Bishop Spong's Weekly Articles December 2009

Most Christians are unable to discern any differences in voice, tone or content in the entire body of work that we now call the epistles, whether written by Paul or not. That is probably because we never read them as a whole and thus never get a sense of Paul's specific thinking. We tend to hear them instead only in small snatches being read as lessons in church and with no context. My hope is that through these columns I will be able to provide my readers with sufficient knowledge of the distinctiveness of each epistle that the differences between them become obvious. It might even be exciting to enable people to become biblically literate, which would place them among the minority of Christians who are conversant with Paul's thinking.

The first epistle that Paul wrote, most scholars agree, was I Thessalonians. It is, however, placed sixth in the epistle section of the Bible because these letters were put into the canon of scripture according to their length. Romans, Paul's longest letter, is first, and Philemon, Paul's shortest letter, is last. If they had been listed chronologically I Thessalonians would be first, Galatians second, I and II Corinthians third and fourth, Romans fifth, Philemon sixth and Philippians seventh. So we begin our study of Paul's content with his first two works.

Thessalonica was the capital of Macedonia and Galatia was in central Asia Minor. The book of Acts tells us that Paul visited both of these towns on his early missionary journeys. He wrote these two epistles in the first few years of the sixth decade, probably between the years 51 and 53. At this time the followers of Jesus were still members of the synagogue. Paul came to each town as a traveling evangelist who also happened to be a rabbi. The venue for his words was thus the Sabbath service in the synagogue, though we need to recognize that in those two towns the synagogues were far removed in both miles and strictness from Judea.

Members of these synagogues were Greek-speaking Hellenized Jews, who lived as members of the Jewish Diaspora. The synagogue was thus not only a worship center for them, it was also their cultic and cultural center. Diaspora synagogues had by this time begun to attract Gentile worshipers. It was a time of great religious ferment in the Greek-speaking Roman Empire. The gods of Olympus had lost most of their appeal. The mystery cults seemed too bizarre and had not yet become established. This meant that the synagogue was more and more a place to which serious worshipers of many varieties turned. In the synagogue there was a firm conviction that God was one. The Torah of the Jews portrayed this one God as concerned about life and ethics, as well as about patterns of worship. As the Jews moved further away from their homeland many of them began to shed the more rigid aspects of their religion, and Judaism for them became more abstract, more spiritual, and less definably J ewish. Gentile worshipers were not drawn to the cultic aspects of Judaism, like kosher dietary rules, circumcision and Sabbath day observance, so these changes made it even more attractive to them.

Paul, as a Greek-thinking Hellenized Jew, was thus frequently more appealing to these modernizing Jews and the Gentile visitors than he was to the stricter Jewish members of the audience, who viewed the synagogue as their last attachment to their ancestry. In Thessalonica Paul had clearly emphasized in his preaching the messianic claim for Jesus. That role had many connotations for the Jews, but among the most compelling was that the messiah, when he came, would establish God's eternal kingdom and inaugurate God's earthly rule. In the service of this idea the early disciples of Jesus had been consumed with the task of connecting the life of Jesus to the messianic promises found in their scriptures. They thus searched their sacred writings for hints and clues to prove that Jesus was the expected messiah. Sometimes they stretched these texts beyond the breaking point. At the heart of the Jesus message was the claim that death had been conquered and that his followers wou ld be transported into eternal life very soon. The Gentile visitors to the synagogue had bought this message and had formed themselves into a separate community of believers within the synagogue. They still attended Sabbath day services, but they also gathered on the first day of the week for the Christian liturgy they called "the breaking of the bread," at which time they prayed "thy kingdom come."

The obvious desire by Gentiles to be in the synagogue, but not of the synagogue, was more than some traditional Orthodox Jews could tolerate, so Paul and his teaching became a source of divisiveness in the various synagogues of the empire. The Orthodox Jewish believers began to attack Paul's credentials and his reputation. The Gentile worshipers had turned from idols to the one God of the Jews, but Paul had located this God in the life of Jesus and so deeply convinced them of this that they had begun to wait for Jesus' promised return from heaven. Clearly this was the message they had heard from Paul.

As time passed, however, the Kingdom did not arrive and they began to waver. When Thessalonian family members began to die, their despair increased. Something was clearly wrong if they died before the kingdom arrived. The bulk of Paul's message in his first epistle was designed to assure these troubled worshippers that the dead would rejoin the living when that second coming arrived. No one knows, he assured them, either the time or the season when that second coming will occur. Paul, the pastor, thus urged them to be vigilant, to keep awake, to be sober and to put on "the armor of God," an image that he would expand in later works.

In Galatia, the pastoral issue was a little different. The content of Paul's message in this second epistle was that in Christ alone their salvation was assured. This had caused those who responded to that message to move dramatically away from the law of the Jews. Keeping the cultic rules of Judaism lost its urgency in Paul's proclamation of the infinite love of God that he believed had been revealed in the life of Jesus. This seemed to Orthodox Jews to be nothing less than a prescription for moral anarchy and the obliteration of the Torah itself. So they struck back at Paul and were supported by the heavy guns of the more traditional Jewish Christians from Jerusalem, including Peter and James, the Lord's brother. This tension erupted into the first major division in Christian history. Was the Christ figure merely a new chapter in Judaism? Was he another prophet in a long line of Jewish prophets waiting to be incorporated into the ongoing Jewish story? Did believer s in Jesus have to come through the rituals and rites of Judaism in order to be Christians? This was the position that Peter and James took and defended.

