A number of Jewish groups, ancient and modern, believed that their liberation lay in the activity of a special prophet who would bring the divine purposes to fruition. This figure known as the Messiah (based upon the Hebrew word; the Greek term is Christos, and both terms mean 'anointed') was held by different groups to have different objectives. He was variously seen as a victorious military figure, a zealous priest anxious to purge the Jewish temple of its religious and social impurity or a powerful monarch whose rule would restore and enhance the fortunes of Israel and bring a glorious peace to the world. There was neither expectation nor precedent in Jewish thought for a Messiah whose death would have salvific significance - much less one dying and being resurrected. Yet the early church from its inception did not see Jesus' death as a failure; rather, they hailed it as a victory and early Christian writers began proclaiming Jesus' resurrection as the key to the hopes of Israel and ultimately the world. One such writer is Paul, whose letters are the earliest Christian texts in existence. Our goal in this session is to briefly survey the evidence in Paul for early Christian celebration of the crucified and risen Messiah and ask what exactly Paul believed Jesus' fate had accomplished.
Contents
1. Death and Life
Scholars of the Apostle Paul universally acknowledge that the spectacular encounter he experienced as he travelled to Damascus was the pivotal moment of his life. There is debate as to exactly what actually happened to him. Was he "converted", and, if so, from what to what? Did he receive a prophetic call like one of the Hebrew prophets of old (Galatians 1:15; cf. Jeremiah 1:5; Isaiah 49:1)? Did he have some kind of psychotic trauma? Perhaps what he suffered was an epileptic seizure? Whatever happened, the risen Jesus turned Paul into a herald of the faith and community he once devoted himself to terrorising.
What we can observe, are traces of evidence within Paul's writings which point to how the Damascus Road encounter affected his perception of reality, his view of what God was doing in the world and his ethno-religious self-consciousness. I explore these ideas in my book, Death and Life: Resurrection, Restoration and Rectification in Paul's Letter to the Galatians (pictured).
Below I will offer two examples from Paul's letters demonstrating the effect that the resurrection had on his articulation of the divine work in the world. These two examples are of particular note because the first outlines how Paul saw his own missionary vocation and the second how he comprehended the place of Jesus in human salvation.
A crucified Messiah was nowhere in the script of Israelite redemptive history....
.....a Messiah dying and rising again would have been a total 'bolt from the blue'. Paul had to read backwards from the event into the Scriptures to make sense of the divine economy of salvation. Now see the two texts below:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ. If we are being afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation; if we are being consoled, it is for your consolation, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we are also suffering. Our hope for you is unshaken; for we know that as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our consolation. We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us; on him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again... (2 Corinthians 1:3-10)
Can you see what is happening in the verses above? Paul relates an incident that befell him and his missionary entourage in Asia (v.8a) which was so harrowing that they were sure they were going to die (or possibly were tempted to end their own lives (v.8b)). In Paul's mind, God had a twofold purpose for permitting this crisis - firstly, it was so that he and his colleagues would put their trust in the God who effects resurrection (and Paul was clear that only the God of Israel could raise the dead). With the same energy by which God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead, He would 'raise' Paul and company from the "deadness" of despair, hopelessness and discouragement (v.9). Secondly, and with this in mind, Paul asserted that the consolatory experience of being so rescued would equip both he and his co-missionaries with the spiritual wherewithal to 'raise' others from the depths of their own despair. (vv.4-6). It is in this way that I understand Paul's worldview to be 'resurrection shaped' (or 'resurrectiform' - a rather unwieldy term I employed in a paper on the subject as it pertains to 2 Corinthians). It is not a coincidence that Paul routinely identifies God as the One having raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 4:24; 8:11; 2 Cor. 1:9; 4:14; Gal. 1:1) in much the same way as the Prophets saw God as the one who delivered Israel from captivity in Egypt (Num. 15:41; Deut. 5:6; 1 Sam. 10:18; Psa. 81:10). For Paul, both the Exodus and the resurrection of Jesus were epochal, life altering moments in Israelite redemptive history. As a number of scholars have noted, the Exodus may itself be symbolically understood as a movement from death to life. I now move to a second example from Paul's letters.
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace (Romans 6:3-14).
