socio-cultural atmosphere, Jesus’ direction to his disciples to serve the lost sheep of Israel launched an apocalyptic, ethno-religious movement aiming to resurrect the twelve tribes of Israel.

But how could Paul’s mission to the Gentiles serve the goals of a restorationist theology focused on the idea of Israel?  The standard Christian answer turns on a reading of Romans 11:25–26.  There, Paul suggests that the salvation of “all Israel” will not happen “until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.”  Creedal Christian theologians, such as Manchen and Dunn, interpret such passages as downplaying the specifically, and narrowly, Jewish restoration eschatology in favour of an apocalyptic vision embracing the whole of humanity.  Dunn, for example, writes that Paul’s “apocalyptic perspective … looked beyond the immediacy of the situation confronting his mission and the Israel of God.”  In doing so, he “set the local or national crisis of Israel’s identity within a cosmic framework.”  The coming Kingdom of God “had a universal significance.”  Like Machen, Dunn maintains that Paul was against “Jewish privilege” and in favour of Gentile freedom and equality in the eyes of God.  “No national or ethnic status, or we may add, social or gender status (cf. Gal. 3:28), afforded a determinative basis for or decisive assurance of God’s favour.”  That universalist principle applied not just to Israel but to the world at large.[xix]

Paula Fredriksen and Derek Lambert of MythVision

Paula Fredriksen takes issue with this interpretation of Paul’s mission.  She flatly rejects any reading of Paul’s letters from which he “emerges as the champion of universalist (‘spiritual’) Christianity over particularist (‘fleshly’) Judaism.”  She sets herself in opposition to scholars such as Machen and Dunn for whom “Paul stands as history’s first Christian theologian, urging a new faith that supersedes or subsumes the narrow Ioudaϊsmos of his former allegiances.”  In her view, far from superseding his Jewish identity, Paul preached “a Judaizing gospel, one that would have been readily recognized as such by his own contemporaries.”  His “core message to his gentiles about their behavior was not ‘Do not circumcise!’  Rather, it was “Worship strictly and only the Jewish god.”  He required Gentile “ex-pagans” to abandon the “lower gods” of their kinfolk.  They would retain their native ethnicity but live, in a certain sense, outside and apart from their co-ethnics.  Having received the holy spirit, these Gentiles “were to live as hagioi, ‘holy,’ or ‘sanctified’ or ‘separated-out’ ethne, according to standards of community behavior described precisely in ‘the Law.’”  But he did not expect, much less require, Gentile males to undergo circumcision.  On the other hand, he nowhere “says anything about (much less against) Jews circumcising their own sons. … He opposed circumcision for gentiles, not for Jews.”  Israel must remain Israel.  God’s coming Kingdom “was to contain not only gentiles, but also Israel, defined as that people set apart by God by his Laws (e.g., Lev 20.22–24).”[xx]

Paul, according to Fredriksen, “maintains and nowhere erases the distinction between Israel and the nations.”  At the same time, however, his rhetoric erases “the distinctions between and among ‘the nations’ themselves.”  The nations or “ethnē function as a mass of undifferentiated ‘foreskinned’ idol-worshippers (if outside the movement) or of ‘foreskinned’ ex-idol-worshippers (if within).”  The God of Israel is also the god of other nations as well.  “But the nations by and large will know this only at the End.”  And the point to bear in mind here is that “Paul, a member of a radioactively apocalyptic movement, sees time’s end pressing upon his generation now, mid-first century.”[xxi]  Moreover, “for Paul, the more intense the pitch of apocalyptic expectation, the greater the contrast between Israel and the nations.”  It was this “ethnic-theological difference between Israel and the nations, the nation’s ignorance of the true god, is what binds all of these other ethnē together in one undifferentiated mass of lumpen idolators.”  At the End, “this sharp dichotomy is resolved theologically, but not ethnically: Israel remains Israel, the nations remain the nations (cf. Isa 11.10; Rom 15.10).”[xxii]

According to Paul’s “eschatological arithmetic” the world consists of the seventy nations listed in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) and the twelve tribes of Israel.  At the End, all “will, somehow, receive Christ’s pneuma” (spirit).”  Gentiles-in-Christ (who Fredriksen describes as “eschatological Gentiles”) will “rejoice with saved Israel, but they do not ‘become’ Israel. … Even eschatologically—that is, ‘in Christ’—Jews and Gentiles, though now in one ‘family’ are not ‘one’.”[xxiii]  Yet, paradoxically, while Paul’s ethnē-in-Christ are not-Israel, they are not only “enjoined to Judaize to the extent that they commit to the worship of Israel’s god alone and eschew idol-worship,” they “must behave toward each other in such a way that they fulfill the Law.”  For Paul, “the only good gentile is a Judaizing gentile.”[xxiv]

Clearly, there are unbridgeable differences between Fredriksen, a convert to Judaism, on the one hand, and Anglo-Protestants such as Machen, Dunn, and Pastor Doug Wilson, on the other.  But, on one issue, at least, they all agree: both Jesus and Paul must be considered failed prophets.  Fredriksen is confident that “the historian and theologian know something that the actors in this [eschatological] drama could not; namely, that Jesus Christ would not return to establish the Kingdom within the lifetime of the first (and, according to their convictions, the only) generation of his apostles.”[xxv]  Unsurprisingly, atheistic/agnostic scholars such as Bertrand Russell, Bart Ehrman, and Richard C. Miller share that view.