For Paul that stance was a violation of everything his Christian experience had taught him. Paul had found in Jesus a love sufficient to embrace him just as he was. Paul had tried the other way. By his own confession he had sought to obey every commandment of the law in order to win salvation. That had not proved to be a path that led him toward wholeness. Religious observance never is. It was and is just another form of human slavery, another attempt to win divine favor, to manipulate the deity with good behavior. At best that approach produced religious self-centeredness, not the glorious liberty of the children of God. For Paul the battle he was fighting in this epistle was for the heart of what he believed was the Christ experience. In defense of his understanding of Christ he mounted a strong counterattack, dismissing Peter's behavior as unworthy of the gospel and expressing a strong dislike for James, the Lord's brother. He berated those in the congregation i n Galatia who had so quickly abandoned his gospel for this new religious bondage. Galatians reveals Paul not only at his most passionate, but also at his angriest and his most human. Defending his claim to be an apostle, Paul tells us more in this epistle than anywhere else about his conversion experience, and the meaning he found in Jesus that had been the source of his conversion. When the smoke of battle cleared, Paul stood victorious and the book of Acts would later relate the story of Peter's conversion (see Acts 10).

It is also in Galatians that Paul first articulates the unity that he finds in Christ, who obliterates the human security boundaries between Jews and Gentiles, males and females, bond and free. All are one in Christ, he asserts. Paul, as we noted earlier in this series, felt himself loved beyond anything he had imagined possible and he refused to allow that single message to be compromised. He won this battle, but it would be one that Christians would fight again and again throughout history. Perhaps it was that this message of unqualified love was simply too good to be true. Imagine a God who knows the secrets of our hearts, but who loves us anyway. That is, however, the meaning of the Christ story for Paul and, as such, it would represent a major step into what it means to be human.

Do you sometimes relate your evaluation of the Bible as a living, progressing document to the Constitution of the United States?

Dear Donna,

Fundamentalists come in many forms. There are in fact biblical fundamentalists and constitutional fundamentalists. When I hear someone say that potential judges for the Supreme Court are only to be the interpreters of the Constitution rather than "legislating from the bench," it sounds to me very much like a fundamentalist Christian saying that every word of the Bible is the inerrant word of God and therefore must be followed literally.

Both the Constitution and the Bible were written by human beings. None of the authors of either work were all-wise, all-knowing or able to see beyond the limits of their own time and place in history. Did the original Constitution guarantee equal rights of all people? Of course not! It defined black people, for example, as three-fifths of a human being for counting the population to determine the number of seats awarded to each state in the House of Representatives. It had to be amended in 1920 to allow women to vote in presidential elections.

Judges have reversed themselves in such cases as Dred Scott and in effect reinterpreted the Constitution in the process. I support intellectually and emotionally the decisions made by the Supreme Court in both Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954 and in Roe versus Wade in 1973. Yet both decisions were greeted with great animosity and with cries that the justices were making law, not interpreting it. I believe they were simply interpreting it, but in a far more enlightened direction than even its writers could ever have fully understood.

The same thing is true of the Bible. Christians in the 2000-plus year history of the church have time after time set aside the words of a literally understood Bible to overcome the slavery that the Bible was quoted as supporting and to set aside the biblical definition of a woman that suggested that women are the property of men. We are as a society at this very moment setting aside the ignorance and fear found in the Bible about homosexual people.

I treasure both the Bible and the Constitution, but both will always be subject to interpretation in the light of new learning, new realities an new levels of consciousness.

Thank you for your question.

The first thing to note about the two Corinthian letters is that they appear to be composites of a more extensive correspondence that perhaps reached a total of four or even five Pauline letters. By a careful analysis of our two remaining epistles to the Corinthians, scholars have come to the conclusion that these "lost letters," to which Paul actually refers in the epistles that we do have, have been included, at least in part, in what we call II Corinthians. These scholars point to such passages as II Cor.6:1-7:1, II Cor.10-13 and even in the extraneous verses in Cor.11:32-33 that appear to be inserts into the texts that actually break the flow of Paul's argument. Despite this strange construction, however, scholars find no evidence to suggest that all of II Corinthians is the authentic work of Paul.

We need to remember that preserving letters in the first century was an inexact and costly procedure of hand copying, and that no one had yet assigned the status of "Holy Scripture" to the writings of Paul. Maybe that is why they preserved only what they believed was most important.

When we turn to the content of these two Corinthian epistles themselves, we find Paul, the pastor, dealing with human beings who are acting like human beings. Paul knows what every pastor knows, namely, that congregations are not made up of angels. At the same time congregations learn very quickly that ordination does not bestow perfection on their ordained leader. Pastoral care is the sensitive attempt to bring wholeness out of an exchange between human passion and human insecurity. It is a delicately nuanced balancing act, the job of which is to enhance the humanity of all who are involved. If we need a text to describe the goal of all pastoral activity, it would be the Fourth Gospel's definition of Jesus' purpose: "I have come," John's Jesus says, "that they might have life and have it abundantly." That is finally both the mission of the Christian Church and the hoped-for outcome in every pastoral situation. Abundant life, please note, does not always mean happines s or even the easing of pain. Many people seek wholeness in quite destructive ways, with addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex and even success being just a few of them. Sometimes abundant life becomes possible only in confrontation and brokenness. Real pastoral care is not about making it feel good; it is about helping wholeness to be created. Paul understood that and every pastor must learn it sooner or later. Wholeness is seen in the freedom to be, in the ability to escape the survival mentality that inevitably locks us into self-centeredness. Wholeness is found in the maturity of being able to live for another by giving our love away. It will be through the lens of that understanding of pastoral care that I will seek to explore the issues found in the epistles to the Corinthians.

The Corinthian congregation appears to have had more than its share of pastoral needs and even to have exasperated Paul on more than one occasion. Some of the issues to which he refers are party lines and divisions among the people. Some claimed loyalty to Paul, some to Apollos and still others to Peter. Beyond that their rowdy behavior had begun to distort the worship of the people. In that early part of Christian history the Eucharist was begun with a community meal called "The Agape Feast." The Corinthians, however, had turned this common meal into a gluttonous orgy that left some of the poor hungry. Then they had turned the Eucharistic wine into an occasion of public drunkenness. Paul obviously needed to speak to this behavior.

