Prologue
God Made Flesh
Stephen—he who was stoned to death by an angry mob of Jews for blasphemy—was the first of Jesus’s followers to be killed after the crucifixion, though he would not be the last. It is curious that the first man martyred for calling Jesus “Christ” did not himself know Jesus of Nazareth. Stephen was not a disciple, after all. He never met the Galilean peasant and day laborer who claimed the throne of the Kingdom of God. He did not walk with Jesus or talk to him. He was not part of the ecstatic crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as its rightful ruler. He took no part in the disturbance at the Temple. He was not there when Jesus was arrested and charged with sedition. He did not watch Jesus die.
Stephen did not hear about Jesus of Nazareth until after his crucifixion. A Greek-speaking Jew who lived in one of the many Hellenistic provinces outside the Holy Land, Stephen had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, along with thousands of other Diaspora Jews just like him. He was probably presenting his sacrifice to the Temple priests when he spied a band of mostly Galilean farmers and fishermen wandering about the Court of Gentiles, preaching about a simple Nazarean whom they called messiah.
By itself, such a spectacle would not have been unusual in Jerusalem, certainly not during the festivals and feast days, when Jews from all over the Roman Empire flocked to the sacred city to make their Temple offerings. Jerusalem was the center of spiritual activity for the Jews, the cultic heart of the Jewish nation. Every sectarian, every fanatic, every zealot, messiah, and self-proclaimed prophet, eventually made his way to Jerusalem to missionize or admonish, to offer God’s mercy or warn of God’s wrath. The festivals in particular were an ideal time for these schismatics to reach as wide and international an audience as possible.
So when Stephen saw the gaggle of hirsute men and ragged women huddled beneath a portico in the Temple’s outer court—simple provincials who had sold their possessions and given the proceeds to the poor; who held all things in common and owned nothing themselves save their tunics and sandals—he probably did not pay much attention at first. He may have pricked up his ears at the suggestion that these particular schismatics followed a messiah who had already been killed (crucified, no less!). He may have been astonished to learn that, despite the unalterable fact that Jesus’s death by definition disqualified him as liberator of Israel, his followers still called him messiah. But even that would not have been completely unheard of in Jerusalem. Were not John the Baptist’s followers still preaching about their late master, still baptizing Jews in his name?
What truly would have caught Stephen’s attention was the staggering claim by these Jews that, unlike every other criminal crucified by Rome, their messiah was not left on the cross for his bones to be picked clean by the greedy birds Stephen had seen circling above Golgotha when he entered the gates of Jerusalem. No, the corpse of this particular peasant—this Jesus of Nazareth—had been brought down from the cross and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest of men in Judea. More remarkable still, his followers claimed that three days after their messiah had been placed in the rich man’s tomb, he came back to life. God raised him up again, freed him from death’s grip. The spokesman of the group, a fisherman from Capernaum called Simon Peter, swore that he witnessed this resurrection with his own eyes, as did many others among them.
To be clear, this was not the resurrection of the dead that the Pharisees expected at the end of days and the Sadducees denied. This was not the gravestones cracking open and the earth coughing up the buried masses, as the prophet Isaiah had envisioned (Isaiah 26:19). This had nothing to do with the rebirth of the “House of Israel” foretold by the prophet Ezekiel, wherein God breathes new life into the dry bones of the nation (Ezekiel 37). This was a lone individual, dead and buried in rock for days, suddenly rising up and walking out of his tomb of his own accord, not as a spirit or ghost, but as a man of flesh and blood.
Nothing quite like what these followers of Jesus were contending existed at the time. Ideas about the resurrection of the dead could be found among the ancient Egyptians and Persians, of course. The Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, though not of the body. Some gods—for instance, Osiris—were thought to have died and risen again. Some men—Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—became gods after they died. But the concept of an individual dying and rising again, in the flesh, into a life everlasting was extremely rare in the ancient world and practically nonexistent in Judaism.
And yet what the followers of Jesus were arguing was not only that he rose from the dead, but that his resurrection confirmed his status as messiah, an extraordinary claim without precedent in Jewish history. Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection. The prophet Isaiah speaks of an exalted “suffering servant” who would be “stricken for the transgressions of [God’s] people” (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). But Isaiah never identifies this nameless servant as the messiah, nor does he claim that the stricken servant rose from the dead. The prophet Daniel mentions “an anointed one” (i.e., messiah) who “shall be cut off and shall have nothing” (Daniel 7:26). But Daniel’s anointed is not killed; he is merely deposed by a “prince who is to come.” It may be true that, centuries after Jesus’s death, Christians would interpret these verses in such a way as to help make sense of their messiah’s failure to accomplish any of the messianic tasks expected of him. But the Jews of Jesus’s time had no conception whatsoever of a messiah who suffers and dies. They were awaiting a messiah who triumphs and lives.
What Jesus’s followers were proposing was a breathtakingly bold redefinition, not just of the messianic prophecies but of the very nature and function of the Jewish messiah. The fisherman, Simon Peter, displaying the reckless confidence of one unschooled and uninitiated in the scriptures, even went so far as to argue that King David himself had prophesied Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in one of his Psalms. “Being a prophet, and knowing God had sworn an oath to him that the fruit of his loins, of his flesh, would be raised as the messiah to be seated on his throne,” Peter told the pilgrims gathered at the Temple, “David, foreseeing [Jesus], spoke of the resurrection of the messiah, saying that ‘his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption’ ” (Acts 2:30–31).
Had Stephen been knowledgeable about the sacred texts, had he been a scribe or a scholar saturated in the scriptures, had he simply been an inhabitant of Jerusalem, for whom the sound of the Psalms cascading from the Temple walls would have been as familiar as the sound of his own voice, he would have known immediately that King David never said any such thing about the messiah. The “prophecy” Peter speaks of was a Psalm David sang about himself:
Therefore my heart is glad, and my honor rejoices;
my body also dwells secure.
For you did not forsake my soul to Sheol [the underworld or “Hades”],
or allow your godly one to see the Pit.
[Rather] you taught me the way of life;
in your presence there is an abundance of joy,
in your right hand there is eternal pleasure.
PSALMS 16:9–11
But—and here lies the key to understanding the dramatic transformation that took place in Jesus’s message after his death—Stephen was not a scribe or scholar. He was not an expert in the scriptures. He did not live in Jerusalem. As such, he was the perfect audience for this new, innovative, and thoroughly unorthodox interpretation of the messiah being peddled by a group of illiterate ecstatics whose certainty in their message was matched only by the passion with which they preached it.
Stephen converted to the Jesus movement shortly after Jesus’s death. As with most converts from the distant Diaspora, he would have abandoned his hometown, sold his possessions, pooled his resources into the community, and made a home for himself in Jerusalem, under the shadow of the Temple walls. Although he would spend only a brief time as a member of the new community—perhaps a year or two—his violent death soon after his conversion would forever enshrine his name in the annals of Christian history.
The story of that celebrated death can be found in the book of Acts, which chronicles the first few decades of the Jesus movement after the crucifixion. The evangelist Luke, who allegedly composed the book as a sequel to his gospel, presents Stephen’s stoning as a watershed movement in the early history of the church. Stephen is called a man “full of grace and power [who] did great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). His speech and wisdom, Luke claims, were so powerful that few could stand against him. In fact, Stephen’s spectacular death in the book of Acts becomes, for Luke, a coda to Jesus’s passion narrative; Luke’s gospel, alone among the Synoptics, transfers to Stephen’s “trial” the accusation made against Jesus that he had threatened to destroy the Temple.
“This man [Stephen] never ceases blaspheming against this holy place [the Temple] and the law,” a gang of stone-wielding vigilantes cries out. “We have heard him say that Jesus of Nazareth will demolish this place and will change the customs that Moses handed down to us” (Acts 6:13–14).
Luke also provides Stephen with the self-defense that Jesus never received in his gospel. In a long and rambling diatribe before the mob, Stephen summarizes nearly all of Jewish history, starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus. The speech, which is obviously Luke’s creation, is riddled with the most basic errors: it misidentifies the burial site of the great patriarch Jacob, and it inexplicably claims that an angel gave the law to Moses when even the most uneducated Jew in Palestine would have known it was God himself who gave Moses the law. However, the speech’s true significance comes near the end, when in a fit of ecstasy, Stephen looks up to the heavens and sees “the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56).
The image seems to have been a favorite of the early Christian community. Mark, yet another Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora, has Jesus say something similar to the high priest in his gospel: “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power” (Mark 14:62), which is then picked up by Matthew and Luke—two more Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews—in their own accounts. But whereas Jesus in the Synoptics is directly quoting Psalm 110 so as to draw a connection between himself and King David, Stephen’s speech in Acts consciously replaces the phrase “the right hand of the Power” with “the right hand of God.” There is a reason for the change. In ancient Israel, the right hand was a symbol of power and authority; it signified a position of exaltation. Sitting “at the right hand of God” means sharing in God’s glory, being one with God in honor and essence. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “to sit on the right hand of the Father is nothing else than to share in the glory of the Godhead … [Jesus] sits at the right hand of the Father, because He has the same Nature as the Father.”
In other words, Stephen’s Son of Man is not the kingly figure of Daniel who comes “with the clouds of heaven.” He does not establish his kingdom on earth “so that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:1–14). He is not even the messiah any longer. The Son of Man, in Stephen’s vision, is a preexistent, heavenly being whose kingdom is not of this world; who stands at the right hand of God, equal in glory and honor; who is, in form and substance, God made flesh.
That is all it takes for the stones to start flying.
Understand that there can be no greater blasphemy for a Jew than what Stephen suggests. The claim that an individual died and rose again into eternal life may have been unprecedented in Judaism. But the presumption of a “god-man” was simply anathema. What Stephen cries out in the midst of his death throes is nothing less than the launch of a wholly new religion, one radically and irreconcilably divorced from everything Stephen’s own religion had ever posited about the nature of God and man and the relationship of the one to the other. One can say that it was not only Stephen who died that day outside the gates of Jerusalem. Buried with him under the rubble of stones is the last trace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth. The story of the zealous Galilean peasant and Jewish nationalist who donned the mantle of messiah and launched a foolhardy rebellion against the corrupt Temple priesthood and the vicious Roman occupation comes to an abrupt end, not with his death on the cross, nor with the empty tomb, but at the first moment one of his followers dares suggest he is God.
