Tag Archives: Paul

Whatever Happened To Pontius Pilate?

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While indisputably a real person, we know only a little about Pontius Pilate, primarily from Philo, writing circa 41CE, and also Josephus (writing 75-79CE). Pilate was appointed as prefect, or governor, of Judea in 26CE and after ten years of insensitive and brutal control was, according to Philo, recalled to Rome in 36 ‘to stand trial for cruelty and oppression, particularly on the charge that he had executed men without proper trial.’ (On the Embassy to Gaius)

Described by Philo as having ‘an inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition’, Pilate was not the kind of man who would entertain in his private residence those marked out for crucifixion, nor one who would feel remorse at the execution of thieves, insurrectionists and general trouble makers. It is likely he had hundreds if not thousands of them crucified during his time as prefect.

Would a man known for ‘his venality, his violence, his thievery, his assaults, his abusive behaviour, his frequent executions of untried prisoners and his endless savage ferocity’ (Philo), have a prisoner over for a chat about the nuances of the meaning of Truth? Almost certainly not.

Would he have suffered mental anguish because he might be about to execute an innocent man? Absolutely not.

Would he have symbolically washed his hands to ease his conscience? He would not.

Would he have offered a rabble the chance to free Jesus or the bandit Barabbas? Again, absolutely not. There was no such ‘tradition’ and the episode is clearly symbolic.

If Jesus was crucified ‘under Pontius Pilate’, the Prefect himself would, in all probability, not have been aware of it. Jesus would have been one more seditionist among many. Nor would Pilate have granted a member of the Sanhedrin, unrelated to the crucified criminal, the right to remove his corpse from a cross to give it a decent burial in compliance with Jewish ritual. Pilate was known for his insensitivity to such niceties.

Jesus’ encounters with Pilate in the gospels are so entirely implausible they can only be fictional. The two would never have met. Even if they had, none of the gospel writers would have known the details of their exchanges, different in each gospel. In all of them, the cruel and savage Pilate behaves entirely out of character.

While no records survive of any trials conducted by any prefect of the area (because there were none in the first place?) it is perhaps surprising that details of Jesus’s trial were not preserved, when only a few days later, reports that he had returned from the dead began to circulate. Yet, say apologists, this is one of the few indisputable, ‘minimal’ facts we know about the historical Jesus: ‘he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ It’s there in both the Nicene creed (325CE) and the so-called Apostles’ creed (circa 341). Yet Paul, writing close to the time of Pilate’s supposed involvement, doesn’t mention him, ever. When he’s not blaming ‘the Jews’ for Jesus’ death (forgetting he is a Jew himself) Paul is insisting demonic powers are responsible:

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age (‘Archons of this Aeon’), who are being destroyed. But we speak God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory and which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Corinthians 2:6-8)

While Paul doesn’t refer to either Pilate or the Romans in his teaching about the crucifixion, he does refer to the latter in his letter to believers in Rome itself. in Romans 13 he tells them they must obey Roman authority because God himself has put it in place. What an incongruous, unreasonable directive if the Romans had indeed been responsible for the execution of the Messiah.

The only other mention of Pilate outside the gospels is in 1 Timothy, which was not written by Paul but forged long after Mark had written the Prefect into his gospel as the embodiment of Paul’s demonic powers. (Mark’s gospel is in fact awash with demons, not to mention Satan himself. It’s essentially an allegory of their defeat at the hands of the Messiah.) 1 Timothy 6:13 merely repeats a tradition developed from Mark’s gospel that Jesus made ‘a good confession’ in front of Pilate. 

The ‘fact’ that Pilate had Jesus executed is therefore poorly attested. Mark is the first to mention it, circa 70CE, and we know Matthew and Luke lifted their timelines and much of their detail from Mark. A growing number of scholars think John also relied on Mark for the general outline of his gospel. It is likely therefore there is only one source for Pilate’s involvement in Jesus’ death: Mark.

Outside the Bible, there is no evidence that Pilate was responsible. Josephus’s Testimonium Flavianum is widely accepted as an interpolation (i.e. later Christian tampering) and Tacitus’ mention of Pilate is far too late (c. 116CE) to be an independent source.* There is therefore no contemporaneous, independent, reliable evidence that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. That myth came later and then only from Mark.