Consequently, few scholars of any stripe, Jewish, Christian, or non-believer, will appeal to a pragmatic theory of truth to uphold the truth of the eschatology of the first-century Jesus movement.  Fredriksen even expresses surprise that Paul remained convinced even at mid-century that the End would come within his own lifetime: How, after a quarter-century delay, could he reasonably assert that ‘salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed?’”[xxvi]

Despite Fredriksen’s incredulity, Paul’s expectations turn out to have been reasonable on the assumption that he looked forward to the end of the Old Covenant age, not the end of the world.  Tom Holland, to cite but one prominent scholar, suggests that both Jesus and Paul framed their eschatological expectations as a New Exodus.  Paul insisted “that Israel’s experience of Exodus whether from Egypt or Babylon was only a rehearsal of the forthcoming eschatological salvation.”  Israel was separated from God and “shut up under Sin,” refusing to heed the message of the gospel.  Israel herself “was now behaving like Pharoah” in opposing the Exodus of the people of God.  In the mimetic character of that New Exodus, Paul could hardly be surprised that forty years would elapse before judgement was visited upon Old Covenant Israel and “the holy city, new Jerusalem” came “down from God out of heaven” (Rev. 21:2).[xxvii]  And, remembering the death of Moses, Paul must have known that he might not live to see that day (Deut. 34:1-8).  In other words, prima facie, a pragmatic case can be made for the credibility of the eschatology foreshadowed in the religion of Paul.  Certainly, the covenant eschatology of Don K. Preston and other preterist biblical scholars does just that.[xxviii]

The work of Jason A. Staples on Paul and the resurrection of Israel lends additional support to the biblical truth of both restoration theology and covenant eschatology.  It is important here to note the difference between Staples’ thesis and Fredriksen’s claim that both Jesus and Paul were working “within Judaism.”  Fredriksen has no doubt that Paul was “an ancient Jew, one of any number of whom in the late Second Temple period expected the end of days in their lifetimes.”  She is no less confident that, in Paul’s mind, “whether ‘now’ (mid-first century) or in the (impending) End time, ‘Israel’ is the Jews.”[xxix]  Staples calls both propositions into question.  He points out that Paul prefers “to identify himself as ‘of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin’ (Phil 3:5; Rom 11:1; 2 Cor 11:22) rather than using the more generic term ‘Jew’.  In addition, Paul frames his ministry in ‘new covenant’ language, suggesting the centrality of the restoration of all Israel to his gospel.”[xxx]

Paul’s “new covenant” theology echoes Jeremiah 31:31 but, Staples reminds us, “Jeremiah’s prophecy primarily concerns the reconstitution of all Israel—that is, that both Israel and Judah will be restored by means of God’s writing the law on their hearts.”  This implies, however, that “the covenant will be madeonly with Israel and Judah,” given that Gentiles are not mentioned in the prophecy.  But it turns out “that faithful Gentiles (those with ‘the law written on their hearts’; see Rom 2:14–15) are the returning remnant of the house of Israel, united with the faithful from the house of Judah (cf. the ‘inward Jews’ of Rom 2:28–29).”  It matters not “whether Paul actually imagines that all redeemed Gentiles are literal descendants of ancient Israelites.”  Gentile inclusion was to be the means of Israel’s promised restoration because the seed of the northern tribes was mixed “among the Gentiles—thus God’s promise to restore Israel has opened the door to Gentile inclusion in Israel’s covenant.”  Staples cites Hosea 8:8 to sum up the situation: “Israel [the north] is swallowed up; they are now in the nations [Gentiles] like a worthless vessel.”[xxxi]

By means of this process, God has provided for the salvation of the Gentiles by scattering the northern tribes “among the nations only to be restored.”  By this means, the new covenant also “fulfills the promises to Abraham that all nations would be blessed, not ‘through’ his seed (i.e., as outsiders) but by inclusion and incorporation in his seed (Gal 3:8).”  These faithful Gentiles need not, however, “become Jews (that is, Judah) in order to become members of Israel—rather they have already become Israelites through the new covenant.”

Go to Part 4.

[i] Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2015), 180–182.

[ii] Ibid., 182

[iii] J. Graham Machen, The Origins of Paul’s Religion; The James Sprunt Lectures Delivered at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, Leopold Classical Library, [Original publication, 1921], 4-5.

[iv] Ibid., 12-15.

[v] Ibid., 17, 19.

[vi] Ibid., 13, 316.

[vii] Miller, Resurrection and Reception, 75.

[viii] Ibid., 66-75.

[ix] “An Open Letter to Gary DeMar of American Vision,”

https://reformation.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-gary-demar

[x] See, e.g., Don K. Preston, Who is this Babylon? (Ardmore, OK: JaDon, 2011) and https://bibleprophecy.com/

[xi] W.H. Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 73, 76.

[xii] Miller, Resurrection and Reception, 104.

[xiii] Walsh, Origins of Early Christian Literature, 37-39.

[xiv] Dennis R. MacDonald, Synopses of Epic, Tragedy, and the Gospels (Claremont, CA: Mimesis Press, 2022).  This reference work based on MacDonald’s mimetic criticism provides a comprehensive collection of parallels between New Testament writers and classical Greco-Roman literature.  There is no space here to discuss those examples.

[xv] Machen, Origin of Paul’s Religion, 13-14.

[xvi] Ibid., 15.

[xvii] Dunn, Partings of the Ways, 114, 133.

[xviii] Staples, The Idea of Israel, 204, 208.

[xix] James D.G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, Revised Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.Eerdmans, 2008), 328-329.

[xx] Fredriksen, Paul, 108, 111-113.

[xxi] Paula Fredriksen, “Paul, Pagans and Eschatological Ethnicities: A Response to Denys McDonald,” (2022) 45(1) Journal for the Study of the New Testament 51, at 56.

[xxii] Fredriksen, Paul, 114-116.

[xxiii] Ibid., 88; Matthew Thiessen and Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Israel,” in B. Matlock and M. Novenson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies 365, at 378.

[xxiv] Fredriksen, Paul, 117, 125.

