A few weeks ago, The Telegraph published a Letter to the Editor from around 50 leading atheists in England, predictably including such names as Philip Pullman, Peter Tatchell, Polly Toynbee, Anthony Grayling, and Evan Harris.

It began as follows: “Sir – We respect the Prime Minister’s right to his religious beliefs and the fact that they necessarily affect his own life as a politician. However, we object to his characterization of Britain as a ‘Christian country’ and the negative consequences for politics and society that this engenders…. Britain is not a ‘Christian country’. Repeated surveys, polls and studies show that most of us as individuals are not Christian in our beliefs or our religious identities.”

One name, however, among those listed beneath the Letter was conspicuous by its absence: that of the most famous atheist of them all: Richard Dawkins. How come?

Well, a few days ago, we got the answer, in the form of a declaration (reported by The Telegraph under the headline “Richard Dawkins: I am a secular Christian”) made at the launch of the first volume of his memoirs, An Appetite For Wonder. In response to an American Protestant minister in the audience who claimed that he no longer believed in miracles or that Jesus was resurrected, but still considered himself a Christian and preached the teachings of Christ, Dawkins made this reply: “I would describe myself as a secular Christian in the same sense as secular Jews have a feeling for nostalgia and ceremonies.” He then made this perceptive comment to the liberal Protestant who had questioned him: “But if you don’t have the supernatural, it’s not clear to me why you would call yourself a minister.” In other words, why consider yourself a Christian at all?

Of his own atheism, Dawkins explained that he had an “Anglican upbringing” but chose atheism in his early teens after learning about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

This reminded me forcibly of my own early history: for I, too, in my early teens decided I was an atheist, and on joining the British Humanist Association at the age of 17, sent off for a small pile of books from its catalogue, including Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, and C M Beadnell’s A Picture Book of Evolution, which would, I was led to believe, explain to me why atheism was inevitable.

Well, here I am today, as a Catholic, because I realized that atheism didn’t work. What interests me is Professor Dawkins’s “nostalgia”, a word signifying a wistful affection for the past. That could mean (as I hope it does) that he is searching, perhaps unconsciously, for lost Christian certainties.

Back to evolution. One reason I came to the conclusion that the theory of evolution, even if true, implied no reason to reject the existence of a God was that very few people within the Church who had seriously studied the issue had ever seen any dissonance between evolution and belief. In my own study of the 19th century (which as a PhD student became my period of particular interest), I discovered that although it was certainly the case that some 19th-century intellectuals lost their faith as a result of reading On the Origin of Species, by no means all of them did, nor was the theory of evolution rejected by most Christian theologians as I had supposed (and as most people still think today). It was rejected by literalist fundamentalists, maybe: but they were in a minority then as they still are (they have always been an essentially protestant phenomenon).

An interesting example was the conservative Anglo-Catholic theologian Henry Liddon, a Canon of St Paul’s, and an admirer of Dr. Pusey, who was prepared seriously to consider Darwin’s theory as far as it went, but simply observed that it didn’t address the real question of our ultimate origins: he, like many ,continued to believe that man was created by God: but that evolution may well have been part of the Creator’s modus operandi. From the pulpit of St. Paul’s he addressed the question of Darwin’s conclusions about the beginnings of human life, by saying that, "We cannot forget what our faith teaches us about its origin, its present purpose, and its coming destiny… For our part, as we contemplate the human body, we cannot forget its author. Even if evolution should win for itself a permanent place in our conceptions of the past history of man, it would still leave untouched the great question of man’s origin…”

There was no automatic rejection by mainstream Christian thought of Darwinian evolution. Early contributions to the development of evolutionary theory were made by Catholic scientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel.

For nearly a century, the Holy See came to no publicly enunciated conclusion about Darwin’s theory. In the encyclical Humani Generis (1950), Pius XII declared that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces.

I think that Professor Dawkins ought now seriously to consider the uncertainties of his own great hero, Charles Darwin: in particular he might ponder on the absurdity of concluding that there is no God, having merely read On the Origin of Species, when that was very far from being Darwin’s own conclusion from the process of having written it.

Darwin himself said that when he wrote On the Origin of Species he was still convinced of the existence of God as a First Cause and that he was a theist. In 1879 he declared that he had never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God, and that generally “an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind”. He went as far as saying that “Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence…. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting … probabilities.”