The above passage is part of a long and complex argument beginning in Romans 5:1 and ending in Romans 8:39. In it, the Apostle attempts to demonstrate that those with faith undergo a kind of death and rebirth within the initiatory rite of baptism (indeed death and rebirth imagery begins at the end of chapter 4 and sets up the collage of life-death imagery right through to the end of chapter 8) that directly associates them with the death and resurrection of Jesus. Just as Jesus was crucified, the believer's "old self" suffered "crucifixion" (v.6a). In the same way as Jesus was buried in the tomb, believers are "buried" in the waters of baptism (v.4a). As the 4th century Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem once wrote, “As Jesus died in taking away the sins of the world, that, by doing sin to death, he might rise in righteousness, so too, when you go down into the water and are, in a fashion, entombed in the water as he was in the rock, you may rise again to walk in newness of life” (The Catechetical Lectures 3.12). Paul concludes that Jesus' resurrection is a picture of the new existence into which the believer enters, having been "raised" from the baptismal pool (v.4b). Paul applies the metaphor of death and rebirth to the experience of liberation from captivity (vv.12-14). Employing the 'death to life' metaphor in this way was typified by Israel's prophets, most especially Ezekiel 37:1-14 (cf. Deut. 30:1-19; Isaiah 26:19-21; Hosea 6:1-3). The prophets spoke of liberation from pagan hegemonies (e.g. Assyria, Babylon) - for Paul, the great slave-master from whom freedom was sought, was sin. Note especially Romans 6:13 - those freed from captivity to sin are described as those having passed from death to life.
In the very short clip below, I briefly outline the theological context for resurrection ideology from which Paul's arguments emerged (erratum! - it is the widow of Zarephath's son whom Elijah raised - not the widow of Nain's son).
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2. The Risen Messiah and Israel's Redemption
Having established that Paul's worldview had been radically decentred by the resurrection of Jesus, we may ask more specifically how - how did one Israelite experiencing the final resurrection in the present time provide the means of rescuing Israel and ultimately the world? This is not a question we can explore in exhaustive detail here, but we can use some broad strokes to sketch an initial portrait.
There are a number of theories regarding the origins of death in Jewish thought and how this is conveyed in the so-called 'fall narrative' in Genesis 3. I am most persuaded the position of the Hebrew Bible and literary-historical scholar James Barr, who writes the following:
Underlying all these distinctions is the distinction between God and human beings. In a garden filled with trees, only two are singled out: The tree of knowledge of good and bad and the tree of life. The twin powers of discrimination and immortality are prerogatives of God alone. Both were originally denied to human beings for human beings were not to become “like one of us” (Gen. 3:22), like God. Now that Adam and Eve had achieved the first, they must be denied the second. This was the ultimate line “that must not be crossed.” Now that they are somewhat like God, God must act to deprive Adam and Eve of immortality. God then banishes them from Eden, lest they “take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever” (Gen. 3:22).
James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 62–73; sourced from Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought.
This appears consistent with what Paul writes:
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— 13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law (Romans 5:12-13).
In other words, the sin of "our first parents" was to disobey the divine mandate about an epistemological re-awakening. Sin - disobeying God - came into the world by the first act of disobedience. Death then came through this sin - death came by God's prohibition of any potential human enterprise to attain divinity. By making humans mortal, they lacked the second component of divinity - immortality - having been tricked into attaining the first - the power of discernment. Paul continues...
Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. 19 For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous (Romans 5:18-19).
For the Apostle Paul, like any Jew of his age, one of the central tenets of his religious heritage was the election of Israel. The people of Israel were the descendants of the patriarch Abraham through his son Isaac - we will leave the significance of this to one side for now. Israel was chosen to bear the image of the divine before all the pagan nations of the world. The key component of this was to adhere to the Law of Moses. In other words, they were to be obedient where Adam had been disobedient to divine law. However, the testimony of the Israelite prophets was that the people were unsuccessful in this endeavour. Rather than be what the prophet Isaiah referred to as ‘a light to the nations’ (Isaiah 49:6), Israel consistently worshipped the gods of the surrounding nations and were punished by being sent into captivity. Within Pauline thought, one special Israelite, who would be the representative of all Israel, would come forth and be the perfect image bearer - obeying the divine command and effectively reversing the effects of the fall. This special Israelite was, of course, Israel's Messiah; the redemption of Israel and ultimately the world lay in the Messiah's obedience. Certain Christian hymns, interpolated but probably not composed by Paul, offered snapshots of this narrative throughout his letters. one example is the poem in Colossians 1: 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17).
