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56. Paulos Apostolos · Undeceptions with John Dickson

• TRANSCRIPT 2 Corinthians 11:23-27 I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged, more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the 40 lashes minus one, three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was pelted with stones. Three times I was shipwrecked. I spent a night and a day in the open sea. I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles, in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep. I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food. I have been cold and naked. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Those are the words of the apostle Paul in his second letter to the church in Corinth written around the year 56. Read for us by actor and friend of the podcast, Yannick Lawry. Thanks mate. It's like Paul lived 100 lives. It certainly wasn't the typical life of a first Jewish man from Tarsus. He was beaten up quite a lot. Shipwrecked three times, bitten by a viper, stoned, chased out of towns and all of that followed his claim to have had a personal encounter with the risen Jesus, the Messiah. He said from that moment, he went from zealously trying to eradicate Christianity, to being willing to give his life, to see Christianity flourish throughout the Roman world. Whatever you say about him, he lived an interesting life. So, who was this Saul of Tarsus, better known as Paul the Apostle? The author, AN Wilson in his controversial biography of Paul said, “The fact that the gentile world adopted Christianity is owing solely to one man, Paul of Tarsus.” That's probably right. After Jesus himself, Paul is considered by many to be the most important person in the history of Christianity. And according to many, Paul is everything that went wrong with Christianity. Jesus never imagined an institution, capital C, Church. Paul started a network of churches all around the Mediterranean. Jesus was a free spirit so the argument goes, preaching love and acceptance. Paul introduced endless rules and created a system of doctrine. Jesus demonstrated the highest regard for women. Paul famously told them to be quiet. Jesus was humble. Paul was a megalomaniac and it's the writings of Paul, not anything from Jesus that dominate the New Testament. It's Paul, not Jesus, who traveled outside of Galilee and Judea as the book of act says to the ends of the earth, to spread the good news, the gospel. But whose gospel was he really selling? And was it really good news? I'm John Dickson and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, How To Be A Christian Philosopher by Dolores Morris. Every episode at Undeceptions, we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. TAPE: PAUL, APOSTLE OF CHRIST FILM Paul: I was in the temple keeping true to my fasts, my prayers. Stephen was out in the streets, bringing charity to widows and orphans preaching truth to drunks and the crippled. I was blameless in the ancient law of Israel while Stephen was blaspheming on the very holy ground of God. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL That's the 2018 film, Paul, Apostle of Christ. James Faulkner is playing Paul as he retells how he persecuted the man, Stephen, one of the earliest Greek speaking followers of Jesus. It's the story you can find in the book of Acts in the New Testament written by Luke, the author of the gospel of Luke. Turn up chapter seven and eight and maybe a bit of nine, and you'll see the story for yourself. Anyway, the movie sort of follows Paul in the last years of his life in Rome, a time we actually don't know much about at all, more about that later. It's a moving film, but as with most movies about biblical figures, it's not always accurate. TAPE: PAUL, APOSTLE OF CHRIST FILM Luke: So, what did you do? Paul: We spread lies, created an uproar that had him brought to trial. Luke: What did he argue? Paul: That Jesus was the Messiah and the temple of God was no longer the only place where God could be worshiped. Blasphemy. In that moment, I vowed to destroy all those that spoke of this Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL It's tempting to think that Saul, a good Jewish name, was changed to Paul, a good Greco Roman name at his conversion, a bit like Simon in the gospels, having his name changed by Jesus to Cephas, or rock, which in Greek is Petros, Peter. But that's probably not what happened. Being fully bilingual from a semi-educated and semi multicultural family. Paul probably always went by Saul when he was with Jews and Paul, when he was with Gentiles. We know that many Jews of this period did the same thing. Anyway, we'll be talking about Paul through this episode. Okay. Back to the pre-Christian Paul, before he supported the killing of Stephen and the persecution of other Christians. INTERVIEW BEGINS John Dickson: So, let's wind right back and talk about what can we say concerning say, his hometown and his upbringing? Douglas Moo: Yeah. Paul does give us some information about that. And we also get information from the book of Acts, which records two or three important speeches of Paul, where he gets into his background a little bit as well. He grew up in a city- JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL That's Douglas J. Moo, Doug, the Blanchard professor of New Testament at the Wheaton College graduate school. He's one of those professors who has been around so long and written so many books that scholars and theological students just refer to him as Moo. Moo says this, Moo says that, the Moo position on Romans 7. Did you see that latest Moo commentary and so on? I'm going to politely call him Doug though. For our purposes, Doug is widely recognized as a Pauline scholar with giant commentaries on several of Paul's letters, including four separate commentaries, just on the letter to the Romans. Douglas Moo: He grew up in a city called Tarsus, which is in modern day southeastern Turkey. And in Paul's day, it was an important city on one of the great Roman roads. So, a lot of people traveling through open to all kinds of influences. He himself makes clear in passages like Philippians 3, that he was raised in a pretty strict Jewish home though. That was his context in terms of his home life, even though in Tarsus, he would naturally have been exposed to much wider currents of thought. Paul tells us about being educated under Gamaliel one of the great rabbis of his day. So, he certainly had a very, very sound background in what we might call theology, knowledge of scripture. What other … JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Gamaliel was a first century Jewish rabbi and a leader in the Jewish Sanhedrin, one of the ruling council. He's a Pharisee, a member