Stephen was martyred sometime between 33 and 35 C.E. Among those in the crowd who countenanced his stoning was a pious young Pharisee from a wealthy Roman city on the Mediterranean Sea called Tarsus. His name was Saul, and he was a true zealot: a fervent follower of the Law of Moses who had burnished a reputation for violently suppressing blasphemies such as Stephen’s. Around 49 C.E., a mere fifteen years after he gladly watched Stephen die, this same fanatical Pharisee, now an ardent Christian convert renamed Paul, would write a letter to his friends in the Greek city of Philippi in which he unambiguously, and without reservation, calls Jesus of Nazareth God. “He was in the form of God,” Paul wrote, though he was “born in the likeness of man” (Philippians 2:6–7).
How could this have happened? How could a failed messiah who died a shameful death as a state criminal be transformed, in the span of a few years, into the creator of the heavens and the earth: God incarnate?
The answer to that question relies on recognizing this one rather remarkable fact: practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named). Those who did know Jesus—those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God’s name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him die a lonely death—played a surprisingly small role in defining the movement Jesus left behind. The members of Jesus’s family, and especially his brother James, who would lead the community in Jesus’s absence, were certainly influential in the decades after the crucifixion. But they were hampered by their decision to remain more or less ensconced in Jerusalem waiting for Jesus to return, until they and their community, like nearly everyone else in the holy city, were annihilated by Titus’s army in 70 C.E. The apostles who were tasked by Jesus to spread his message did leave Jerusalem and fan out across the land bearing the good news. But they were severely limited by their inability to theologically expound on the new faith or compose instructive narratives about the life and death of Jesus. These were farmers and fishermen, after all; they could neither read nor write.
The task of defining Jesus’s message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus’s message so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.
This transformation did not occur without conflict or difficulty. The original Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus, including the members of his family and the remnants of the Twelve, openly clashed with the Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews when it came to the correct understanding of Jesus’s message. The discord between the two groups resulted in the emergence of two distinct and competing camps of Christian interpretation in the decades after the crucifixion: one championed by Jesus’s brother, James; the other promoted by the former Pharisee, Paul. As we shall see, it would be the contest between these two bitter and openly hostile adversaries that, more than anything else, would shape Christianity as the global religion we know today.
Chapter Thirteen
If Christ Has Not Been Risen
It was, the gospels say, the sixth hour of the day—three o’clock in the afternoon—on the day before the Sabbath when Jesus of Nazareth breathed his last. According to the gospel of Mark, a crowning darkness came over the whole of the earth, as though all creation had paused to bear witness to the death of this simple Nazarean, scourged and executed for calling himself King of the Jews. At the ninth hour, Jesus suddenly cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Someone soaked a sponge in sour wine and raised it to his lips to ease his suffering. Finally, no longer able to bear the heaving pressure on his lungs, Jesus lifted his head to the sky and, with a loud, agonized cry, gave up his spirit.
Jesus’s end would have been swift and unnoticed by all, save, perhaps, for the handful of female disciples who stood weeping at the bottom of the hill, gazing up at their maimed and mutilated master: most of the men had scattered into the night at the first sign of trouble in Gethsemane. The death of a state criminal hanging on a cross atop Golgotha was a tragically banal event. Dozens died with Jesus that day, their broken bodies hanging limp for days afterward to serve the ravenous birds that circled above and the dogs that came out under cover of night to finish what the birds left behind.
Yet Jesus was no common criminal, not for the evangelists who composed the narrative of his final moments. He was God’s agent on earth. His death could not have conceivably gone unnoticed, either by the Roman governor who sent him to the cross or by the high priest who handed him over to die. And so, when Jesus yielded his soul to heaven, at the precise moment of his final breath, the gospels say that the veil in the Temple, which separated the altar from the Holy of Holies—the blood-spattered veil sprinkled with the sacrifice of a thousand thousand offerings, the veil that the high priest, and only the high priest, would draw back as he entered the private presence of God—was violently rent in two, from top to bottom.
“Surely this was a son of God,” a bewildered centurion at the foot of the cross declares, before running off to Pilate to report what had happened.
The tearing of the Temple’s veil is a fitting end to the passion narratives, the perfect symbol of what the death of Jesus meant for the men and women who reflected upon it many decades later. Jesus’s sacrifice, they argued, removed the barrier between humanity and God. The veil that separated the divine presence from the rest of the world had been torn away. Through Jesus’s death, everyone could now access God’s spirit, without ritual or priestly mediation. The high priest’s high-priced prerogative, the very Temple itself, was suddenly made irrelevant. The body of Christ had replaced the Temple rituals, just as the words of Jesus had supplanted the Torah.
Of course, these are theological reflections rendered years after the Temple had already been destroyed; it is not difficult to consider Jesus’s death to have displaced a Temple that no longer existed. For the disciples who remained in Jerusalem after the crucifixion, however, the Temple and the priesthood were still very much a reality. The veil that hung before the Holy of Holies was still apparent to all. The high priest and his cohort still controlled the Temple Mount. Pilate’s soldiers still roamed the stone streets of Jerusalem. Not much had changed at all. The world remained essentially as it was before their messiah had been taken from them.
The disciples faced a profound test of their faith after Jesus’s death. The crucifixion marked the end of their dream of overturning the existing system, of reconstituting the twelve tribes of Israel and ruling over them in God’s name. The Kingdom of God would not be established on earth, as Jesus had promised. The meek and the poor would not exchange places with the rich and the powerful. The Roman occupation would not be overthrown. As with the followers of every other messiah the empire had killed, there was nothing left for Jesus’s disciples to do but abandon their cause, renounce their revolutionary activities, and return to their farms and villages.
Then something extraordinary happened. What exactly that something was is impossible to know. Jesus’s resurrection is an exceedingly difficult topic for the historian to discuss, not least because it falls beyond the scope of any examination of the historical Jesus. Obviously, the notion of a man dying a gruesome death and returning to life three days later defies all logic, reason, and sense. One could simply stop the argument there, dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen Jesus to be the product of a deludable mind.
However, there is this nagging fact to consider: one after another of those who claimed to have witnessed the risen Jesus went to their own gruesome deaths refusing to recant their testimony. That is not, in itself, unusual. Many zealous Jews died horribly for refusing to deny their beliefs. But these first followers of Jesus were not being asked to reject matters of faith based on events that took place centuries, if not millennia, before. They were being asked to deny something they themselves personally, directly encountered.
The disciples were themselves fugitives in Jerusalem, complicit in the sedition that led to Jesus’s crucifixion. They were repeatedly arrested and abused for their preaching; more than once their leaders had been brought before the Sanhedrin to answer charges of blasphemy. They were beaten, whipped, stoned, and crucified, yet they would not cease proclaiming the risen Jesus. And it worked! Perhaps the most obvious reason not to dismiss the disciples’ resurrection experiences out of hand is that, among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus alone is still called messiah. It was precisely the fervor with which the followers of Jesus believed in his resurrection that transformed this tiny Jewish sect into the largest religion in the world.
Although the first resurrection stories were not written until the mid- to late nineties (there is no resurrection appearance in either the Q source materials, compiled in around 50 C.E., or in the gospel of Mark, written after 70 C.E.), belief in the resurrection seems to have been part of the earliest liturgical formula of the nascent Christian community. Paul—the former Pharisee who would become the most influential interpreter of Jesus’s message—writes about the resurrection in a letter addressed to the Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth, sometime around 50 C.E. “For I give over to you the first things which I myself accepted,” Paul writes, “that Christ died for the sake of our sins, according to the scriptures; that he was buried and that he rose again on the third day, according to the scriptures; that he was seen by Cephas [Simon Peter], then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by over five hundred brothers at once, many of whom are still alive, though some have died. After that, he was seen by [his brother] James; then by all the apostles. And, last of all, he was seen by me as well …” (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).
Paul may have written those words in 50 C.E., but he is repeating what is likely a much older formula, one that may be traced to the early forties. That means belief in the resurrection of Jesus was among the community’s first attestations of faith—earlier than the passion narratives, earlier even than the story of the virgin birth.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the resurrection is not a historical event. It may have had historical ripples, but the event itself falls outside the scope of history and into the realm of faith. It is, in fact, the ultimate test of faith for Christians, as Paul wrote in that same letter to the Corinthians: “If Christ has not been risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:17).
Paul makes a key point. Without the resurrection, the whole edifice of Jesus’s claim to the mantle of the messiah comes crashing down. The resurrection solves an insurmountable problem, one that would have been impossible for the disciples to ignore: Jesus’s crucifixion invalidates his claim to be the messiah and successor to David. According to the Law of Moses, Jesus’s crucifixion actually marks him as the accursed of God: “Anyone hung on a tree [that is, crucified] is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23). But if Jesus did not actually die—if his death were merely the prelude to his spiritual evolution—then the cross would no longer be a curse or a symbol of failure. It would be transformed into a symbol of victory.
Precisely because the resurrection claim was so preposterous and unique, an entirely new edifice needed to be constructed to replace the one that had crumbled in the shadow of the cross. The resurrection stories in the gospels were created to do just that: to put flesh and bones upon an already accepted creed; to create narrative out of established belief; and, most of all, to counter the charges of critics who denied the claim, who argued that Jesus’s followers saw nothing more than a ghost or a spirit, who thought it was the disciples themselves who stole Jesus’s body to make it appear as though he rose again. By the time these stories were written, six decades had passed since the crucifixion. In that time, the evangelists had heard just about every conceivable objection to the resurrection, and they were able to create narratives to counter each and every one of them.
The disciples saw a ghost? Could a ghost eat fish and bread, as the risen Jesus does in Luke 24:42–43?
Jesus was merely an incorporeal spirit? “Does a spirit have flesh and bones?” the risen Jesus asks his incredulous disciples as he offers his hands and feet to touch as proof (Luke 24:36–39).