Legend has it that Pilate either killed himself in 37CE on the orders of Caligula or retired and faded into obscurity. Whichever it was, would he, in his last days, have regretted his excessive cruelty? Would he have suffered remorse for executing an innocent man? Would he even have remembered? It all seems so unlikely.

*See chapter 3 of Michael Alter’s The Resurrection and Its Apologetics, 2024)

Homelander created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Image of Antony Starr from Amazon Prime’s The Boys.

Whatever Happened to Yeshua bar Yosef?

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What happened to the real Jesus? The itinerant Jew who trudged around Palestine with a small group of followers, preaching who knows what. How to survive the imminent end of the world perhaps. His name wasn’t really Jesus. That’s a Hellenised version of the Jewish name Yeshua: Ἰησοῦς’ pronounced ‘Yay-soos’, which means (suspiciously) ‘YHWH is salvation’. The bar Yosef part means son of Joseph, not son of God. Whatever he was about, this Yeshua was crucified by the Romans and soon after his death, one or two of his friends convinced themselves they’d seen him alive again. Or so the story goes.

The earliest information we have about Yeshua includes very little of what we now think we know of him. The crucifixion/resurrection are the only parts of the story that interest Paul, and then only because he thinks he too has seen the risen Yeshua inside his own head. But this Yeshua, whom Paul does indeed call Jesus, is no itinerant preacher. Paul seems unaware of any of his story, his parables, aphorisms or miracles. Instead he consistently describes Jesus as a heavenly being who speaks to him through ‘revelation’, explaining in convoluted terms how his death leads to salvation. This Jesus, now with appended ‘Christ’, Greek for Messiah, is an amalgam of elements from mystery religions, resurrection myths and Paul’s own fanciful ideas. He is hard to reconcile with a real man who walked the Earth years earlier.

Verdict: Paul’s celestial Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. Paul’s Christ never existed.

The accounts of Jesus that appear decades later attempt to ground Paul’s imaginary being historically and geographically. In this, the gospels are superficially successful but even a cursory analysis reveals serious fault lines. The gospels rely heavily on myth, metaphor and the misapplication of ‘prophecy’, rather than historical fact. They are a form of midrash. The first, written anonymously round about 70CE and later attributed to someone called Mark, is, as today’s TV dramas often say, based on an idea by Paul. It is unlikely it reflects an historical Yeshua. Subsequent gospels, also anonymous but known later as Matthew and Luke, are themselves based on Mark’s, importing its flaws and introducing spurious material of their own. In neither is Jesus the son of Joseph; he’s the son of God, born of a virgin

Verdict: the Jesus of the synoptic gospels is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s a literary construct, a fantasy figure.

When the fourth gospel appears, sixty to seventy years after Yeshua is supposed to have lived, the Jesus character has evolved yet again. John’s supremely confident, egotistical creation equates himself fully with God: ‘I and the Father are one,’ as he puts it. This Jesus bears little relation to Mark’s central character who keeps his mission and identity secret (as well he might as a literary construct created primarily for cult members in the know.)

Verdict: the fourth gospel’s Jesus is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s constructed from the beliefs of later versions of the cult.

By the time of Revelation (95-96CE), Christ has become a Game of Thrones reject, overseeing the destruction of demons, dragons and other non-existent creatures. Any semblance of reality has been left far behind.

Verdict: Revelation’s Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s as imaginary as Paul’s Christ, another fanatic’s ‘vision’.

Can Yeshua bar Yosef be rescued from all these accretions? Can a historical figure be detected beneath the layers of fantasy constructed around him (or the idea of him at least)? The attempts made in the last 150 years suggest not. He is lost for good underneath layers of myth and magic.

Does it matter? Not really. None of his followers today would be interested even if he could be unearthed and resurrected. They are content with the Jesus of imagination: Paul’s, the gospel writers’, the creators of creeds, ministers who interpret the stories about him and their own emotional need. Today’s Christ is an imaginary being, a heavenly superman as unreal as the sky gods who preceded him; a faith-created myth.

Verdict: the Jesus worshipped by today’s Christians isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef either. That character is lost to us. So early did cultists lose sight of him, he may as well have not existed.

Perhaps he didn’t. 

Whatever Happened to Judas Iscariot?