Thus, as Paul wrote in Romans 5:18-19 above, one man's obedience - the Messiah's obedience to God's plan in submitting to death by crucifixion - reversed the effect of Adam's disobedience. Adam introduced death; by overcoming death with resurrection life, Jesus opened the door of humanity's reconciliation to God. This is what Paul means when he says that we are saved by his [Jesus'] life (Romans 5:10). For Paul, just as Jesus passed from death to life, so do all those 'in Christ' (Romans 6:13). Resurrection was not, in Pauline thought, just something that happened to Jesus, but something was was now happening through him.
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3. Questions for the Church
It seems to me that within Pauline thought, the Christ event, that is, the death and resurrection of Jesus, was itself a graphic symbol of the way in which Israel’s God was rectifying humankind. What played out in Jesus’ body was being played out in the world. Just as Jesus suffered death and rebirth into a new kind of existence, Paul believed that by trusting in Jesus, humanity would experience an existential transformation into a new sphere of being. The keyword for this in two of Paul’s letters - Galatians and Romans - is justification. I understand this to mean being transformed into the right covenant status before God. This is a fancy way of saying being 'in the right' in God's presence. Justification has a forensic component (a declaration of innocence from the charge of sin), a transformative component (from being dead in captivity to sin, to being alive to God in freedom from sin) and a moral component (being ethically directed by the Spirit of God). As is clear from the passages below, the Pauline lexicon of newness, outlines how these components coalesce:
Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).
Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, 6 who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:5-6).
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Corinthians 5:17).
May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! (Galatians 6:14-15).
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all! (Colossians 3:9-11).
As you can see from the newness language, there are quite important ramifications for the transformative effect of Jesus’ resurrection on believing communities. Paul hints at, amongst other things, the demolition of ethnic hierarchy (circumcision versus uncircumcision means nothing according to Galatians 6:15), the cutting across of class lines (there is no longer slave and free in Colossians 3:11 - a very similar sentiment is raised in Galatians 3:28) and the reference to the new covenant, which draws upon a prophetic passage from Jeremiah 31:31. For the prophet Jeremiah, the new covenant would be evidenced by divine law becoming an inner reality amongst God’s people, so each individual would know what God required of them (Jeremiah 31:32-34). This is what Paul is hinting at in 2 Corinthians 3:6 – because the commandments of God would be an inner reality under the auspices of His Spirit, God’s people would no longer be beholden to the written Law of Moses (hence the Spirit versus letter contrast).
With the above in mind, the following are critical questions for the church:
1. What part does the pursuit of social justice play within a community of those transformed by faith in the resurrected Messiah?
2. How might Paul's letters serve to inform Christian views on social and even community hierarchy, whether this is based on class, ethnicity or gender?
3. What does this reading of Paul's theology suggest about modern dialogue between the church and the synagogue - are there any points of contact or contrast which might yield fruitful discussion?
4. Do modern Christians have a view of eschatology which is largely consistent with early Christian witness?
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4. Further Reading
Andrew Boakye, “Inhabiting the ‘Resurrectiform’ God: Death and Life as Theological Headline in Paul,” The Expository Times 128:2 (2016): 53–62.
Andrew Boakye, Death and Life: Resurrection, Restoration and Rectification in Paul's Letter to the Galatians (Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2017).
Michael J. Gorman, The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).
J. R. Daniel Kirk, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans Publishing, 2008).
N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion (London: SPCK, 2016).
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These pages were created by me, Dr Andrew Boakye, researcher and lecturer in the New Testament Criticism at the University of Manchester. My primary research interest is in Paul and the socio-theological and political impact of the resurrection of Jesus. I've written about this in my book, Death and Life: Resurrection, Restoration and Rectification in Paul's Letter to the Galatians (Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2017) and plan to explore the ideas further in an upcoming volume on Ephesians in Zondervan's Word Biblical Themes series (due 2025).