Jesus’s body was stolen? How so, when Matthew has conveniently placed armed guards at his tomb—guards who saw for themselves the risen Jesus, but who were bribed by the priests to say the disciples had stolen the body from under their noses? “And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day” (Matthew 28:1–15).
Again, these stories are not meant to be accounts of historical events; they are carefully crafted rebuttals to an argument that is taking place offscreen. Still, it is one thing to argue that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. That is, in the end, purely a matter of faith. It is something else entirely to say that he did so according to the scriptures. Luke portrays the risen Jesus as addressing this issue himself by patiently explaining to his disciples, who “had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), how his death and resurrection were in reality the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies, how everything written about the messiah “in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms” led to the cross and the empty tomb. “Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day,” Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke 24:44–46).
Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of Moses, not in the prophets, not in the Psalms. In the entire history of Jewish thought there is not a single line of scripture that says the messiah is to suffer, die, and rise again on the third day, which may explain why Jesus does not bother to cite any scripture to back up his incredible claim.
No wonder Jesus’s followers had such a difficult time convincing their fellow Jews in Jerusalem to accept their message. When Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that the crucifixion is “a stumbling block to the Jews,” he is grossly understating the disciples’ dilemma (1 Corinthians 1:23). To the Jews, a crucified messiah was nothing less than a contradiction in terms. The very fact of Jesus’s crucifixion annulled his messianic claims. Even the disciples recognized this problem. That is why they so desperately tried to deflect their dashed hopes by arguing that the Kingdom of God they had hoped to establish was in actuality a celestial kingdom, not an earthly one; that the messianic prophecies had been misconstrued; that the scriptures, properly interpreted, said the opposite of what everyone thought they did; that embedded deep in the texts was a secret truth about the dying and rising messiah that only they could uncover. The problem was that in a city as steeped in the scriptures as Jerusalem, such an argument would have fallen on deaf ears, especially when it came from a group of illiterate peasants from the backwoods of Galilee whose only experience with the scriptures was what little they heard of them in their synagogues back home. Try as they might, the disciples simply could not persuade a significant number of Jerusalemites to accept Jesus as the long-awaited liberator of Israel.
The disciples could have left Jerusalem, fanned out across Galilee with their message, returned to their villages to preach among their friends and neighbors. But Jerusalem was the place of Jesus’s death and resurrection, the place to which they believed he would soon return. It was the center of Judaism, and despite their peculiar interpretation of the scriptures, the disciples were, above all else, Jews. Theirs was an altogether Jewish movement intended, in those first few years after Jesus’s crucifixion, for an exclusively Jewish audience. They had no intention of abandoning the sacred city or divorcing themselves from the Jewish cult, regardless of the persecution they faced from the priestly authorities. The movement’s principal leaders—the apostles Peter and John, and Jesus’s brother, James—maintained their fealty to Jewish customs and Mosaic Law to the end. Under their leadership, the Jerusalem church became known as the “mother assembly.” No matter how far and wide the movement spread, no matter how many other “assemblies” were established in cities such as Philippi, Corinth, or even Rome, no matter how many new converts—Jew or gentile—the movement attracted, every assembly, every convert, and every missionary would fall under the authority of the “mother assembly” in Jerusalem, until the day it was burned to the ground.
There was another, more practical advantage to centering the movement in Jerusalem. The yearly cycle of festivals and feasts brought thousands of Jews from across the empire directly to them. And unlike the Jews living in Jerusalem, who seem to have easily dismissed Jesus’s followers as uninformed at best, heretical at worst, the Diaspora Jews, who lived far from the sacred city and beyond the reach of the Temple, proved far more susceptible to the disciples’ message.
As small minorities living in large cosmopolitan centers like Antioch and Alexandria, these Diaspora Jews had become deeply acculturated to both Roman society and Greek ideas. Surrounded by a host of different races and religions, they tended to be more open to questioning Jewish beliefs and practices, even when it came to such basic matters as circumcision and dietary restrictions. Unlike their brethren in the Holy Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought processes, the language of their worship. They experienced the scriptures not in the original Hebrew but in a Greek translation (the Septuagint), which offered new and originative ways of expressing their faith, allowing them to more easily harmonize traditional biblical cosmology with Greek philosophy. Consider the Jewish scriptures that came out of the Diaspora. Books such as The Wisdom of Solomon, which anthropomorphizes Wisdom as a woman to be sought above all else, and Jesus Son of Sirach (commonly referred to as The Book of Ecclesiasticus) read more like Greek philosophical tracts than like Semitic scriptures.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Diaspora Jews were more receptive to the innovative interpretation of the scriptures being offered by Jesus’s followers. In fact, it did not take long for these Greek-speaking Jews to outnumber the original Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. According to the book of Acts, the community was divided into two separate and distinct camps: the “Hebrews,” the term used by Acts to refer to the Jerusalem-based believers under the leadership of James and the apostles, and the “Hellenists,” those Jews who came from the Diaspora and who spoke Greek as their primary language (Acts 6:1).
It was not just language that separated the Hebrews from the Hellenists. The Hebrews were primarily peasants, farmers, and fishermen—transplants in Jerusalem from the Judean and Galilean countryside. The Hellenists were more sophisticated and urbane, better educated, and certainly wealthier, as evidenced by their ability to travel hundreds of kilometers to make pilgrimage at the Temple. It was, however, the division in language that would ultimately prove decisive in differentiating the two communities. The Hellenists, who worshipped Jesus in Greek, relied on a language that provided a vastly different set of symbols and metaphors than did either Aramaic or Hebrew. The difference in language gradually led to differences in doctrine, as the Hellenists began to meld their Greek-inspired worldviews with the Hebrews’ already idiosyncratic reading of the Jewish scriptures.
When conflict broke out between the two communities over the equal distribution of communal resources, the apostles designated seven leaders among the Hellenists to see to their own needs. Known as “the Seven,” these leaders are listed in the book of Acts as Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus (a Gentile convert from Antioch), and, of course, Stephen, whose death at the hands of an angry mob would make permanent the division between the Hebrews and Hellenists.
A wave of persecution followed Stephen’s death. The religious authorities, who until then seemed to have grudgingly tolerated the presence of Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem, were incensed by Stephen’s shockingly heretical words. It was bad enough to call a crucified peasant messiah; it was unforgivably blasphemous to call him God. In response, the authorities systematically expelled the Hellenists from Jerusalem, an act that, interestingly, did not seem to have been greatly opposed by the Hebrews. Indeed, the fact that the Jerusalem assembly continued to thrive under the shadow of the Temple for decades after Stephen’s death indicates that the Hebrews remained somewhat unaffected by the persecutions of the Hellenists. It was as though the priestly authorities did not consider the two groups to be related.
Meanwhile, the expelled Hellenists flooded back into the Diaspora. Armed with the message they had adopted from the Hebrews in Jerusalem, they began transmitting it, in Greek, to their fellow Diaspora Jews, those living in the Gentile cities of Ashdod and Caesarea, in the coastal regions of Syria-Palestine, in Cyprus and Phoenicia and Antioch, the city in which they were, for the first time, referred to as Christians (Acts 11:27). Little by little over the following decade, the Jewish sect founded by a group of rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. No longer bound by the confines of the Temple and the Jewish cult, the Hellenist preachers began to gradually shed Jesus’s message of its nationalistic concerns, transforming it into a universal calling that would be more appealing to those living in a Graeco-Roman milieu. In doing so, they unchained themselves from the strictures of Jewish law, until it ceased to have any primacy. Jesus did not come to fulfill the law, the Hellenists argued. He came to abolish it. Jesus’s condemnation was not of the priests who defiled the Temple with their wealth and hypocrisy. His condemnation was of the Temple itself.
Still, at this point, the Hellenists reserved their preaching solely for their fellow Jews, as Luke writes in the book of Acts: “They spoke the word to no one but the Jews” (Acts 11:19). This was still a primarily Jewish movement, one that blossomed through the theological experimentation that marked the Diaspora experience in the Roman Empire. But then a few among the Hellenists began sharing the message of Jesus with gentiles, “so that a great number of them became believers.” The gentile mission was not paramount—not yet. But the farther the Hellenists spread from Jerusalem and the heart of the Jesus movement, the more their focus shifted from an exclusively Jewish audience to a primarily gentile one. The more their focus shifted to converting gentiles, the more they allowed certain syncretistic elements borrowed from Greek gnosticism and Roman religions to creep into the movement. And the more the movement was shaped by these new “pagan” converts, the more forcefully it discarded its Jewish past for a Graeco-Roman future.
All of this was still many years away. It would not be until after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. that the mission to the Jews would be abandoned and Christianity transformed into a Romanized religion. Yet even at this early stage in the Jesus movement, the path toward gentile dominance was being set, though the tipping point would not come until a young Pharisee and Hellenistic Jew from Tarsus named Saul—the same Saul who had countenanced Stephen’s stoning for blasphemy—met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and became known forevermore as Paul.
Chapter Fourteen
Am I Not an Apostle?
Saul of Tarsus was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples when he left Jerusalem to find and punish the Hellenists who had fled to Damascus after Stephen’s stoning. Saul was not asked by the high priest to hunt down these followers of Jesus; he went of his own accord. An educated, Greek-speaking, Diaspora Jew and citizen of one of the wealthiest port cities in the Roman Empire, Saul was zealously devoted to the Temple and Torah. “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” he writes of himself in a letter to the Philippians, “as to [knowledge of] the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5–6).
It was while en route to Damascus that the young Pharisee had an ecstatic experience that would change everything for him, and for the faith he would adopt as his own. As he approached the city gates with his traveling companions, he was suddenly struck by a light from heaven flashing all around him. He fell to the ground in a heap. A voice said to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.
The reply broke through the blinding white light, “I am Jesus.”
Struck blind by the vision, Saul made his way to Damascus, where he met a follower of Jesus named Ananias, who laid hands upon him and restored his sight. Immediately, something like scales dropped from Saul’s eyes and he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Right then and there, Saul was baptized into the Jesus movement. He changed his name to Paul and immediately began preaching the risen Jesus, not to his fellow Jews, but to the gentiles who had, up to this point, been more or less ignored by the movement’s chief missionaries.