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Even more significant in the gospels than Mary Magdalene is Judas. Like her, he is strangely absent from the rest of the New Testament. Apart from Luke’s ridiculous story of his death in Acts 1:18 – a story that contradicts the one in Matthew 27:5 – he isn’t mentioned anywhere else. You might think that’s to be expected, given he’s the disciple who betrays Jesus in the gospels. His name must have been anathema to early Christians.

We might expect, however, that when Paul is describing the Lord’s Supper for the very first time in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, he might, when he gets to the part where he says ‘on the night he was betrayed’, have mentioned the name of the betrayer. It would seem the natural thing to do. Unfortunately, the word ‘betrayed’ (prodidomi) doesn’t appear in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 or anywhere else in the epistles. The word Paul uses is paradidomi, meaning ‘handed over’, a handing over by spiritual agents (God himself?) not a traitorous human. Judas is in fact absent from Paul’s description of the Lord’s Supper, a revelation he claims to have received directly from the heavenly Jesus, who neglects to include Judas and all the other disciples too. Nor does Paul call the event ‘The Last Supper’; that name would come later. Read 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 for yourself and see. Bart Ehrman also addresses the problem here.

Bizarrely though Judas does turn up, sort of, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, when Paul is quoting a creed thought to originate in the earliest days of the new faith. Because it is considered so early, this creed is greatly valued and frequently cited by apologists. Never mind that it contradicts the later gospel sightings of the Risen Jesus (see the previous post). Here’s what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:5: ‘(Jesus) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.’ Then to the Twelve? What Twelve? As Simon Peter, wasn’t Cephas one of the Twelve to begin with? Maybe they weren’t the same person after all.

More significantly, the Twelve, at least according to the later gospels, originally included Judas. He was one of Jesus’ inner circle. And according to Matthew 27 and Acts 1 he killed himself almost immediately after betraying Jesus. He wasn’t around to see the Resurrected Christ. Yet according to Paul and the early creed all of the Twelve saw Jesus alive again. Either Judas wasn’t one of the Twelve and the gospels are wrong, or he was and he didn’t betray his Master after all, remaining alive for his reappearance. (Just to be clear, the Twelve at the time of the resurrection appearances did not include Judas’s replacement, Matthias (Acts 1:23-26). Matthias doesn’t become one of the Twelve till after Jesus has returned to Heaven (Acts 1: 9).

So, Judas isn’t mentioned as a Jesus’ betrayer by anyone other than the gospel writers, decades after the supposed resurrection. He isn’t mentioned by name at all. The only possible reference to him is in 1 Corinthians 15:5 where he’s still one of the Twelve and sees the resurrected Jesus. It couldn’t be could it, that Mark, reading Paul’s description of the Lord’s supper mistook, or deliberately misinterpreted, the phrase ‘was handed over’ to mean ‘was betrayed’ and constructed his story about the duplicitous Judas accordingly? Why, yes it could.

Conveniently, ‘Judas’ is the Greek form of ‘Judah’, the kingdom of the Jews who, so far as early Christians were concerned, rejected Jesus as the Messiah. Judas is a symbolic character in a literary work, representing those foolish Jews who turned their backs on salvation and so ‘betrayed’ the true Messiah.

The Great Resurrection Scam

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Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.  For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 (circa AD 49-51)

Paul said that because Jesus died and rose from the dead others would too. How does this follow?

He also claimed that all a person had to do to be sure of a spiritual resurrection was to believe that Jesus had already risen (1 Corinthians 15:20, AD 53-54), How did he know this? Almost certainly it came to him in one of his visions and his subsequent ‘revelations’ (‘the Lord’s word’ as he puts it in the letter to the Thessalonian sect).

Possibly, though less likely, he learnt it from the Christians he persecuted prior to his conversion. If so, where did they get the idea from? That the cult members in Thessalonica had to ask Paul what would happen to those who had passed away suggests this wasn’t a significant concern prior to this point. Paul and other early believers thought the Messiah/Son of Man was going to appear within their lifetimes (‘we who are still alive’ etc). It was only when cultists started dying off in noticeable numbers, and the Lord remained a no-show, that it started to become an issue. Paul had to make something up. And make it up he did.