How close Professor Dawkins is to discovering that the supernatural is a reality, I cannot say. But he may without realizing it be very close. What he needs now is a small dose of his hero’s own uncertainty; he sounds to me as though already he may be quite close to his agnosticism. From there it’s a much smaller leap to faith.
 
 
Originally posted at the Catholic Herald. Used with permission.
(Image credit: The Guardian)

Ronald Knox once quipped that “the study of comparative religions is the best way to become comparatively religious.” The reason, as G. K. Chesterton says, is that, according to most “scholars” of comparative religion, “Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.”

But any Christian who does apologetics must think about comparative religions because the most popular of all objections against the claims of Christianity today comes from this field. The objection is not that Christianity is not true but that it is not the truth; not that it is a false religion but that it is only a religion. The world is a big place, the objector reasons; “different strokes for different folks”. How insufferably narrow-minded to claim that Christianity is the one true religion! God just has to be more open-minded than that.

This is the single most common objection to the Faith today, for “today” worships not God but equality. It fears being right where others are wrong more than it fears being wrong. It worships democracy and resents the fact that God is an absolute monarch. It has changed the meaning of the word honor from being respected because you are superior in some way to being accepted because you are not superior in any way but just like us. The one unanswerable insult, the absolutely worst name you can possibly call a person in today’s society, is “fanatic”, especially “religious fanatic”. If you confess at a fashionable cocktail party that you are plotting to overthrow the government, or that you are a PLO terrorist or a KGB spy, or that you molest porcupines or bite bats’ heads off, you will soon attract a buzzing, fascinated, sympathetic circle of listeners. But if you confess that you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, you will find yourself suddenly alone, with a distinct chill in the air.

Here are twelve of the commonest forms of this objection, the odium of elitism, with answers to each.

1. “All religions are the same, deep down.”

That is simply factually untrue. No one ever makes this claim unless he is (1) abysmally ignorant of what the different religions of the world actually teach or (2) intellectually irresponsible in understanding these teachings in the vaguest and woolliest way or (3) morally irresponsible in being indifferent to them. The objector’s implicit assumption is that the distinctive teachings of the world’s religions are unimportant, that the essential business of religion is not truth but something else: transformation of consciousness or sharing and caring or culture and comfort or something of that sort—not conversion but conversation. Christianity teaches many things no other religion teaches, and some of them directly contradict those others. If Christianity isn’t true, why be a Christian?

By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much truth they teach.

• Catholicism is first, with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue of papal authority.
• Then comes Protestantism and any “separated brethren” who keep the Christian essentials as found in Scripture.
• Third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via Christ.
• Fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies.
• Fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism;
• Sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos;
• Seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and secular humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural religion but only ethics;
• Eighth, idolarity; and
• Ninth, Satanism.

To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat.

2. “But the essence of religion is the same at any rate: all religions agree at least in being religious.

What is this essence of religion anyway? I challenge anyone to define it broadly enough to include Confucianism, Buddhism, and modern Reform Judaism but narrowly enough to exclude Platonism, atheistic Marxism, and Nazism.

The unproved and unprovable assumption of this second objection is that the essence of religion is a kind of lowest common denominator or common factor. Perhaps the common factor is a weak and watery thing rather than an essential thing. Perhaps it does not exist at all. No one has ever produced it.

3. “But if you compare the Sermon on the Mount, Buddha’s Dhammapada, Lao-tzu’s Tao-te-ching, Confucius’ Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, the Proverbs of Solomon, and the Dialogues of Plato, you will find it: a real, profound, and strong agreement.”

Yes, but this is ethics, not religion. The objector is assuming that the essence of religion is ethics. It is not. Everyone has an ethic, not everyone has a religion. Tell an atheist that ethics equals religion. He will be rightly insulted, for you would be calling him either religious if he is ethical, or unethical because he is nonreligious. Ethics maybe the first step in religion but it is not the last. As C.S. Lewis says, “The road to the Promised Land runs past Mount Sinai.”

4. “Speaking of mountains reminds me of my favorite analogy. Many roads lead up the single mountain of religion to God at the top. It is provincial, narrow-minded, and blind to deny the validity of other roads than yours.”