There was also a dispute in the congregation about the meat served at this "Agape Feast." It had been bought at a local butcher shop where, in this pagan society, it had been slaughtered in ceremonial offerings to the idols of the people. Could Christians eat meat that had been offered to idols? Some Corinthian followers of Jesus were offended by this idea. Still others had become enamored with Paul's message of salvation as the ultimate expression of God's grace and the conviction that this grace, so abundantly and freely given, was not dependent on their personal behavior. This meant that they had now become what the church came to call "anti-nomianism," that is, some were suggesting that the more they sinned, the more God's grace abounded. This stance appeared to render any sense of personal ethical responsibility completely meaningless. Still others seemed to have a hierarchy of value associated with certain activities of the synagogue. Prophets who shared their prophetic words with the congregation were deemed to be of less value than those who claimed the gift of "glossolalia" or "speaking in tongues," that is, the ability to utter words that only God could understand. This was, they seemed to think, the highest gift of all and thus the most to be honored.

If this were not enough for one pastor to deal with, there was also a gender dispute going on. Some Corinthian women seemed to take seriously Paul's words, in his earlier letter to the Galatians, that "in Christ there is neither male nor female, but all are one." This new freedom and equality for women obviously challenged the patriarchal value system of that ancient world. Some women, quite clearly, pushed these boundaries well beyond even Paul's comfort level. No one, not even Paul, escapes his or her cultural prejudices completely. The extent of this boundary pushing becomes obvious when Paul asserts his threatened male authority by saying, "I forbid a woman to have authority over a man!" Since no one forbids what has never happened, these women were overtly claiming authority over men in the life of the church.

While Paul's prejudiced humanity is in full display in this last conflict, on most of the others he rises to the pastoral challenge. Paul begins by telling them that Christ alone is their foundation and that any division of loyalties among the followers of various leaders was based on the inability to understand that these leaders were simply "servants through which you believed — I planted, Apollos watered, but only God gave the increase." In regard to the Eucharist, Paul upbraids the members of this congregation for eating and drinking in such a way that some are hungry and some are drunk. He urges them to eat and drink in their own homes and to recognize that the act of breaking bread and drinking wine in the Eucharistic feast is "a participation in the body of Christ" and what his life of love and sacrifice was all about. The Eucharist, he proclaims, is a liturgical way in which they participate in Christ's wholeness.

Paul takes anti-nomianism on directly, reminding them of their mutual responsibility to one another. He suggests that immorality, at its heart, was to treat another human being as a thing to be used rather than as a person to be loved. He defuses the debate about meat offered to idols by saying that since idols are nothing, meat offered to idols is meat offered to nothing, so there is no prohibition as to its use. He continues, however, by stating that this stance misses the point of this dispute. "All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful but not all things build up." It was a subtle, but powerful, distinction. The evil in this debate, he continues, is the lack of sensitivity on the part of some to the feelings of others. Candy is not evil, but to offer candy to one battling with obesity is not loving. It does not build up the person or fulfill the goal of Christ.

Finally, Paul gets to the debate on spiritual gifts. There is no hierarchy of gifts, he argues, for all gifts are in the service of the same spirit and are expressions of the same God who inspires us all. The gifts of the people offered in worship are necessary to the building up of all, he suggests. Every gift is for the benefit of the whole community that he calls the body of Christ. Following that analogy of the body, he moves on to suggest that their bickering as to whose gift is the most important makes as much sense as a debate between the eye, the ear, the hand and the foot as to which part of the body has the higher value.

This sets the stage for Paul's writing of what is surely the most beautiful, the most memorable and the most quoted passage in the entire Pauline corpus. After describing the body in which the various organ and parts work together for the good of the whole, Paul says, "I will show you a more excellent way." Then he begins his famous ode to love. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." He continues by defining love as patient, kind, not boastful or jealous and never ending. He recognized that all human knowledge is partial. No one sees God face to face. We all see "through a glass darkly." He urges the Corinthians to put away childish things and to grow up. Finally, he concludes "that faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love." It is Paul at his insightful best.

I had to smile when reading your recent newsletter in which you suggest that you might be becoming a mystic. I have always read you as a mystic.

God's peace be with you.

Dear John,

I appreciate your words and even your insight. I don't believe one can volunteer to be a mystic, a prophet, a seer, an intellectual or a genius. Those are qualities attributed to you by others sometime well after your earthly pilgrimage is complete. It is meaningful, however, when another attributes one of those titles to you — so thank you.

Mysticism is to me primarily coming to terms with the limitations of words. That seems to be harder to do in religious circles than anywhere else. Words are always symbols or pointers. They are not the truth or the essence they seek to describe. They are always human, always time bound and always time warped. When any human experience is reduced to words, it is always distorted by time, place, one's level of knowledge, one's time in history and one's culturally conditioned language Nowhere is that more clear than when we try to frame who or what God is in the vehicle of human words. A horse cannot communicate to another horse what it means to be a human being, for a horse cannot escape its horse nature. A human being can never tell another human being what it means to be God, because human beings can never escape the limits of our human nature. Perhaps that is why all human images of God look very much like a great big human being.

The deeper I experience the reality and presence of God, the less my words seem like adequate vehicles to express that truth. Then words cease and one enters the experience of wordless wonder. Perhaps that is the realization of the mystic.

Most biblical scholars simply dismiss the historicity of this Acts account, yet they do not dismiss the historicity of Paul's conversion. The reason for that is that Paul tells us himself: "I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it." He claims to have advanced dramatically in "the tradition of my Fathers, until God called me through his grace and was pleased to reveal his Son to me in order that I might preach among the Gentiles." Paul himself gives us no other details of his conversion. He does, however, and in a rather full way, relate his activities following this life-altering moment. "I did not confer with flesh and blood," he says, "I did not go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me." Instead, he says, "I went away into Arabia and again I returned to Damascus."