The story of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus is a bit of propagandistic legend created by the evangelist Luke; Paul himself never recounts the story of being blinded by the sight of Jesus. If the traditions can be believed, Luke was a young devotee of Paul: he is mentioned in two letters, Colossians and Timothy, commonly attributed to Paul but written long after his death. Luke wrote the book of Acts as a kind of eulogy to his former master some thirty to forty years after Paul had died. In fact, Acts is less an account of the apostles than it is a reverential biography of Paul; the apostles disappear from the book early on, serving as little more than the bridge between Jesus and Paul. In Luke’s reimagining, it is Paul—not James, nor Peter, nor John, nor any of the Twelve—who is the true successor to Jesus. The activity of the apostles in Jerusalem serves only as prelude to Paul’s preaching in the Diaspora.
Although Paul does not divulge any details about his conversion, he does repeatedly insist that he has witnessed the risen Jesus for himself, and that this experience has endowed him with the same apostolic authority as the Twelve. “Am I not an apostle?” Paul writes in defense of his credentials, which were frequently challenged by the mother assembly in Jerusalem. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Corinthians 9:1).
Paul may have considered himself an apostle, but it seems that few if any of the other movement leaders agreed. Not even Luke, Paul’s sycophant, whose writings betray a deliberate, if ahistorical, attempt to elevate his mentor’s status in the founding of the church, refers to Paul as an apostle. As far as Luke is concerned, there are only twelve apostles, one for each tribe of Israel, just as Jesus had intended. In recounting the story of how the remaining eleven apostles replaced Judas Iscariot with Matthias after Jesus’s death, Luke notes that the new recruit needed to be someone who “accompanied [the disciples] all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, starting with John’s baptism, right up to the day [Jesus] was taken from us” (Acts 1:21). Such a requirement would clearly have ruled out Paul, who converted to the movement around 37 C.E., nearly a decade after Jesus had died. But that does not deter Paul, who not only demands to be called an apostle—“even if I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you,” he tells his beloved community in Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:2)—he insists he is far superior to all the other apostles.
“Are they Hebrews?” Paul writes of the apostles. “So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one (though it may be foolish to say so), with greater labors, more floggings, more imprisonments, and more often near death” (2 Corinthians 11:22–23). Paul holds particular contempt for the Jerusalem-based triumvirate of James, Peter, and John, whom he derides as the “so-called pillars of the church” (Galatians 2:9). “Whatever they are makes no difference to me,” he writes. “Those leaders contributed nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6). The apostles may have walked and talked with the living Jesus (or, as Paul dismissively calls him, “Jesus-in-the-flesh”). But Paul walks and talks with the divine Jesus: they have, according to Paul, conversations in which Jesus imparts secret instructions intended solely for his ears. The apostles may have been handpicked by Jesus as they toiled away on their fields or brought up their fishing nets. But Jesus chose Paul before he was born: he was, he tells the Galatians, called by Jesus into apostleship while still in his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). In other words, Paul does not consider himself the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the first apostle.
The claim of apostleship is an urgent one for Paul, as it was the only way to justify his entirely self-ascribed mission to the gentiles, which the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem appear not to have initially supported. Although there was a great deal of discussion among the apostles over how strictly the new community should adhere to the Law of Moses, with some advocating rigorous compliance and others taking a more moderate stance, there was little argument about whom the community was meant to serve: this was a Jewish movement intended for a Jewish audience. Even the Hellenists reserved their preaching mostly for the Jews. If a handful of gentiles decided to accept Jesus as messiah, so be it, as long as they submitted to circumcision and the law.
Yet, for Paul, there is no room whatsoever for debating the role of the Law of Moses in the new community. Not only does Paul reject the primacy of Jewish law, he refers to it as a “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on a stone tablet” that must be superseded by “a ministry of the Spirit come in glory” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). He calls his fellow believers who continue to practice circumcision—the quintessential mark of the nation of Israel—“dogs and evildoers” who “mutilate the flesh” (Philippians 3:2). These are startling statements for a former Pharisee to make. But for Paul they reflect the truth about Jesus that he feels he alone recognizes, which is that “Christ is the end of the Torah” (Romans 10:4).
Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all, Jesus claimed to have come to fulfill the Law of Moses, not to abolish it. Far from rejecting the law, Jesus continually strove to expand and intensify it. Where the law commands, “thou shall not kill,” Jesus added, “if you are angry with your brother or sister you are liable to [the same] judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Where the law states, “thou shall not commit adultery,” Jesus extended it to include “everyone who looks at a woman with lust” (Matthew 5:28). Jesus may have disagreed with the scribes and scholars over the correct interpretation of the law, particularly when it came to such matters as the prohibition against working on the Sabbath. But he never rejected the law. On the contrary, Jesus warned that “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19).
One would think that Jesus’s admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything “Jesus-in-the-flesh” may or may not have said. In fact, Paul shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus. There is almost no trace of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his letters. With the exception of the crucifixion and the Last Supper, which he transforms from a narrative into a liturgical formula, Paul does not narrate a single event from Jesus’s life. Nor does Paul ever actually quote Jesus’s words (again, with the exception of his rendering of the Eucharistic formula: “This is my body …”). Actually, Paul sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. Compare what Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans—“everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13)—to what Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
Paul’s lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care. He repeatedly boasts that he has not learned about Jesus either from the apostles or from anyone else who may have known him. “But when it pleased God … to reveal his son to me, so that I might preach him to the gentiles, I did not confer with anyone, nor did I go up to Jerusalem [to ask permission of] the apostles before me,” Paul boasts. “Instead, I went directly to Arabia, and then again to Damascus” (Galatians 1:15–17).
Only after three years of preaching a message that Paul insists he received not from any human being (by which he quite obviously means James and the apostles), but directly from Jesus, did he deign to visit the men and women in Jerusalem who had actually known the man Paul professed as Lord (Galatians 1:12).
Why does Paul go to such lengths not only to break free from the authority of the leaders in Jerusalem, but to denigrate and dismiss them as irrelevant or worse? Because Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought, that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly get away with preaching them. What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality. Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’ dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making: Christ.
Although “Christ” is technically the Greek word for “messiah,” that is not how Paul employs the term. He does not endow Christ with any of the connotations attached to the term “messiah” in the Hebrew Scriptures. He never speaks of Jesus as “the anointed of Israel.” Paul may have recognized Jesus as a descendant of King David, but he does not look to the scriptures to argue that Jesus was the Davidic liberator the Jews had been awaiting. He ignores all the messianic prophecies that the gospels would rely on many years later to prove that Jesus was the Jewish messiah (when Paul does look to the Hebrew prophets—for instance, Isaiah’s prophecy about the root of Jesse who will one day serve as “a light to the gentiles” (11:10)—he thinks the prophets are predicting him, not Jesus). Most tellingly, unlike the gospel writers (save for John, of course), Paul does not call Jesus the Christ (Yesus ho Xristos), as though Christ were his title. Rather, Paul calls him “Jesus Christ,” or just “Christ,” as if it were his surname. This is an extremely unusual formulation whose closest parallel is in the way Roman emperors adopted “Caesar” as a cognomen, as in Caesar Augustus.
Paul’s Christ is not even human, though he has taken on the likeness of one (Philippians 2:7). He is a cosmic being who existed before time. He is the first of God’s creations, through whom the rest of creation was formed (1 Corinthians 8:6). He is God’s begotten son, God’s physical progeny (Romans 8:3). He is the new Adam, born not of dust but of heaven. Yet while the first Adam became a living being, “the Last Adam,” as Paul calls Christ, has become “a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45–47). Christ is, in short, a comprehensively new being. But he is not unique. He is merely the first of his kind: “the first-born among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). All those who believe in Christ, as Paul does—those who accept Paul’s teachings about him—can become one with him in a mystical union (1 Corinthians 6:17). Through their belief, their bodies will be transformed into the glorious body of Christ (Philippians 3:20–21). They will join him in spirit and share in his likeness, which, as Paul reminds his followers, is the likeness of God (Romans 8:29). Hence, as “heirs of God and fellow heirs of Christ,” believers can also become divine beings (Romans 8:17). They can become like Christ in his death (Philippians 3:10)—that is, divine and eternal—tasked with the responsibility of judging alongside him the whole of humanity, as well as the angels in heaven (1 Corinthians 6:2–3).
Paul’s portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright bizarre to Jesus’s Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean into a divine, preexistent, literal son of God whose death and resurrection launch a new genus of eternal beings responsible for judging the world has no basis in any writings about Jesus that are even remotely contemporary with Paul’s (a firm indication that Paul’s Christ was likely his own creation). Nothing like what Paul envisions exists in the Q source material, which was compiled around the same time that Paul was writing his letters. Paul’s Christ is certainly not the Son of Man who appears in Mark’s gospel, written just a few years after Paul’s death. Nowhere in the gospels of Matthew and Luke—composed between 90 and 100 C.E.—is Jesus ever considered the literal son of God. Both gospels employ the term “Son of God” exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title, not a description. It is only in the last of the canonized gospels, the gospel of John, written sometime between 100 and 120 C.E., that Paul’s vision of Jesus as Christ—the eternal logos, the only begotten son of God—can be found. Of course, by then, nearly half a decade after the destruction of Jerusalem, Christianity was already a thoroughly Romanized religion, and Paul’s Christ had long obliterated any last trace of the Jewish messiah in Jesus. During the decade of the fifties, however, when Paul is writing his letters, his conception of Jesus as Christ would have been shocking and plainly heretical, which is why, around 57 C.E., James and the apostles demand that Paul come to Jerusalem to answer for his deviant teachings.
This would not be Paul’s first appearance before the movement’s leaders. As he mentions in his letter to the Galatians, he initially met the apostles on a visit to the holy city three years after his conversion, around 40 C.E., when he came face-to-face with Peter and James. The two leaders were apparently thrilled that “the one who had been persecuting us is now proclaiming the message of faith he once tried to destroy” (Galatians 1:23). They glorified God because of Paul and sent him on his way to preach the message of Jesus in the regions of Syria and Cilicia, giving him as his companion and keeper a Jewish convert and close confidant of James named Barnabas.