of a particular Jewish party we'll hear more about later. He's mentioned twice in the New Testament, both times in the book of Acts, which records the immediate aftermath of Jesus' death and the actions of his followers. And one of those references is Paul telling an angry Jewish crowd that he was a student of Gamaliel in Jerusalem. He's trying to express that he too is Jewish. The Jewish Talmud, a compilation of Jewish oral law is fairly frank about the importance of Gamaliel. "When Raban Gamaliel, the elder died," it reads, "regard for the Torah," the Jewish law, "ceased and purity and piety died." That's Paul's teacher one of the greatest Pharisees of the age. INTERVIEW CONTINUES We know of the Pharisees from the gospels. They're the people who were always clashing with Jesus for some reason. But apart from that what do we know about the Pharisees? What did it mean from day to day for Paul to be a Pharisee? Douglas Moo: Pharisees took scripture very seriously. They wanted to bring it into the lives of everyday Jewish people. In order to do that, they developed what's called the oral law. That is in addition to the written law, the Pentateuch, they added other laws, commandments, prohibitions, designed to help the people of Israel live lives pleasing to God. They were also very jealous or zealous, maybe we should use the word that the New Testament uses for, the Jewish traditions. While they didn't get into politics a lot, they were very concerned to preserve Israel as the people of God and to have the people of God flourishing under God's rule. I think the Pharisees have gotten a pretty bad rap, but in a sense the constant conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is simply an indication that Jesus was pretty close to the Pharisees in many ways, in terms of their theological outlook. In other words, they had stuff to fight about. Whereas there were other Jews who were much more secular who were more interested in power and politics. Jesus just didn't have that much in common with them, but he had quite a bit in common with the Pharisees. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL As a Pharisee, Paul was meticulous, a sincere Jew who loved the scriptures. He shared all the hopes of the Jewish people about the coming Messiah, but he most certainly did not believe that the Messiah was Jesus of Nazareth. The Pharisees were alarmed at Jesus while he was alive. Partly because although Jesus shared many of their views, he critiqued their oral law, the bits of their law that weren't written down in what we call the Old Testament, but were passed on verbally from rabbi to student. Now that Jesus was dead, the Christians were running around claiming that this crucified false teacher who had critiqued the Pharisaic oral law was actually the risen Messiah. It must have sounded close to blasphemous. Who has ever heard of a crucified Messiah? Paul starts persecuting these followers of Jesus within about the first year after Jesus' death, in the very city of his death. He was like the Asha at the mob execution of Stephen, holding everyone's coats as they picked up rocks and stoned Stephen to death. He then carries on that task, persecuting Christians all the way up to Damascus in Syria, 350 kilometers north of Jerusalem. Can we detect what was his problem with Christianity? Douglas Moo: One of the things that Pharisees were known for was their devotion to the law of God as that, which should rule the people that should guide them, that sort of guaranteed their place in their relationship to God. And the early Christians began speaking in ways that elevated Christ over the law and began to question the law in various ways. And I think that's particularly what exacerbated Paul as it were, what stimulated him to go on his persecuting ministry. Actor reads: "Then Paul said, 'I am a Jew born in Tarsus of Silesia, but brought up in this city. I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained in the law of our ancestors. I was just as zealous for God as any of you are today. I persecuted the followers of this way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, as the high priest and all the council can themselves testify. I even obtained letters from them to their associates in Damascus and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished.'" Paul speaking, as recorded in the book of Acts chapter 22. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL It's on his way to Damascus, trying to track down the followers of Jesus that Paul had the original road to Damascus experience. TAPE: Monologue from Vantage Studios So, I set off for Damascus with some of my companions. We were walking down the road, talking joking around like it was any other day, any other day. Little did I know what was about to happen. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL We're listening to a dramatic retelling of Paul's trip to Damascus by Vantage Stories. We're going to put a link in these show notes. TAPE: Monologue from Vantage Studios Just as we were outside the city limits, suddenly a bright light flashed all around me. And then I heard it, a voice. It was almost as if the light was speaking to me. It said, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" What? I didn't understand. "Who are you?" His next word shook me to the core. "I'm Jesus." No, no, no, no, no. Jesus was dead. I saw him bleed out on that cross. "I'm Jesus, whom you're persecuting, Saul." And at his final words, everything went black. I couldn't see, I was blind. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL After Paul encounters Jesus on the road, he's blinded. We get all those proverbial cliches from this road to Damascus experience, of course, but also seeing the light and blinded by the light. Anyway, according to the book of Acts written by Luke, a direct colleague of Paul, Jesus told Paul to go into the city where he will know what to do. His traveling companions help him into the city. He remains there for three days, he doesn't eat or drink, and he can't see a thing. Then a man named Ananias lived in Damascus and he was a Christ follower already. The book of Acts says that Jesus appeared to Ananias in a kind of dream or vision and told him to seek out Paul. Thanks, Producer Kaley. Producer Kaley: "Then an Ananias answered, 'Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priest to bind all who call on your name.' But the Lord said to him, 'Go. For he as a chosen vessel of mine to bear my name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel. For I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake.' And Ananias went his way and entered the house and laying his hands on him he said, 'Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.' Immediately there fell