Continuing his chronicle of that time, he says, "After three years, I went up to Jerusalem. His purpose, he said, was to visit Cephas, which was Simon's nickname. Simon was called "the rock." In Greek the word for rock was "petros," while in Aramaic the word for rock was "kepha." So Simon is best known in the Bible for his nicknames, Peter in Greek and Cephas in Aramaic. Both meant something close to our word "Rocky" today. In those 15 days with Cephas Paul must have heard for the first time the details of the life of Jesus in their earliest and most primitive form. This meeting with Peter would have come no earlier than four and no later than nine years after the crucifixion. So in these words of Paul we have gotten back to the first decade of Christian memory and have touched primitive Christianity. Jesus is clearly a person of history not a mythological creation.

It is fascinating to note what Paul actually says and perhaps even more to note what he does not say about the death of Jesus. He covers the cross in just ten literal words: "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures." Elsewhere in Paul's writing he refers to the cross and to Jesus as the crucified one, so I think it is fair to say that Paul knew that Jesus had died at the hands of the Romans by means of crucifixion. Paul has also begun to interpret the meaning of that death. It was "for our sins," he asserted. That phrase, which was destined to form a major building block in the much later theologies of the atonement, appears to have been lifted by Paul out of the Synagogue's liturgy of Yom Kippur, in which the "innocent lamb of God" was slain as an atonement offering for the sins of the people.

Paul adds further that this death of Jesus was "in accordance with the scriptures." The two places in the scriptures to which Paul might have been alluding were the "servant" passages of Isaiah 40-55, in which the servant absorbed the pain and hostility of the world and returned it as love; or perhaps to II Zechariah (9-14), in which the shepherd king of the Jews was betrayed into the hands of those who bought and sold animals in the Temple for thirty pieces of silver. Within the first decade of Christian history, we can safely assume that these two passages in the Hebrew Bible had become incorporated into the disciples' understanding of Jesus. Please note also that Paul seems to know nothing of the later developing narratives that purport to tell the details of the crucifixion. There is for Paul no betrayal by Judas, no prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, no arrest, no trial, no Pilate, no Barabbas, no denial by Peter, no torture by the Romans, no purple robe or crown o f thorns, no Simon of Cyrene to carry his cross, no one crucified with him, no words spoken from the cross, no expression of separation from God, no cry of thirst and no darkness at noon. All of those things appear to be later developing details that simply are not part of what was handed to Paul as being of "first importance."

Then Paul moves on to look at the rest of the final events in the life of Jesus. After he died, says Paul, "he was buried." Again no details are given. Paul appears not to know anything about the tomb in which Jesus was laid or the spices that were used in the burial. He certainly appears to know nothing of a man named Joseph of Arimathea, who comes into the tradition much later as the architect of the burial. Again most scholars today regard the familiar burial stories of the gospels as late developing traditions. Paul probably does not include any reference to these things because these traditions had not yet been developed or even born.

Paul then moves to the crux of the Christian claim: Jesus, he says, "was raised." Paul always employs a passive verb to describe what came to be called Easter. Jesus never "rises" in Paul. God always "raises" him. Into what? That should be the question we ask. Did God raise him from death back into the life of this world? Was the body of Jesus physically resuscitated and thus enabled to walk out of the tomb? That has been the way many have incorrectly read Paul. That is, however, clearly not what Paul understood Easter to be. If resurrection was a resuscitation of a dead person back into the life of this physical world, then the raised person would inevitably have to die again at a later point in time. There is no other way to get out of this life. Paul will, however, write in another place these words: "Christ being raised from the dead dies no more. Death has no more dominion over him." That does not sound like physical resuscitation back to the life of this world to me.

Paul adds to the resurrection account only two details. Whatever this raising was it occurred, he said, "on the third day" and it was, he repeats, "in accordance with the scriptures." Was this reference to the "third day" a reference to physical time? Or had these words already become a symbol developed before Paul, but then adopted by Paul? When the early gospels were written, their authors were not sure whether this traditional and thus proper time measure was "after three days," which is what Mark quotes Jesus as having said on three occasions, or "on the third day," as both Matthew and Luke changed Mark to read. That would not be the same day. Either way, "on" or "after" the third day is hard to fix chronologically with the way the gospels tell the story. If the timeline of the gospels is followed literally Jesus dies at 3 p.m. in the afternoon and is buried by sundown or by 6 p.m. From sundown to midnight is six hours. From midnight on Friday to midnight on Sat urday is twenty-four hours. From midnight to dawn or 6 a.m. on Sunday morning is six more hours. Put those time markers together and the best one can get is not three days, but thirty-six hours, which is only a day and a half. So how did we get to the concept of three days? That is some of the data that suggests that three days is a symbol and not a literal measure of time. If that is so then we need to wonder where it came from. Was it adapted from the three days it takes the moon to move into total darkness and then back to light as "the new moon?" "Three days" could possibly be a time measure like "forty days," which the Jews used to mark revelatory moments in history. I think it is obvious that three days was for Paul a symbol and not a measure of "clock" or "calendar" time.

Then Paul gets to what he calls those to whom the raised Jesus was "made manifest," or those to whom Jesus appeared. The Greek word that is translated "appeared" in this Corinthian text is the same word used by the translators of the Septuagint (a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek between the third and second centuries BCE) to describe how God "appeared" to Moses at the Burning Bush (see Exodus 3). Did Moses "see" God in a physical way? Could Moses have caught the likeness of God on his camera if he had had the ability to take pictures? Or was this a poetic description of a defining insight? Was it an example of what we would later call "insight" or "second sight?" The story is far more complex than most people think. Next week we will look at the list of names of those to whom Paul says the raised Christ appeared. The story then gets more intriguing, so stay tuned.

In your recent response about Darwin (in which you suggested the atonement theology will no longer be an adequate way to interpret the Jesus story) you said, "The traditional meaning of the Eucharist will have to be revised." Looking at the Eucharistic prayers of various denominations, including the United Church of Christ, I find them all focused on sacrificial death and atonement, all including the "words of institution." Is there a Eucharistic prayer that is not so focused that you are aware of or that you like? Or, perhaps, have you drafted a proposal of your own that we could see?

