Paul the Apostle-Scholars Answer Questions About Paul-Part 3

By: Staff Writer; ©2004

Dr. N. T. Wright answers the following questions: What authority does Paul give for his message? Did Paul invent Christianity? What changed Paul over to believing in Jesus? Was Paul predisposed to believe in Jesus? Define “tradition” as Paul used it. What does Paul tell us about the burial of Jesus? What is the “spiritual body”? What was the understanding of “resurrection” among the Jews, particularly the Pharisees? What was it about the resurrection of Jesus that got Paul’s attention?

Dr. N. T. (Tom) Wright

[Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey and was formerly Dean of Lichfield Cathedral. He taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God is regarded as one of the most significant studies in the contemporary “Third Quest” of the historical Jesus.]

What authority does Paul give for his message?

Dr. N. T. Wright: Right at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15, which, by the way, is really where he’s summing up a lot of the stuff that he wants to say in the whole letter, so this isn’t just a bit tacked on at the end, he says, “Now, look, I’m going to remind you of the stuff I preached to you right at the beginning and here’s how it went.” And then it’s this formula: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, was raised on the third day according to the Scrip­tures, and was seen by” these various witnesses.”

Now, Paul is quoting there something which he has told them right at the beginning. In other words, back in maybe the late 40s when he first arrived in Corinth. So we’re talking 20 years after Jesus’ crucifixion and Resurrection. But he’s also saying that this wasn’t just what he used to teach, it was what Peter and Apollos and everybody else used to teach. And it’s clear that the Corinthians knew those other teachers and if they could have called up, or however, got in touch with one of the other teachers and said, “Hey, just check it out. Is this the real thing?,” Paul knows that they would have got the answer, “Yes. It is.” So with that little nugget there at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15 we are in touch with material which takes us right back to the very early days of Christianity.

Did Paul invent Christianity?

Wright: Paul does talk of himself as building on the foundation and he says in a sense, “I am the one whose done this stuff” but it’s clear that it’s Jesus who is the foundation and Paul is constantly looking back and saying that what he is doing is building on that Messiah foundation which is the very beginning of it all because if you take away the death and resurrection of Jesus, for Paul, there’s nothing left. Paul is not offering people a new way of being religious. Paul is telling people that something has happened through which the world is now a different place.

What changed Paul over to believing in Jesus?

Ankerberg: People have to go back and say, “What persuaded this fellow to change from his views over to believing in Jesus?”

Wright: For Paul it’s clear that he had and hadn’t abandoned his previous views. I mean, for Paul, he was and remained a Jew loyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and that was absolutely fundamental. But he believed that this God, and not some other God, had acted in Jesus in the decisive events of the crucifixion and Resurrection. As I say, through which the world had been changed and a door had been opened into God’s future.

Was Paul predisposed to believe in Jesus?

Ankerberg: He was not predisposed to believe in Jesus. Right?

Wright: No. No. No. No, that’s right. And it would have taken something pretty dramatic. I mean, we’ve seen in our own day how people can get very fixed and set in believing that God is on the side of their particular movement, whichever it may be. And Paul was exactly in that kind of mind-set. So for him it took this blinding flash of light on the road to Damascus which wasn’t just a religious experience, it was God revealing to him that Jesus of Nazareth really had been raised from the dead. Take that away and you can’t explain why Paul did and said what he did and said.

Define “tradition” as Paul used it.

Ankerberg: Some people look at that and they say that he’s talking about giving traditional material, and that word “tradition,” especially in America, has a bad connotation. Tell us why that’s valuable stuff.

Wright: Oh, it’s valuable because in the early Church they lived in what we would call an “oral culture,” by and large. We live in a print-based or an electronic-based culture. They didn’t have any of that and for them, having something that was passed down by word of mouth and you could check where it had come from was the best way of making sure you were on safe ground. Now, of course, over the subsequent centuries, the Church has developed a thing called “Tradi­tion” which often then becomes an excuse for, “We like doing it this way so let’s call it Tradition and that makes it okay.” And since the Reformation we’ve learned that there’s a lot of danger in that. But for Paul and the early Church this was the way of saying, “We are in touch here with the authentic, early, original events.” And so Paul uses the Jewish language called “handing on Tradition” because that meant we were on secure, solid rock. You could base your life on it.

What does Paul tell us about the burial of Jesus?

Ankerberg: Now, in 1 Corinthians 15 he says, “Jesus died according to the Scriptures, and then He was buried.” It doesn’t say that He was buried in a tomb. But you say that that is im­plied. Tell me why.

Wright: Oh, yes. When Paul talks about Jesus dying, being buried and being raised, Paul is familiar, of course, with the burial practices of first century Jews. He was a first century Jew himself. And so to be buried implies that He was in whatever sort of a tomb it was. Now, they had different types of tombs, but many of them–and we can see these in and around Jerusalem today–were to tombs cut in a rock, in a cave, into which you would go and roll a stone outside the door and so on. So it seems to me quite clear that Paul is aware of that as the sort of burial it was.

What is the “spiritual body”?

Ankerberg: What did Paul mean in 1 Corinthians 15 when he talked about “spiritual body”?