from his eyes, something like scales, and he received his sight at once and he arose and was baptized." JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Some scholars question whether Paul's Damascus Road experience should really be called a conversion. I mean, at such early days in Christian, it's probably not right to think of it as a new religion as if he converted from one to the other. Christianity is really a renewal movement within Judaism. Still, it was a massive life changing experience for Paul, a conversion of some kind, from wanting to lock up and kill the followers of Christ to being willing to suffer for that same movement. He doesn't describe it simply as a vision or a dream. He seems to think that he experienced an actual, the actual risen Jesus, like some of the others had earlier. INTERVIEW CONTINUES Douglas Moo: Yeah, I think so. That is the way he tries to portray it. Again, we get into realms here, which I think are difficult for us to pin down in terms of the phenomena we're talking about. There is obviously a central reality that Paul experienced there however that came to him, it's a reality that, again, those with them apparently didn't experience them the same way. So that's where we have to be cautious about talking about this as a simple, just realistic appearance. There are other elements there, I think. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL There are a ridiculous number of theories about what actually happened to Paul on that road to Damascus, perhaps it was dehydration. Paul was traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus, a trip that might have taken about two weeks, perhaps he forgot to drink and the vision of Jesus was a type of illusion, a mirage. At least one academic article has suggested that Paul saw a fireball meteor. That's the bright light that appeared and knocked him to the ground. Lightning is another theory. Others have suggested Paul experienced an epileptic fit. Seriously. There's a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy that produces seizures that can rob the sufferer of sight to varying degrees and can make them see things that aren't really there. Sigmund Freud thought that Paul had some kind of hysteria brought on by of course, suppressed trauma, perhaps from seeing poor old Stephen stoned to death. As NT Wright, another well-known Pauline expert puts it, "Theories of this kind are in fact a bit like what happens when people who have never seen a neon sign are suddenly confronted with one, but in the script of a foreign language. They spend their time wondering how on earth it lights up like that without even realizing that the sign is saying something." Historically, we should treat Paul's vision of Jesus like we might treat the accounts of Jesus performing miracles. People who were there at the time, really thought they were seeing something that was miraculous. And I don't think any expert Jewish, Christian, or atheist actually doubts that Paul himself thought he really saw Jesus. The radical change in his life that occurred at that point brought him no earthly benefits over the next 30 years. He suffered loss of religious status, loss of social status, beatings, imprisonments, and ultimately worse. INTERVIEW CONTINUES Douglas Moo: If we put his conversion around 33, we can't be sure of the date, but I would put it somewhere around 33. He doesn't write his first letter, which I take to be Galatians until around 48. So here we have about a 15-year period before Paul writes a letter. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Okay, so Paul has his vision of Jesus within about a year after Jesus was crucified. We learned from the book of Acts and Paul's oblique references in some of his later letters that he has baptized almost immediately by Ananias and goes into the synagogue in Damascus to proclaim that Jesus is the Lord, the Messiah, his message doesn't go down well and a plot is soon uncovered to have Paul killed. So, his friends helped smuggle him out of Damascus and back to Jerusalem. And then 15 years go by. What? INTERVIEW CONTINUES John Dickson: Okay. Something you just mentioned, I think will interest maybe my more skeptical listeners. And that is if Paul's earliest letter is almost 20 years after Jesus, well, let's say 15 to 20 years after Jesus and after Paul's conversion, how do we know what earth was going on in that first decade or two? Douglas Moo: Yeah, we are given glimpses here and there in writing to the Galatians again, in my view, probably the first letter Paul wrote, he's sort of defending himself and explaining his background. And so, he goes into a little bit of detail there about his movements, converted, spending some time in Arabia, he says, then going to Jerusalem briefly before heading back to Tarsus. So, we learn a little bit there. Acts fills in a few blanks there. Acts chapters 8 and 9, give a little bit of detail about Paul's life there. There's a lot we don't know to be sure. For instance, what did Paul do during that time in Arabia? I think traditionally Christians thought, "Well, there he is out in the desert meditating." Possibly, but Arabia in Paul's day was also the name of the Nabatian kingdom, now focused on Petra, which some of us of course will know about, famous archeological site. Populated place, and I think it's more likely Paul began preaching right away. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Most of what we know about Paul comes from the New Testament itself and similar to the search for the historical Jesus, there is a search for the historical Paul that has captured the imagination of plenty of scholars. We have scraps of evidence about Paul from the book of Acts, of course, but there's also a letter from outside the New Testament written by Clement of Rome to the Corinthians. That's still in the first century. Then there's Ignatius of Antioch who mentions Paul a few times, about 45 years after Paul. But the coolest thing for the historian, is that we have a collection of Paul's own authentic letters. We don't have that for many figures at all from ancient history, not for Alexander the Great, Emperor Augustus, Pontius Pilate, Gamaliel, not even for Emperor Nero who lived at the same time as Paul. And the letters of Paul are a treasure trove of information in about Paul's life and work, and of course his thoughts about Jesus. So, I asked Doug, what are some of the recurring themes in Paul's writings? Douglas Moo: The first point we should make 13 letters written on very different occasions to different audiences, dealing with different problems. There's inevitably going to be quite a bit of diversity here. So, we have to recognize that. Some themes though that run right through the letters, the first one I would identify