[xxv] Paula Fredriksen, “Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2,” (1991) 42(2) Journal of Theological Studies 532, at 533.

[xxvi] Ibid., 533 n.4.

[xxvii] Tom Holland, Contours of Pauline Theology: A Radical New Survey of the Influences on Paul’s Biblical Writings (Fern, Scotland: Mentor, 2004), 211.

[xxviii] Don K. Preston, “We Shall Meet Him in the Air:” The Wedding of the King of Kings! (Ardmore, OK: JaDon, 2010).

[xxix] Paula Fredriksen, “What Does it Mean to See Paul ‘within Judaism’?” (2022) 141(2) Journal of Biblical Literature 359, at 379; Fredriksen, “Reply to McDonald,” 60 (emphasis added).

[xxx] Staples, “What Do the Gentiles Have to Do with ‘All Israel,’” 378.

[xxxi] Ibid., 380-381.

Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Greco-Roman Antiquity New Perspectives on The Lordship of Jesus, Judaism, and the “Truthiness” of Christianity, Part Two

/in , /by

Go to Part 1.

What Do We Know About Jesus and His Movement?

For Christians such as Stephen Wolfe, the declaration that “Jesus is Lord” signifies that Jesus is God.  It is, however, not at all obvious that the historical Jesus considered himself to be a divine being, on a par with the ruler of all creation, the Lord of lords and King of kings.  Nor did his disciples.  James Dunn contends, however, that the “earliest forms of the Jesus tradition were the inevitable expression of their faith in Jesus.”  The first forms of that disciple faith were not yet the “Easter faith, not yet of the gospel as it came to be expounded by Paul and the other first apostles.”  They were nonetheless “born of, imbued with, expressive of [a] faith” produced by “the impact Jesus had made severally upon them.”  Dunn insists that there is no point in scholarly efforts to distinguish the “historical Jesus” from the Christ of faith.  There is only one Jesus available to us; namely, “Jesus as he was seen and heard by those who first formulated the traditions we have.”  According to him, “we really do not have any other sources that provide an alternative view of Jesus or that command the same respect as the Synoptic Gospels in providing testimony of the initial impact made by Jesus.”[I]

But, of course, the earliest written versions of the pre- and post-Easter disciple faith did not appear until twenty or so years after the death and reported resurrection of Jesus.  Dunn appeals to a process of oral transmission to bridge the gap between the death of Jesus in 30 AD and the earliest manifestation of a written tradition of faith in the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  He assumes that “the great majority of Jesus’ first disciples would have been functionally illiterate.”  So, too, would most of the earliest followers of the Jesus movement.  Accordingly, we cannot assume that Jesus himself was literate.  That being so, “it remains “overwhelmingly probable that the earliest transmission of the Jesus tradition was by word of mouth.”  Inevitably, therefore, oral faith tradition was a group tradition “used by the first churches and [was] presumably at least in some degree formative of their beliefs and identity.” [II]

Having grown accustomed to the written forms of the Jesus tradition, we naturally prefer such literary explanations.  While Dunn presents a case for confidence in the oral histories lying behind the written gospels, he acknowledges the “brutal fact…that we simply cannot escape from a presumption of orality for the first stage of the transmission of the Jesus tradition.”  As a “living tradition” of oral performances, the early Jesus tradition must have been both stable and variable, fixed and flexible.  Dunn maintains, however, that the variability of the oral tradition “is not a sign of degeneration or corruption.  Rather, it puts us in touch with the tradition in its living character, as it was heard in the earliest Christian groups and churches, and can still be heard and responded to today.”[iii]

Dunn’s thesis begs at least two important questions.  One such issue, whether the earliest ekklesia of the Jesus movement can properly be described as “Christian,” will be dealt with below.  The other is whether the gospels really were histories or biographies.  In other words, did they transmit a true and historical witness to the characteristic features of the Jesus tradition, thereby reflecting “the original impact made by Jesus’ teaching and actions on several at least of his first disciples?”[iv]  On this issue, Dunn reflects the conventional approach to the Synoptic gospels.  Ever since the nineteenth century, most scholars have characterized the gospel authors as literate spokespersons for their religious communities.

Robyn Faith Walsh, however, doubts that the gospel writers were engaged in “documenting intragroup ‘oral traditions’ or preserving the collective perspectives of their fellow Christ-followers (e.g., the Markan, Matthean, or Lukan ‘churches’).”  Instead, she argues, “that the Synoptic gospels were written by elite cultural producers working within a dynamic cadre of literate specialists—including persons who may or may not have had an understanding of being ‘in Christ’.”  Her recent work on early Christian literature compares “a range of ancient bioi (lives), histories, and novels” to the gospels, concluding that the latter works “are creative literature produced by educated elites interested in Judean teachings, practices, and paradoxographical subjects in the aftermath of the Jewish War” (66–73 AD).[v]

Walsh contends that the gospel writers were not “strictly concerned…with writing histories.”  Nor, however, should their works be treated “principally as religious texts.”  New Testament scholars, she believes, “muddle” the social context in which the gospel writers worked by presuming antecedent “oral traditions, Christian communities, and their literate spokesmen.”  Like Dunn, they “continually look for evidence of socially marginal, preliterate Christian groups…treating the gospel writers not as rational actors but as something more akin to Romantic Poets speaking for their Volk.”[vi]

In contrast, Walsh approaches the gospels as a classical scholar “would any other kind of Greco-Roman literature.”  She observes that “Greek and Roman authors routinely describe themselves writing within (and for) literary networks of fellow writers—a competitive field of educated peers and associated literate specialists who engaged in discussion, interpretation, and the circulation of their works.”  Given “such a historical context, the gospel writers are not the ‘founding fathers’ of a religious tradition.”  Rather, they are better understood as “rational agents producing literature about a Judean teacher, son of God, and wonder-worker named Jesus.”  The gospels, therefore, “represent the strategic choices of educated Greco-Roman writers working within a circumscribed field of literary production.”[vii]

