The Origin of Paul's Religion

by J. Gresham Machen

But even if Paul before his conversion was a devotee of the apocalyptic Messiah, the genesis of the Pauline Christology has not yet been explained. For the apocalyptic Messiah is different in important respects from the Christ of the Epistles.

In the first place, there is in the apocalypses no doctrine of an activity of the Messiah in creation, like that which appears in 1 Cor. viii. 6; Col. i. 16. The Messiah of the apocalypses is preëxistent, but He is not thought of as being associated with God in the creation of the world. This difference may seem to be only a difference in detail; but it is a difference in detail which concerns just that part of the Pauline Christology which would seem to be most similar to the apocalyptic doctrine. It is the Pauline conception of the preëxistent Christ, as distinguished from the incarnate or the risen Christ, which Wrede and Brückner find it easiest to connect with the apocalypses. But even in the preëxistent period the Christ of Paul is different from the apocalyptic Messiah, because the Christ of Paul, unlike the apocalyptic Messiah, has an active part in the creation of the world.

In the second place, there is in the apocalypses no trace of the warm, personal relation which exists between the believer and the Pauline Christ.[119] The Messiah of the apocalypses is hidden in heaven. He is revealed only as a great mystery, and only to favored men such as Enoch. Even after the judgment, although the righteous are to be in company with Him, there is no such account of His person as would make conceivable a living, personal relationship with Him. The heavenly Messiah of the apocalypses is a lifeless figure, clothed in unapproachable light. The risen Christ of Paul, on the other hand, is a person whom a man can love; indeed He is a person whom as a matter of fact Paul did love. Whence was derived the concrete, personal character of the Christ of Paul? It was certainly not derived from the Messiah of the apocalypses. Whence then was it derived?

The natural answer would be that it was derived from Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that the risen Christ of Paul is not merely a heavenly figure but a person whom a man can love is most naturally explained by supposing that Paul attributed to the Messiah all the concrete traits of the striking personality of Jesus of Nazareth. But this supposition is excluded by Wrede's hypothesis. Indeed, Wrede supposes, if Paul had come into such close contact with the historical Jesus as to have in his mind a full account of Jesus' words and deeds, he could not easily have attached to Him the supernatural attributes of the heavenly Son of Man; only a man who stood remote from the real Jesus could have regarded Jesus as the instrument in creation and the final judge of all the world. Thus the hypothesis of Wrede and Brückner faces a quandary. In order to explain the supernatural attributes of the Pauline Christ, Paul has to be placed near to the apocalypses and far from the historical Jesus; whereas in order to explain the warm, personal relation between Paul and his Christ, Paul would have to be placed near to the historical Jesus and far from the apocalypses.

This quandary could be avoided only by deriving the warm, personal relation between Paul and his Christ from something other than the character of the historical Jesus. Wrede and Brückner might seek to derive it from the one fact of the crucifixion. All that Paul really derived from the historical Jesus, according to Wrede and Brückner, was the fact that the Messiah had come to earth and died. But that one fact, it might be maintained, was sufficient to produce the fervent Christ-religion of Paul. For Paul interpreted the death of the Messiah as a death suffered for the sins of others. Such a death involved self-sacrifice; it must have been an act of love. Hence the beneficiaries were grateful; hence the warm, personal relationship of Paul to the one who had loved him and given Himself for him.[120]

