If it is not abundantly clear, the announcement, or gospel, as it has come to be known is the most important thing for Paul, if not the only important thing. It is quite literally the key to understanding the entirety of Paul’s life and mission. He is singly devoted to this revelatory experience in a fanatical way. As Paul describes himself, he is, “called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (Rom 1:11). He serves God “with my spirit by announcing the gospel of his Son” (Rom. 1:9). As much as the announcement is from God, it is also Paul’s announcement (Rom 2:16). The announcement was something that began with Paul, according to his own testimony. As Paul states, “For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin, for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal 1:11–12). This is quite an interesting admission, especially due to the great lengths that Paul goes to in order to defend his right to be called an apostle and his authority within the movement. However, he does not link his authority to human tradition, but to the revelatory experiences he experienced (that he believed himself to have experienced – the veracity of such claims is left to faith, of course). I believe this was due to the contrast that Paul attributed to his former life in Ioudaismos, ‘Judaism,’ which might refer to his former Pharisaic training (Phil 3:5) or something else. Unfortunately, it is a rather vague statement. However, given the context of his discussion of the announcement to the nations or ‘gentiles’, it might refer to his understanding of the role of Gentiles in the movement or vis-a-vis Torah observance more broadly. In this case, his linking of his own apostolic authority to revelatory visions and not to a human chain of tradition serves to note the implicit divine power he felt through these experiences and likely explains why he began to believe in Jesus’ messianic candidacy.
The nature of what the immediate followers of Jesus were doing before they accepted Paul’s announcement is somewhat of a mystery, although I do not think that it need be something wholly alien to what Paul was concerned with, only that Paul’s message was explicitly geared towards Gentiles and not Jews. This implies that the original message of Jesus’ followers after his death was related to Jews, meaning that it was a messianic proclamation of some kind. This group of followers included Cephas (Peter), Jacob, John, the so-called pillars, the ‘twelve’, an anonymous additional group, perhaps including the pillars, the apostles, seemingly another group, and a larger population of some five hundred associated members (1 Cor 15:5–7).
What was the message? It is hard to say but several conjectures might be made. Due to the importance of the immersing mission of John and perhaps Jesus, it seems that the followers of Jesus might have continued with the immersing mission of their predecessors. Paul’s comments in 1 Corinthians might indicate that immersing was associated from the movement early on. In Paul’s case, he did not follow an immersing agenda but only concerned himself with proclaiming the announcement. However, the recipients of immersion in 1 Corinthians 1, Crispus, Gaius, and the household of Stephanus, are apparently all Gentiles. It is unclear how the act of immersion became attached to Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. WIthin the period, immersion was becoming to be a symbol of conversion into Judaism, although this was not a fixed practice during Paul’s lifetime.
1 Corinthians 1:17 (NET)
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—and not with clever speech, so that the cross of Christ would not become useless.
To turn again the contents of Paul’s announcement, it is firmly found within the aftermath of his experiences of revelation and of seeing Jesus in some hallucinatory way. This was a common type of experience among Second Temple Jews, although the contents of Paul’s experience are unique, albeit a unique combination of pre-existing elements of Jewish religious experience. The clearest presentation of what Paul understands by the announcement is found in 1 Corinthians.
1 Corinthians 15:1–7
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received:
- that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and;
- that he was buried and;
- that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and;
- that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
- Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
This suggests a means of reading Scripture that Paul developed over time, perhaps during his travels through Arabia during the years after his experience of the revelation. That is, Paul interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures as revealing the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. This was not unique among Jews at the time but the application of such principles to the life of Jesus was unique to Paul.
I have laid out the components of Paul’s announcement in a way such that the various components can be easily seen in separation from each other.
The first component is that “Christ died for our sins”. Where does Paul derive this from in the Hebrew Scriptures? The most logical candidate would be Deut. 21:23 which states, “for every one that is hanged on a tree is cursed of God” which Paul cites in Galatians 3 in a somewhat complicated Scriptural exegesis to explain how Gentiles can become identified to Christ through faith (which will be explored in much detail later). This is done in other contexts as well, with or without explicit Scriptural references. For example, Paul also links Christ’s death with the paschal sacrifice, “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor 5:7) without citing any text from the Septuagint. However, it is understood that he has in mind the passages related to the sacrifice, perhaps Exodus 12.