Walsh calls into question Christianity’s own myth of origins, treating it as an example of the “invention of tradition.”[viii]  Unlike Dunn, she rejects the “limiting perspective that accepts the first-century Jesus movement as a recognizable and coherent social formation.”  It is only the “uncritical acceptance of Christianity’s myth of origins” that authorizes the assumption that “Christianity” emerged in the first century as a “spontaneous, cohesive, diverse, and multiple” movement.  She does acknowledge that “it is possible that the authors of the Synoptic gospels were associated in some measure with a group of persons either interested in or actively participating in practices pertaining to the Jesus or Christ movement.”  But, “ultimately,” she says, that “remains conjecture.”[ix]

Speaking of conjecture, it is significant that Walsh blithely asserts that the Synoptic gospels were produced in the “aftermath of the Jewish War” while, in the next paragraph, remarking that her study does “not scrutinize dates for these writings.”[x]  The cognitive dissonance created by the juxtaposition of those two statements immediately called to my mind the vivid impression left by the professor in my first-year honours history class as he repeatedly and forcefully emphasized the importance of accuracy in the dating of historical documents and events.  This is a perennial issue in New Testament scholarship.  Despite the existence of several solid studies dating, not just the Synoptic gospels, but the New Testament, as a whole, to the period prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, it is commonplace for scholars to assign later dates to the book or books under discussion.[xi]  Studies of the Book of Revelation are particularly prone to this practice since a post-70 date allows scholars to ignore the destruction of Jerusalem and instead to treat the book as a prophecy of the doom awaiting the Roman empire, the papacy, or modern-day America.  Agnostics and atheists who, by definition, deny the credibility of biblical prophecies of a providential divine judgement on Old Covenant Israel also have an obvious incentive to assume late dates for the New Testament writings as do theologians committed to a futurist eschatology.

Walsh clearly prefers a late date for the Synoptic gospels.  On her account, their authors were independent of oral tradition, producing creative literature by employing the conventional tools of their trade.  The stories they crafted were “beholden to the dictates of genre, citation, and allusion” arising from within a circle of peers.  No mere reflection of oral tradition, their literary choices presented “an idealized view of Jesus and his life using details more strategic than historical.”  Consequently, their work now presents scholars seeking to reconstruct the past based on such creative literary artefacts with a problem: “how can we meaningfully distinguish between fiction and history?”  But is it necessary to choose between “oral tradition” emanating from functionally illiterate, religious “communities” and the “creative literature” produced by gospel authors who “were similarly trained and positioned, working within cadres of fellow, cultural elites?”[xii]

Walsh doubts that whatever faith might have been engendered by Jesus among his disciples and those who heard their stories was sufficiently powerful to inspire a spontaneous, cohesive, and autonomous ethnoreligious movement operating in his name before the Jewish War.  Given such skepticism, Walsh’s assumption of a late date for the gospels makes sense.  By the late first century, if Hellenistic writers had little more than Paul’s letters to work with, they clearly would have been on their own in fleshing out the story of a Judean Christ.

But there is a strong case for an early date for each of the Synoptic gospels.  Moreover, something like Walsh’s literary community of educated Hellenized Jews was certainly present in both Judea and the diaspora well before AD 70.  Members of a Hellenistic Jewish intelligentsia already steeped in the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible must have been influenced by a widespread sense of impending doom spreading among first-century Jews of all social classes.  Writers steeped in such an apocalyptic interpretation of restoration theology would have been well-placed to serve as “organic intellectuals” and publicists for the embryonic Jesus movement in major urban centres throughout the empire.[xiii]  Such an ethnoreligious movement had little need for well-researched and fully documented biographies of the historical Jesus.  Instead, the authors of the Synoptic gospels competed with other writers (and each other) to generate idealized mythic portrayals of a god-like messiah come to usher in the kingdom of God.

Jesus as Lord

In Mark, the shortest and probably the first of the Synoptic gospels, the very first verse identifies Jesus as the Son of God.  For Christians, ever since the Council of Nicaea in the early fourth century, “Son of God has been the key title for Christ.”  As such, it “has all the overtones of the full-blown Trinitarian formula— ‘Son of God’ means second person of the Trinity, ‘true God from true God, begotten not made,’ etc.”  But, as James Dunn points out, this was not the case in Jesus’ lifetime.  In the Hebrew Bible “it could be used collectively of Israel…or in the plural in reference to angels, the heavenly council…or in the singular of the king.”  Indeed, more generally still, the title could be used to characterize anyone “who was thought to be commissioned by God or highly favoured by God.”  Even in relation to Jesus, “initially at least, ‘son of God’ did not necessarily imply any overtones of divinity.”[xiv]  In time, of course, the title, as applied to Jesus, did suggest that he was divine in some sense.  But, even though first-century Jews “believed that there was only one God Almighty,” as Bart Ehrman reminds us, “it was widely held that there were other divine beings—angels, cherubim, seraphim, principalities, powers, hypostases.”  Moreover, there was no impassable gulf between the human and the divine.  “Angels were divine, and could be worshipped, but they could also come in human guise.”  Conversely, it was possible for humans to become angels or demi-gods.[xv]