Just suppose…

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Let’s imagine that the gospels were all written by eye-witnesses or the associates of eye-witnesses. Let’s suppose that prior to their composition there was a vibrant oral tradition that accurately preserved the Jesus story and his teaching in particular. Let’s suppose that Paul learnt what he knew of Christianity initially from the early believers he persecuted and then, following his miraculous conversion, from his meetings with the disciples. Let’s suppose that the later books of New Testament were written by people who knew Jesus personally or were really by Paul. Let’s suppose that everything in the bible was inspired by God and is truly his word. Let’s imagine that as result of all this, everything predicted and prophesied in the gospels, in Paul’s letters and the later ones by apostles, came to pass.

Because we’d have to imagine this. Even if everything we’ve supposed was true, none of the prophesies, predictions or promises have materialised in reality. Not one. No Son of Man beaming down from heaven while the disciples and Pilate were still alive, (as he promises in Mark 9:1 and Mark 14:62 respectively), no visit from the Messiah while Paul and his acolytes were living (1 Thessalonians 4:17), no final judgement, no Kingdom of heaven on Earth, no Christians performing miracles greater than those attributed to Jesus. Not even any ‘new creations’ imbued with the Holy Spirit (‘by their fruits shall ye know them.’)

Apologists put a lot of effort into explaining away these failures, some even arguing the Kingdom is actually with us now (how incredibly disappointing it is if this is the case!) Most disappointing of all is that no Christian has ever resurrected from the dead. Not Paul, not Peter, Mary Magdalene nor any other early follower, and no-one since: not Martin Luther, Charles Wesley, C. S. Lewis, Billy Graham nor any bishop, minister or evangelist who has ever lived. All have remained resolutely dead, just like everyone else who has ever ‘fallen asleep’ and everyone who will in the future.

However much Christians want to insist the Bible is true, accurate and God-breathed, in the end it simply doesn’t deliver.

How the Bible tells us the Resurrection was nothing more than Visions

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I’ve written about this before, but want to pull together some strands that demonstrate the risen Jesus was a vision or hallucination. He appeared only in the mind of others: the New Testament tells us as much.

Exhibit 1. Paul writes of the appearance of the risen Jesus, whom he sees as a ‘life-giving Spirit’, being ‘in’ him (Galatians 1.16). Paul has more than one such vision, including his trip to heaven recounted in 2 Corinthians 12.2, which he refers to as his ‘revelations’.

Exhibit 2. Paul implies in Corinthians 15.5-8 that others who have experienced the post-mortem Jesus ‘saw’ him in exactly the same way he did. For Paul, there was no difference between his inner-visions and those experienced by the so-called apostles.

Exhibit 3. The author of Acts creates a story out of Paul’s first vision, the famous account of his conversion on the road to Damascus. It’s a fabrication of course, told differently each time it’s referred to Even so, Luke retains the visionary nature of the experience: Jesus is a bright light and a disembodied voice.

Exhibit 4. The other sightings of the risen Jesus in Acts are visions. When, for example, Stephen is about to be stoned (Acts 7:54-56) he sees in his mind’s eye the heavens open and Jesus sitting at the right hand of god. Other New Testament encounters of the resurrected Jesus, such as John’s Revelation, are explicitly said to be visions.

Exhibit 5. Many of the sightings of the risen Jesus in Matthew and Luke are not of a real, physical human being. Those who experience him see him materialising in locked rooms, vanishing at will and floating up into the clouds. None of these events actually happened; they are the gospel writers’ literary realisations of visions experienced decades earlier, and they retain the hallucinatory qualities of those experiences.

Exhibit 6. Remaining with the gospels’ accounts of the risen Jesus, there is the strange phenomenon of those experiencing him failing to recognise him. Mary in the garden thinks he’s the gardener; the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t know its him until he breaks bread; the disciples mistake him for someone else on the shore until he tells them how to fish properly. Most damning of all, some of the inner circle of disciples doubt it’s Jesus they’re seeing in their collective visions (Matt 28:17-18). Again, these stories preserve the tradition that the earlier visions weren’t always recognised as Jesus. And why wasn’t he? Because he was an hallucination

Exhibit 7. The risen Jesus has to prove who he is. According to Acts 1:1-3, he ‘presents himself’ his followers, some of whom have wandered around aimlessly with him for three years, and has to convince them he is who he appears to be. And, the text suggests, it takes him forty days to do it. This makes no sense. A far better explanation of this story (and it is a story) is that having experienced their visions of something-they-took-to-be-the-resurrected-Jesus (bright lights? Disembodied voices?), his followers set about convincing themselves that what they experienced really was their former Master. This they did by scouring the scriptures to find ‘proof’ that the Messiah would die and rise again. We know this is how their thinking worked. The same process was used to create the gospels and is evident throughout the New Testament.

