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(2024)

Philosophy is nothing but a battle against common sense!
      —Martin Heidegger, Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion (1921/2023), p. 34

Part C: Good Form (Morphe); or, Aristotle in Paul’s Sources

1. The Philippian Christ Hymn that Paul Quotes
2. The Nature of Faith (Pistis)
     2.1 The Inner Conflict
3. Two Key Interpretations of the Cross in Paul
4. Approaching the Literary Form of Gospel
5. The Incarnation of Jesus (or Jesus as the Law Personified/Incarnate)
6. The Difference between Jesus and Paul
     6.1 Similarities
     6.2 Key Differences at the Core of the Messages of Jesus (J) and Paul (P)
7. Paul’s Conversion (9:1-21)
8. Returning to the Philippian Christ Hymn
9. The Gospels as Bios: Subversive Biographies and the Shadow of Socrates
10. Conclusion

ABSTRACT: This is Part C of a three-part literary application and defense of Robyn Faith Walsh’s recent (2021) hypothesis that the Gospels are not, as is usually thought, the product of literate spokespersons conveying the oral tradition of their community, but rather are birthed out of networks of elite Greco-Roman-Jewish writers in dialogue with one another, not downtrodden illiterate peasants. For example, what if the empty tomb narrative did not originate in the oral tradition of a Christian community, but in empty tomb apotheosis narratives that the author had read from ancient novels like that of Chariton? As a literary test of a hypothesis, I ask what predictions we can make of the kinds of concepts that we should find in the New Testament on Walsh’s literary elite education model, compared to what we should find if the oral tradition model is correct. I show that Walsh’s approach is certainly plausible and makes good sense of the evidence, such as pervasive intertextual haggadic midrash (Jewish) and mimesis (Greek) going on in writing the Gospels, which seems less likely on the “oral tradition of the community” hypothesis. In other words, what sorts of predictions about the text can we make to test Walsh’s hypothesis? If the writers are the product of elite Greco-Roman education (paideia), then certainly the hallmarks of such an education should be visible in the writing. New Testament Jewish intertextuality can be explained away by claiming an oral culture where everyone just has the scriptures memorized (though why a peasant farmer would have the time or inclination to do such a thing is unclear), but what if there was an equal amount of Greco-Roman intertextuality in the New Testament (as Dennis MacDonald has long argued)? And how might this kind of elite Greco-Roman Jewish-educated writer make us rethink core issues, like Jewish polysemy techniques/puzzles in reading the New Testament? My aim is not to extensively recapitulate or assess Walsh’s presentation, but to see if the New Testament writers were experts in Greco-Roman/Jewish literary practices and were sophistically engaging in the content from those traditions beyond what one might expect from a mere literate member of a community enshrining oral traditions about Jesus. Walsh’s critique of the community oral tradition model is important because that model is what bridges the gap from the opaque period of Jesus’ life and death in the 30s through Paul (who is silent on the details of Jesus’ life) to the destruction of the Temple in the 70s, when Mark’s gospel appears. A few bare details aside, without this chain of sources, reconstruction of the events of Jesus’ life is essentially impossible.

1. The Philippian Christ Hymn that Paul Quotes

It has taken nearly 200 years of critical New Testament and comparative religion scholarship to realize that it is a mistake to interpret Jesus’ sacrifice in terms of the pagan idea of appeasing divine wrath, rather than to interpret it for what it actually is: an expression of the Jewish idea of divine forgiveness. The world should not be forgiven for the horrific and humiliating torture and impalement of God’s specially beloved/agapetos Jesus (and yet is forgiven). We see the same theme in the Jewish case of Jesus’ most famous ancestor, David (and in the penitential Psalms and the story of Jonah generally), who doesn’t at all deserve forgiveness for raping Bathsheba and killing her husband Uriah, and yet God forgives. David says: “For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:16-17). Matthew includes Bathsheba among the four mothers that he mentions, calling her not the wife of David, but the wife of Uriah, the man David murdered (Matthew 1:6). The issue is having a change of heart/mind (metanoia) that makes it possible for God to forgive.