But how did the death of Jesus ever come to be interpreted by Paul as a vicarious death of the Messiah? The natural answer would be that it was because of something that Jesus had said or because of an impression derived from His character. That answer is excluded by Wrede's hypothesis. How then did Paul come to regard the death of Jesus as a vicarious death of the Messiah? It could only have been because Paul already had a doctrine of the vicarious death of the Messiah before his conversion. But nothing is more unlikely. There is in late pre-Christian Jewish literature not a trace of such a doctrine.[121] The Messiah in 4 Ezra is represented, indeed, as dying, but His death is of benefit to no one. He dies, along with all the inhabitants of earth, simply in order to make way for the new world.[122] In Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew Trypho is represented as admitting that the Messiah was to suffer. But the suffering is not represented as vicarious. And since the Dialogue was written in the middle of the second century after Christ, the isolated testimony of Trypho cannot be used as a witness to first-century conditions. It is perfectly possible, as Schürer suggested, that certain Jews of the second century were only led to concede the suffering of the Messiah in the light of the Scriptural arguments advanced by the Christians. The rabbinical evidence as to sufferings of the Messiah is also too late to be used in reconstructing the pre-Christian environment of Paul. And of real evidence from the period just before Paul's day there is none. In 4 Maccabees vi. 28, 29, indeed (less clearly in xvii. 21, 22), the blood of the righteous is represented as bringing purification for the people. The dying martyr Eleazar is represented as praying:[123] "Be merciful unto thy people, and let our punishment be a satisfaction in their behalf. Make my blood their purification, and take my soul to ransom their souls." This passage, however, is entirely isolated. There is no evidence whatever that the vicarious suffering of the righteous was anything like an established doctrine in the Judaism of Paul's day, and in particular there is no evidence that in pre-Christian Judaism the idea of vicarious suffering was applied to the Messiah. Undoubtedly Isaiah liii might have formed a basis for such an application; it may even seem surprising that that glorious passage was not more influential. But as a matter of fact, Judaism was moving in a very different direction; the later doctrine of the Messiah had absolutely no place for a vicarious death or for vicarious suffering. All the sources are here in agreement. Neither in the apocalypses nor in what is presupposed in the New Testament about Jewish belief is there any trace of a vicarious death of the Messiah. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that such an idea was extremely repulsive to the Jewish mind. The Cross was unto the Jews a stumbling-block.[124]

Thus the warm, personal relation of love and gratitude which Paul sustains to the risen Christ is entirely unexplained by anything in his Jewish environment. It is not explained by the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah; it is not explained by reflection upon the vicarious death of the Messiah. For the Messiah in Jewish expectation was not to suffer a vicarious death. Such a relation of love and gratitude could be sustained only toward a living person. It could be sustained toward Jesus of Nazareth, if Jesus continued to live in glory, but it could not be sustained toward the Messiah of the apocalypses.

The third difference between the Pauline Christ and the Messiah of the apocalypses concerns the very center of the Pauline conception—there is in the apocalypses no doctrine of the divinity of the Messiah. In Paul, the divinity of Christ is presupposed on every page. The word "divinity" is indeed often being abused; in modern pantheizing liberalism, it means absolutely nothing. But the divinity of Christ in the Pauline Epistles is to be understood in the highest possible sense. The Pauline doctrine of the divinity of Christ is not dependent upon individual passages; it does not depend upon the question whether in Rom. ix. 5 Paul applies the term "God" to Christ. Certainly he does so by any natural interpretation of his words. But what is far more important is that the term "Lord" in the Pauline Epistles, the characteristic Pauline name of Christ, is every whit as much a designation of deity as is the term "God."[125] Everywhere in the Epistles, moreover, the attitude of Paul toward Christ is not merely the attitude of man to man, or scholar to master; it is the attitude of man toward God.

Such an attitude is absent from the apocalyptic representation of the Messiah. For example, the way in which God and Christ are linked together regularly at the beginnings of the Pauline Epistles—God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ[126]—this can find no real parallel in 1 Enoch. The isolated passages (1 Enoch xlix. 10; lxx. 1) where in 1 Enoch the Lord of Spirits and the Son of Man or the Elect One are linked together by the word "and," do not begin to approach the height of the Pauline conception. It is not surprising and not particularly significant that the wicked are designated in one passage as those who have "denied the Lord of Spirits and His anointed" (1 Enoch xlix. 10). Such an expression would be natural even if the Anointed One were, for example, merely an earthly king of David's line. What is characteristic of Paul, on the other hand, is that God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ are not merely united by the conjunction "and" in isolated passages—that might happen even if they belonged to different spheres of being—but are united regularly and as a matter of course, and are just as regularly separated from all other beings except the Holy Spirit. Moreover, God and Christ, in Paul, have attributed to them the same functions. Grace and peace, for example, come equally from both. Such a representation would be quite incongruous in 1 Enoch. Equally incongruous in 1 Enoch would be the Pauline separation of the Christ from ordinary humanity and from angels. The author of 1 Enoch could hardly have said, "Not from men nor through a man but through the Elect One and the Lord of Spirits," as Paul says, "Not from men nor through a man but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead" (Gal. i. 1). On the other hand, the way in which 1 Enoch includes the Elect One in the middle of a long list of beings who praise the Lord of Spirits (1 Enoch lxi. 10, 11) would be absolutely inconceivable in Paul.