Dear Tom,

I have run into many Eucharistic prayers that are almost a denial of sacrificial thinking; the Church is certainly moving in that direction. I have never tried to write one, since liturgy has never been my talent. I do believe that Darwin's thinking will finally force the Christian Church to alter the way it talks about God, Jesus, salvation and human life. When that insight finally dawns on the Christian consciousness, the result will be a reformation so total that it will put the Reformation of the 16th century into the category of an afternoon tea party.

We will have to recognize first that we cannot define God; we can only experience the sense of transcendence, wonder and awe. When we talk about God, we are not talking about an external being, we are talking about a human perception and, as such, God is ever changing. When we talk about human life, we are not talking about a fallen sinner, but about an incompletely evolved creature that cracked the boundary into self-consciousness and needs to be empowered to become whole, something more than a survival-oriented creature. When we talk about Jesus, we are not talking about an external savior who came to rescue us, but a life in whom and through whom transcendence has broken into history. Jesus does not save us from a fall that never happened or restore us to a status that we have never had. He empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and to enter higher and higher levels of consciousness where we finally discover that we live in God and God lives in us. The Euchar ist then becomes a celebration of who we are and a call to walk more deeply into the meaning of humanity.

It was my work trying to understand life after death that drew me in this direction. I think we are headed for the most exciting century in Christian history. I anticipate that most of what we call religion today will die in the next century. Rigor mortis has already set in. Out of that death, however, will come a new beginning. I am glad that I have lived to see the birth pangs. Hard labor is ahead but a new creation is being born and in that new creation God will be newly experienced and newly discovered — not as a Being who lives above the sky, but as the presence that is revealed in the heart of the human.

Take these thoughts to your next Eucharist.

To show how thorough this purge is we need to be aware that there is in Paul's writing no hint of a special tomb in a special garden owned by one named Joseph of Arimathea, no account of a stone that had been placed against the mouth of this tomb, no mention of either a messenger or an angel making the resurrection announcement and no reference to women coming to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week, bringing spices to anoint him. Paul has no narrative detail such as the setting Matthew employs on a mountaintop in Galilee, which enabled the raised Jesus to give the divine commission. He reveals no knowledge of Luke's narrative of the two disciples walking to the village of Emmaus who are overtaken by a stranger, who turns out to be Jesus, or of John's narrative that focused on a resurrection appearance with Thomas absent, his subsequent doubt and his later ecstatic words, "My Lord and my God." Paul only provides a list of those to whom he claims this raised Christ was manifested. In Paul, there are no supernatural signs accompanying either Jesus' crucifixion or his resurrection. Paul knows nothing about the supposed darkness of the sun from 12 noon to 3:00 p.m. on the day of the crucifixion, of which all the gospels take notice. He mentions no earthquakes, no Eucharistic context for the resurrection and no cosmic ascension, all of which play a large role in the various gospel narratives. If these things were part of the original Easter story then we must conclude that Paul was either not interested in or aware of them, or we must raise the distinct possibility that these traditions were not part of the original Christian story but were developed after Paul's death and thus are not historical at all. As these realizations dawn, the traditional reading of the resurrection stories, as if they are literal recollections, begins to fade as realistic possibilities. Paul thus provides us with the earliest glimpse we have into primitive C hristianity and it is quite revealing, even troubling, since it challenges what has become "common Christian wisdom."

When Paul finally gets around to listing the key witnesses to whom, he asserts, the raised Christ had made himself "manifest," we enter a world of mystery and intrigue. Even Paul's list calls most of our pious Easter conclusions into question.

Was the resurrection of Jesus a physical event that took place within the boundaries of time, an event that could be documented as a literal, observable, historical occurrence? I do not think so. Paul actually asserts in the letter to the Romans (written some four years after I Corinthians) that it was in the resurrection itself that God "designated" Jesus to be "the Son of God." By the standards of the Nicene theology of the 4th century, Paul was thus a heretic, for he asserts that God raised Jesus into the status of being the divine son only at the resurrection. This attitude would later be called "Adoptionism" and was condemned by a future church council as an "impaired" understanding of Jesus. Our study, therefore, begins to force us to probe a far deeper mystery, that is the nature of Jesus, himself.

When Paul gets around to listing his witnesses, he begins with Cephas. Cephas was the Aramaic nickname for the disciple whose given name was Simon. Tradition suggested that Jesus had called him "the Rock." The word for rock in Greek is "petros," so Peter was his Greek nickname. The word for rock in Aramaic is "kepha," so Cephas became his Aramaic nickname. Paul always called Peter "Cephas." There is nothing unusual about Cephas being listed first. Simon was generally regarded as the head of the disciple band, but one wonders whether this was a reading back into history of the role that Simon played in the life of the early church and thus in the resurrection drama. We will never know for sure, but the primacy of Peter is a note present throughout the gospel writing period. In Mark, the messenger of the resurrection says to the women, "Go tell the disciples and Peter." Peter is the one portrayed as making the confession that Jesus is the Christ at Caesarea Philippi. P eter is the one for whom Jesus says he will pray that "when you are converted, you will strengthen the brethren."

Next on Paul's list is "the twelve." The designation "the twelve" is fascinating for two reasons. First, while the number twelve for the disciples is a constant in the gospels, they do not agree on who constituted that body. Mark and Matthew have one list. Luke and Acts have another. John does not ever provide a list of the twelve but he refers to people not on any other list, like Nathaniel, whom he portrays as clearly at the center of the Jesus movement. It is quite possible that the number twelve was a more important symbol than were the actual people who constituted the twelve. The second fascinating thing about Paul's use of the designation "the twelve" is that Judas is clearly still one of them. Paul quite obviously had never heard of the tradition that one of the twelve was a traitor. The betrayal involving Judas Iscariot thus also appears not to have been an original part of the Christian story. When Judas does appear in the gospels, he is a literary compos ite of all of the traitors in Jewish scriptures, which hardly suggests that he was himself a person of history.

