The Origin of Paul's Religion

by J. Gresham Machen

PAUL AND JESUS[67]

The review of Paul's life has prepared the way for the principal subject of investigation. What was the origin of the religion of Paul?

The most obvious answer to that question is that the religion of Paul was based upon Jesus. That is the answer which has always been given in the Church. The Church has always accepted the apostle Paul, not at all as a religious philosopher, but simply and solely as a witness to Jesus. If he was not a true disciple of Jesus, then the authority which he has always possessed and the influence which he has wielded have been based upon a misconception.

But exactly the same answer was given by Paul himself. Paul regarded himself as a servant of Christ, and based his whole life upon what Christ had done and what Christ was continuing to do. "It is no longer I that live," he says, "but Christ liveth in me." Unquestionably this Christ, upon whom Paul based his life, was identified by Paul with Jesus of Nazareth, a person who had lived in Palestine a few years before. A mighty change in the mode of existence of Jesus had indeed, Paul believed, been wrought by the resurrection; a life of humiliation had given place to a life of glory. But it was the same person who lived throughout. There is in the Pauline Epistles not a trace of any distinction between "Jesus" and "Christ," as though the former were the name of the historic personage who lived in Galilee and the latter the name of the risen Lord. On the contrary, the name Jesus is applied freely to the risen Lord, and the name Lord—the loftiest of all titles—is applied to the Jesus who suffered and died. It was "the Lord of glory," according to Paul, who was crucified (1 Cor. ii. 8). The same phenomenon appears everywhere in the Epistles: the Lord of glory lived the life of a servant on earth; and Jesus, the man who had recently lived in Palestine, was to be worshiped by all in heaven and on earth (Phil. ii. 10, 11).

There is, therefore, in the Pauline Epistles not the slightest trace of any gnosticizing separation between Jesus the historic person, and Christ the divine Lord. There is, moreover, as W. Morgan rightly observes,[68] not the slightest trace of any "adoptionist Christology," by which a man Jesus could be conceived of either as growing up gradually into divinity or as received into divinity by a catastrophic event like the resurrection. On the contrary, Paul says expressly that the Jesus who lived in Palestine existed, before His appearance upon earth, in the form of God; and the entrance of that person upon human life is represented as a voluntary act of love. His higher nature, therefore, existed from the beginning; indeed He was, according to Paul, the instrument in the creation of the world.

Finally, there is no trace in Paul of any doctrine of "kenosis," by which the higher nature of Christ might have been regarded as so relinquished while He was on earth that the words and deeds of the historic person would become matter of indifference. Such a representation is refuted not only by what has just been said about the application of the term "Lord" to the historic Jesus, but also by the references of Paul to actual words and deeds of Jesus. These references are few; their scantiness may require explanation. But they are sufficient to show that Paul regarded the words of the historic Jesus as possessing absolute authority and His example as normative for the Christian life.

Thus the testimony of Paul is plain. He regarded Christ as Lord and Master, and he identified that Christ fully with the Jesus who had lived but a few years before. This testimony must be faced and invalidated by those who would find the origin of Paul's religion elsewhere than in Jesus of Nazareth.

Such is the testimony of Paul. But what was the testimony of his contemporaries? In the environment of Paul were to be found some men who had been intimate friends of Jesus; presumably they were acquainted with Jesus' character and teaching. What was their attitude toward Paul? Did they regard him as an innovator with respect to Jesus, or did they admit him to the company of Jesus' true disciples? Since they knew both Jesus and Paul, their testimony as to the relationship between the two is obviously worth having. At this point appears the importance of Baur's work. It is the merit of Baur that however faulty his solution he placed at least in the forefront of interest the problem of the relationship between Paul and the intimate friends of Jesus. That relationship, Baur believed, was fundamentally a relationship of conflict; Paul and Peter, according to Baur, established at best only a modus vivendi, an agreement to disagree; really they were separated by a deep-seated difference of principle. But at this point a further problem arises. If Paul and Peter were really in disharmony, how did they ever come to be regarded as in harmony? If there was a deep-seated difference of principle between Paul and Peter, how did it come about that the Catholic Church was founded not upon Paul taken alone, or upon Peter taken alone, but upon Paul and Peter taken together?

Here, again, Baur displayed his true intellectual greatness by detecting and facing the problem. He saw clearly what has seldom been seen with equal clearness since his day, that the historian must explain the transition not only from the historical Jesus to apostolic Christianity, but from apostolic Christianity to the Old Catholic Church. And for this latter problem he proposed a solution which was not wanting in grandeur. But his solution, despite its grandeur, has succumbed. Baur's reconstruction of the second century, with the supposed gradual compromise between Pauline and Petrine Christianity, resulting finally in the Christianity of the Old Catholic Church, was one of the first elements in his system which had to be abandoned; it was destroyed, in the first place, by the criticism of A. Ritschl, and, in the second place, by the painstaking labors of Lightfoot, Zahn, Von Harnack and others, by which, through a study of second-century documents and their literary relationships, it was shown that the New Testament books cannot be scattered at will anywhere throughout the second century in the interests of a theory of development. Ritschl showed that the importance of specifically Jewish Christianity had been enormously exaggerated by Baur; and the study of patristics tended to place the New Testament books much earlier than the late dating which the theory of Baur required.

Thus Baur did not succeed in overcoming the fundamental objection raised against him by the very existence of a Church that appealed both to Peter and to Paul. If Peter and Paul were really in fundamental disharmony, how did the Church come to bring them together so confidently and at such an early time? This question has never been answered. The very existence of the Church is a refutation of Baur; the Church never could have existed unless the apostles had been in fundamental agreement.