Tag Archives: Colossians

The New New Testament

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With the New Testament books in their traditional sequence, it’s easy to conclude that there was first a remarkable individual who travelled around Galilee proclaiming the arrival of his Father God’s kingdom on Earth. He demonstrated great wisdom and compassion before being crucified by the Romans at the behest of the Jewish authorities. The first four books of the existing New Testament tell us so; that all of this happened first and all that follows occurred afterwards as a consequence of the events the gospels describe.

But, put the gospels where they belong in the chronological arrangement of the New Testament, and the events of the gospels do not happen first. Paul does:

I acknowledge that in putting the books in their correct order in my previous post, I cheated when I made the first the work of the very earliest cultists. No such book exists (no, it’s not Q and even if it were, we don’t have it). The earliest Christian beliefs are largely lost to us. All we know is that some individuals had visions of the Messiah. Paul tells us so in 1 Corinthians 15:5:

He (first) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

These visions undoubtedly mark the beginnings of the cult. It later finds a convert in the Hellenized Jew Paul who he has his own vision(s). That these are visions and not an encounter with an actual person is clear from Paul’s declarations in Galatians 1:15-17 and 2 Corinthians 12. He stresses in Galatians that what he knows of the Messiah (‘Christ’ in Greek) comes not from any human source but from what this Christ has revealed to him in his own head: the revelations he’s fond of referring to. These, he says, showed him the importance of the Christ’s sacrifice, the crucifixion being the only Jesus event he’s interested in. Nowhere in his seven letters (1 Thessalonians to Philippians) does he mention anything a Galilean said, did or had done to him, apart from the crucifixion, which is mentioned without any historical detail. Paul’s interpretation of the crucifixion is devoid of Romans, the Sanhedrin, Gethsemane, Judas, Pilate, the scourging and cross carrying, Golgotha, the centurion, grieving disciples and empty tomb. Paul appears not to know anything specific about the event he obsesses over. Who can blame him when these details had yet to be invented?

Paul also has it revealed to him, or so he says, that this heavenly saviour will soon be coming down to the Earth to raise the dead, rescue the faithful who yet live and usher in God’s new golden age (1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Thessalonians 4:16). It is an idea that permeates the rest of the New Testament writings.  

Paul’s faith, then, rests entirely on his visions/revelations. When proving that they really were of Jesus the Christ, he does so by repeatedly citing Jewish scriptures, never by referring to a particular saying, miracle or healing of an earthly Jesus. Paul’s Christ is a cosmic Superman who is raised from the dead as a ‘life giving spirit’ (1 Corinthians 15.46). (I’ve written about this on numerous occasions, including this post, so won’t reiterate all the details here.)

Written about a decade after Paul’s last letter, we come to the first gospel, which, lo and behold contains an abundance of sayings, miracles and healings of an earthly Jesus. Where did ‘Mark’ get these from? Not from a hitherto unknown document which won’t be posited for almost two millennia (Q); not from an ‘oral tradition’ when the only oral tradition we know of is Paul’s preaching, which doesn’t mention any details about an earthly Jesus.

  • To compound the problem, the first gospel is littered with angels, demons and other supernatural elements (voices from heaven anyone?)
  • It makes extensive use of stories from Jewish scripture, rewriting them and recasting their original protagonists with Jesus in their place.
  • It has him utter teaching that ‘astonishes’ those around him, when much of it is lifted directly from Jewish scriptures and would have been familiar to his listeners.
  • It makes him address the issues of the church as they existed around 70CE when the gospel was written and reflects the rules of the cult at that time.
  • It relies heavily on metaphor and allegory.
  • It has Jesus promise that the Son of Man will soon arrive on Earth to sort out its problems. This is Paul’s teaching about the imminent arrival of the Saviour through the clouds, dressed up in jargon from the book of Daniel. While apologists assume the Son of Man character is Jesus himself, promising his own future return, it evidently is not (it is rather, as I demonstrate here, a metaphor for the Jewish nation). What we have in Mark then, is a fictionalised Jesus predicting the appearance of the ‘real’ Christ from Heaven, just as Paul does.    

Mark’s gospel is most certainly not history nor an accurate record of the activities and teaching of a real human being. It is, as I’ve demonstrated before, fiction, from start to finish.