What about Jesus?  In all three Synoptic gospels, when (1) Jesus is baptized by John; (2) the heavens were torn asunder; (3) a voice from heaven was heard; (4) the voice declared Jesus to be his Son; and (5) the Spirit descended.  Similarly, the temptation narratives which follow agree that (1) the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness; (2) Jesus’ sojourn there lasted forty days; and (3) he was tempted by Satan.  Whether Matthew and Luke predate the gospel of Mark or expand upon it, their temptation stories provide essential insight into how Satan tempted Jesus in the desert.  They reveal the psychic fault line within Jesus’ messianic consciousness.  The Son of God is bound by filial loyalty to the Father; yet Jesus is also by right the uncrowned king of the Jews, and presumably of a restored Israel as well.  Hence, he is bound by religious obligations rooted in blood, law, and tradition to share and respect the worldly ambitions of his tribe and people.  In Mark’s mythic image of Paradise Restored, Jesus remains curiously passive while Satan actively works his wiles.  By contrast, in Matthew and Luke, Jesus resolutely resists three powerful temptations.[xvi]

Knowing that Jesus has fasted for forty days and nights and is bound to be famished, Satan challenges him to demonstrate that he really is the Son of God by commanding that the stones at his feet be made bread (Matt. 4:2).  Satan’s first temptation calls to mind John the Baptist’s rebuke to the Pharisees and Sadducees several verses earlier in the text.  There, John warns them “not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham (Matt. 3:9).  John expects the carnal pride displayed by these representatives of the Jewish religious establishment to be followed by a fall.  Anticipating Paul’s mission to the Gentiles (Rom. 11:11), John is certain that the ethnoreligious movement soon to be launched by Jesus will produce so many children of Abraham (according to the spirit) that Abraham’s seed (according to the flesh) will be provoked to jealousy.  In effect, when tempting Jesus to flaunt his miraculous powers as the Son of God, Satan serves as a stand-in for the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Having failed in his first attempt, the tempter holds out another enticement calculated to fire the imagination of first-century Jewish Zealots keen to restore Israel to her former imperial glory.  Satan takes Jesus to the top of the highest mountain, pitching the prospect of dominion over all the kingdoms of the world if only he will “fall down and worship me (Matt. 4:9; Lk. 4:7).  Jesus rejects this temptation as well.  Nor is he moved to weaken his determination not to tempt God when Satan sets him upon a pinnacle of the Jerusalem temple, inviting Jesus to prove that he is the Son of God by jumping off the edge, trusting in angels to save him from certain death (Matt. 4:5-7; Lk 4:9-12).

Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13 help us to see that Satan’s three temptations reflect the irrepressible conflict between the two personae incarnate in Jesus’ messianic consciousness, the exalted Son of God, and the historical king of the Jews.  During those forty days in the desert, Jesus struggled to reconcile those potentially contradictory roles.  In both gospel narratives, Jesus resolves his messianic identity crisis.  In doing so, he learns how to preach the Word to his people—the lost sheep of Israel (Matt. 10:6)—in accordance with the will of the Father.  He also learns that Satan will dog his footsteps to the cross and beyond.  Clearly, the temptation narratives in the Synoptic gospels encapsulate the world-historical conflict between the spiritual Israel of God and Old Covenant Israel according to the flesh.  In fact, the seismic shift in the foundations of the cosmic temple during the first century drove the entire cast of characters in the gospels towards the creation of a new heaven and a new earth.[xvii]

It is a mistake to read the temptation stories as an account of the sort of existential crisis that might face any human being in any time and any place.[xviii]  Jesus faced those temptations, not because he was a human being but as a remarkably gifted and devout Jewish holy man descended through the royal line of David from the seed of Abraham.  Scot McKnight demonstrates that “Jesus’ God is the national God of Israel, not some abstract universal deity.  He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; he is the God of David and of the prophet; he is the God of the Maccabees and of John the Baptist.”  Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God was animated not “by an abstract religious feeling but [by] a concrete realistic vision for God’s chosen nation.”  It “concerned Israel as a nation and not a new religion”.  Accordingly, “[w]hen Jesus taught his disciples to pray for the kingdom to come (Matt 6:10), he surely had in mind more than an existential encounter with the living God that would give his followers an authentic experience”.  For McKnight, it follows that “[t]he most important context in which modern interpreters should situate Jesus is that of ancient Jewish nationalism.”[xix]

Both John and Jesus “had one vision for their contemporary Israel, and that was for Israel to become what God had called it to be.”[xx]  For Jesus, God was not a universal deity.  Israel stood in a covenantal relationship with the Father known to no other nation.  Throughout the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures, “God never destroys his offspring…but rather pursues them in order to bring them to perfection.”[xxi]  The telos of that covenantal history was to be perfected in the Lord Jesus and the righteous remnant of Old Covenant Israel; they alone were the true Israelites, forever separated from the false Israelites when the nation faced its final judgement (Matt 13:41-43).  Jesus’ messianic mission was “to lead Israel away from a national disaster and towards a redemption that would bring about the glorious kingdom.”  From the time of his confrontation with Satan in the wilderness it became clear to him that he would have “to offer himself consciously and intentionally to God as a vicarious sacrifice for Israel in order to avert the national disaster.”[xxii]

But there was more than one vision of Israel’s destiny in the popular imagination of first-century Judaism.  Steeped in a tradition of chauvinistic religious rhetoric dating back to the Maccabean revolt in the second century BC, most first-century Judeans scoffed at the notion that “true Israelites” were not “destined to be part of God’s eschatological people…on the basis of heredity.”  They rejected the charge made by John the Baptist and Jesus that Israel according to the flesh had “forfeited their enjoyment of covenant blessings and was in exile “because of unfaithfulness and sinfulness.”  Certainly, they did not believe that “God was forming a new people” based solely on repentance, righteous obedience, and covenant faithfulness.”[xxiii]