Next Paul says that the raised Jesus appeared to "500 brethren at once." There is nothing in any later gospel that provides any clue as to the content of this claim. An early 20th century New Testament scholar sought to establish a connection between the appearance to these 500 brethren at once and the Pentecost experience described in the book of Acts, but that is a huge stretch! This strange list will get even stranger as it gets longer.

Paul moves on to say that next the raised Jesus appeared to James. Who is this James? Is he James, the son of Zebedee; James, the son of Alphaeus; or James, the brother of the Lord? Those are the three "James" included in the pages of early Christian history. By a process of elimination, James, the brother of the Lord, appears to be the probable one. James, the son of Zebedee, was killed by King Herod in the early years of the Christian movement, according to the book of Acts (12:1). James, the son of Alphaeus, is a total unknown, never mentioned again in any Christian writing that we can locate beyond this inclusion on the list of twelve disciples. James, the brother of Jesus, however, was a major player in early Christian history. It is this James at whom Paul directs his anger in the Epistle to the Galatians. It is this James who appears to have been the leader of the Christians in Jerusalem when Peter departed on his missionary journeys. It is this James who ins isted that Gentiles had to become Jews first before they could become Christians. The weight of scholarship suggests that this is the James to whom Paul is referring. The idea that Jesus had no brothers and sisters was born in a much later period of history, when the attempt was being made to prove that the mother of Jesus was a "perpetual virgin." Mark, the first gospel to be written, refers to Jesus' four brothers by name (Mk. 6:3): James, Joses, Judas and Simon. Mark further states that Jesus had at least two sisters, neither of whom in that patriarchal world was deemed worthy of naming. So the intrigue deepens.

The next name on Paul's list only adds to that mystery. "Then," says Paul, "he appeared to all the apostles." Who are they? He has already mentioned the twelve. This must be a different group. Paul was not given to vain repetition. A distinction between "the twelve" and "the apostles" was clear to Paul, but it had disappeared by the time of the gospels.

The final name on the list is the most fascinating of all. "Last of all," Paul writes, "as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me." Paul was making the startling claim that he too had been a witness to the resurrection and that his resurrection experience was identical to the experience that everyone else on his list had, except that his was last.

How much later would "last" be? The early 20th century church historian Adolf Harnack made a study of this and came to the conclusion that the conversion of Paul could not have happened any earlier than one year or any later than six years following the crucifixion. No one has challenged that finding. If that is accurate, as I believe it is, then we have to conclude that Paul understood the resurrection very differently from the way it is portrayed in the later gospels. For Paul, the resurrection was not an act of a dead man walking out of a tomb and back into the world. It was not the physical resuscitation of a three-days-dead body. A resuscitated formerly deceased body does not wait around for one to six years to make another dramatic appearance. Even St. Luke recognized this when he placed the ascension of Jesus forty days after the first Easter, at which time, he states, the appearances ceased. Resurrection thus clearly meant something different to Paul in the ea rly years of the Christian Church. By the time the gospels were written (71-100 CE) the idea of resurrection had evolved until it had become quite physical and stories were told about the resurrected Jesus walking, talking, eating, drinking and interpreting scripture in a physically functioning, resuscitated body. That, however, is clearly not Paul's understanding. What, then, did the resurrection mean to Paul? Can we ever recover that original meaning of Easter? We can try and I will seek to do that in next week's column.

I am a progressive Christian, one who follows your scholarship and that of my pastor. In fact, you have visited our church and I have heard you speak in person. It was a wonderful experience for me. The problem I'm having at this present holiday season is that the scholarship and the traditional Christmas music and the visuals are not in agreement with each other. I feel that I abandon my intellectual knowledge when I participate in the traditional forms of Christmas liturgy and imagery. Can you suggest how that I may enjoy both the scholarship and the traditions of Christmas without feeling conflicted?

Dear Charles,

Thank you for your question, which is perfect for the column that goes out on Christmas Eve. There is no doubt that most people have literalized the images that Matthew and Luke have in their birth stories of Jesus (See Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2), but I do believe it is quite clear that neither Matthew nor Luke thought of them as literal events. The great majority of biblical scholars share that perspective.

The facts are that stars do not travel across the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with them; angels do not break through the midnight sky to sing to hillside shepherds; and human beings do not follow stars to pay homage to a newborn king of a foreign nation, especially when the same gospel that tells us this story also tells us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter. To continue this train of thought, no real head of state, including King Herod, would deputize eastern Magi that he had never seen before to be his CIA to bring him a report of this threat to his throne. That is the stuff of fairy tales.

A star does not lead magi down a wagon track of a road six miles from Jerusalem and then bathe the house in which the baby lies with heavenly light to show these Magi where the child they seek is to be found. Wise men do not bring gifts that symbolize kingship (gold), divinity (frankincense) and suffering (myrrh) that will mark the life of this infant. No one is that prescient.

Virgins do not conceive except in mythology, of which there were many examples in the Mediterranean world. Kings do not order people to return to their ancestral home for enrolling for taxation. There were 1000 years between David and Joseph, or some 50 generations. David had multiple wives and concubines. In 50 generations, the descendants of David would number in the billions. If they had all returned to Bethlehem, there would be no wonder that there was no room at the inn!

A man does not take his wife, who is "great with child," on a 94-mile donkey ride from Nazareth to Bethlehem so that the expected messiah can be born in David's city. One lay Roman Catholic woman theologian said of that account, "Only a man who had never had a baby could have written that story!" No king slaughters all the boy babies in a town trying to get rid of a pretender to his throne, especially if everyone in that town would have known exactly which house it was over which the star had stopped and into which the Magi had entered. The whereabouts of the "pretender" to Herod's throne would not have been hard to identify if this were a literal story that really happened.