Following Mark in our chronological New Testament are two forged letters, purportedly by Paul (2 Thessalonians) and Peter (1 Peter) but actually by two different, anonymous authors. In them we’re back to hearing about a celestial Christ not an earthly Jesus. Earthly Jesus doesn’t get a mention despite the fact that one of the letters is supposedly by Peter, the fisherman who trailed around Galilee with Jesus for three years – allegedly – and witnessed his resurrection appearances. You think he’d have mentioned some of this in the letter. But no. Not a word.

And then two more gospels, both of which make extensive use of the first. ‘Matthew’ uses 80% of ‘Mark’ and adds some extra material of his own, including a birth narrative that is pure fantasy (including a magic dream and wandering star) and several new miracles. Where does this extra material (the so-called M source) come from? Some theologians speculate that again it’s from an oral tradition (the same hypothetical tradition used in Mark or a different one? Certainly not one known by Paul.) Even if so, we have no way of knowing whether it is reliable nor who originally reported it. It could just as easily have been invented by the anonymous creator of Matthew’s gospel. In fact, Matthew’s gospel is demonstrably a literary construct that plagiarises and embellishes Mark with more symbolic parallels – with Moses in particular – from Jewish scriptures. The stories of the resurrection are constructed in precisely this way.

Luke’s gospel is open to the same criticism. Where did his extra material (L) come from and why was it unknown to Paul and the creators of the two forgeries that preceded it? The obvious conclusion is that ‘Luke’ also made stuff up.

Here’s the problem with the synoptic gospels (those that carry the names of Mark, Matthew and Luke.) They appear in the midst of a sea of writing that knows nothing of an earthly Jesus and speaks only of a supernatural Superman. Yet we’re expected to believe that in the middle of this sea of myth and fantasy, the three gospels are an island of factual information about a real person. We’re required to accept that the synoptic gospels are reliable, factual, historical accounts of Jesus’ life on Earth. Apparently the gospel authors are the only ones who know the truth about his earthly existence while Paul and other writers evidently did not (or couldn’t care less about it) despite living and writing closer to Jesus’ supposed lifetime.

This is not the only problem. Even if the information about Jesus contained in the gospels was derived from an oral tradition, a hypothetical sayings gospel (‘Q’) or other lost sources (M & L) this would not make it any more reliable. It is just as likely to have been invented.

The next book of our chronological NT, the Acts of the Apostles was written by the same anonymous author as the third gospel. This story of the early days of the cult includes: a Jesus who beams up into the sky; visions; dreams; magic hankies and imaginary table cloths; angels; supernatural murders: miracle earthquakes and characters re-enacting events from Odyssey and the Jewish book of Jubilees. It gets Paul’s itinerary and theology wrong, smooths over his disputes with the pillars of the Jerusalem church and invents speeches for both him and various support characters. History it is not.

Immediately after Acts, we’re back to forgeries: Colossians and Ephesians, the latter being a composite of other Pauline letters and Colossians itself. We’re also back to the supernatural Jesus who makes salvation known through revelation. The two people who created these letters masquerading as Paul appear to have no knowledge of an Earthly Jesus. Had they not read any of the synoptic gospels? Did they not know any of the oral traditions or Q? Do they not care about all the supposedly factual information about Jesus that by this point was in wider circulation? Evidently not. They were interested only in promoting a celestial being, the Christ Jesus.

We’ll see more of this as we move on to the remaining books of the chronological New Testament, next time.

*It’s a trick question. Neither is any sense real.

Fakin’ It

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Here’s my dilemma. I got this letter from a group of students at the university of Selcuck in Turkey. Well, when I say I received the letter, it was addressed to Professor Paulson who was head of the Philosophy department here in the 90s. He’s been dead now over 20 years of course, so when I picked up the letter, I thought I’d just write back and tell them that and that they’d have to work out their problems for themselves. Then I thought, ‘well, hang on a minute, the Professor was your tutor back in the day. You know how he thought and how he’d address these particular problems. Hell, you’ve even got some of his old papers locked away in your filing cabinet. You could take one or other of those and with a bit of tweaking, concoct a reply yourself. That’d be perfectly legitimate wouldn’t it?’ I mean I occupy the chair he once did so I am in effect his replacement.