Philosophically, we explored this in terms of philosophy and such things as Aristotle’s notion of athanatizing/godliness/deathlessness and Socrates’ prayer to Asclepius in the Phaedo. We will build on this below with Plato’s notion of the Demiurge in Timaeus and later neo-Platonic thought. The Platonic Demiurge is often thought of as the personification of the divine in human thinking, just as the philosopher’s deathlessness/athanatizein intends divine comportment in human life. Plato used the term Demiurge as the godly one who takes the preexisting materials of chaos, arranges them according to the models of eternal forms, and produces all of the physical things of the world.

Here we’ll consider the angst in Paul’s theology due to his difficulty with his churches falling away from the faith, since the sin of lack of faith is the one sin that God can’t remedy by forgiving. Paul says: “For this reason, when I could bear it no longer, I sent to find out about your faith; I was afraid that somehow the tempter had tempted you and that our labor had been in vain” (1 Thessalonians 3:5). This will be related to the Antichrist. Mark makes a similar point when he says: “These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them” (Mark 4:15). Since Christ teaches to go beyond the letter of the law (e.g., in the prohibition of adultery) to the stricter spirit (geist) of the law in which it was intended (adultery is even a lustful eye), a life in the spirit is constantly falling short (“all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”). But the key issue is your Christ mind/disposition.

Jesus as an ancient philosophical sage, the “Living Law,” said that the whole of the law is to be interpreted through the lens of love of God above all else, and of love of neighbor as yourself to the extent of even loving your enemy more than yourself, exemplified by Jesus going to the cross to open the world’s eyes to how horrible they had become. Paul teaches in precisely this way, and thus is to be interpreted through the lens of an ancient philosopher:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be arrogant, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink, for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:14-21)

The mandate in Mark that love of enemy is more important than self is the whole point of Jesus going to the cross to open his enemies’ eyes. When your heart is crushed (contrite) when you realize what you (vicariously) did to God’s specially beloved Jesus, this produces what Paul calls a “godly grief which produces a repentance that leads to salvation” (2 Corinthians 7:10), which is why Matthew says the poor in spirit are given the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3). Given these preliminary thoughts, let’s consider the philosophical content in Paul’s thought.

In the previous installments (Part A: “Jesus in the Light of Greco-Roman Philosophy and Highly Sophisticated Engagement with the Old Testament” & Part B: “The Gospels and the Prayer of Socrates Thanking Asclepius“) of this three-part series, I’ve been applying Robyn Faith Walsh’s thesis that the sources about Jesus were authors who had a paidea education, not the oral tradition of a community related by a literate member of the community. We have seen this with the Gospels, but now let us consider this in Paul’s letters. To begin with, let’s consider Morphe/Form and The Pre-Pauline Philippian Christ Poem:

who, though he existed in the form (morphe) of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form (morphe) of a slave,
    assuming human likeness.
    And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

Therefore God exalted him even more highly
    and gave him the name
    that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

(Philippians 2:6-11)

It is remarkable that in the early source that Paul is quoting here we see a poem built around the Greek concept of morphe/form. There have been countless interpretations of this term here in Paul, but a helpful recent treatment is Andrew Perriman, author of In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul (2022). Perriman notes:

The opening clause of the famous encomium celebrating the strange career of Jesus in Philippians 2:6-11 is usually translated “being in the form of God.” This is sometimes tendentiously paraphrased: “in the form and unchanging essence of God” (AMP), “truly God” (CEV), “like God in every way” (ERV), “by nature God” (EHV), “in very nature God” (NIV), “as God is” (NLV), and so on. So here’s the point. The morphē of a person or thing is always the outward appearance—and this is true even in those philosophical texts where it is purported to mean “essence” or “substance.” For the details see my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. Jews do not speak about the morphē of God, first, because God is invisible; secondly, because the term was widely used with reference to the Greek gods and demigods and to the statues and images by which they were represented…. The only way to translate the opening clause of the encomium, therefore, is “being in the form of a god,” which means we must suppose that it has been composed from a pagan or post-pagan perspective. (Perriman, 2024)