Certainly, both Matthew and Luke were aware that they were using these stories to try to interpret the power of God experienced in the adult life of Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew drew his wise men story out of Isaiah 60, where kings were said to come on camels "to the brightness of God's rising." They came bringing gifts of gold and frankincense. Matthew expanded this story with details drawn from other biblical narratives like the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon and the truckload of spices (myrrh) that she brought with her (see I Kings 10) and the story of Balaam and Balak from Numbers 22-24 in which a star in the East plays a prominent role. Traditional Jewish writings also used a star in the sky to announce the births of its great heroes, Abraham, Isaac and Moses.

Matthew wrapped his interpretation around the well-known story of Moses. That is why he repeated the story of Pharaoh killing the boy babies in Egypt at the time of Moses' birth, transforming it to be a story of Herod killing the boy babies in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth.

What these narratives were designed by the gospel writers to proclaim are:

1. Human life could not have produced the presence of God that people believed they had met in Jesus.
2. The importance of his birth was symbolized by having it announced with heavenly signs, a star in Matthew and angels in Luke.
3. In the life of Jesus, they believed that heaven and earth had come together and that divinity and humanity had merged.
4. Messiah for the Jews had many facets. Messiah had to be both a new Moses and the heir to the throne of David. The Moses claim was in the story of how Jesus was taken by Joseph down to Egypt so that God could call him as God had called Moses out of Egypt. The heir to David was the reason his birth was located in David's place of birth (Bethlehem) instead of in Nazareth, where Jesus was in all probability born.
5. This Jesus draws the whole world to himself, even the Gentile world of the Magi as well as the humble lives of the shepherds.

These are the interpretive details of the Christian myths. All of them came into the Christian faith only in the 9th decade. None of them is original to the memory of Jesus. Neither Paul nor Mark had ever heard of them. John, the last gospel to be written, must have known of these birth traditions, but he doesn't include them and, on two occasions, calls Jesus the son of Joseph (see John Chapters 1 and 6).

Given these pieces of data, there is no way the authors of the Christmas stories in the Bible thought they were writing literal history. They were interpreting the meaning they found in Jesus. As long as we understand that, I see no reason why we can't sing, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night" or "O, little town of Bethlehem" even if there were no shepherds who attended Jesus' birth and the probability is that he was born in Nazareth, which is what the first gospel Mark assumes.

As far as I know, adults don't believe there is a literal North Pole inhabited by a jolly elf named Santa Claus, who harnesses his toy-laden sled to his reindeer in order to bring gifts to all of the children of the world on Christmas Eve. Yet we still sing, "Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer" and "Santa Claus is coming to town" without twisting our minds into intellectual pretzels.

My suggestion is that you separate fantasy from history and then enter into and enjoy the fantasy of the season. Dream of Peace on Earth and good will among men and women, and then dedicate yourself to bringing that vision into being. In that way you will understand the intentions of the gospel writers.

Thanks for writing. Enjoy the holidays, and Merry Christmas.

Nothing makes this as clear as an examination of other writings that are authentically from the pen of Paul. In Romans (1:1-4) Paul writes: God declared (or designated) Jesus "to be the Son of God" by raising him from the dead. That does not mean physically resuscitating him back into the life of this world, as many have argued. If it did the words attributed to Paul in Colossians would make no sense. In this epistle Paul is made to suggest that the resurrection was the account of Jesus being raised into the presence and eternity of God: "If then you have been raised with Christ, seek those things which are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God." Please be aware that the story of Jesus being at the right hand of God is a reference to the resurrection, not the ascension, since the story of the ascension, against which these words are misinterpreted, would not be written for almost thirty more years. The word "raised" in Paul's mind embraced both dimensions of what would later be separated into the dual activities of "resurrection," that is, being raised from death and the grave, and "ascension," which meant being united with God in heaven. For Paul those two actions were one thing. Jesus was not resuscitated back into the life of this world; he was raised into being part of who God is. It was not resuscitation, it was transformation. This interpretation is confirmed once more in another text from Romans that we quoted earlier in this series. There Paul writes: "Christ being raised from the dead, will never die again, death has no more dominion over him — the life he lives, he lives to God." A person raised physically back into the life of this world would surely die again. That is the universal law of life — all living things ultimately die. It is clear that resuscitation back into the physical life of this world is not what Paul had in mind when he spoke of Jesus "being raised." Again in Romans , Paul suggests that "As Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father, we too might walk in newness of life." That is, in this Christ figure a new dimension has been added to our lives that is not subject to death. Paul later speaks of being raised to the "new life of the spirit." He says that the one (Jesus) "who was raised from the dead, and who is at the right hand of God," has been enthroned as part of the life of God, understood as dwelling above the sky, external to the life of this world. Still later Paul writes to the Romans: "Who will ascend to heaven to bring Christ down?" In the mind of Paul, resurrection raised Jesus into the presence and being of God. Paul argues in 1st Corinthians that "flesh and blood cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." He is so obviously not talking about the physical resuscitation of the body of Jesus so that he could return to his former life. It is not for this life that we have hope. Resurrection was rather the tra nsformation of who he was to a realm or to a state of consciousness beyond the boundaries of time and space. That is why Paul goes to such lengths to make a distinction between our natural bodies and something he called "a spiritual body."

We have trouble envisioning what this is all about for two primary reasons. The first is that we are using human words that are bound by both time and space to describe an experience that, if it is real, is beyond time and space. Second, our minds have been corrupted by later understandings of resurrection, shaped primarily by the last two gospels to be written, Luke and John. In those gospels the physicality of the resurrected Jesus is emphasized. The portrait of the raised Jesus drawn in these two 9th and 10th decade pieces of writing is a body in which death has been reversed. He asks for food to demonstrate that his gastrointestinal system is functioning. He is portrayed as both walking and talking to demonstrate that his skeletal system, his vocal chords and his larynx are functioning. He is interpreted as teaching and opening their minds to the meaning of scripture to demonstrate that his brain is functioning. He is said in Luke to have argued that he was not a ghost and to have urged the disciples to touch his very physical flesh to demonstrate that he was in fact fleshly. In John he is pictured as inviting Thomas to examine his wounds. Of note is the fact that only in Luke and John are resurrection and ascension portrayed as separate events. As two distinct acts resurrection and ascension have very different meanings. Resurrection gets Jesus physically back into the life of the world; ascension gets him back to his origins that were thought to be in God, God's self.