So that’s what I do. I take one of Professor Paulson’s papers and I use it as the basis of a letter. Of course, matters in philosophy have moved on a bit since the Professor’s time so I add quite a bit of my own stuff, which is all pretty good and in line with what he might have thought, had he lived this long. After all, I studied under him in the ’80s so I have a pretty good idea of what he might think today, if he were still with us. If I do say so myself, it’s pretty good stuff. Nobody could tell Paulson didn’t write it.

Now, I do consider admitting at the start of the letter, or maybe the end of it, that I wrote the letter and not the Prof. But then I think, well, these folk don’t know he’s no longer with us so what’s the harm? I’ll just send it and they can reach their own conclusions. I mean, it wouldn’t be my fault, would it, if they jumped to the wrong conclusion. And then I think, well, if they’re going to do that I might as well sign it as if it is from the Professor. I mean, who’s to know? And maybe I could add that bit at the beginning suggesting it was from him. Suggesting? Saying it is from him. That’s what I do, and off it goes.

I hear later, on the grapevine, it’s gone down pretty well. They like what it says and are convinced it’s from Paulson. Everybody’s happy.

And then I find out, a couple of months down the line, that it’s been published. The Selcuck students have had it published, in an influential journal no less, and the academic world is celebrating the final lost paper of Professor Paulson’s. And here’s my dilemma: it’s not, is it. It’s me. I’ve taken his old paper, embellished it and sent it out into the world as if it’s his. What do I do? What would you do? Confess it’s not what it seems? Or bask in the knowledge that what I’ve written is as good as anything he wrote in life? A fake, yes, for sure, but a damn good one that, with a bit of luck, no-one’s ever going to spot. Do you know, I think I’ll leave it, say nothing. The joke’s on them.

Of course such a thing could never happen. Or could it? The letter to the Ephesians in the New Testament claims to have been written by Paul. It starts with this greeting:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To God’s holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

and ends with some vaguely autobiographical details.

But it wasn’t written by Paul. Scholars think it was created in the 80s, about twenty years after Paul died. Much of the letter is a reworking of Colossians, the authorship of which is similarly disputed. Here’s the opening of Colossians:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, To God’s holy people in Colossae, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ: Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

The Ephesians opening is a direct lift. None of Paul’s genuine letters follow this format. The letter itself has a style and vocabulary unlike that in the genuine Pauline letters and there are significant differences in theology too. Here’s how Bart Ehrman summarises the problem (though note he is not the only scholar who disputes Paul’s authorship of Ephesians; it is the consensus view): 

Ephesians does not resemble Paul’s writing style and the letter contains an inordinate number of words that Paul does not use in any of his undisputed letters. As in Colossians, Ephesians suggests that the believer has already been raised with Christ-a view that contradicts Paul’s undisputed writings. The author of Ephesians, moreover, uses the term “works” differently than Paul. For Paul, “works” refers to adherence to the Jewish law, actions that cannot save. The author of Ephesians, however, understands “works” to mean those actions that demonstrate one’s faith.

Some generously describe Ephesians and other letters attributed to Paul that aren’t by him, as Deutero-Pauline: ‘in the tradition of Paul’. Some speculate that they were written by one of Paul’s disciples but there’s no way of knowing this for sure. Others prefer the term Pseudepigrapha, literally ‘false inscription or writing’, which is nearer the mark.

The author of Ephesians, like those of other pseudepigraphical letters, such as the pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) claims explicitly to be Paul knowing full well he is not. This is not some disciple trying to express the views of the master, this is someone passing themselves off as someone else, pretending they are the more well-known, revered and authoritative figure. Even if they were someone familiar with Paul’s teaching (the differences in theology suggest otherwise) would it be legitimate for him to claim he is Paul?

Like my fictional individual above, the author of Ephesians is a deceitful impostor, his work a forgery, designed possibly to ‘correct’ Paul’s position on certain issues. And yet here is his letter in the New Testament; God’s Holy Word no less. While there is a very human history of how works were selected for inclusion in the New Testament, how on Earth did God, in the guise of the Holy Spirit, allow this and other forgeries to become part of the canon?

Of course, God had nothing to do with it. The author of Ephesians duped not only the letter’s original audience, but also the later believers who included it in the Bible. He continues to deceive the faithful down to this day.  I know: I was one.