This is a good starting point. We have everyone wanting to read morphe/form as nature or essence, yet for the Greeks it meant the “look” of something. To reconcile these two positions, let’s consider the essence of “look” for the Greeks. In the first article on Walsh I thought about the divine comportment in Aristotle as athanatizein or deathlessness/godliness, which was the hallmark of contemplative/theoria life. Now Plato also gives us an analysis of what for the Greeks would be a divine comportment with his image in the Timaeus of the demiurge-craftsman, where godliness is thought in a Greek way in terms of production. The divine Craftsman (“Demiurge,” dêmiourgos, 28a6) imitates eternal forms/models, imposing mathematical order on chaos to produce the ordered universe (kosmos). Demiurge originally meant “craftsman” or “artisan,” but gradually came to mean “producer,” and eventually “creator.” Jesus is similarly identified as a tektōn: “stone mason/architect/craftsman.” Rabbi Jason Sobel notes:

The Greek word tektōn can be translated as “stone mason” or “architect.” All these concepts are significant in reference to Jesus, since they connect back to Him as the architect of creation….

The first word of Genesis in Hebrew is bereshit (pronounced “ber-ee-sheet”), which is commonly translated as “in the beginning.” But bereshit can also be translated as “through the firstborn,” since the Hebrew letter bet is also the preposition “through,” and reshit (pronounced “re-sheet”) can mean “firstborn.” So Genesis 1:1 can be translated, “through the firstborn, God created the heavens and the earth.” And who is God’s Firstborn? It is Jesus. The New Testament tells us He was the “firstborn over all creation” (Colossians 1:15) and “the firstborn from the dead” (Revelation 1:5).

Jesus is the Tektōn, the Architect of all creation. This reading aligns perfectly with the apostle John’s understanding of creation. In John 1:3, he states, “through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.” (Gifford & Sobel, 2018, pp. 42-43)

Given this primacy of production in divine life, let us consider “form.” The word “form” has been used in a number of ways throughout the history of philosophy and aesthetics. It was early applied to Plato’s term eidos, by which he identified the permanent reality of the abstract entity/universal that makes a thing what it is, in contrast to the concrete particulars that are finite and subject to change. In the first article in this series, we took our clue from Homer that for the ancient Greeks “the gods don’t presence to everyone” enargeis (in fullness). Homer talks of how the goddess appeared incarnate/personified to Odysseus, but not so to Telemachus next to him. As Plato says in the Gorgias, being present/presencing is the everyday way that the Greeks understood Being (e.g., Beauty is present in the beautiful thing). Platonically, we might say that houseness presences fully in the mansion, in an average way in the bungalow, and deficiently in the dilapidated shack, though following Aristotle’s contradictory concept of presencing (Aristotelian realism, where form is not transcendent, but immanent/infused in matter), the idea is not manifesting in the particular, but the particular is creating the exemplar. So the mansion may be encountered as having a gaudy “look,” just as the shack may appear quaint. To take another example, Niagara Falls may appear as a wonder of the world to a tourist, but “as” noise pollution to a local resident. In a Christian context, we can see Jesus as God’s law incarnate, through whom the law is manifested and tangible in everything that he does and says, yet the Jewish leaders don’t experience this and see him as a criminal. Similarly, being a Christian is manifesting the love of Christ for all to see, like when forgiving dying Stephen spoke of his persecutors: “Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he died” (Acts 7:60).

What is the philosophical truth behind Plato’s Demiurge, compared to Aristotle’s athanatizein? The form (eidos in Plato) is most properly what is encountered prior to the actual thing at hand, such as the “look” of the table that the carpenter has before her mind’s eye prior to production. The form is understood to definitively determine the thing that we perceive. To understand the ancient Greeks here we need to note that the “look” is primarily thought of as a production, not just a perception.