Most first-century Jews were confident that the God of Israel would rest forever in a temple made by hands in Jerusalem.  Few took seriously Jesus’ warning that in their lifetime a newly inaugurated kingdom of God would pronounce final judgement on Old Covenant Israel and throw the “false Israelites” into the flames of hell. (Matthew 13:40-43).  Jesus knew his fellow Jews longed instead for the restoration of national Israel according to the flesh.  Indeed, inspired as he was by his own national vision for Israel, he shared the messianic longing resonating within the blood faith of his people.  In his heart of hearts, Jesus could not properly deny the satanic spirit of the Maccabees and the zealots a fair hearing.[xxiv]  Indeed, Jesus saw that spirit at work even in his disciples, most notably on the occasion in Mark 8:31–33 when he administered the sternest possible rebuke to Peter: “Get thee behind me, Satan; for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.”[xxv]

To put the matter plainly, it was not his generic humanity tempting Jesus with bread, universal dominion, and independence from the Father.  Rather, it was his inner Jew.  The historical Satan emerged within the breast of the historical Jesus Christ.  As a charismatic personality, at ease in crowds, recognized in childhood as the king of the Jews, and by the Father as his Son, Jesus could hardly fail to empathize with all but the most grandiose aspirations of his own once-holy people.

Did Jesus Think He Was God?

In the New Testament, Jesus is often given the title “Christ,” a Greek translation of the Hebrew word for messiah, meaning “one who is anointed.”  As with a “Son of God,” to be anointed was to be “chosen and specially honoured by God…in order to fulfill God’s purposes and mediate his will on earth.”  Both titles could be “used to refer not to a divine angelic being, but to a human being.”  Some Jews “deeply committed to the ritual laws given in the Torah” had the idea that the messiah would appear as a great and powerful priest who would serve as a future ruler of Israel, interpreting and enforcing the law of God.  More commonly, first-century Jews looked forward to the appearance of a messiah as a mighty warrior who would overthrow the oppressors who had taken over the promised land, thereby restoring both the Davidic monarchy and the nation of Israel.  Others held to a more apocalyptic vision in which the coming of the messiah would bring a new creation, not just a political revolution, but “the Kingdom of God, a utopian state in which there would be no evil, pain, or suffering of any kind.”[xxvi]

According to Bart Ehrman, it seems likely “that Jesus’s followers, during his lifetime, believed that he might be this coming anointed one.”  But they certainly did not expect him to die and rise from the dead.  Nor did Jesus.  But he did think of himself as the messiah.  He did expect to become the king of Israel, not by means of political struggle or military victory, but when God intervened in history to destroy the forces of evil and to make Israel a kingdom once again ruled through his messiah.  He prophesied, publicly and privately, that the kingdom would arrive when the Son of Man came in judgement against everyone, and everything opposed to God.  In fact, Ehrman observes, “Jesus told his disciples—Judas Iscariot included—that they would be seated on twelve thrones ruling the twelve tribes of Israel in the future kingdom.”  Ehrman is convinced that “Jesus must have thought that he would be the king of the kingdom of God soon to be brought by the Son of Man.”  Everyone knew that the future king of Israel would be the anointed of God, the Messiah.  “It is in this sense that Jesus must have taught his disciples that he was the messiah.”[xxvii]

Both Jesus and his disciples expected that the messiah was destined to defeat the enemy; instead, the putative messiah was “arrested, tortured, and crucified, the most painful and publicly humiliating form of death known to the Romans.”  Such an outcome “was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be.”  But then “they came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and this reconfirmed what had earlier been disconfirmed.”  Their faith was restored: “He really is the messiah.  But not in the way we thought!”[xxviii]

Dr. Bart Ehrman

Ehrman hastens to add that, while the historical Jesus did think of himself as “a prophet predicting the end of the current evil age and the future king of Israel in the age to come,” he never—not in the Synoptic gospels at least—called himself God.  Of course, in the gospel of John, “Jesus does make remarkable claims about himself.”  For example, in John 8:58, “Jesus appears to be claiming not only to have existed before Abraham, but to have been given the name of God himself.”  Ehrman argues that not only was the gospel of John produced later than the Synoptics, but verses, such as Jesus’ proclamation that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), “simply cannot be ascribed to the historical Jesus.”  Instead, Ehrman tells us, “What we can know with relative certainty about Jesus in that his public ministry and proclamation were not focused on his divinity; in fact, they were not about his divinity at all.”  Rather, they were about what “the kingdom that God was going to bring.  And about the Son of Man who was soon to bring judgement upon the earth.”[xxix]

But, if the historical Jesus never claimed to be God, how did this messianic Judean prophet become a Hellenized cosmic Christ?  That story, Ehrman explains, begins with the crucifixion and death of Jesus.  “It was only afterward, once the disciples believed that their crucified master had been raised from the dead, that they began to think that he must, in some sense, be God.”[xxx]  Before his death, the followers of Jesus believed that he was the messiah, the king of the future kingdom.  After the discovery of the empty tomb, they were convinced that he had been exalted to the heavenly realm.  It was then that they knew he was the future king and fully expected him to come from heaven to reign as the Son of Man.  In his role as the Son of Man, Jesus would have been understood to be a divine figure.  Indeed, in one sense or other, in all four of his exalted roles—as messiah, as Son of God, as Son of Man, and as Lord—Jesus was divine.  But, in no sense did his followers understand Jesus to be God the Father.  Ehrman emphasizes that:

whenever someone claims that Jesus is God, it is important to ask: God in what sense?  It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity, and “of the same essence” as the Father.[xxxi]

How Did Jesus Become God?