Exhibit 8. Dead people stay dead. They do not resurrect.. This is not an a priori assumption. No corpse has ever revived after 36 hours or indeed any other period of time. We know this experientially, statistically and scientifically. Only in stories and religious myth do the dead return. This is what we are dealing with here: stories and myth that flesh out the visions and hallucinations of a few religious zealots.

No God and the Domino Effect

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This a response to Don Camp’s comment on my post The Evil of Christianity, in which he tries to isolate ‘the crux’ of our disagreement about the Faith.

You start, Don, from the assumption that there is a God. I, on the other hand, have considered the evidence and concluded that in all probability there isn’t one. Certainly not the Christian God. There may be a god out there somewhere that has no interest in human beings and their affairs, though I doubt it. As far as we humans are concerned such a deity is as good as non-existent, being entirely hypothetical. If it is out there, it certainly won’t be offended at my saying so.

Once I realised some years ago that a personal God did not exist a number of other things followed (or rather, collapsed):

No God means no Son of God or God Incarnate, no Saviour or Christ.

No God means no resurrection (which Paul makes clear was a work of God).

No God means no Holy Spirit.

No Holy Spirit means no regeneration of individuals to become new creations in God (you only have to look at Christians today to see this is the case.)

No God means no grand Salvation plan.

No God means no Heaven, no Final Judgement, no Kingdom of Heaven of Earth, no Eternal Life.

No God means the universe can’t have been created by him.

No God means no manipulation of evolution, no intervention in human history and no prophecy of things to come.

No God means that the world would be just as we find it: messy, beautiful, dangerous, turbulent, indifferent.

No God means prophecy is man-made and comes to pass at no greater rate than chance allows (i.e. practically zero.)

No God means conversations with ‘him’, revelations from him and visions of him are all imagined, generated by and within the human brain, which works in mysterious ways.

No God means no God-given morality. Morality is, as you say, culturally determined and so may and does change over time. (You can see this in the Bible itself where morality supposedly handed down by God for all time evolves throughout the Old Testament and into the new.)

No God means there is neither Sin nor Righteousness. These are religious concepts. The whole spectrum of human behaviour, from destructive to altruistic, is demonstrated by believers and non-believers alike.

No God means assertions like ‘the issue turns on what I perceive as good for me versus what God declares is good for me’ are illusory. What is good for you is what you have worked out, even if you think God had a hand in it. A supernatural being who doesn’t exist cannot be responsible for your well-being, though your church and the bible undoubtedly contributed to your conditioning.

No God means individuals must work out their own meaning and purpose. Some do, some don’t, as you observe, Don. This is as true of believers as it is for non-believers. Many atheists have managed it, or not, without having it imposed by religion. And despite what you say, Christianity is a religion. It is the epitome of religion.

No God means none of the Abrahamic religions are true and therefore Christianity and its ‘holy’ book, being based on an invalid premise, must be false. Most of the posts on this here blog are about demonstrating this fact.

No God means all gods are man-made, not all gods except one.

The crux of the matter is you believe in God while I see how unlikely it is that there is one. I’d agree with you if I could, Don, but then we’d both be wrong.

An Anonymous Author Writes…

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A little while ago I came across a group of enthusiasts who met locally to celebrate the chap who’d founded their group a few decades back. I paid them a few visits to see what they were about and when they learnt I was capable of stringing a few sentences together, asked if I would write a short biography of their Founder. Being an obliging sort, I said I would, not realising the challenges that lay ahead.

For a start, none of them had actually known the guy. He’d died soon after the group had started and none of the current membership had ever met him. Worse, they weren’t even sure what his real name was. Some said ‘Josh’, some ‘Jess’ and others ‘Manny’. They thought a guy who had known him was still alive, but couldn’t remember his name either. ‘Rocky’, they said, or maybe ‘Tiny’.