What does Paul mean here by our sins? Christians try to universalize this to mean that Paul is referring to a common guilt shared by humankind. However, this is to misunderstand Paul, who is not a universalist but subscribed to all of the ethnocentric prejudices of the Jewish people of the time. We can turn to Paul’s comments in Romans 1 to understand that by our sins here, he is referring to the sins of the Gentiles and including himself as their representative.
The context of Paul’s presentation of the announcement in Romans 1 is clearly directed towards Gentiles (v. 13–14). This is no unserious matter, as Paul states, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth (v. 18).” Paul says that the Gentiles did have a means of knowing God through the creation but that they darkened their hearts and rejected God. He continues, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature (v. 25),” that is, the Gentiles turned towards idolatry, the worship of false gods, from a Jewish perspective. V. 26–27 describe Gentile sexuality, which was considered immoral from a Jewish perspective. The sins of idolatry and sexual immorality were considered particularly Gentile sins that caused grave problems for the nations of the world. As Paul concludes, “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters,[g] insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die, yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them (v. 28–32).” This leads to the judgment of God, for, according to the gospel, “God through Christ Jesus judges the secret thoughts of all (Romans 2:16).” God will not spare anyone in the coming judgment, and he will “repay according to each one’s deeds (Rom 2:6).” This includes both Jews and Gentiles, because, “All who have sinned apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged in accordance with the law (Rom 2:12).” That is, Jews will be judged according to the Torah and Gentiles will be judged according to the laws of nature.
The clearest presentation of what Paul means by “Christ died for our sins” or, in other words, “who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father (Gal 2:4),” is found in the following section in Romans, where he states:
But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets, the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe.] For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to demonstrate at the present time his own righteousness, so that he is righteous and he justifies the one who has the faith of Jesus (3:21–26).
The importance of faithfulness (or ‘faith’ here) is important throughout Paul’s letters. In Romans, Paul is focused on presenting the implications of the announcement for both Jews and Gentiles. Based on his comments, it seems that he intends Jews to be included within the movement, that is, needing immersion (to be discussed later) and trust in the faithfulness of Christ as well. The place of the non-believing Jews was not entirely clear and something that Paul sought to address later in Romans, perhaps suggesting a more Jewish-dominated scene in Rome within which the Christian movement operated. It seems that Paul continued to regard the calling of Israel as guaranteeing the Jews status as members of the covenant, even if they had rejected the announcement, as Paul states, “As regards the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their ancestors (Rom 11:28).”
Due to the universal implications of Paul’s message here, he does not enter into the technical nature of what he is proposing for Gentiles, which I will explain in much further detail later. However, for the time being, it is sufficient to summarize Paul’s argument in Galatians which involves a response to the experience of revelation and the apocalyptic setting of Paul’s work among the nations. Paul turned to Hellenistic understanding of medicine and used the concept of pneuma, ‘life-breath’ or, as usually found in New Testament translations ‘the spirit’ to explain the drastic means that God had provided to rescue Gentiles through Christ and to bring them into genetic relationship to Abraham’s covenantal family through the altering of their genetic codes via the introduction of Christ’s pneuma into their bodies. This was a radical solution offered to a serious problem brought about by the mortal nature of Gentile sins that Paul thought killed the soul and made them essentially dead. Through a last-ditch rescue mission, Christ was able to bring about a ritual and spiritual means of reviving them from the dead and bringing them into life through his own life-breath.
The second point about Christ’s burial is categorically different from the other points in Paul’s announcement because it is not presumed to be according to the Scriptures. This might be a logical conclusion to the assertion that Christ’s death happened due to the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps it is included here as a means of emphasizing that Christ truly died, making the powerful statement of the belief in his resurrection more receptacle by sympathetic audiences.