Forming, as Martin Heidegger says, is enacted on something in the light of an anticipation of a model, guide, or standard of some sort. The painter, for instance, utilizes the paint and creates a painting according to a model—an idealized painting in her mind that is the actual painting beforehand, its ground. This model, which is anticipated beforehand, carries the ownmost sense of eidos (form), which is why the shaped or formed product is understood as a posterior likeness of the look or eidos, and is grounded in it. In this sense essence as form carries the sense. Another example is how a maple tree grows to be what it is with a view to (actualizing) the maple tree blueprint in the seed. So when Jarava Lal Mehta notes that “Idea or eidos means the look, the view presented by anything that confronts us, its visage” (Mehta, 1967, p. 416), this has to be thought of in an ancient Greek way—namely, that eidos primarily has the sense of the look of the thing prior to its coming into being. In this way we could not have the experience of beings that we do unless we already had in view, invisibly (aphanes, Heraclitus Fr. 54, “what does not appear”) by the mind’s eye, things like: variation/equality in order to encounter various things; a view of sameness/contrariety to encounter ourselves as self-same in each case; a view of symmetry and harmoniousness that allows us to arrange and construct things; and so on. With a seeing/having in view of the invisible (aphanes) ideas sameness/contrariety, disorder is re-created as an intelligible thing, hence the demiurge-craftsman divine comportment. The key issue is “encounter.” A child who encounters a triangle without knowing her shapes precisely does not encounter the triangle “as it is in itself” the way that a teenager studying geometry would, and even less so than the university math teacher. Being allows us to encounter beings as they really are. Regardless of whether we are able to define the essence of something, the eidos, in a proposition, we still have a certain familiarity with it. So if we go to market to buy strawberries, even if we do not know the definition of ‘strawberry,’ because we have strawberry before our mind’s eye, we are still able to return home with strawberries and not confusingly bring home, for instance, a parrot.

What all of this means for Plato’s imagery of the Demiurge is that the “exemplar is the look which is cited in advance, the look of that which makes up the outer aspect of the table—the ‘idea,’ the essence … the essence is not gleaned from the individual cases as their universal; it has its own origin” (Heidegger, 1937-1938/1994 [BQP], pp. 73-74). There is, in this regard, a productive seeing. The ‘look’ that is being discussed is also the one that we have in advance. Prior to actualization, then, the entity already was before (ti en einai), as anticipatory look in the mind. It is from the eidos that the formed thing receives its genos, which is not simply a group in the sense of genus, but rather its kind, family, or stock. In the case of ‘family,’ on the other hand, we would say that (C) “Smith is” on account of having been produced by (A) and (B). Aristotle had to correct Plato here.

Aristotle said that Being cannot be equivocal (homonumos) or univocal (sunonumos), but rather is analogical. Being is quite obviously not equivocal. On the other hand, it cannot be, as Plato said, genus like univocal, because the genus is what is common to many, which must then be differentiated into species. The genus cannot be included in what defines any of the species, for otherwise it would not be the genus. Heidegger gives the example of rationality, the determination of humans, as being included in the genus ‘living thing.’ In that case, plants, if they are living, would have to be rational. If Being were a genus and the different ways of being, such as being true and being possible were species, then insofar as these ways are something rather than not, the genus would have to be included in the species, which is impossible. Being, rather, is analogical. Health, for instance, is what is understood in general in something that possesses that condition (dehikon), or else something that produces health (poiein), or something that is an indication of health (semeion einai), or else something that is conducive to the recovery of health (phulatteiri). What is seen here is that while ‘health’ is general, it is not said of the various kinds in the same way, and so is not a genus. Rather, in all the different cases health is co-intended, and hence thought analogously—that is, one thinks the various kinds of health and thinks ‘health as such’ at the same time. So, Being is most primarily for the ancient Greeks what is always already co-intended (para) with the thing: for example, materiality is always co-present with the piece of chalk. Let us consider this another way. It cannot be the case, for instance, that ‘essence’ goes out to both ‘essence of kind’ in the sense of a commonality of many things, and ‘essence of Socrates’ in the same way, since the latter only goes out to one person. ‘Essence’ in these cases is not intended in the same way.