The unproved assumption of this very common mountain analogy is that the roads go up, not down; that man makes the roads, not God; that religion is man’s search for God, not God’s search for man. C. S. Lewis says this sounds like “the mouse’s search for the cat”.

Christianity is not a system of man’s search for God but a story of God’s search for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense wafting up from special spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but like a Father’s hand thrust downward to rescue the fallen. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails. There is no human way up the mountain, only a divine way down. “No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.”

If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any one road is the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least in all being human, finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made the roads, it would be as stupid to absolutize one of them as to absolutize one art form, one political system, or one way of skinning a cat. But if God made the road, we must find out whether he made many or one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as God’s God-made one.

But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true, not all religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more arrogant than all others, for it centers on one who claimed, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father but by me.”

5. “Still, it fosters religious imperialism to insist that your way is the only way. You’re on a power trip.”

No, we believe it not because we want to, because we are imperialistic, or because we invented it, but because Christ taught it. It isn’t our way, it’s his way, that’s the only way. We’re just being faithful to him and to what he said. The objector’s assumption is that we can make religion whatever we want it to

6. “If the one-way doctrine comes from Christ, not from you, then he must have been arrogant.”

How ironic to think Jesus is arrogant! No sin excited his anger more than the arrogance and bigotry of religious leaders. No man was ever more merciful, meek, loving, and compassionate.

The objector is always assuming the thing to be proved: that Christ is just one among many religious founders, human teachers. But he claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life; if that claim is not true, he is not one among many religious sages but one among many lunatics. If the claim is true, then again he is not one among many religious sages, but the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

7. “Do you want to revive the Inquisition? Don’t you value religious tolerance? Do you object to giving other religions equal rights?”

The Inquisition failed to distinguish the heresy from the heretic and tried to eliminate both by force or fire. The objector makes the same mistake in reverse: he refuses to condemn either. The state has no business defining and condemning heresy, of course, but the believer must do it-if not through the Church, then by himself. For to believe x is to condemn non-x as false. If you don’t believe non-x is false, then you don’t really believe x is true.

8. “I’m surprised at this intolerance. I thought Christianity was the religion of love.”

It is. It is also the religion of truth. The objector is separating two divine attributes. We are not. We are “speaking the truth in love”.

9. “But all God expects of us is sincerity.”

How do you know what God expects of us? Have you listened to God’s revelation? Isn’t it dangerous to assume without question or doubt that God must do exactly what you would do if you were God? Suppose sincerity were not enough; suppose truth was needed too. Is that unthinkable? In every other area of life we need truth. Is sincerity enough for a surgeon? An explorer? Don’t we need accurate road maps of reality?

The objector’s implicit assumption here is that there is no objective truth in religion, only subjective sincerity, so that no one can ever be both sincere and wrong; that the spirit does not have objective roads like the body and the mind, which lead to distinct destinations: the body’s physical roads lead to different cities and the mind’s logical roads lead to different conclusions. True sincerity wants to know the truth.

10. “Are non-Christians all damned then?”

No. Father Feeny was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for teaching that “outside the Church, no salvation” meant outside the visible Church. God does not punish pagans unjustly. He does not punish them for not believing in a Jesus they never heard of, through no fault of their own (invincible ignorance). But God, who is just, punishes them for sinning against the God they do know through nature and conscience (see Rom 1-2). There are no innocent pagans, and there are no innocent Christians either. All have sinned against God and against conscience. All need a Savior. Christ is the Savior.

11. “But surely there’s a little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the best of us. There’s good and bad everywhere, inside the Church and outside.”

True. What follows from that fact? That we need no Savior? That there are many Saviors? That contradictory religions can all be true? That none is true? None of these implied conclusions has the remotest logical connection with the admitted premise.

There is a little good in the worst of us, but there’s also a little bad in the best of us; more, there’s sin, separation from God, in all of us; and the best of us, the saints, are the first to admit it. The universal sin Saint Paul pinpoints in Romans 1:18 is to suppress the truth. We all sin against the truth we know and refuse it when it condemns us or threatens our self-sufficiency or complacency. We all rationalize. Our duty is plain to us—to be totally honest—and none of us does his duty perfectly. We have no excuse of invincible ignorance.