All the same, I’d said I’d have a go at the biography and didn’t want to disappoint them so I set about searching the Web. I soon discovered that both ‘Rocky’ and ‘Tiny’ had passed away, about the same time six or so years earlier. There was nothing online about any Rocky but there was quite a bit about Tiny. Or rather by him. He’d left a whole series of posts, mostly about he’d been contacted by the founder from beyond the grave. He said over and over that he could prove it really was the Founder he was channelling because, apparently, it said so in some old stories. He quoted these all over the place.

All weird stuff, but all I had to go on.

So I set to. I tried to make as much sense as I could of Tiny’s writing. I made stories out of his rambling, imagining what the Founder must’ve been like from the things Tiny claimed he’d told him. Like Tiny, I used old stories to fill out the narrative and included loads of metaphor. People love finding hidden meanings in things. I stopped short though at having the Founder come back from the dead at the end, not even metaphorically. Tiny insisted he had done but no-one in their right minds would believe it.

In the end, I thought I’d made a good job of it. The guys in the group thought so too. They were so pleased they suggested I publish it on Amazon, which I did. To my surprise, it started selling really well and got some very good reviews (and only a couple of poor ones.) To my annoyance, though, it wasn’t not long before a bunch of opportunists took to writing novellas about the Founder themselves, and (the nerve of it) lifting whole chunks of my story and ‘correcting the errors’! Errors? How could there be errors in something I’d made up? They even used my technique, lifted from Tiny, of borrowing bits from older books and making them fit their version. Their ‘Founder’ turned out to be different from mine, though not, I’m convinced, anywhere near as good.

I’ve decided I was going to retire from this writing lark. It’s too competitive and there are too many plagiarists around. Let them get on with their inferior sequels. Everybody will remember I was the first, and the best. Won’t they?

Mark and the Oral Tradition

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Paul never refers to ‘the disciples’, the term used for Jesus’ inner circle in the later gospels. Instead, he refers to the founders of the cult as ‘apostles’ (literally ‘messengers’). Cephas is described as an apostle, as is Barnabas (Acts 14:14) and Paul himself. Paul defines the term more specifically as someone who has been commissioned directly by Jesus (1 Corinthians 9:1; Galatians 1:1-2). Evidently he himself was not: he encountered the risen Christ only in his head. He felt this was more than good enough. For Paul it was the only qualification anyone needed to be an apostle. He cites others who had encountered Jesus in the same way:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15: 3-8)

What he goes on to say is crucial in understanding the nature of ‘the gospel’ that was in circulation in the years before Mark’s gospel:

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them – yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed (1 Corinthians 15: 8-11; my emphasis.)

What they preached was their visions of a celestial Saviour. The witness of these visionaries of the risen Christ was the only gospel they knew and, Paul suggests here and elsewhere, the only one that was being transmitted orally when he was active. As we saw last time, he knew no other details of Jesus’ life, had none passed on to him and passed none on to others, except for these visions and the teaching he worked out from them – his ‘revelations’. Let me say that again: the visions of the risen Jesus were all he, Cephas and others knew. Paul says so categorically. There was no other ‘oral tradition’.

Paul builds his subsequent teaching on Jewish scripture, showing how his ‘revelations’ must be from the Christ because they comply with this scripture (even though he has to manipulate it to make it do so: in Romans 9, for example). Nowhere does he say he is referring to any history he has learnt, nor to anything passed on to him orally about Jesus’ teaching, ministry, life or miracles. Just the opposite in fact:

I want you to know… that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it; rather I received it (directly) by revelation from Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 1: 11-12).

About seven years after Paul’s death, a literate member of the one of the cult communities – known to us as Mark – decided to set down Paul’s teaching about the Christ in allegorical form. He tells us this is what he is doing several times in his gospel, including Mark 4:11-12:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (referencing and misquoting Isaiah 6:9)