and the most central one is based on Paul's ubiquitous phrase in Christ, in him, the way in which God has enabled human beings who are sinful and estranged from God because of that sin to have that sin forgiven and enter into a union with Jesus himself, and that's central then in defining what it means to be a Christian. We are people who are in Christ, who live and breathe the air of Christ as it were, which affects obviously then all of our lives. A second great theme of course, is the way in which God has sent Jesus initially to bring in the first stage of God's kingdom. But of course, there is awaiting us a second stage of God's work when Christ returns. So, the focus on two different appearances of Jesus, one to, again, inaugurate the kingdom, he dies, he's raised, he's ascended, providing forgiveness, justification, reconciliation, so on. And yet another stage that we're waiting for. Another series of events that will come with a climax of salvation history when Jesus returns in glory, our bodies are transformed through resurrection, and the eternal state is opened up to us. So that's as second kind of structural theme that's really important in Paul. He wants to locate Christians in Christ and in this sort of overlapping period of time where the new has come, but the old still here, and we live in the tension of that old and new, and Paul's constantly working with that and trying to help his churches lead faithful Christian lives. You could certainly add as a third sort of leg to our stool, in a sense, Paul's concern to involve the Gentiles and the people of God. When Paul was before Paul was converted as a Pharisee, again, he was very for the traditions of Israel. Israel was God's chosen people, they were special and they needed to keep their identity as a special, unique people of God. And one of the things quickly revealed to Paul in that Damascus Road episode, I think, was the new inclusive nature of what God was doing. Now Messiah has come, and this Messiah is not just for Israel, this Messiah is universally available and Gentiles then are able to enter into the people of God as full and equal citizens with Jews. And that was a very new thing for many Jewish people in Paul's day. And it was one of the things that drove his mission to be sure. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL This is perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Paul. From both a historical and a theological perspective he was a radical inclusivist, much like Jesus, more about that later. As much as Paul exemplified the openness of Jesus, the fact is, and we can detect this from passing statements in his own letters, he sometimes had a standoffish relationship with the other disciples who had known Jesus personally. He refers to a couple of tense meetings in Jerusalem with the chief disciples, Peter, James, and John. One was sometime before the year 35 and another about a decade or more later. He laid before them the guts of his message about Jesus to the Gentiles. Although he gained their support, it's pretty clear from the way he describes things and from one or two clues in the book of Acts, that those first followers of Jesus were initially wary of Paul, because it wasn't so long ago that he was trying to throw them in prison. It's also clear that they were a little bit concerned that Paul might turn his back on the poor Jerusalem Christians, as he jet sets off into the Roman world. "All they asked," Paul says, "in his letter to the Galatians," which Doug reckons is the earliest of Paul's letters, "is that I remember the poor," meaning the poor of Jerusalem. And then he adds, "the very thing I was eager to do." Douglas Moo: There are passages like Galatians 2, which talk about a disagreement among Paul and the original apostles, Peter, James, and John, if we may single out those three, seem to be kind of the inner circle in the gospels to some degree. A bit of dissonance, I think it's fair to say, not surprising granted this new Christian movement, granted everybody trying to figure out, okay, who are we now in light of Christ, having to rethink how to read the OT, how to rethink some of their fundamental values. And again- JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL By the way, OT here stands for Old Testament. Maybe that was obvious, but you know. Douglas Moo: ... and people came out and slightly different places on that, so there was some friction on, particularly in the matter of how Gentiles should be invited into the Kingdom. And again, that's reflected in Acts 11, it's reflected in Galatians 2 and some other places as well. In the history of the study of Paul has grown up this notion that Peter and Paul were kind of fundamentally opposed to each other. They were entirely in different camps. And that's just not faithful to what we read in scripture. In Galatians 2, the disagreement ends with Peter and Paul agree on the gospel. In Acts again, you have Acts 11 where Peter talks about his experience and the conversion of Cornelius. Again, there's kind of general agreement about what's what's going on there. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Cornelius was a Roman Centurion with the so-called Italian regiment. He was stationed at Caesarea on the coast of Judea when he met Peter. And he was the first recorded non-Jewish convert. Douglas Moo: So different styles, different emphases, yes, certainly among the apostles. But I think a fundamental agreement on the core of the gospel emerges clearly as well. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL The thought of tensions between the first disciples and the apostle Paul so close to the time of Jesus might be unsettling for some, but you got to remember the death and resurrection of Jesus are still fresh in everyone's minds. The movement is growing rapidly, but so is persecution. And although the Christians had a strong educational program from the beginning, none of the gospels were yet written. So, there's not a settled written form of things yet. There's still processing at all we might say. But whatever teething problem there were between Paul and the other Christian leaders, these pale in comparison to the contradictions people have since imagined between Paul and Jesus himself. Is Paul the real inventor of Christianity and thus the great perverter of the teaching of Jesus? That's after the break. SPONSOR AD: ZONDERVAN This episode of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan's new book, Believing Philosophy, A Guide to Becoming a Christian Philosopher by Dolores Morris. We're going to be talking to Dolores for an episode later in the season on whether faith and reason are at odds and how philosophy can actually help Christianity and its followers. Dolores's book offers an accessible