Paul and John seem to paint a different portrait of Jesus than those who walked and talked with him (last week’s topic).

Last week, we looked at the first half of that paradoxical Christian expression: Jesus was “fully human and yet fully divine.” We learned that the people who walked and talked with him found him to be a fully human, Jewish Messiah who would redeem Israel. But the Apostle Paul and the author(s) of the Gospel of John paint a very different portrait. John refers to Jesus as “the Logos” (a universal, impersonal, cosmic force of reason) and as a universal Savior of all mankind (the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world). Likewise, Paul also refers to him as something much more than human.

We asked a New Testament scholar  — Dr. Christopher Zoccali — to help us reconcile these two different perspectives. We picked away at some unsettling questions:

• why do Luke (in his writing of the Book of Acts) and Paul seem to tell different versions of Paul’s history, particularly his road to Damascus experience? Did Luke not get it right?
• exactly what/who did Paul encounter on that road to Damascus?
• did Paul ever meet Jesus … either in the flesh, or as some kind of cosmic, divine being?
• did Paul’s teachings of a cosmic, divine Jesus influence the writing of the Gospels?
• why did Paul never write about the life of Jesus: his birth, parents, specific teachings (like the Beatitudes, or his parables), miracles, followers, or conflicts with the Jewish authorities (since Paul was part of that establishment)? Instead, Paul seems to only ever talk about Jesus’s death, as if Jesus’s life story is unimportant.
• if Paul was sent to the Gentiles, why did he always go to the synagogues (where Jews meet) to tell them about Jesus being the Messiah (a very Jewish message), rather than to the city squares (where the Gentiles could hear a more universal message)?
• when he spoke to the Greek philosophers in Athens — the perfect audience to hear about Jesus being “the Logos” or a cosmic, divine being — why did Paul simply talk about Jesus being “a man” who would judge the world?

We ended with a thought-provoking scenario of Paul essentially acting like a time-traveller, in the sense that:

• he moved forward in time in the normal fashion for several decades, saturating the entire region with an image of Jesus being a cosmic, divine being;
• that image began to re-contextualize the memories of his listeners who walked with and talked with Jesus twenty or thirty years before Paul started sharing this new perspective;
• after those twenty or thirty years of Pauline influence on how the people who walked and talked with Jesus would remember Jesus, the writers of the Gospels interview those people about what had happened fifty years or more prior: those writers record their stories, now remembered and re-contextualized through a “post-Pauline lens”;
• that recorded story moves forward in time in the usual fashion right up to the present (you and me): we read those stories, which transport us backward in time almost two thousand years, but do they take us to …
  • … a version of events which are remembered precisely accurately?
  • … or a version of events which have been … re-shaped?

Is this the kind of paradox that always comes up in movies that involve time-travel: someone goes backward through time to influence earlier events, so that now the outcome of the story is changed (sometimes radically!?).

As always, tell us what you think …

To find more about Dr. Christopher Zoccali, go to his personal web-page or to his faculty web-page.

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