Doherty quotes Romans 10:9 from the KJV and remarks: "For all the discussion about faith which he indulges in throughout his letters, Paul never itemizes the one element of faith we would expect . . . that Jesus of Nazareth, a human being . . . was in fact the Son of God and Messiah."
With seemingly deliberate obtuseness, Ted starts out: "Doherty doesn't give a good example of what he expects." Then he goes on: "He thinks we should expect Paul to say something about who Jesus had been on earth." No, actually, what Doherty and we who agree with him think we should expect Paul to say is something indicating that he believed Jesus was a man who had once been on earth. We think that if Paul had believed such a thing, then he would have, at least once in a while, made such a belief more obvious.
As always with historicists, Ted is forced to read volumes between the lines of what Paul wrote. Thus:
The passage above is Paul's belief about what brings salvation. A major theme of the preceding chapters is salvation through faith in things unseen. The resurrection brings salvation. Therefore the faith should be expressed in terms of the resurrection.
For starters, Paul nowhere says that salvation is all about and only about the resurrection. At the very least, it is also and equally about the crucifixion. (It is furthermore about believing that the person who was crucified and resurrected was the son of God and, still furthermore, that he was the messiah.)
But now, what about "faith in things unseen"? Actually, that works just fine. The crucifixion was unseen because it didn't happen in this world. The resurrection was unseen because it didn't happen in this world. The only way for anyone to know about them was to have had a revelation from God, or to have been told about them by someone (such as Paul) who had had the revelation. Likewise for the identity of the person who was crucified and resurrected.
According to Ted, "it is not surprising to me that Paul doesn't write something like 'if thou shalt confess with thy mouth that Jesus of Nazareth taught us of salvation and proved it by miraculous signs, thou shalt be saved.'" Of course it isn't, because Paul never thought such a thing and nobody thinks he did. Even assuming a historical Jesus, the earliest Christians weren't telling people that they had to believe that certain teachings originated with Jesus. What they were telling people was that they had to believe certain teachings. The question is: When anyone asked "Why must I believe those things?" what were they then told? If the teachings originated with a historical Jesus, we should expect the answer to have been, "Because our Lord Jesus told us these things while he was with us." But that was never Paul's answer. Neither, so far as we can tell from the extant writings, was it ever the answer of any other early leader of the Christian movement.
"It is clear," says Ted, "that Paul's conviction was that it was faith in the resurrection of a sinless man--a concept supported in his works in many places--that enables salvation." Yes, that is quite clear. But how were Christians supposed to know that a sinless man was resurrected? On the historicist assumption, in Paul's time there were numerous men still alive who had known Jesus and had witnessed his resurrection, and Paul was personally acquainted with at least some of them. But he never cites their testimony as men who had known Jesus. If we get anything at all from Paul, it is that many men had had visions of a risen Christ. It is just not credible that he would have thought their testimony to his ministry to have been so completely irrelevant to anything he had say about Jesus.
This is especially so with regard to the essentials of salvation. Whatever the first Christians thought you had to believe in order to be saved, did not one of them at least imagine that Cephas, or James, or somebody -- anybody -- had heard Jesus say something on the subject? And if they did, why didn't Paul ever say so?
Oh, but some of them did say so, according to Ted. And to prove it, he gives us I Peter, whose author "claimed to have been a witness of the sufferings of Christ." Now, I Peter was not written by any actual witness, and I think Ted knows that or at least is aware of the scholarly consensus on that issue. To be charitable, I'll suppose his argument to be that, absent a historical Jesus, it would never have occurred to anyone to pretend to have been a witness to his sufferings. But that depends on when I Peter was written. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a second-century provenance is probable. It is not disputed that by that time, some Christians were starting to think that the god-man they were worshiping had indeed spent a few years living among men in this world.
But even if that were the case, why doesn't the author tell us more about
what he was supposed to have witnessed? He says nothing more specific than that
he witnessed "the sufferings of Christ." If he was familiar with stories about
what Jesus' disciples had seen, why didn't he include any of them? His
letter is full of moral instructions and admonitions. Why didn't he
claim to have heard any of them from Jesus himself? Considering all that the writer
does not say, all that we may reasonably expect him to have said, his claim
to be "a witness of the sufferings of Christ" could mean almost anything. And if a
statement can mean anything, then it effectively means nothing.
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This page last updated on August 4, 2010.