introduction to the discipline of philosophy and how to start thinking about the questions that will confront us all at some point in our lives. What exactly do I believe? Why do I believe it? Are there reasons, good reasons for that belief? Should I believe something else instead? What if I'm wrong? How would I know? If I'm right, how can I explain that fact to others who disagree with me and so on. "Philosophy" says Dolores, "asks you to think more carefully about what you believe." Honestly, one of my biggest intellectual regrets is not doing more philosophy early on in my academic life. I needed this book 20 years ago. Better late than never. So, check out Dolores Morris's new book, Believing Philosophy it's on Amazon of course, or get more info at zodervan.com. SPONSOR AD: ANGLICAN AID Beautiful India is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women. Rates of domestic violence in the country are soaring and violence against women is often seen as an appropriate action. It happens here as well. Anglican Aid supports a safe house in the city of Bangalore in India, offering refuge for women and children fleeing abuse. The safe house offers crisis accommodation, counseling, medical care, legal aid, and skills training to help women get back on their feet. You can help support these women who dare to seek a better life. I am a big supporter of Anglican Aid's work. I trust them and urge you to go to anglicanaid.org.au. That's anglicanaid.org.au to support their wonderful work. EPISODE CONTINUES Barry Wilson YouTube clip Paul is a rather interesting person because he comes on the scene out of the blue. He's a man who never met of Jesus. Their paths never crossed. He never walked with Jesus in the Galilee. Wasn't with him in that last time in Jerusalem or anything like that. He was not mentored by Jesus in any way whatsoever. Paul comes out of the blue and appears on the scene as a remarkable conversion experience that we'll talk about in a minute. And then he develops a theology about Jesus. He develops a whole kind of theology, or I think a mythology about what Jesus' death meant. So, we have then a contrast, a Johnny come lately, a guy out of the blue coming in and oddly enough, he gets believed. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL That's Canadian professor Barry Wilson talking about his 2008 book, How Jesus Became Christian, in which he argues that Jesus who was really just a young Jewish rabbi was transformed by Paul into the God of a religion Jesus would never have recognized. It used to be a pretty popular view in scholarship. It still is on the internet. INTERVIEW CONTINUES John Dickson: So, I still meet people today who think Paul invented what we call Christianity. Jesus was the humble Jewish teacher and Paul turned him into the divine savior of the world. Jesus emphasized love for the needy, Paul turned Christianity into a theological system. How much merit do you give that sort of bifurcation? Douglas Moo: Certainly, there's kind of a difference in the amount of theology, if we may put it that way, and the way the theology is expressed. In the gospels, of course, we have a narration of Jesus' ministry on earth. And one important thing to keep in mind then is that he, he is ministering before the cross in the resurrection. I think there's a deliberate reserve on Jesus' part in talking too explicitly about those events and their significance and to put it bluntly and unfairly, at the end of the day, Jesus came not to teach about his death. He came to die. So, we have to appreciate the difference there in terms of where they are placed in the timeline of salvation. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL This is a pretty simple observation, but it explains a lot. Jesus is in that gospel story. In fact, he is that gospel story. So, there's very little self-conscious exposition of the story from Jesus within that story. But Paul appears on the scene just on the other side, when that gospel story is a completed whole. A huge part of Paul's task is on the one hand explaining how this gospel of Jesus was forecasted in the Old Testament and he's brilliant at that. And then on the other hand, he's trying to work out in real time, how to communicate all this to a non-Jewish audience. Many of the alleged tensions between Jesus and Paul are explained by these factors. Douglas Moo: We also have to realize that these differences between Paul and Jesus are often caricatures. I would encourage people who think there's a dichotomy to go back and read sympathetically one of the gospels and one of the letters of Paul. And I think what we will find is that there are clear differences here, but it's difficult to detect any contrasts or conflicts. And indeed, if you read the gospels carefully, while Jesus doesn't say a lot about the theology of his death and resurrection, there are key statements he makes that are obviously ones that Paul and other apostles build on in elaborating the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection. So, differences, yes, explained by context, Jesus ministering in a Jewish environment with a certain background and culture in place. So just as today people do not preach the gospel the same way if they're in a village in Africa as they do in downtown Sydney, because you're trying to reach an audience, a different audience, and you're going to cast things differently, depending on that audience. That's something of what we've got going on here when we compare Jesus and Paul. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL One of the starkest contrasts people often make between Jesus and Paul concerns women. That's above my pay grade and maybe even Doug's. So, I called dear friend, professor Lynn Cohick a New Testament scholar from Northern Seminary in Illinois. John Dickson: I want to ask, do you see a great contrast between Jesus who was of course known for welcoming women and the Apostle Paul, whose reputation is that he's sidelined them? Lynn Cohick: I don't see a big difference between the two. So, Jesus did most of his ministry in rural Galilee where he could walk from town to town, and most people knew somebody related to him as you go, he was with family, if you will. And so that casts a kind of different light on how you're going to welcome disciples. The women going along with him as they went from town to town, Paul was in an urban context and that you just, kind of, you negotiate things a little bit differently when you're in an urban context. Nevertheless, he included women as his coworkers. Yeah, so I think both Jesus and Paul involved women in very important ways, central ways in their ministries. John Dickson: What would you say is our best evidence in Paul's letters for the involvement of women in