12. “But isn’t God unjust to judge the whole world by Christian standards?”

God judges justly. “All who sinned without [knowing] the [Mosaic] law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law” (Rom 2:12). Even pagans show “that what the law requires is written on their hearts” (Rom 2:15). If we honestly consult our hearts, we will find two truths: that we know what we ought to do and be, and that we fail to do and be that.

Fundamentalists, faithful to the clear one-way teaching of Christ, often conclude from this that pagans, Buddhists, et cetera, cannot be saved. Liberals, who emphasize God’s mercy, cannot bring themselves to believe that the mass of men are doomed to hell, and they ignore, deny, nuance, or water down Christ’s own claims to uniqueness. The Church has found a third way, implied in the New Testament texts. On the one hand, no one can be saved except through Christ. On the other hand, Christ is not only the incarnate Jewish man but also the eternal, preexistent word of God, “which enlightens every man who comes into the world” (Jn 1:9). So Socrates was able to know Christ as word of God, as eternal Truth; and if the fundamental option of his deepest heart was to reach out to him as Truth, in faith and hope and love, however imperfectly known this Christ was to Socrates, Socrates could have been saved by Christ too. We are not saved by knowledge but by faith. Scripture nowhere says how explicit the intellectual content of faith has to be. But it does clearly say who the one Savior is.

The Second Vatican Council took a position on comparative religions that distinguished Catholicism from both Modernist relativism and Fundamentalist exclusivism. It taught that on the one hand there is much deep wisdom and value in other religions and that the Christian should respect them and learn from them. But, on the other hand, the claims of Christ and his Church can never be lessened, compromised, or relativized. We may add to our religious education by studying other religions but never subtract from it.
 
 
Excerpted from Fundamentals of the Faith. Copyright 1988 by Ignatius Press, all rights reserved, used with permission.
(Image credit: Nirvana)

 
Like every religion, Catholicism has three aspects, corresponding to the three parts of the soul.

First, every religion has some beliefs, whether expressed in creeds or not, something for the intellect to know. Second, every religion has some duty or deed, some practice of program, some moral or ethical code, something for the will to choose. Finally, every religion has some liturgy, some worship, some "church", something for the body and the concrete imagination and the aesthetic sense to work at.

In Fundamentals of the Faith, Dr. Peter Kreeft uses these three divisions as the basic outline. He considers all the fundamental elements of Catholicism, explaining, defending, and showing their relevance to our life and the world's yearnings.
 

Who really founded Christianity? Was it Jesus, as most Christians believe? Or did St. Paul invent an elaborate mythology—a shameless, self-serving ruse, some would say—that has distorted or destroyed the authentic teachings of Jesus?

If the idea seems crazy, be assured there are some rather crazy proponents of this basic perspective. For example, a Web site titled "Just Give Me the Truth" has a page declaring—screaming, really—that "Paul was Satan in the flesh," "Paul was never recognized as an apostle by the disciples or Jesus," and "Paul worked to destroy and undo everything Jesus and his disciples did and were doing."

A Brief History

 
If that were the extent of it, it wouldn’t be worth spending much time and energy on it. But this theory has developed a notable scholarly pedigree in modern times. It has been taken up by well-educated and influential men, some of them Scripture scholars. The basic roots can be traced back to the mid-18th century and the influential Tübingen School of historical criticism. Although David Strauss (1808-1874), the author of the famous Life of Jesus (1835) is better known today, it was the work of the Hegelian Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) that began driving a wedge between Jesus and Paul. Baur used Hegel’s theory of dialectic to argue that early Christianity was marked by two opposing theses, represented by "Pauline Christianity" and "Petrine Christianity," and that a synthesis of the two was established in the second century.

In the preface to his 1845 book, Paul: His Life and Works, Baur wrote:
 

I advanced the assertion which I have since maintained and furnished with additional evidence, that the harmonious relation which is commonly assumed to have been between the apostle Paul and the Jewish Christians with the older apostles at their head, is unhistorical, and that the conflict of the two parties whom we have to recognize upon this field entered more deeply into the life of the early Church than has been hitherto supposed.