Mark did not depend on any oral tradition for his information about Jesus’ life because apart from the ‘announcement’ built on Cephas’, Paul’s and others’ visions there was no oral tradition. Mark took Paul’s teaching and like him, used Jewish scripture as the basis for the story he developed from it. Thus, Paul’s ‘revelation’ of a bread and wine ritual (1 Corinthians 11:23-27) becomes the Last Supper (Mark 4:22-24); Paul’s teaching about forgiveness becomes Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness; Paul’s dispute with Cephas leads to a gospel Peter who is bungling and disloyal; Paul’s mention of The Twelve in 1 Corinthians becomes, with a miscalculation, the disciples; Paul’s instruction to obey the authorities (Roman’s 13:1) becomes Jesus’ (Mark 12:17); Paul’s, and Jewish scriptures’, promise of the spiritually blind (2 Corinthians 4:3-6) being helped to see becomes Jesus’ miracles of healing; Paul’s predictions about the end of the age (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17) become Jesus’ (Mark 13); Paul’s talk of the coming of the Christ in person (1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11) becomes Jesus’ prophecies about the Son of Man appearing (Mark 14:61); Paul’s vision of the risen Christ becomes the resurrection. And on and on. There is nothing in Mark’s gospel that doesn’t derive from Paul’s teaching, and Jewish scripture in turn. it is, in short, made up.

All of this accounts for the absence of any resurrection appearances in Mark. His gospel ends with the discovery of the allegorical empty tomb and leaves off there because it is where his audience came in, as it were. They had been converted by hearing of the ‘appearances’ of the celestial Christ to Cephas and those Paul lists in 1 Corinthians. They already knew how the story ended or, more accurately, how it had begun: with those visions.

Later, Matthew, Luke and John would take Mark’s allegory and use it as the basis for their gospels, adding new, invented material of their own. The myth, in both the technical and popular sense, was born.

Paul and the Oral Tradition

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Much is made of the oral tradition that it is said informs the material in the synoptic gospels, and possibly John too. The tradition of conveying the events of Jesus’ life and the things he said goes back to Jesus’ original followers – the disciples and the apostles (the terms are not necessarily interchangeable) – and continues with a high degree of accuracy, at least until AD70 when the first gospel was written. 

Which must be why we find so much detail about Jesus’ life in the letters of Paul, from his first letter, 1 Thessalonians, written circa AD55 to his last, Philippians (now an amalgam of several letters), written about 62. Paul was aware of the stories about Jesus – as all converts were – and affirms so many of the details of his life in his letters, passing on the vital stories and the traditions associated with him, in written form.

But not in our reality. Our Paul knows nothing of the details of Jesus’ life. Not once does he quote him or refer to the events of his life before the resurrection. There is nothing of the oral tradition. Nowhere in his letters does he draw from it; never does he say he knows for a fact that Jesus said or did a specific thing while on Earth.

Even after his meeting with Cephas and James, a full three years after his conversion, Paul relays not a single thing he learnt from them. After the encounter, he continues to promote only his own revelations and says nothing of what he learnt about Jesus from the man who supposedly spent three eventful years with him.

Fourteen years later, Paul meets again with Cephas and encounters other apostles for the first time. On this occasion, he and Cephas argue about justification and Paul comes away grumbling that ‘those leaders added nothing to me’ (Galatians 2:6) What? Not even stories about their time with the Master? Apparently these weren’t as important as disputes about soteriology.

Later still, Acts tells us that immediately after his conversion, Paul stayed with ‘disciple’ Ananias and other ‘disciples’ for several days. Did Ananias not know any of the oral tradition that he could pass on to Paul? Details about Jesus’ life, a saying or two or an account of a miracle? Apparently not. (This might be because the story is pure fabrication. Paul tells us himself, in Galatians 1: 16, that immediately after his conversion he ‘did not rush to consult with flesh and blood’).

Surely, though, he must have heard some of the Jesus story from those he persecuted prior to his dramatic conversion. If he did, he didn’t see fit to include any of it in his letters. Likewise, Paul had contact with cult communities he didn’t himself establish, such as that in Rome. Surely they conveyed some of the stories about Jesus that they had had passed on to them. He appears too to have known at least one other evangelist:  Apollos. If these other believers did pass on stories of Jesus from an ultra-reliable oral tradition, why didn’t Paul see fit to include any of them in his letters?

So what were Paul’s sources? Certainly not the oral tradition, nor Q, the hypothetical sayings gospel, which he likewise ignores. If the gospel was being spread orally from the time Jesus lived, by the apostles and other preachers, and was being passed around the fledgling cult communities, why did Paul know nothing of it? If in fact he did, why did he choose to ignore it in favour of his own inner-visions? Did he consider it of such little value?

These questions matter, as we’ll see next time when Mark decides he’ll set the Jesus story down on paper.