Paul’s second trip to Jerusalem took place about a decade later, sometime around 50 C.E., and was far less cordial than the first. He had been summoned to appear before a meeting of the Apostolic Council to defend his self-designated role as missionary to the gentiles (Paul insists he was not summoned to Jerusalem but went of his own accord because Jesus told him to). With his companion Barnabas and an uncircumcised Greek convert named Titus by his side, Paul stood before James, Peter, John, and the elders of the Jerusalem assembly to strongly defend the message he had been proclaiming to the gentiles.
Luke, writing about this meeting some forty or fifty years later, paints a picture of perfect harmony between Paul and the council’s members, with Peter himself standing up for Paul and taking his side. According to Luke, James, in his capacity as leader of the Jerusalem assembly and head of the Apostolic Council, blessed Paul’s teachings, decreeing that thenceforth gentiles would be welcomed into the community without having to follow the Law of Moses, so long as they “abstain from things polluted by idols, from prostitution, from [eating] things that have been strangled, and from blood” (Acts 15:1–21). Luke’s description of the meeting is an obvious ploy to legitimate Paul’s ministry by stamping it with the approval of none other than “the brother of the Lord.” However, Paul’s own account of the Apostolic Council, written in a letter to the Galatians not long after it had taken place, paints a completely different picture of what happened in Jerusalem.
Paul claims that he was ambushed at the Apostolic Council by a group of “false believers” (those still accepting the primacy of the Temple and Torah) who had been secretly spying on him and his ministry. Although Paul reveals little detail about the meeting, he cannot mask his rage at the treatment he says he received at the hands of “the supposedly acknowledged leaders” of the church: James, Peter, and John. Paul says he “refused to submit to them, not even for a minute,” as neither they, nor their opinion of his ministry, made any difference to him whatsoever (Galatians 2:1–10).
Whatever took place during the Apostolic Council, it appears that the meeting concluded with a promise by James, the leader of the Jerusalem assembly, not to compel Paul’s gentile followers to be circumcised. Yet what happened soon afterward indicates that he and James were far from reconciled: almost immediately after Paul left Jerusalem, James began sending his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in Galatia, Corinth, Philippi, and most other places where Paul had built a following, in order to correct Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus.
Paul was incensed by these delegations, which he viewed, correctly, as a threat to his authority. Almost all of Paul’s epistles in the New Testament were written after the Apostolic Council and are addressed to congregations that had been visited by these representatives from Jerusalem (Paul’s first letter, to the Thessalonians, was written between 48 and 50 C.E.; his last letter, to the Romans, was written around 56 C.E.). That is why these letters devote so much space to defending Paul’s status as an apostle, touting his direct connection to Jesus, and railing against the leaders in Jerusalem who, “disguising themselves as apostles of Christ,” are, in Paul’s view, actually servants of Satan who have bewitched Paul’s followers (Corinthians 11:13–15).
Nevertheless, James’s delegations seem to have had an impact, for Paul repeatedly lambastes his congregations for abandoning him: “I am amazed at how quickly you have deserted the one who called you” (Galatians 1:6). He implores his followers not to listen to these delegations, or to anyone else for that matter, but only to him: “If anyone else preaches a gospel contrary to the gospel you received [from me], let him be damned” (Galatians 1:9). Even if that gospel comes “from an angel in heaven,” Paul writes, his congregations should ignore it (Galatians 1:8). Instead, they should obey Paul and only Paul: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
Feeling bitter and no longer tethered to the authority of James and the apostles in Jerusalem (“Whatever they are makes no difference to me”), Paul spent the next few years freely expounding his doctrine of Jesus as Christ. Whether James and the apostles in Jerusalem were fully aware of Paul’s activities during this period is debatable. After all, Paul was writing his letters in Greek, a language neither James nor the apostles could read. Moreover, Barnabas, James’s sole link to Paul, had abandoned him soon after the Apostolic Council for reasons that are unclear (though it bears mentioning that Barnabas was a Levite and as such would probably have been a strict observer of Jewish law). Regardless, by the year 57 C.E., the rumors about Paul’s teachings could no longer be ignored. And so, once again, he is summoned to Jerusalem to answer for himself.
This time, James confronts Paul directly, telling him that it has come to their attention that Paul has been teaching believers “to forsake Moses” and “not circumcise their children or observe the customs [of the law]” (Acts 21:21). Paul does not respond to the accusation, though this is exactly what he has been teaching. He has even gone so far as to say that those who let themselves be circumcised will have “cut themselves off from Christ” (Galatians 5:2–4).
To clear up matters once and for all, James forces Paul to take part with four other men in a strict purification ritual in the Temple—the same Temple that Paul believes has been replaced by the blood of Jesus—so that “all will know there is nothing to the rumors said about you, and that you observe and guard the law” (Acts 21:24). Paul obeys; he seems to have no choice in the matter. But as he is completing the ritual, a group of devout Jews recognize him.
“Men of Israel!” they shout. “Help! This is the man who has been teaching everyone everywhere against our people, our law, and this place” (Acts 21:27–28). All at once, a mob descends upon Paul. They seize him and drag him out of the Temple. Just as they are about to beat him to death, a group of Roman soldiers suddenly appears. The soldiers break up the mob and take Paul into custody, not because of the disturbance at the Temple, but because they mistake him for someone else.
“Are you not the Egyptian who some days ago led a revolt in the wilderness of four thousand Sicarii?” a military tribune asks Paul (Acts 21:38).
It seems Paul’s arrival in Jerusalem in 57 C.E. could not have come at a more chaotic time. One year earlier, the Sicarii had begun their reign of terror by slaying the high priest Jonathan. They were now wantonly murdering members of the priestly aristocracy, burning down their homes, kidnapping their families, and sowing fear in the hearts of the Jews. The messianic fervor in Jerusalem was at a boil. One by one, claimants to the mantle of the messiah had arisen to liberate the Jews from the yoke of Roman occupation. Theudas the wonder worker had already been cut down by Rome for his messianic aspirations. The rebellious sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, had been crucified. The bandit chief Eleazar son of Dinaeus, who had been ravaging the countryside, slaughtering Samaritans in the name of the God of Israel, had been captured and beheaded by the Roman prefect Felix. And then the Egyptian had suddenly appeared on the Mount of Olives, vowing to bring the walls of Jerusalem tumbling down at his command.
For James and the apostles in Jerusalem, the turmoil could mean only one thing: the end was near; Jesus was about to return. The Kingdom of God they had assumed Jesus would build while he was alive would now finally be established—all the more reason to ensure that those espousing deviant teachings in Jesus’s name were brought back into the fold.
In that light, Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem may have been unexpected, but considering the apocalyptic expectations in Jerusalem, it was neither ill timed nor unwelcomed. If Jesus were about to return, it would be no bad thing to have Paul waiting for him in a prison cell, where, at the very least, he and his perverse views could be contained until Jesus could judge them himself. But because the arresting soldiers assumed Paul was the Egyptian, they sent him at once to be judged by the Roman governor, Felix, who happened at the time to be in the coastal town of Caesarea dealing with a conflict that had erupted between the city’s Jews and its Syrian and Greek inhabitants. Although Felix ultimately cleared Paul of the Egyptian’s crimes, he nevertheless threw him in a Caesarean prison, where he languished until Festus replaced Felix as governor and promptly transferred Paul to Rome at his behest.
Festus allowed Paul to go to Rome because Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen. Paul was born in Tarsus, a city whose inhabitants had been granted Roman citizenship by Mark Antony a century earlier. As a citizen, Paul had the right to demand a Roman trial, and Festus, who would serve as governor for an extremely brief and tumultuous period in Jerusalem, seemed happy to grant him one, if for no other reason than to simply be rid of him.
There may have been a more urgent reason for Paul to want to go to Rome. After the embarrassing spectacle at the Temple, in which he was forced to renounce everything he had been preaching for years, Paul wanted to get as far as he could from Jerusalem and the ever-tightening noose of control placed around his neck by James and the apostles. Besides, Rome seemed the perfect place for Paul. This was the Imperial City, the seat of the Roman Empire. Surely the Hellenistic Jews who had chosen to make Caesar’s home their own would be receptive to Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus Christ. Rome already had a small but growing contingent of Christians who lived alongside a fairly sizable Jewish population. A decade before Paul’s arrival, conflicts between the two communities had led the emperor Claudius to expel both groups from the city. By the time Paul arrived some time in the early sixties, however, both populations were once again flourishing. The city seemed ripe for Paul’s message.
Although Paul was officially under house arrest in Rome, it appears he was able to continue his preaching without much interference from the authorities. Yet by all accounts, Paul had little success in converting Rome’s Jews to his side. The Jewish population was not just unreceptive to his unique interpretation of the messiah, they were openly hostile to it. Even the gentile converts did not appear overly welcoming toward Paul. That may be because Paul was not the only “apostle” preaching Jesus in the imperial city. Peter, the first of the Twelve, was also in Rome.
Peter had come to Rome a few years before Paul and likely at James’s command to help establish an enduring community of Greek-speaking Jewish believers in the heart of the Roman Empire, a community that would be under the influence of the Jerusalem assembly and taught in accordance with the Jerusalem doctrine: in short, an anti-Pauline community. It is difficult to know just how successful Peter had become in his task before Paul arrived. But according to Acts, the Hellenists in Rome reacted so negatively to Paul’s preaching that he decided to cut himself off once and for all from his fellow Jews “who listen but never understand … who look but never perceive.” Paul vowed from that moment on to preach to none but the gentiles, “for they will listen” (Acts 28:26–29).
No record exists of these final years in the lives of Peter and Paul, the two men who would become the most important figures of Christianity. Strangely, Luke ends his account of Paul’s life with his arrival in Rome and he does not mention that Peter was in the city, too. Stranger still, Luke does not bother to record the most significant aspect of the two men’s years together in the Imperial City. For in the year 66 C.E., the same year that Jerusalem erupted in revolt, the emperor Nero, reacting to a sudden surge of Christian persecution in Rome, seized Peter and Paul and executed them both for espousing what he assumed was the same faith.