 
More theologians (mostly German and Protestant) pushed through the crack in the door opened by Baur, and soon it was wide open. The work of two men is worth mentioning here: philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Lutheran theologian Georg Friedrich Eduard William Wrede (1859-1906). Although Nietzsche in The Antichrist (1895) mocked Jesus as an "idiot," he reserved special hatred for "the Christianity of Paul," which he argued was radically different from the teachings of Jesus. Paul, he wrote:
 

represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Savior: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth! . . . Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: In his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself.

 
Paul, in other words, was a master synthesizer of wildly divergent beliefs, the better to gain him a wide following.

Wrede was an ardent practitioner of historical criticism who argued, in The Messianic Secret (1901), that Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah. The Gospel of Mark, Wrede believed, made Jesus out to be a secret Messiah who was simply a teacher and miracle worker. In his book Paulus (1907) Wrede wrote there was "an enormous gulf between this man and the Pauline Son of God," and that Paul’s belief in "a celestial being" and "a divine christ" prior to his belief in Jesus resulted in Paul becoming "the second founder of Christianity." He further argued that Paul, although a Jew, constructed a theology that was mostly Hellenistic in character.

Newer Variations on the Theme

 
These same basic lines of argument have been explored further in recent decades by authors intent on demonstrating that if Paul was the "founder" or "creator" of Christianity, then Jesus was not the Incarnate Son of God. A good example on the popular level is Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (1997), by biographer A.N. Wilson, which portrays Paul as a complex and enigmatic mythologizer. "The genius of Paul and the collective genius of the ‘early church,’" Wilson states, "which wrote the twenty-seven surviving books we call the New Testament, was to mythologize Jesus." Because Paul was well-educated and traveled, he "had a richer language-store, a richer myth-experience, than some of the other New Testament writers, whose mythologies were limited to Jewish liturgy or folk-tale."

"One does not need to revive the old History of Religions School," Wilson insists,
 

to see how obvious all of this is. One is not saying that Paul crudely invented a new religion, but that he was able to draw out the mythological implications of an old religion, and the death of a particular practitioner of that religion, and to construct therefrom a myth with reverberations much wider than the confines of Palestinian Judaism. (72)

 
For Paul, historical fact and detail are of little interest: "The historicity of Jesus became unimportant from the moment Paul had his apocalypse" (73). Wilson, in other words, is more nuanced and sophisticated than Dan Brown, but shares his same basic assumptions.

A similar approach can be found in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (Harper and Row, 1986) by Hyam Maccoby, a Jewish author. Maccoby’s central thesis is that "Paul was never a Pharisee rabbi, but was an adventurer of undistinguished background" and that "Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion." Paul, Maccoby insists, "not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity" who relied on "pagan myths of dying and resurrected gods and Gnostic myths of heaven-descended redeemers." A more scholarly work that comes to the same basic conclusions is Paul: the Founder of Christianity (Prometheus Books, 2002), by Gerd Lüdemann, a German theologian who has admitted that he is no longer a Christian.

Where Are the References?

 
Most of those who claim Paul created Christianity based on a mythical Christ figure with little, if any, basis in historical reality point to the small number of references in his writings to the teachings and life of Jesus.

While Paul often mentions the death and resurrection of Jesus—an obviously central theme for him—almost nothing is said about Jesus’ family, birth, baptism, miracles, discourses, and parables. Paul does state in several places that he is passing on information or instruction he had received "from the Lord" (1 Cor 7:10-11; 9:14; 11:23-25; 14:37; 2 Cor 12:9; 1 Thes 4:15-17), but he does not quote Jesus directly. Critics argue he was simply using claims of personal revelations as a basis for his supposed apostolic authority. In addition, they ask why Paul doesn’t quote Jesus in places where it would be to his benefit to do so. For instance, when Paul states, "I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for any one who thinks it unclean" (Rom 14:14), why does he not refer to Jesus’ teaching about food and defilement (Mk 7:17-23)?