The resurrection of Christ was derived from a variety of prooftexts including: Psalm 8:6; Isaiah 22:13; and 56:12. The nature of Paul’s belief in Christ’s resurrection is of utmost importance to understand the nature of Paul’s faith. First, it is likely the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection was one of the principal reasons why Paul was attracted to the Jesus movement in the first place. Given that Paul was identified with the Pharisees, as there is no reason to doubt his own autobiographical statements, the announcement of the resurrection of Jesus, as experienced by his followers, would have resonated with Paul. We know that the Pharisees were firm believers in the resurrection from Josephus’ accounts and that other sects did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. That being the case, Paul might have seen Jesus’ resurrection as proof of the coming resurrection of all Israel. Paul looks to the above prooftexts to show how he read Scripture as pointing towards the resurrection of Jesus and used that in his announcement to the nations. It is likely that the contents of the announcement here might have also been present, in some form, before Paul, in the announcement of Jesus’ messianic candidacy to the Jews, especially point #3. Paul’s reflections on the death of Jesus and its meaning to Gentiles are most likely unique to him.
There are other elements of the announcement that are found throughout Paul’s letters. The announcement itself is core to Paul’s identity and, according to him, gives him the right to call himself an apostle. However, this seems to have been contested by his competitors in Galatia and Corinth. Yet, there is another sense in which the announcement shapes Paul’s religious identity and position in that it allows him to serve as a priest of sorts, in order to offer the sacrifice of the nations, which he links to the collection that he organizes throughout the letters. He states, “Nevertheless, on some points I have written to you rather boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. (Rom 15:15–16).” The importance of this Gentile offering reiterates the Second Temple framework within which Paul operated and the importance of Jerusalem and its Temple in his thinking and in his letters (c.f. 1 Cor 16:1–4; 2 Cor 8:1–9:15; Rom 15:14–32). That is, this offering of the Gentiles was a cultic obligation that they needed to fulfill and Paul proposed himself as the one who would deliver it on their behalf. In this act, he would serve as a kind of priest on their behalf to bring their offering to the Temple in worship of God.
Was Paul’s announcement substantially different from what other apostles were proclaiming? In contrast to many others, I would claim that Paul was entirely congruent with the mission of the historical Jesus and the Jerusalem community that continued to follow him after his death – albeit with the unique mission he created to the nations. Without drifting too far beyond the theme of this section, I would subscribe to the idea of Jesus as some kind of sign prophet, as those characters were described by the Jewish historian Josephus. Jesus, being an eschatological prophet, might have expected some mission to the Gentiles, if he viewed himself as a messianic candidate – certainly an issue of intense debate and without any satisfactory answer at this point. This idea can be read in the statements of Jesus in the Gospels, for example, consider, “I tell you, many will come from east and west and will take their places at the banquet with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, 12 while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt 8:11–12).” Here, Jesus might have been pointing toward a future proclamation of the messianic kingdom, whether initiated by him or someone else, among the nations, which was a component of some messianic expectations of the time.
Whether or not Jesus himself expected such missions, it is certainly the case that the Jerusalem community agreed with Paul’s mission. We are left to rely on Paul’s own comments to reconstruct what happened in the twenty years between Jesus’ death and his composition of the letters in the New Testament. It seems that Paul met with Cephas some three years after his embrace of Jesus as messiah. However, he does not admit to revealing the details of his announcement until fourteen years later. It seems implausible to think that there was no discussion between him and Cephas in the first meeting regarding the work that Paul was either already doing or planned to do. However, Paul was concerned that he was not “running in vain”, perhaps meaning against the wishes of the pillars in Jerusalem. He took Barnabas and Titus with him to show off his work among the Gentiles. It seems that there was an understanding of (at least) two emissaries of the movement, Cephas to the circumcised, and Paul to the uncircumcised. It is unclear if Cephas’ mission began at this point or earlier. However, the result of the meeting was the recognition of Paul’s mission and the extension of the “right hand of fellowship” and sending him among the nations. There is no indication that the pillars saw Paul’s announcement as contradictory to their own work among the Jews in any way.
A Jewish View 