Wright: That’s one of those phrases which have caused endless problems because the word “spiritual” in our culture doesn’t mean at all what Paul meant by it. In the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version which many Christians use and which are very good versions in many ways, they oppose the physical body to the spiritual body and in our culture that means physical–this “stuff,” and spiritual is kind of nebulous like a ghost or a vision or whatever. But the actual words in the Greek don’t mean that. In the Greek what we have is soma pseuchekon, which is from the same word that we get psyche or psychedelic or psychia­trist, and that is what is translated “physical.” And it seems to mean the embodiment for the soul. And then the soma pseumatikon, which is the appropriate embodiment for the spirit. And what we have then is not a contrast between what we would call physical and spiritual but a contrast between this present body–which is corruptible and which is heading for death–and a body which, because it’s finally animated by God’s Holy Spirit, the Resurrection body, is not corruptible. When Paul is talking about this in 1 Corinthians 15, that is the main contrast that he is making between a body that is corruptible–going to die and going to corrupt in the grave; and a new body which will be incorruptible and has come through death and come out the other side and will never be touched by death again.

What was the understanding of “resurrection” among the Jews, particularly the Pharisees?

Ankerberg: In the context of Judaism, in all that they were thinking about in terms of when people died what happened to them, and the expectations of the Resurrection that the Phari­sees held, okay? There also is a little turn in the road when Jesus comes forth from the dead and appears to the disciples, and that is, that there is only one Resurrection; where the Phari­sees you talk about held to everybody was going to be raised. Now, talk about why that is impor­tant.

Wright: Yes. I think, for Paul, again, because he is our earliest witness, you can see it very clearly, you could summarize it like this: What Paul expected God to do for all the righteous at the end of time, he discovered that God had done for Jesus in the middle of time. And so you have this sense of not just, “This is a very odd thing that’s happened,” but this was what was supposed to happen to everybody and it happened to Jesus. And that is, of course, one of the reasons why for Paul Jesus is the Messiah who represents the whole people of God. It’s as though in him all of this has actually happened, has actually come to pass, so that you then get not just a sharpening up of the idea of Resurrection, that it isn’t just resuscitation, it means going through death and out into this new sort of body, you also get a revising of the time table of history. Instead of history going along and at the end God’s going to do it all, God has done an advanced version in the middle of the present sequence of what He’s going to do at the end.

It’s very interesting that in the Greek Orthodox tradition of iconography–I’ve got on the man­telpiece an icon of the Resurrection. And what we have there is not simply Jesus as the Risen One, but Jesus helping up Adam and Eve out of the tomb. And when I bought a different icon just recently in a Greek Orthodox shop, I said, “I want an icon of the Resurrection of Jesus” and they pointed me to one like this which is actually of the Resurrection of all people. And they said, “Yes. This is Easter. This is what it’s all about.” And whereas for us in the West we have really separated that out: “There’s Easter over there” and “There’s all of us being raised there,” in the Eastern Church these things belong together and they’ve never really separated them out. And that’s a very biblical, a very Pauline insight.

What was it about the resurrection of Jesus that got Paul’s attention?

Wright: Paul was what we would call a right-wing Pharisee. We know a little bit about some right-wing Jewish agendas of our own day. This is a very politicized agenda. It’s about getting rid of pagans; getting rid of enemies; about God acting through the devotion to Torah of particular Jews and God thus revealing what we call God’s righteousness, God’s faithfulness, to the cov­enant.

And this is Paul’s question: How is God going to be faithful to the covenant? And Paul’s answer as a Jew–Saul of Tarsus’ answer—is that God is going to do this through the Torah, through the obedience of His people through which He will act splendidly to bring about justice and peace for Israel and the judgment of the world.

Take this man, Saul of Tarsus, having gone off zealously to persecute the followers of Jesus because they are out of line; they are being disloyal to Torah; they’re being disloyal to Temple and the land and all these other things; have him confronted by the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and suddenly, Paul’s world turns inside out because he realizes that Jesus has been raised from the dead; that Jesus, who was executed as a blaspheming, would-be Messiah, and this means that God has vindicated this Jesus as Messiah, which means that in fact that whole plan of God has in fact been fulfilled in the messianic events of Jesus’ life and death and Resur­rection. And from there it’s actually only a short step to saying this good news, this Gospel message of Jesus, God has now unveiled what His covenant plan was all along. And in the letter to the Romans Paul says, “The gospel is revealed, the righteousness of God, the cov­enant faithfulness of God.” On that basis Paul then looks at Jesus himself and sees that God has done in Jesus what in the Old Testament God said He would do Himself. In the Old Testa­ment God says, “I love my people so much, I will come and deliver them.” Paul sees that God Himself was present. He says, “God was in Christ redeeming the world to Himself.” And so he writes that extraordinary poem in Philippians 2 in which he talks about Jesus being in the form of God but not regarding His equality with God as something to exploit–which is a way of saying being equal with God didn’t mean giving Himself as putting on grandeur like a Roman emperor would. It meant being committed to the path of self-sacrificial humble service, going being obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. That is why Paul says, “God has now raised Him from the dead, exalted Him, given Him the name Lord, the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus we should bow…” and we shouldn’t mistake what’s happening there. This is both the theological statement again–a way of saying “in Christ God has redeemed the world” and it’s also a political statement because if Jesus is Lord, Caesar isn’t. And all of that is there in a nutshell in Philippians 2:6-11 and in Romans 1:1-17.

 

Read Part 4