He was wrong.
Chapter Fifteen
The Just One
They called James, the brother of Jesus, “James the Just.” In Jerusalem, the city he had made his home after his brother’s death, James was recognized by all for his unsurpassed piety and his tireless defense of the poor. He himself owned nothing, not even the clothes he wore—simple garments made of linen, not wool. He drank no wine and ate no meat. He took no baths. No razor ever touched his head, nor did he smear himself with scented oils. It was said he spent so much time bent in worship, beseeching God’s forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew hard as a camel’s.
To the followers of Jesus, James was the living link to the messiah, the blood of the Lord. To everyone else in Jerusalem, he was simply “the just one.” Even the Jewish authorities praised James for his rectitude and his unshakable commitment to the law. Was it not James who excoriated the heretic Paul for abandoning the Torah? Did he not force the former Pharisee to repent of his views and cleanse himself at the Temple? The authorities may not have accepted James’s message about Jesus any more than they accepted Paul’s, but they respected James and viewed him as a righteous and honorable man. According to the early Christian historian Hegesippus (110–180 C.E.), the Jewish authorities repeatedly asked James to use his influence among the people to dissuade them from calling Jesus messiah. “We entreat you, restrain the people, for they have gone astray in regard to Jesus, as if he were the Christ,” they begged. “For we bear you witness, as do all the people, that you are just and that you do not respect persons. Persuade, therefore, the multitude not to be led astray concerning Jesus.”
Their entreaties went unheeded, of course. For although James was, as everyone attests, a zealous devotee of the law, he was also a faithful follower of Jesus; he would never betray the legacy of his elder brother, not even when he was martyred for it.
The story of James’s death can be found in Josephus’s Antiquities. The year was 62 C.E. All of Palestine was sinking into anarchy. Famine and drought had devastated the countryside, leaving fields fallow and farmers starving. Panic reigned in Jerusalem, as the Sicarii murdered and pillaged at will. The revolutionary fervor of the Jews was growing out of control, even as the priestly class upon which Rome relied to maintain order was tearing itself apart, with the wealthy priests in Jerusalem having concocted a scheme to seize for themselves the tithes that were meant to sustain the lower-class village priests. Meanwhile, a succession of inept Roman governors—from the hotheaded Cumanus to the scoundrel Felix and the hapless Festus—had only made matters worse.
When Festus died suddenly and without an immediate successor, Jerusalem descended into chaos. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the emperor Nero hurriedly dispatched Festus’s replacement, Albinus, to restore order in the city. But it would take weeks for Albinus to arrive. The delay gave the newly appointed high priest, a rash and irascible young man named Ananus, the time and opportunity to try to fill the vacuum of power in Jerusalem himself.
Ananus was the son of the extremely influential former high priest, also named Ananus, whose four other sons (and one son-in-law, Joseph Caiaphas) had all taken turns serving in the post. It was, in fact, the elder Ananus, whom Josephus calls “the great hoarder of money,” who instigated the shameless effort to strip the lower priests of their tithes, their sole source of income. With no Roman governor to check his ambitions, the young Ananus began a reckless campaign to rid himself of his perceived enemies. Among his first actions, Josephus writes, was to assemble the Sanhedrin and bring before it “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah.” Ananus charged James with blasphemy and transgressing the law, sentencing him to be stoned to death.
The reaction to James’s execution was immediate. A group of the city’s Jews, whom Josephus describes as “the most fair-minded and … strict in the observance of the law,” were outraged by Ananus’s actions. They sent word to Albinus, who was en route to Jerusalem from Alexandria, informing him of what had transpired in his absence. In response, Albinus wrote a seething letter to Ananus, threatening to take murderous vengeance upon him the moment he arrived. By the time Albinus entered Jerusalem, however, Ananus had already been removed from his post as high priest and replaced with a man named Jesus son of Damneus, who was himself deposed a year later, just before the start of the Jewish Revolt.
The passage concerning the death of James in Josephus is famous for being the earliest nonbiblical reference to Jesus. As previously noted, Josephus’s use of the appellation “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah,” proves that by the year 94 C.E., when the Antiquities was written, Jesus of Nazareth was already recognized as the founder of an important and enduring movement. Yet a closer look at the passage reveals that the true focus of Josephus is not Jesus, whom he dismisses as “the one they call messiah,” but rather James, whose unjust death at the hands of the high priest forms the core of the story. That Josephus mentions Jesus is no doubt significant. But the fact that a Jewish historian writing to a Roman audience would recount in detail the circumstances of James’s death, and the overwhelmingly negative reaction to his execution—not from the Christians in Jerusalem, but from the city’s most devout and observant Jews—is a clear indication of just how prominent a figure James was in first-century Palestine. Indeed, James was more than just Jesus’s brother. He was, as the historical evidence attests, the undisputed leader of the movement Jesus had left behind.
Hegesippus, who belonged to the second generation of Jesus’s followers, affirms James’s role as head of the Christian community in his five-volume history of the early Church. “Control of the church,” Hegesippus writes, “passed, together with the apostles, to the brother of the Lord, James, whom everyone from the Lord’s time till our own has named ‘the Just,’ for there were many Jameses.” In the noncanonical Epistle of Peter, the chief apostle and leader of the Twelve refers to James as “Lord and Bishop of the Holy Church.” Clement of Rome (30–97 C.E.), who would succeed Peter in the imperial city, addresses a letter to James as “the Bishop of Bishops, who rules Jerusalem, the Holy Assembly of the Hebrews, and all the Assemblies everywhere.” In the Gospel of Thomas, usually dated somewhere between the end of the first and the beginning of the second century C.E., Jesus himself names James his successor: “The disciples said to Jesus, ‘We know that you will depart from us. Who will be our leader?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Where you are, you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.’ ”
The early Church father Clement of Alexandria (150–215 C.E.) claims that Jesus imparted a secret knowledge to “James the Just, to John, and to Peter,” who in turn “imparted it to the other Apostles,” though Clement notes that among the triumvirate it was James who became “the first, as the record tells us, to be elected to the episcopal throne of the Jerusalem church.” In his Lives of Illustrious Men, Saint Jerome (c. 347–420 C.E.), who translated the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), writes that after Jesus ascended into heaven, James was “immediately appointed Bishop of Jerusalem by the apostles.” In fact, Jerome argues that James’s holiness and reputation among the people was so great that “the destruction of Jerusalem was believed to have occurred on account of his death.” Jerome is referencing a tradition from Josephus, which is also remarked upon by the third-century Christian theologian Origen (c. 185–254 C.E.) and recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–c. 339 C.E.), in which Josephus claims that “these things [the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem] happened to the Jews in requital for James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus, known as Christ, for though he was the most Righteous of men, the Jews put him to death.” Commenting on this no longer extant passage of Josephus, Eusebius writes: “So remarkable a person must James have been, so universally esteemed for Righteousness, that even the most intelligent of Jews felt this was why his martyrdom was immediately followed by the siege of Jerusalem” (Ecclesiastical History 2.23).
Even the New Testament confirms James’s role as head of the Christian community: It is James who is usually mentioned first among the “pillars” James, Peter, and John; James who personally sends his emissaries to the different communities scattered in the Diaspora (Galatians 2:1–14); James, to whom Peter reports his activities before leaving Jerusalem (Acts 12:17); James who sits in charge of the “elders” when Paul comes to make supplication (Acts 21:18); James who is the presiding authority over the Apostolic Council, who speaks last during its deliberations, and whose judgment is final (Acts 15:13). In fact, after the Apostolic Council, the apostles disappear from the rest of the book of Acts. But James does not. On the contrary, it is the fateful dispute between James and Paul, in which James publicly shames Paul for his deviant teachings by demanding he make supplication at the Temple, that leads to the climax of the book: Paul’s arrest and extradition to Rome.
Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as head of the first Christian community—above Peter and the rest of the Twelve; above John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 20:2); far above Paul, with whom James repeatedly clashed. Why then has James been almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?
Partly it has to do with James’s very identity as the brother of Jesus. Dynasty was the norm for the Jews of Jesus’s time. The Jewish Herodian and Hasmonaean families, the high priests and the priestly aristocracies, the Pharisees, even the bandit gangs all practiced hereditary succession. Kinship was perhaps even more crucial for a messianic movement like Jesus’s, which based its legitimacy on Davidic descent. After all, if Jesus was a descendant of King David, then so was James; why should he not lead David’s community after the death of the messiah? Nor was James the sole member of Jesus’s family to be given authority in the early church. Jesus’s cousin Simeon, son of Clopas, succeeded James as head of the Jerusalem assembly, while other members of his family, including two grandsons of Jesus’s other brother, Judas, maintained an active leadership role throughout the first and second centuries of Christianity.
By the third and fourth centuries, however, as Christianity gradually transformed from a heterogeneous Jewish movement with an array of sects and schisms into an institutionalized and rigidly orthodox imperial religion of Rome, James’s identity as Jesus’s brother became an obstacle to those who advocated the perpetual virginity of his mother Mary. A few overly clever solutions were developed to reconcile the immutable facts of Jesus’s family with the inflexible dogma of the church. There was, for example, the well-worn and thoroughly ahistorical argument that Jesus’s brothers and sisters were Joseph’s children from a previous marriage, or that “brother” actually meant “cousin.” But the end result was that James’s role in early Christianity was gradually diminished.