Even if Jesus did not become fully God until the fourth century, his divine status was assured at the resurrection.  As a historian, however, Ehrman does not think “we can show—historically—that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead.”  When “it comes to miracles such as the resurrection,” he declares, “historical sciences simply are of no help in establishing exactly what happened.”  In other words, Ehrman is not saying “that the resurrection is what made Jesus God.”  Rather, “it was the belief in the resurrection that led some of his followers to claim he was God.”  In short, Ehrman denies the historicity of the resurrection.  As far as he is concerned it never happened.  As for the empty tomb, it too is no more than legend.  Victims of crucifixion were not given proper burials.  Indeed, he claims there is good reason to accept “the rather infamous suggestion,” made by John Dominic Crossman, “that Jesus’s body was not raised from the dead but was eaten by dogs.”[xxxii]

Other historians make the similarly unorthodox suggestion that the facticity of the empty tomb and resurrection narrative may not have mattered, as such, to those who constructed it.  Richard C. Miller, for example, contends that the gospel resurrection narratives were never intended to demonstrate historical truth through research and evidence.  Sometime around 150 AD Justin Martyr admitted as much in his 1 Apology.  As summarized by Miller, the burden of Justin’s Christian apologia was as follows: “We, O Romans, have produced myths and fables with our Jesus as you have done with your own heroes and emperors; so why are you killing us?”  This appears to be an admission “that the earliest Christians had composed Jesus’ divine birth, dramatically tragic death, resurrection, and ascension within the earliest Christian Gospel tradition as fictive embellishments following the stock structural conventions of Greek and Roman mythology.”[xxxiii]  In other words, the gospel accounts of the risen Jesus differ in detail but not in kind from fables surrounding antique Mediterranean demigods such as Hermes, Dionysus, and Heracles, as well as emperors such as Caesar Augustus.

Indeed, Miller observes, Justin’s argument does “not even qualify as an ‘admission’ per se but merely arose as a statement in passing, as though commonly acknowledged both within and without Christian society.”  Justin’s point, however, was not just that there was “nothing unique” or sui generis about the “dominant framing contours of the Jesus narrative.”  His apology also “asserted that the classical pantheon was, in truth, a cast of demons.”  Nor was this assertion the product of a reasoned line of argument.  Rather, Justin flatly declared “that the gods were to be understood as wicked and impious.  Only out of ignorance did the classical world regard such demons as deities.”  It might seem that the Greeks were saying the same things as the Christians but, Justin affirms, the Greek legends “arose by the inspiration of ‘evil demons’ through the ‘myth-making of the poets’” By contrast, Justin simply pronounces the Christian narratives to be “true” without providing any further evidence or reasoned argument to support his claim.[xxxiv]

This was a rhetorical rather than philosophical or historical strategy.  Justin was attempting “to assign archaic precedence to Judeo-Christian tradition.”  He simply proposed “that demons inspired the classical writers to produce lies or fictions that proleptically mimicked the Christian Gospel narratives.”  Miller suggests that Justin’s apology marked a step beyond the task facing the gospel writers in the first century.  That is to say that, at first, the gospel “stories succeeded inasmuch as they were capable of appropriating, riffing on, and engaging the conventions of the classical literary tradition” in ways which appealed to an audience comprising both Hellenistic Jews and Gentile God-fearers in diaspora synagogues.  By the middle of the second century, however, “early Christians had their sights on a higher prize: a comprehensive cultural revolution of the Hellenistic Roman world.”  In this strategic context, it was no longer “enough that Jesus should join the classical array of demigods. … [H]e must obtain a sui generis stature, while condemning all prior Mediterranean iconic figures.”  Such ambitions placed new demands on the rhetorical style of Christian apologetics, requiring “an underlying shift in the proposed modality of the Gospel narratives, moving along the continuum from fictive mythography towards historical fact.”[xxxv]

At their appearance in the first century, however, the gospels, the letters of Paul, and the Acts of the Apostles already reflected a “fundamental metanarrative or theme” which amounted to “the systematic abrogation of nearly every isolationist, separatist practice of early Judaism.”  According to Miller, “the forms of these urban early Christian constructions were, more often than not, at their core lifted from the structures of classical antique culture, often with a mere outward Judaistic decor.”  The resurrection narratives of the New Testament were “first composed, signified, and sacralized in the Hellenistic urban world of Roman Syria, Anatolia, Macedonia, and Greece, these works typically reflected and played on crudely stereotypical myths of Jewish Palestine.”  Their syncretic language reflected the adaptation by early Judeo-Christian theology of antique Greco-Roman forms such as “Zeus-Jupiter, with his own storied demigod son born of a mortal woman.”[xxxvi]

So outlined in the neutral scholarly language of “comparative analysis,” it is easy to miss the explosive significance of Miller’s thesis.  But, simply by refusing to apply the definite article in reference to the allegedly “unimaginable miracle” which is collectively supposed to be “the singular impetus for the birth of Christianity, Miller challenges the fundamental presuppositions of contemporary Christian apologetics.  He denies that one can speak, in the context of Greco-Roman antiquity, of the Resurrection, the Empty Tomb, the Event, the Mystery.  He condemns the tacit agreement according to which classicists designate and relinquish to New Testament scholars a uniquely partitioned and sacralized discursive space surrounding “the question of the historicity of Jesus’ narrated resurrection.”  His own study identifies “a detailed, shared conventional system between the Gospel resurrection narratives” and what are known to classicists as “the extant translation narratives of Hellenistic and Roman literature.”[xxxvii]

Miller subsumes the “resurrection” language of the Gospels under the broader “translation topos” found in Hellenistic and Roman cultures.  He demonstrates how the latter “tradition functioned in an honorific capacity.”  In other words, “the convention had become a protocol for honoring numerous heroes, kings, and philosophers, those whose bodies were not recovered at death.”  He points to “the translation of Romulus … as the quintessential, archetypical account for a pronounced ‘apotheosis’ tradition in the funerary consecration of the principes Romani.”  The Romulus fable relates how the

legendary founding king of Rome, while mustering troops on Campus Martius, was caught up to heaven when clouds suddenly descended and enveloped him.  When the clouds had departed, he was seen no more.  In the fearsome spectacle, most of his troops had fled, but the remaining nobles instructed the people that Romulus had been translated to the gods.  An alternate account arose that perhaps the nobles had slain the king and invented the tale to cover up their treachery.  Later, however, Julius Proculus stepped forward to testify before all the people that he had been eyewitness to the translated Romulus, having met him travelling on the Via Appia.  Romulus, according to this tale, offered his nation a final great commission and again vanished.[xxxviii]