Christian mission and leadership? Can you talk us through some of that best evidence? Lynn Cohick: Sure, sure. So, when I start talking about women who are leading, I want us to have the proper frame in mind, the apostles themselves like Peter and James and Paul, all describe themselves as a slave of Christ, a doulas of Christ, this idea of serving, that that's how they understood their ministry. So, when we look in Philippians, for example, and we find Euodia and Syntyche, two women, they're mentioned in chapter 4, they're Paul's coworkers, that's how he describes them. They may also be overseers or well in the Greek it's [foreign language 00:40:24] it's the only place in Paul's letters when he's addressing the audience, addressing the recipients that he uses that particular word. Philippians is also the only place where he calls out particular congregants as needing to be of the same mind and of working together. And so, I think a reasonable assumption is that Euodia and Syntyche were, in fact, overseers. Paul talks about Nympha we don't know about her very much. She has a church in her house. Lydia who takes care of Paul while he's in Philippi, showing hospitality and led a church in her house. And when we think of hospitality today, I think we imagine it to be the house is nice and picked up and I've just baked cookies. And- John Dickson: Just like when Buff and I have visited your house, right? Lynn Cohick: Exactly. Exactly. And that's what heaven's going to smell like, is fresh baked cookies. So, I don't want to denigrate this at all, but the there's more to it. So, when women have a church in their house, they're leading that church. They're the ones that, yeah ... I don't know how else to say it. They're leading it. Phoebe, I've talked about Phoebe as the one who takes Paul's letter of the Romans and exegetes it. She reads it. She explains it. So, she clearly knew the theology. Isn't that amazing? She knew the theology in Romans well enough that Paul entrusted her with that letter. She's a deacon there at the church outside of Corinth and also Paul's benefactor. So, she helped Paul with whether it was financial aid or connecting, networking. And we think of Junia who Paul talks about as an apostle and that's at the end of Romans, Romans chapter 16. But when I say this, because people argue about, did he really call her an apostle? Yes. I think most people believe that he did. Where is she? She's in prison. So, when we talk about women leading, they're leading with self-sacrificial intensity. They're giving their money. They're in prison for the sake of the gospel. That's what leadership is about in the New Testament. It's about stand for the gospel come what may, and women were doing that right alongside Paul and were in that same group of disciples that Jesus gathered. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL There's another serious claim that people make about Paul and Jesus. And it goes to the very heart of what we call Christianity. So, I put it to Professor Moo. John Dickson: Some say Paul didn't even know about the historical Jesus, or all he knew was this sort of, I don't know the savior celestial Jesus. What do you say to that? Douglas Moo: Yeah, that's partly resting on a misunderstanding of a verse in 2 Corinthians 5 where Paul talks about no longer knowing Christ, according to the flesh and a famous German theologian in the early 1900s, a German theologian named Rudolf Bultmann famously said, "Well, ticks like this show Paul perhaps didn't know about and was unconcerned about anything about the historical Jesus, all he was concerned about was the risen Christ." I think just about everyone agrees now that's what Paul is saying in that verse. It's not that he didn't know Christ in his fleshly time or period, it's that he doesn't know Christ from a fleshly point of view. That's what he's talking about there. Now it has to be said that, and I find this, I'll be honest, somewhat surprising that Paul does not refer to Jesus' teaching very often at all. You very rarely have him telling his churches, "Okay, behave this way because Jesus taught that." Now there are a lot of illusions to the teaching of Jesus and Paul that we sometimes miss, so clearly, he's been impacted by the teaching of Jesus. And he sort of then, that comes out in his own expressions in many, many places. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Sure, Paul's letters don't contain anything like a narrative description of Jesus' life, but he was operating in the mid first century, a time where he could be confident that readers of his letters already knew that stuff about Jesus. They were already followers of the way. They had heard about Jesus' life, his teaching, his miracles and so on. And Paul had already visited these churches in person, sometimes staying with them for months, preaching and teaching. And the letters we have were written after these missions. So, they provide little snippets in passing of what Paul had already told them and then expands on. And it turns out that a lot of that stuff is the same stuff we find in greater detail in the later gospels. Way back in episode 25, that's Bible Mistakes, I listed 20 details we have about the historical Jesus, just from the letters of Paul. Jesus' name, of course. His place, a few details about Jesus' family, his selection of 12 apostles and some of their names, his teaching on love, divorce, the financing of the Christian mission. Of course, his crucifixion, burial, and appearances and quite a bit more besides. There's a link to the full list in the show notes. Being our earliest Christian documents, Paul's passing mention of things his readers already know about Jesus, provide excellent evidence for Jesus. The notion that Paul didn't know or didn't care about the historical Jesus is in my view, thoroughly debunked. INTERVIEW CONTINUES One problem that won't go away for scholars is the question of the authorship of some of Paul's letters. There are 13 letters of Paul in the New Testament. I think it's fair to say though, that a majority of today's scholars reckon Paul only wrote seven or eight of them and that a later disciple or just a fan of Paul wrote the others in his name. What's the story there? It's very common among scholars to say that Paul didn't write all of the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. He didn't write 1 or 2 Timothy; he didn't write Ephesians and so on. What's your reading of the evidence? Douglas Moo: Yeah. In the academic world often work on the apostle Paul focuses on seven letters. These are sort of considered the truly authentic letters of Paul, the other six, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians are all doubted by many scholars, not all. And in some cases, maybe not