At the same time that James’s influence was in decline, Peter’s was ascendant. Imperial Christianity, like the empire itself, demanded an easily determinable power structure, one preferably headquartered in Rome, not Jerusalem, and linked directly to Jesus. Peter’s role as the first bishop of Rome and his status as the chief apostle made him the ideal figure upon which to base the authority of the Roman Church. The bishops who succeeded Peter in Rome (and who eventually became infallible popes) justified the chain of authority they relied upon to maintain power in an ever-expanding church by citing a passage in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells the apostle, “I say to you that you shall be called Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church” (Matthew 16:18). The problem with this heavily disputed verse, which most scholars reject as unhistorical, is that it is the only passage in the entire New Testament that designates Peter as head of the church. In fact, it is the only passage in any early historical document—biblical or otherwise—that names Peter the successor to Jesus and leader of the community he left behind. By contrast there are at least a dozen passages citing James as such. What historical records do exist about Peter’s role in early Christianity are exclusively about his leadership of the assembly in Rome, which, while certainly a significant community, was just one of many assemblies that fell under the overarching authority of the Jerusalem assembly: the “mother assembly.” In other words, Peter may have been bishop of Rome, but James was “Bishop of Bishops.”
There is, however, a more compelling reason for James’s steady abatement in early Christianity, one that has less to do with his identity as Jesus’s brother or his relation to Peter than it does with James’s beliefs and his opposition to Paul. Some measure of what James stood for in the early Christian community has already been revealed through his actions in the book of Acts and in his theological disagreements with Paul. But an even more thorough understanding of James’s views can be found in his own often overlooked and much maligned epistle, written sometime between 80 and 90 C.E.
Obviously James did not himself write the epistle; he was, like his brother Jesus and most of the apostles, an illiterate peasant with no formal education. James’s epistle was probably written by someone from within his inner circle. Again, that is true of almost every book in the New Testament, including the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, as well as a good number of Paul’s letters (Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus). As noted, naming a book after someone significant was a common way of honoring that person and reflecting his views. James may not have written his own letter, but it no doubt represents what he believed (the epistle is thought to be an edited and expanded version of a sermon James gave in Jerusalem just before his death in 62 C.E.). The overwhelming consensus is that the traditions contained within the epistle can confidently be traced to James the Just. That would make James’s epistle arguably one of the most important books in the New Testament. Because one sure way of uncovering what Jesus may have believed is to determine what his brother James believed.
The first thing to note about James’s epistle is its passionate concern with the plight of the poor. This, in itself, is not surprising. The traditions all paint James as the champion of the destitute and dispossessed; it is how he earned his nickname, “the Just.” The Jerusalem assembly was founded by James upon the principle of service to the poor. There is even evidence to suggest that the first followers of Jesus who gathered under James’s leadership referred to themselves collectively as “the poor.”
What is perhaps more surprising about James’s epistle is its bitter condemnation of the rich. “Come now, you wealthy ones, weep and howl for the miseries that are about to come upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and the venom within them shall be a witness against you; it shall eat your flesh as though it were fire” (James 5:1–3). For James there is no path to salvation for the wealthy who “hoard treasures for the last days,” and who “live on the land in luxury and pleasure” (James 5:3, 5). Their fate is set in stone. “The rich man will pass away like a flower in the field. For no sooner does the sun rise with its scorching heat, which withers the field, than the flower dies and its beauty perishes. So it shall be with the rich man” (James 1:11). James goes so far as to suggest that one cannot truly be a follower of Jesus if one does not actively favor the poor. “Do you with your acts of favoritism [toward the rich] really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” he asks. “For if you show favoritism, you commit sin and are exposed as a transgressor of the law” (James 2:1, 9).
James’s fierce judgment of the rich may explain why he drew the ire of the greedy high priest Ananus, whose father had schemed to impoverish the village priests by stealing their tithes. But in truth, James is merely echoing the words of his brother’s Beatitudes: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger. Woe to you laughing now, for soon you will mourn” (Luke 6:24–25). Actually, much of James’s epistle reflects the words of Jesus, whether the topic is the poor (“Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs to the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” James 2:5; “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours.” Luke 6:20); the swearing of oaths (“Do not swear, either by heaven or earth, or by any other oath; let your yes be yes and your no be no.” James 5:12; “Do not swear at all, either by heaven, which is the throne of God, or by the earth, which is God’s footstool.… Let your yes be yes and your no be no.” Matthew 5:34, 37); or the importance of putting one’s faith into practice (“Be doers of the word, not just hearers who deceive themselves.” James 1:22; “He who hears these words of mine and does them will be like the wise man who built his house on a rock … he who hears these words of mine and does not do them is like the foolish man who built his house on sand.” Matthew 7:24, 26).
Yet the issue over which James and Jesus are most clearly in agreement is the role and application of the Law of Moses. “Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew (Matthew 5:19). “Whoever keeps the whole law but trips up on a single point of it is guilty of [violating] it all,” James echoes in his epistle (James 2:10).
The primary concern of James’s epistle is over how to maintain the proper balance between devotion to the Torah and faith in Jesus as messiah. Throughout the text, James repeatedly exhorts Jesus’s followers to remain faithful to the law. “But he who looks to the perfect law—the law of liberty—and perseveres [in following it], being not just hearers who forget, but doers who act [upon it], he shall be blessed in his doing” (James 1:25). James compares Jews who abandon the law after converting to the Jesus movement to those who “look at themselves in the mirror … and upon walking away, immediately forget what they looked like” (James 1:23).
There should be little doubt as to whom James is referring in these verses. In fact, James’s epistle was very likely conceived as a corrective to Paul’s preaching, which is why it is addressed to “the Twelve Tribes of Israel scattered in the Diaspora.” The epistle’s hostility toward Pauline theology is unmistakable. Whereas Paul dismisses the Law of Moses as a “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on a stone tablet” (2 Corinthians 3:7), James celebrates it as “the law of liberty.” Paul claims that “one is not justified by the works of the law but only through belief in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). James emphatically rejects Paul’s notion that faith alone engenders salvation. “Can belief save you?” he retorts. “Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (James 2:14,19). Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that “a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28). James calls this the opinion of a “senseless person,” countering that “faith apart from works [of the law] is dead” (James 2:26).
What both men mean by “works of the law” is the application of Jewish law in the daily life of the believer. Put simply, Paul views such “works” as irrelevant to salvation, while James views them as a requirement for belief in Jesus as Christ. To prove his point, James offers a telling example, one that demonstrates he was specifically refuting Paul in his epistle. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac upon the altar?” James says, alluding to the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac at the behest of the Lord (Genesis 22:9–14). “You see how faith went hand-in-hand with [Abraham’s] works, how it was through his works that his faith was made complete? Thus what the scripture says was fulfilled: ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,’ and he was called the friend of God” (James 2:23).
What makes this example so telling is that it is the same one Paul often uses in his letters when making the exact opposite argument. “What then are we to say about Abraham, our father according to the flesh?” Paul writes. “For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, though not before God. Rather, what does the scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’ ” (Romans 4:1–3; see also Galatians 3:6–9).
James may not have been able to read any of Paul’s letters but he was obviously familiar with Paul’s teachings about Jesus. The last years of his life were spent dispatching his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in order to correct what he viewed as Paul’s mistakes. The sermon that became his epistle was just another attempt by James to curb Paul’s influence. Judging by Paul’s own epistles, James’s efforts were successful, as many among Paul’s congregations seem to have turned their backs on him in favor of the teachers from Jerusalem.
The anger and bitterness that Paul feels toward these “false apostles [and] deceitful workers,” these “servants of Satan” sent to infiltrate his congregations by a man he angrily dismisses as one of the “supposedly acknowledged leaders” of the church—a man he claims “contributed nothing” to him—seeps like poison through the pages of his later epistles (2 Corinthians 11:13; Galatians 2:6). Yet Paul’s attempts to convince his congregations not to abandon him would ultimately prove futile. There was never any doubt about where the loyalty of the community would lie in a dispute between a former Pharisee and the flesh and blood of the living Christ. No matter how Hellenistic the Diaspora Jews may have become, their allegiance to the leaders of the mother assembly did not waver. James, Peter, John—these were the pillars of the church. They were the principal characters in all the stories people told about Jesus. They were the men who walked and talked with Jesus. They were among the first to see him rise from the dead; they would be the first to witness him return with the clouds of heaven. The authority James and the apostles maintained over the community during their lifetimes was unbreakable. Not even Paul could escape it, as he discovered in 57 C.E., when he was forced by James to publicly repent of his beliefs by taking part in that strict purification ritual in the Temple of Jerusalem.
As with his account of the Apostolic Council some years earlier, Luke’s rendering of this final meeting between James and Paul in the book of Acts tries to brush aside any hint of conflict or animosity by presenting Paul as silently acquiescing to the Temple rite demanded of him. But not even Luke can hide the tension that so obviously exists in this scene. In Luke’s account, before James sends Paul to the Temple to prove to the Jerusalem assembly that he “observes and guards the law,” he first draws a sharp distinction between “the things that God had done among the gentiles in [Paul’s] ministry,” and the “many thousands of believers … among the Jews [who] are all zealous for the law” (Acts 21:20). James then gives Paul “four men who are under a vow” and instructs him to “go through the rite of purification with them, and pay for the shaving of their heads” (Acts 21:24).
What Luke is describing in this passage is called a “Nazirite vow” (Numbers 6:2). Nazirites were strict devotees of the Law of Moses who pledged to abstain from wine and refused to shave their hair or come near a corpse for a set period of time, either as an act of piety or in return for the fulfillment of a wish, such as a healthy child or a safe journey (James himself may have been a Nazirite, as the description of those who take the vow perfectly matches the descriptions of him in the ancient chronicles). Considering Paul’s views on the Law of Moses and the Temple of Jerusalem, his forced participation in such a ritual would have been hugely embarrassing for him. The entire purpose of the rite was to demonstrate to the Jerusalem assembly that he no longer believed what he had been preaching for nearly a decade. There is no other way to read Paul’s participation in the Nazirite vow except as a solemn renunciation of his ministry and a public declaration of James’s authority over him—all the more reason to doubt Luke’s depiction of Paul as simply going along with the ritual without comment or complaint.
Interestingly, Luke’s may not be the only account of this pivotal moment. An eerily similar story is recounted in the compilation of writings known collectively as the Pseudo-Clementines. Although compiled sometime around 300 C.E. (nearly a century before the New Testament was officially canonized), the Pseudo-Clementines contain within them two separate sets of traditions that can be dated much earlier. The first is known as the Homilies, and comprises two epistles: one by the apostle Peter, the other by Peter’s successor in Rome, Clement. The second set of traditions is called the Recognitions, which is itself founded upon an older document titled Ascent of James that most scholars date to the middle of the second century C.E., perhaps two or three decades after the gospel of John was written.