Miller provides a lengthy catalogue of similar translation fables and contends that such tales “provide a mimetic background for the Gospel narratives.”  Like Robyn Faith Walsh, Miller finds that Greek, Roman, and first-century Hellenistic Jewish writers competed, not just with each other, but with older authors such as Homer to mimic, improve upon, and embellish existing examples of the translation topos, or genre.  He argues, very persuasively, “that the textualized Romulus indeed figured prominently within early Christian resurrection narrative construction.”  He then discusses what such mimetic, rhetorical performances “achieved within the cultural milieu of a Romano-Greek East, that is, in the primitive centuries of the rise of Christianity.”  In a distinctly understated fashion, Miller remarks that his “book also tacitly delivers a rather forceful critique of standing theories regarding the likely antecedents of the early Christian ‘resurrection’ accounts.”  In particular, he takes careful aim at modern Christian apologetics which deny any antecedents.  He attributes such efforts to endow the Resurrection of Jesus Christ with a sui generis status to “a perspective typically arising out of ‘faith-based discourse.’” [xxxix]

Miller “sets forth a more satisfying thesis, a model that more comprehensively explains the available data, namely that such narratives fundamentally relied upon and adapted the broadly applied cultural-linguistic conventions and structures of antique Mediterranean society.”  In this cultural context, the early Christian resurrection tale functioned “as an ideology and not as an argued event of history.”  Early Christian writers, Miller writes, “did not attempt a case for the historicity of the resurrection of their founding figure.”  Instead, Jesus was deployed in the gospel resurrection narratives as “a mythic literary vehicle.”  Miller defines “myth” as “a sacred narrative or account” that served to frame the present for the Jesus movement.  The resurrection myth functioned, like the Greco-Roman translation fable, “to undo tragic loss, reclaiming the hero in a modal reverie of heroic exaltatio.”[xl]

Miller argues that the innovation of the Gospel postmortem accounts did not reside in the employment of the translation fable convention per se, but in the scandal of the application of the embellishment to a controversial Jewish peasant, an indigent Cynic, otherwise marginal and obscure on the grand stage of classical antiquity.”  Jesus emerges as a mythic literary figure in the gospels rather than as a historical actor.  As Miller puts it, the risen Jesus became the iconic “image of a counter-cultural ideology” through the conscious appropriation by the gospel writers of the literary protocols of the ancient Hellenistic Roman world.[xli]  In accordance with such protocols, Paul and the gospel writers presented Jesus as unique, not because he was exalted as a god following his death, but because he was better than the other gods of the classical world.

[I] James D.G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 25, 31.

[II] Ibid., 41, 36, 43.

[iii] Ibid., 53, 125.

[iv] Ibid., 69-70.

[v] Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), xiii-xiv.

[vi] Ibid., 3-6.

[vii] Ibid., 5-6.

[viii] Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

[ix] Walsh, Origins of Early Christian Literature, 32-33, 35.

[x] Ibid., xiii-xiv.

[xi] Cf. John A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1976) and Jonathan Bernier, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament: The Evidence for Early Compostion (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).

[xii] Walsh, Origins of Early Christian Literature, 4-6.

[xiii] The term “organic intellectuals” was coined by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), but it is not at all anachronistic when transposed into the context of an ethnoreligious movement with geopolitical ambitions in the first century.  See, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (eds. and trans.) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5-23.

[xiv] Dunn, Partings of the Ways, 170-171.

[xv] Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: Harper One, 2015), 83.

[xvi] Andrew Fraser, Dissident Dispatches: An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology (London: Arktos, 2017), 424-446.

[xvii] On the Old Testament account of the creation of the cosmic temple, see John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Dover Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009).

[xviii] See, e.g., Helmut Thielicke, Between God and Satan: The Temptation of Jesus and the Temptability of Man [orig. ed., 1938] (Farmington Hills, MI: Oil Lamp Books, 2010).

[xix] Scot McKnight, A New Vision for Israel: The Teachings of Jesus in National Context (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 69, 83, 6, 10.

[xx] Ibid., 6.

[xxi] Anthony D. Baker, Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 77.

[xxii] McKnight, New Vision, 147, 13.

[xxiii] Ibid., 62, 110-115.

[xxiv] Ibid., 136-137, 146-147, 96.

[xxv] Mark does not identify Satan’s three temptations in 1:13, but in 14:30 (just before standing trial before the Sanhedrin) Jesus predicts, accurately, that a satanic impulse will cause Peter to “disown me three times” before the cock crows twice.  Shortly afterward, the disciples fall asleep three times while on guard duty, revealing the tempter within at work again with a suite of counter-Trinitarian snares likely to entrap Jesus’ closest followers (Mark 14:37-41).

[xxvi] Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 113-115.

[xxvii] Ibid., 115-119.

[xxviii] Ibid., 116-118.

[xxix] Ibid., 124-128

[xxx] Ibid., 128.

[xxxi] Ibid., 208-209.

[xxxii] Ibid., 132, 157.

[xxxiii] Richard C. Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 1-3.

[xxxv] Ibid., 4-5.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 12-13.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 15-16 (emphasis added).

[xxxviii] Ibid., 16.

[xxxix] Ibid., 16.

[xl] Ibid., 16-17, 158, 162.

[xli] Ibid., 180.