Jesus will always be the center of Christianity, but the “Jesus” who most influenced history was the “Jesus Christ” of Paul, not the historical figure of Jesus. There is a double irony here. Paul became the most influential defining figure for later Christianity, even beyond the historical Jesus, but he is also a man waiting to be discovered, even after nearly two thousand years. Paul transformed Jesus himself, with his message of a messianic kingdom of justice and peace on earth, to the symbol of a religion of otherworldly salvation in a heavenly world. Recovering the authentic Paul, as he was in his own time, and from his own words, is my task in this book. All of us, whether Christian or not, whether wittingly or unwittingly, are heirs of Paul, since the parameters of Christ and his heavenly kingdom created by Paul were what shaped Christian civilization.
ONE
CHRISTIANITY BEFORE PAUL
I grew up thinking that the “lost years” of early Christianity referred to Jesus’ childhood and his early twenties. The gospels only record a single story from his youth.1 I had no idea there was a much more significant gap of “missing years” in the history of early Christianity, much less a forgotten brother of Jesus.2 Paul calls him “James the brother of the Lord,” and it is James, not Peter, who takes over leadership of the movement following Jesus’ death. Paul met James face-to-face, in Jerusalem, on at least three separate occasions.3 In later tradition he is called “James the Just” to distinguish him from the other James, the Galilean fisherman, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, and one of the twelve apostles.4
Who was this James, the brother of Jesus, and why was he forgotten? And what kind of shape had the early Christian movement taken, under his leadership, before Paul even came on the scene? The Roman Catholic Church looks to Peter while the Protestants have focused on Paul, but James seems to have been deliberately marginalized, as we will see. The tradition most people know is that the apostle Peter took over leadership of the movement as head of the Twelve. Not long afterward the apostle Paul, newly “converted” to the Christian movement from Judaism, joined Peter’s side. Together the apostles Peter and Paul became the twin “pillars” of the emerging Christian faith, preaching the gospel to the entire Roman world and dying gloriously, together under the emperor Nero, as martyrs in Rome—the new divinely appointed headquarters of the Church. This view of things has been enshrined in Christian art through the ages and popularized in books and films. Indeed, Peter’s primacy, as the first pope, has even become the cornerstone of Roman Catholic dogmatic teaching. We now know that things did not happen this way.
As we will see, the original apostolic Christianity that came before Paul, and developed independently of him, by those who had known and spent time with Jesus, was in sharp contrast to Paul’s version of the new faith. This lost Christianity held sway during Paul’s lifetime, and only with the death of James in A.D. 62, followed by the brutal destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70, did it begin to lose its influence as the center of the Jesus movement. Ironically, it was the production and final editing of the New Testament itself, in the early second century A.D., supporting Paul’s version of Christianity, that ensured first the marginalization, and subsequently the death of this original form of Christianity within Christian orthodoxy. By the fourth century A.D., the dominant Roman church classified surviving forms of this Jewish Christianity as heresy and Christians were forbidden under threat of penalties to follow any kind of Jewish observances.
One of my theses in this book is that the form of Christianity that subsequently developed as a thriving religion in the late Roman Empire was heavily based upon the ecstatic and visionary experiences of Paul. Christianity, as we came to know it, is Paul and Paul is Christianity. The bulk of the New Testament is dominated by his theological vision. Its main elements are: 1) the forgiveness of sins through the blood of Christ, God’s divine Son, based on his sacrificial death on the cross; 2) receiving the Holy Spirit and the gift of eternal life guaranteed by faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead; and 3) a glorified heavenly reign with Christ when he returns in the clouds of heaven. The mystical rites of baptism and the “Lord’s Supper” function as experiential verification of this understanding of “salvation.”
It is difficult for one to imagine a version of Christianity predating Paul with none of these seemingly essential elements. Yet that is precisely what our evidence indicates. The original apostles and followers of Jesus, led by James and assisted by Peter and John, continued to live as Jews, observing the Torah and worshipping in the Temple at Jerusalem, or in their local synagogues, while remembering and honoring Jesus as their martyred Teacher and Messiah. They neither worshipped nor divinized Jesus as the Son of God, or as a Dying-and-Rising Savior, who died for the sins of humankind. They practiced no ritual of baptism into Christ, nor did they celebrate a sacred meal equated with “eating the body and drinking the blood” of Christ as a guarantee of eternal life. Their message was wholly focused around their expectations that the kingdom of God had drawn near, as proclaimed by John the Baptizer and Jesus, and that very soon God would intervene in human history to bring about his righteous rule of peace and justice among all nations. In the meantime both Jews and non-Jews were urged to repent of their sins, turn to God, and live righteously before him in expectation of his kingdom.
But that takes us far ahead of our story. Let’s begin with James the forgotten brother of Jesus. Since the late 1990s there have been over a dozen major scholarly studies of James published.5 Prior to this, to my knowledge, not a single major scholarly study of James had ever been published. But these academic studies by and large did not reach the public.
Remarkably, on October 21, 2002, James made headline news around the world. Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, announced at a Washington, D.C., press conference that a first-century A.D. limestone burial box, or ossuary (literally “bone box”), inscribed in Aramaic “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” had turned up in Jerusalem in the hands of a private collector. The news flashed around the globe. Experts involved in studying the artifact were convinced that it was genuine, that it most likely referred to James the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, and that it had once held his bones. As such, it would be our earliest archaeological reference to Jesus and to James.6 Some scholars have since questioned the authenticity of various parts of the inscription and it has become part of a highly controversial ongoing criminal forgery case in Israel, but there is no question that the ossuary story gave James the brother of Jesus his fifteen minutes of fame, almost as if he had been resurrected from the dead after nineteen hundred years.7