The Recognitions contains an incredible story about a violent altercation that James the brother of Jesus has with someone simply called “the enemy.” In the text, James and the enemy are engaged in a shouting match inside the Temple when, all of a sudden, the enemy attacks James in a fit of rage and throws him down the Temple stairs. James is badly hurt by the fall but his supporters quickly come to his rescue and carry him to safety. Remarkably, the enemy who attacked James is later identified as none other than Saul of Tarsus (Recognitions 1:70–71).
As with the Lukan version, the story of the altercation between James and Paul in the Recognitions has its flaws. The fact that Paul is referred to as Saul in the text suggests that the author believes the event took place before Paul’s conversion (though the Recognitions never actually refers to that conversion). Yet regardless of the historicity of the story itself, Paul’s identity as “the enemy” of the church is repeatedly affirmed, not only in the Recognitions, but also in the other texts of the Pseudo-Clementines. In the Epistle of Peter, for example, the chief apostle complains that “some from among the gentiles have rejected my lawful preaching, attaching themselves to certain lawless and trifling preaching of the man who is my enemy” (Epistle of Peter 2:3). Elsewhere, Peter flatly identifies this “false prophet” who teaches “the dissolution of the law” as Paul, cautioning his followers to “believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother, or whosoever may come after him” (Recognitions 4:34–35).
What the Pseudo-Clementine documents indicate, and the New Testament clearly confirms, is that James, Peter, John, and the rest of the apostles viewed Paul with wariness and suspicion, if not open derision, which is why they went to such lengths to counteract Paul’s teachings, censuring him for his words, warning others not to follow him, even sending their own missionaries to his congregations. No wonder Paul was so keen to flee to Rome after the incident at the Temple in 57 C.E. He was surely not eager to be judged by the emperor for his alleged crimes, as Luke seems to suggest. Paul went to Rome because he hoped he could escape James’s authority. But as he discovered when he arrived in the Imperial City and saw Peter already established there, one could not so easily escape the reach of James and Jerusalem.
While Paul spent the last years of his life in Rome, frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm he received for his message (perhaps because the Jews were heeding Peter’s call to “believe no teacher, unless he brings from Jerusalem the testimonial of James the Lord’s brother”), the Jerusalem assembly under James’s leadership thrived. The Hebrews in Jerusalem were certainly not immune to persecution by the religious authorities. They were often arrested and sometimes killed for their preaching. James the son of Zebedee, one of the original Twelve, was even beheaded (Acts 12:3). But these periodic bouts of persecution were rare and seem not to have been the result of a rejection of the law on the part of the Hebrews, as was the case with the Hellenists who were expelled from the city. Obviously, the Hebrews had figured out a way to accommodate themselves to the Jewish priestly authorities, or else they could not have remained in Jerusalem. These were by all accounts law-abiding Jews who kept the customs and traditions of their forefathers but who happened also to believe that the simple Jewish peasant from Galilee named Jesus of Nazareth was the promised messiah.
That is not to say that James and the apostles were uninterested in reaching out to gentiles, or that they believed gentiles could not join their movement. As indicated by his decision at the Apostolic Council, James was willing to forgo the practice of circumcision and other “burdens of the law” for gentile converts. James did not want to force gentiles to first become Jews before they were allowed to become Christians. He merely insisted that they not divorce themselves entirely from Judaism, that they maintain a measure of fidelity to the beliefs and practices of the very man they claimed to be following (Acts 15:12–21). Otherwise, the movement risked becoming a wholly new religion, and that is something neither James nor his brother Jesus would have imagined.
James’s steady leadership over the Jerusalem assembly came to an end in 62 C.E., when he was executed by the high priest Ananus, not just because he was a follower of Jesus and certainly not because he transgressed the law (or else “the most fair-minded and … strict in the observance of the law” would not have been up in arms about his unjust execution). James was likely killed because he was doing what he did best: defending the poor and weak against the wealthy and powerful. Ananus’s schemes to impoverish the lower-class priests by stealing their tithes would not have sat well with James the Just. And so, Ananus took advantage of the brief absence of Roman authority in Jerusalem to get rid of a man who had become a thorn in his side.
One cannot know how Paul felt in Rome when he heard about James’s death. But if he assumed the passing of Jesus’s brother would relax the grip of Jerusalem over the community, he was mistaken. The leadership of the Jerusalem assembly passed swiftly to another of Jesus’s family members, his cousin Simeon son of Clopas, and the community continued unabated until four years after James’s death, when the Jews suddenly rose up in revolt against Rome.
Some among the Hebrews seem to have fled Jerusalem for Pella when the uprising began. But there is no evidence to suggest that the core leadership of the mother assembly abandoned Jerusalem. Rather, they maintained their presence in the city of Jesus’s death and resurrection, eagerly awaiting his return, right up to the moment that Titus’s army arrived and wiped the holy city and its inhabitants—both Christians and Jews—off the face of the earth. With the destruction of Jerusalem, the connection between the assemblies scattered across the Diaspora and the mother assembly rooted in the city of God was permanently severed, and with it the last physical link between the Christian community and Jesus the Jew. Jesus the zealot.
Jesus of Nazareth.
Epilogue
True God from True God
The balding, gray-bearded old men who fixed the faith and practice of Christianity met for the first time in the Byzantine city of Nicaea, on the eastern shore of Lake Izmit in present-day Turkey. It was the summer of 325 C.E. The men had been brought together by the emperor Constantine and commanded to come to a consensus on the doctrine of the religion he had recently adopted as his own. Bedecked in robes of purple and gold, an aureate laurel resting on his head, Rome’s first Christian emperor called the council to order as though it were a Roman Senate, which is understandable, considering that every one of the nearly two thousand bishops he had gathered in Nicaea to permanently define Christianity was a Roman.
The bishops were not to disband until they had resolved the theological differences among them, particularly when it came to the nature of Jesus and his relationship to God. Over the centuries since Jesus’s crucifixion, there had been a great deal of discord and debate among the leaders of the church over whether Jesus was human or divine. Was he, as those like Athanasius of Alexandria claimed, God incarnate, or was he, as the followers of Arius seemed to suggest, just a man—a perfect man, perhaps, but a man nonetheless?
After months of heated negotiations, the council handed to Constantine what became known as the Nicene Creed, outlining for the first time the officially sanctioned, orthodox beliefs of the Christian church. Jesus is the literal son of God, the creed declared. He is Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of the same substance as the father. As for those who disagreed with the creed, those like the Arians who believed that “there was a time when [Jesus] was not,” they were immediately banished from the empire and their teachings violently suppressed.
It may be tempting to view the Nicene Creed as an overtly politicized attempt to stifle the legitimate voices of dissent in the early church. It is certainly the case that the council’s decision resulted in a thousand years or more of unspeakable bloodshed in the name of Christian orthodoxy. But the truth is that the council members were merely codifying a creed that was already the majority opinion, not just of the bishops gathered at Nicaea, but of the entire Christian community. Indeed, belief in Jesus as God had been enshrined in the church centuries before the Council of Nicaea, thanks to the overwhelming popularity of the letters of Paul.
After the Temple was destroyed, the holy city burned to the ground, and the remnants of the Jerusalem assembly dispersed, Paul underwent a stunning rehabilitation in the Christian community. With the possible exception of the Q document (which is, after all, a hypothetical text), the only writings about Jesus that existed in 70 C.E. were the letters of Paul. These letters had been in circulation since the fifties. They were written to the Diaspora communities, which, after the destruction of Jerusalem, were the only Christian communities left in the realm. Without the mother assembly to guide the followers of Jesus, the movement’s connection to Judaism was broken, and Paul became the primary vehicle through which a new generation of Christians was introduced to Jesus the Christ. Even the gospels were deeply influenced by Paul’s letters. One can trace the shadow of Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew. But it is in the gospel of Luke, written by one of Paul’s devoted disciples, that one can see the dominance of Paul’s views, while the gospel of John is little more than Pauline theology in narrative form.
Paul’s conception of Christianity may have been anathema before 70 C.E. But afterward, his notion of a wholly new religion free from the authority of a Temple that no longer existed, unburdened by a law that no longer mattered, and divorced from a Judaism that had become a pariah was enthusiastically embraced by converts throughout the Roman Empire. Hence, in 398 C.E., when, according to legend, another group of bishops gathered at a council in the city of Hippo Regius in modern-day Algeria to canonize what would become known as the New Testament, they chose to include in the Christian scriptures one letter from James, the brother and successor of Jesus, two letters from Peter, the chief apostle and first among the Twelve, three letters from John, the beloved disciple and pillar of the church, and fourteen letters from Paul, the deviant and outcast who was rejected and scorned by the leaders in Jerusalem. In fact, more than half of the twenty-seven books that now make up the New Testament are either by or about Paul.
This should not be surprising. Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem was almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology. And that is precisely what Paul provided. The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers to make.
Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus the man—is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.
For my wife, Jessica Jackley, and the entire Jackley clan,
whose love and acceptance have taught me more about Jesus
than all my years of research and study.
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of two decades of research into the New Testament and the origins of the Christian movement conducted at Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Although I am obviously indebted to all my professors, I would like to single out my extremely patient Greek professor Helen Moritz, and my brilliant adviser, the late Catherine Bell, at Santa Clara, Harvey Cox and Jon Levinson at Harvard, and Mark Juergensmeyer at UCSB. I am also grateful for the unconditional support I received from my editor Will Murphy and the entire team at Random House. Special thanks to Elyse Cheney, the best literary agent in the world, and to Ian Werrett, who not only translated all the Hebrew and Aramaic passages in the book, but also read multiple drafts and provided vital feedback on the manuscript. But the biggest thanks of all goes, as always, to my beloved wife and best friend Jessica Jackley, whose love and devotion have made me the man I always hoped I could be.