Paul’s Writing and Work

 
Several substantive points can be made in response. The first is that the letters of Paul are largely occasional in nature; that is, they were written to address ongoing issues and questions in churches that were already established. They were meant to be primarily works of exhortation, not argumentation. None of them, after all, were addressed to non-believers; they were not evangelistic in nature, but aimed at exhorting, encouraging, correcting, and pastoring. Because of this, many scholars believe that Paul did not need to quote from Jesus’ teaching, writes David Wenham in Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity?, "because he and his readers have been taught it and know it well. In his letters his task is to discuss what is disputed and unclear, not to repeat what is already very familiar" (5). While this argument from silence is unconvincing to many critics, it intersects very well with the second point, which is made by N.T. Wright in What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? , which is that Jesus and Paul had quite different roles in the "eschatological drama" of salvation history.

This argument rests on the priority and the validity of the Gospels, asserting that if Jesus really was the Messiah, did proclaim and establish the Kingdom of God, did die and rise from the dead, and did ascend into heaven, then he was completely unique. Therefore his teachings and life would have been the first things passed on by oral teaching and preaching, liturgy, and example (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 76-79). Paul understood himself to be a "servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God" (Rom 1:1); as such, Wright argues, he didn’t simply "repeat Jesus’ unique, one-off announcement of the kingdom to his fellow Jews. What we are looking for is not a parallel between two abstract messages. It is the appropriate continuity between two people living, and conscious of living, at different points in the eschatological timetable" (181).

Jesus believed that he had been sent by God to "bring Israel’s history to its climax" and Paul believed that Jesus had succeeded in this heavenly, covenantal mission. Paul was not interested in establishing a new religion or an ethical system or a syncretistic mixture of mystery religions. He was, Wright stressed, "deliberately and consciously implementing the achievement of Jesus" (181). Or, in his own words: "According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 3:10-11). And part of this work—this participation in what Jesus had achieved by his death and resurrection—was to apply and live out the reality of this salvation in many different cultural contexts, including Palestine, Greece, Asia Minor, and Rome.

In the words of New Testament scholar James Dunn, the "Jesus-tradition" was "a living tradition, a tradition that was evidently adaptable to different needs and diverse contexts" (qtd. in The Jesus Legend by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, 229-30). That tradition was rooted in historical fact, but was lived out in the present, with the belief that Jesus was the resurrected, living Lord of Lords.

The authors of The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition also point out that Paul writes of the "meekness and gentleness of Christ" (2 Cor 10:1), as well as his profound humility (Phil 2:5-7), and that Paul "consistently held up Jesus’ life—and his own life as modeled on Jesus’ life—as examples to be emulated (1 Cor 11:1). In light of this, it cannot be regarded as a coincidence that Paul’s own thought, attitude and conduct paralleled closely what we find in the Jesus of the Gospels" (209).

This is especially notable because it shows that Paul understood Jesus as a real, historical person, not as a mythic savior figure with little or no connection to earthly life. For first-century Jews and Greeks alike, it was taken for granted that it was only possible for a community or group to imitate the character and behavior of someone who was real and whose life was known. This is part of the reason the Gospels were written: to preserve and present the words and actions of Jesus, so that, in the words of Paul, readers would "be conformed to the image of his Son" (Rom 8:29; cf. 1 Cor 11:1).

The Living Christ

 
Jean Cardinal Daniélou (1905-74), the great patristic scholar and theologian, wrote about Paul’s understanding of Jesus in Christ and Us (Sheed & Ward, 1961). He argued that "it was completely pointless to insist on the human details of the life of Jesus; first, because they were not questioned in Paul’s circle, and second, because they were not what mattered most."

Daniélou was not, of course, dismissing the importance of historical fact, but was emphasizing the importance of priority. "What did matter," he explained, "was the witness borne to the Sovereignty of Jesus. That is why, even when he mentions features of Jesus’ history, Paul always give them their theological meaning" (4-5). Daniélou noted the danger of Jesus simply being seen merely as a great historical figure of the past rather than who he is today. "Paul’s personal gospel," he wrote, "is to proclaim that Jesus lives."

But that is not the gospel of the critics who believe Paul was the founder and inventor of Christianity. To the extent that they might acknowledge some sort of gospel, it is a myth—perhaps inspiring, fascinating, and even admirable—but nonetheless a myth only. But for Paul and for all true Christians, Jesus is no myth, but is alive and real—"a stumbling block" to many, "but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor 1:23-24).
 
 
Originally appeared in This Rock Magazine, volume 20, no. 6. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: GodandScience.org)