even a majority, but certainly many. And the argument here is that, well, there was a kind of a recognized style in the world of that day, where you wrote a letter in someone else's name. We certainly know of many books of various kinds from that time that are written that way. There are these so-called Jewish apocalypses, for instance. You have the Apocalypse of Moses, the Apocalypse of Abraham, clearly not written by Moses or Abraham, and arguably not even intending to fool people into thinking that they were written by Abraham or Moses. It was just a kind of known style. So, the argument is, well, that's what these authors are doing. They're trying to recapture the teaching of Paul in days after he had died. And to do that by just borrowing his name as it were. And it's a kind of innocent literary device that people would see through. My problem with that, is that I don't find that this device of what we might call false authorship, pseudonymity, was you used in letters. That was a genre in the ancient world that apparently people did not write in other people's name, and the evidence we have is that when letters were detected as not being written in the name they claimed to have been written by, they were rejected. They were not used as a basis for any kind of authority or anything of the sort. So, I don't think the evidence is there that any of the letters that Paul claims to have written were not written by him. I think he had help in writing some of them. We forget that many of the letters of Paul begin by naming not only Paul, but also some of his co-workers as co-writers or co-authors in some sense. So other people were collaborating with Paul in the writing of the letters at times. Certainly, the style is different because Paul is using different scribes as he dictates to them and they have some authority or license perhaps to choose wording of their own. So, all that diversity is there. And there's, again, diversity in the teaching of the letters. But to me, it's not a diversity of contradiction. It's a diversity of growth. It's a diversity in which you're applying the same gospel to very different circumstances. And because of that you're making different points, emphasizing different things and so on. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL We've talked about the authorship of some of Paul's letters before. Check out the show notes for all that stuff. In addition to the verbal argument, that say the pastoral epistles have different words and ways of creating sentences. There is the idea that what we find in 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus is very structural Christianity, hierarchical Christianity, whereas the original Paul was sort of charismatic and free flowing. What strength do you give to that kind of argument? Douglas Moo: Again, there are differences here. There's no doubt about that. You read a 1 Corinthians 12 and you get the sense, "Oh, the Spirit just gives gifts as he wants, and we're just going to kind of hang loose and see what the Spirit's doing." And that's the end of the story, whereas you're right. You get to 1 Timothy and Titus especially; Paul talks there about offices in the church as it were and the need to follow the teaching. There is structure obviously going on there. I think a lot of that, if not all of it, can be explained by the different circumstances of Paul's life. 1 Timothy and Titus are written as Paul is aware of reaching the end of his apostolic work. He clearly knows the end is near for him. And I think he begins naturally to ask the question, "How am I going to figure out how to keep the churches on track when I'm gone?" The kind of issue that Steve Jobs at Apple had to face, a charismatic leader who's run the company, throwing out all these great ideas, okay, what's going to happen after Steve Jobs? How's Apple going to survive as a corporation? Well, you're going to have to find successors. You're going to have to find maybe organization to preserve the truth that Paul was so anxious to teach himself. So, I don't think it's that unlikely kind of move nor do we find in Paul, the authentic so-called letters of Paul, an immunity to structure. In 1 Thessalonians 5, he talks about the need to obey the leaders and so forth, so some kind of structure is there I think pretty early on. 5 MINUTE JESUS, JOHN DICKSON Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. The most extraordinary thing about the apostle Paul is his inclusiveness. He once shared the view of his fellow Pharisees that the Jews alone were the people of God, the pure. Even where the Pharisees accepted converts, and they certainly did, those converts had to adopt the entire Jewish culture, food laws, circumcision, and so on. Paul's message of welcome to those outside Judaism is extraordinary. He said that Gentiles a word that basically meant foreigners could be full members of God's family as Gentiles, not by adopting a culture or custom, but by faith, which in his letters essentially means entrusting yourself to Jesus Christ. Here is one of the ways he puts it in Romans chapter 3. "Now, apart from the Jewish law, the righteousness of God has been made known to which the Jewish law and the prophets testified. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and falls short of the glory of God and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through the shedding of his blood to be received by faith. For we maintain," he goes on, "that a person is justified by faith, apart from the works of the Jewish law, or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes. Of Gentiles too, since there is only one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith." Honestly, this is the manifesto that launched Christianity onto the international scene. And it is not a curbing of the free spirit and love of Jesus. It is the very expression of Jesus' own habit of including sinners to his dinner table. Consider these statements in Mark chapter 2, "When Jesus was having dinner at Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples for there were many that followed him. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees, saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?'" Or Luke 7, "Jesus said, 'For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say "He has a demon." The son of man'" that's Jesus, "'came eating and drinking. And you say, "Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners."'" Or Luke 15. "Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus, but the Pharisees and teachers of the law muttered, 'This man welcomed sinners and eats with them.'" This is quintessential Jesus, sitting down with the outsiders, those classed sinners people normally thought to be under the judgment of God. And here in the gospels, this only refers to Jewish sinners and the Pharisees were still super upset by it. Friend of sinners was no compliment on their lips, but here's the thing. Paul who had formerly been a Pharisee, took this inclusive spirit of Jesus and universalized it. "Anyone from any nation," Paul said, "who entrusts themselves to Jesus the Lord is part of God's family." As Paul memorably, put it in Romans chapter 5, "God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners Christ died for us." Paul was the ultimate disciple and herald of the mission of Jesus. You can press play now. EPISODE CONTINUES JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL We don't know for sure how and when Paul died. The book of Acts leaves off with Paul in Rome alive and well around the year 62. He's awaiting trial before crazy Emperor Nero. No one knows why Acts ends there. Some reckon it's because that's when Acts was written, before Paul died. Others Think Luke's goal in writing Acts was to show how the gospel message made it to the Imperial capital. He wasn't trying to write a biography of Paul. There was, we know, a huge purging of Christians in Rome two years later in AD 64, following the great fire of Rome in mid-July. Nero blamed the Christians for the fire that wiped out several suburbs of the capital. And we know from the Roman writer, Tacitus that, "Nero convicted vast numbers of Christians," he says, "setting wild animals on them in the games arena, as well as crucifying and setting alight many others." If Paul was in Rome in 64, it is highly probable he got swept up in all of this. He was a well-known ringleader of the Christians, and this would chime with a passing statement 30 years later in a document known as 1 Clement written by the leader of the Roman church to the Corinthian church in the year 96. In it Clement says that Paul endured quote, "many indignities and tortures" and quote, "having testified before the rulers, he thus departed from the world." It seems clear from the way Clement writes that he expects everyone, even over in Corinth, to know the details of Paul's departure. It's just frustrating to us all these century later, that he doesn't stop to tell us. If I were a betting man, I'd put money on this statement from Clement being a reference to the awful roundup of Christians in Rome in AD 64. As the great New Testament historian FF Bruce writes, "The most that can safely be said is that Clement bears witness to Paul's death at Rome under Nero." If the letter in the New Testament known as 2 Timothy was written by Paul, as I believe, but plenty of scholars doubt, we have what must be among Paul's last formal words from chapter 4. "At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them, but the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me, the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. And I was delivered from the lion's mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom." I asked Doug Moo what are his favorite lines from Paul? Douglas Moo: I've always been drawn to the Colossians 2 text, which I think Paul is using to kind of summarize his message to the Colossian church, where he plays on the language of fullness to remind us that God and Christ has given us all we possibly need to flourish spiritually. And the problem in Colossae is the people were tempted to look elsewhere, "Oh, to find spiritual fulfillment, we have to go after this God or this religion or this philosophy." And Paul was saying, "Even if they're helpful in some ways to think about what's going on, you've got everything you need in Christ and in the gospel." JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL Everything you need in Christ, or as Paul wrote it in that passage, "In Christ you have been brought to fullness." People have tried to drive a wedge between Jesus and Paul, but it just doesn't work. Paul thought Christ was everything. And he thought that anyone who had Christ had the fullness. I wanted leave you with the words of Tom Holland, perhaps the world's best selling historian. We had him on the show, you might remember for episode 45, Christian Revolution. He isn't sure Christianity is true, but he's sure it remade our world. And a huge part of that was the way the apostle Paul brought Jesus to the west. We were going to ask Yannick Lawry to read a lovely paragraph from Tom Holland about the apostle Paul. But then I thought, "Nah, why not ask him to record it for us?" He's a lovely bloke. And he sent this straight back. Thanks, Tom. Tom Holland: Paul's letters are like a collection of acorns from which mighty Oaks have grown. They are the most in influential pieces of writing to have survived trauma antiquity and their influence on Christian history and the present day character and assumptions of the west are incalculable, not just our earlier sources for Christianity. They are also the most influential. If the European philosophical tradition can be characterized as a series of footnotes to Plato, than even more so can Christian theology be characterized as a series of footnotes to Paul. Yet that does not mean he should be regarded as the founder of Christianity. Without Jesus we would never have heard of Paul. The figure of Christ stands at the heart of Paul's letters just as he stands at the heart of the later gospels. That is why Christianity, although it may be Pauline, is not named after Paul. JOHN DICKSON EDITORIAL If you like what we are doing, spread the word by picking up an Undeceptions t-shirt from our store, or by leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts. And if you really like what we're doing, please consider donating through the website every little bit helps just in the last week. I can see that listeners have sent us $10, $49, 2,200, yay! $20, $250, and $31. If we kept that up every week, we would almost cover the podcast. So head to undeceptions.com and click donate, and thank you. John Dickson: While you're there, send us a question. You can write it or just record your voice and we'll play your question on the show in the Q&A episode later in the season. Next episode, we're exploring the depths of faith and reason. Somehow we've come to the point where it's accepted that atheism is the thoughtful and intelligent choice, and Christianity is just the stuff of blind faith. So if philosophy can help us to think more carefully about what we believe, then I reckon we should be doing much more philosophy. And so does next week's guest. See ya. CREDITS Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dickson produced by Kaley Payne and directed by the apostle Mark Hadley, editing by Richard Hamwi. Special thanks to our series sponsor Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of undecptions.com. An Undeceptions podcast.