What we need to embrace is the oft-forgotten fact that Paul was a Jew and that he thus processed everything that he experienced in and through the life of Jesus in terms of the Jewish traditions. So to hear Paul's words in this proper Jewish context, we have to look at the traditions of the Jews for examples of people being raised from life or even being "translated" from death into God's presence. In none of these cases was this act conceived of as a physical resuscitation back into the life of this world. There are three such episodes in the Hebrew Scriptures and each one of these three finds itself referred to in the Christian story. It is clear that these Jewish stories served as the examples that were destined to shape not only Paul's thought on the resurrection, but also informed all early Christian thinking.

The first one of these Jewish stories involved a man named Enoch, whose story is told in a single verse in the fourth chapter of Genesis. He is identified simply as the father of Methuselah, who was presumed to be the oldest person in the Bible, having reached according to the Bible the ripe old age of 969 years. Of Enoch it was said that he "walked with God and was not, for God took him." Enoch was considered to have lived a life of such goodness and holiness that his virtue was rewarded by being lifted beyond death into the immediate presence of God. Later much mythology gathered around the figure of Enoch, and during the inter-testament years he was said to have authored a book that described the realm of God as only an eyewitness could do. This "Book of Enoch" found a place in writings called the "Pseudapigrapha" and from that position exercised great influence on the developing Jesus story.

The second of these Jewish stories described the final events in the life of Moses, the greatest of all the Jewish heroes, the founder of Israel and the father of the law. The death of Moses is recorded in Deuteronomy 34 with great care, but also with much mystery. Moses was said to have died in the wilderness of the land of Moab with only God present. God was said to have buried him in a grave that God had prepared, the location of which is "unknown from that day to this." God was portrayed as writing an epitaph that presumably was designed to eulogize this gigantic figure. It was not long, however, before the tradition began to grow that Moses had not actually died, but had been transformed and transported into God's presence and was now himself an inhabitant in the dwelling place of God.

The final figure in this Jewish trilogy was Elijah, probably second to Moses alone in the hierarchy of Jewish heroes. Elijah was deemed to be the father of the prophets and thus of the prophetic movement in Judaism. When the Jews defined Judaism, it was in terms of its twin towers — the law and the prophets, or Moses and Elijah.

The story of Elijah's death is told in II Kings, again with details that are full of wonder and mystery. In effect the narrative says that Elijah did not really die at all. He was rather transported into the presence of the living God by a magical, fiery chariot drawn by magical, fiery horses and propelled heavenward by a God-sent whirlwind. In that new status, as one who shares in the presence of God, Elijah was portrayed as dispensing a double portion of his spirit onto his single disciple, Elisha, who had been chosen to be his successor. When Luke wrote the story of Jesus' ascension in the book of Acts, he borrowed many of the details from this story of the ascension of Elijah. In a revealing interpretive clue, Mark, Matthew and Luke all relate the story of the "Transfiguration" of Jesus in which it was said that Jesus conferred with Moses and Elijah, both of whom had transcended the limits of death and were already dwelling in the presence of the God of life.

These were the things that the Jewish Paul had in mind when he said that Jesus had been raised from the dead. The resurrection was for Paul the act by which God affirmed the life of Jesus as holy by raising him at death into the eternal life of God. Jesus was thus able to offer to his followers a pathway through himself into the eternity of God. The raised Jesus was thus the mediator of this access, the way into eternal life for all who came through him. The resurrection of Jesus in its earliest formulation thus had nothing to do with empty tombs, physical resuscitations and apparitions. Those expansions would all come later in the developing Christian story. This is, however, where Paul was and this is what the resurrection of Jesus meant in the primitive Christian community.

When this series resumes, we will look at Paul's most systematic work, the Epistle to the Romans.

You said in a recent lecture at Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte that you believe you love people into being loveable. What about sociopaths?

Dear Jann,

Indeed, sociopaths do not appear at first glance to fit into this way of viewing life. The first thing we need to determine is whether sociopaths are genetically produced or environmentally produced abnormalities. If it is a genetically or neurochemical precondition, then all that remains possible to us is to contain them within society and minimize the pain they inflict on others. Unfortunately, the process usually means that we do not discover their pathology until someone has been hurt by their behavior.

If sociopathology is an environmentally produced reality brought about by human abuse, either physically or psychologically, then we seek to counter it in a retraining process. The one thing we do not do is to tolerate destructive behavior. That requires what some psychiatrists call tough love. No person has a license to abuse anyone else regardless of the causes of his or her abusive behavior. So society must hold everyone accountable. That means treating by incarceration if necessary. That means institutional care for long terms, including lifetime, if no assurance can be given that responsible action has replaced systemically destructive action. The goal of all life is wholeness. Some people are so wounded that wholeness is not realistic, then lesser goals of safety and as much freedom as possible become that on which our sights are set.

Human wounding can be severe. Some human "givens" make wounding all but inevitable. Our goals as Christians do not change. The Christ we serve stated his purpose and ours to be that of giving life abundantly to all. It is the exigencies of life that define what the limits of abundant life are in every individual situation.

Some of the criminal behavior that creates headlines is clearly the work of sociopaths and psychopaths. No matter how heinous the crime, from Adolf Hitler to the Manson family, I do not favor execution. However, I do favor putting these people into a situation where they can never harm another person. Some people do sacrifice their right to live in a free society forever.

Thank you for your question.