The notion of eidos as seeing-before is also brought out in what the ancient Greeks understood as the mathematical:

In Greek, the mathema are those things which are properly learnable, of which numbers are the exemplary case. These things are properly learnable because we already have them with us somehow. We say, for instance, that there are three books. We do not read ‘threeness’ off the books, but already have a vague idea of it, which enables us to identify the books as just these particular three/group. Given this particular instance of the mathematical, the mathematical in general is this dimension of the thing that is always already with us in an indeterminate way. The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they should be given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things. Therefore, Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the words ‘Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!’ These words do not mean that one must be educated in only one subject—’geometry,’ but that he must grasp the fundamental condition for the proper possibility of knowing is the knowledge of the fundamental presupposition of all knowledge and the position we take based on such knowledge (Heidegger, 1968 [WT], pp. 75-76).

Before a child learns her numbers, she still has the idea that the three pencils on her left belong together as a bunch, as opposed to the two pencils on her right that also “somehow belong together” as a different bunch (more than just artificial, indifferent abstracted “groups/generalizations”), like a family unit or team. Man always moves about in the mathematical in a vague way, and so understands the ball is “about a pound” before measuring it and making it explicit—hence Protagoras says that man is the measure of all things. Now that we have done some preparatory work on “form” for the ancient Greeks—in the sense of outward appearance, but also in its relation to nature (phusis) and essence in productive seeing—let’s apply this to the Philippian Christ hymn/poetry.

John W. Ritenbaugh comments:

The first word we need to consider is form in verse 6. It is the Greek morphe, for which English has no exact equivalent. Unlike “form” in English, morphe does not mean “shape.” It is a philosophical term that means “the outward expression of an inner essence.” We can derive an illustration of this definition from figure skating. One might say, “I went to the Winter Olympics, and the figure skater’s form was outstanding.” What is meant is that skater’s swift, rhythmic grace, and coordinated movements were an outward expression of his inward ability to skate expertly. (Ritenbaugh, 1994)

One of the classic distinctions in philosophy is between matter and form, such as when we say that something is made of sand (matter) and is in the “form” of a castle. Antiphon distinguished arruthmiston (compare Plotinus, Enneads V.8 [31], 1, 8) or indeterminate matter from ruthmos (structure/configuration—independently noted by Émile Benveniste and Heidegger). This was later understood as the Latin materia and forma. However, Aristotle’s understanding of hyle and morphe (commonly called matter and form) is not simply a restatement of Antiphon’s arruthmiston and ruthmos. Hyle and morphe do not mean what is intended in the Latin materia and forma. Aristotle doesn’t think Antiphon is wrong, but relegates his distinction to the lowest level of Being.

Hyle means something for production, in the sense that the wood from the woods is for table-making. Morphe is similar to Plato’s term eidos, although for Plato eidos is what is common (koinon) to the particular things, and hence relegated the eidos to an entirely different place from the particulars. Aristotle said that the eidos has to be understood as morphe manifested in the things. So, for example, chairness is merely present in the stool, but presences in an exemplary way the Queen’s throne: “Now that’s a chair!” The thing offers the eidos/morphe or “look” of a chair, be that look exemplary, average, or deficient.

Heidegger comments that we say of a painting by van Gogh, ‘[Now] this is art[!],’ or, when we see a bird of prey circling above the forest, ‘That is nature’ … [We do not say this in regard to anything, not] just when some piece of canvas hangs there smeared with dabs of colour, not even when we have just any old ‘painting’ there in front of us, but only when a being that we encounter steps forth preeminently into the appearance of a work of art …[W]e find what is phusis—[nature/essence]—like only where we come upon a placing into appearance; i.e., only where there is morphe. Thus morphe constitutes the essence of phusis, or at least co-constitutes it” (Heidegger, 1998c [PA—Phusis], p. 212). In normal language we sometimes speak of gods as incarnate when they manifest themselves in a human form: “This is the god incarnate.” It is in this sense that Heidegger is speaking of art here in relation to the ancient Greek notion of presencing. In the painting in front of us, for Plato it is as though ‘art’ itself is present incarnate in the painting, art personified, art manifest in the artwork, manifesting itself in its lustrous radiance through this painting. Aristotle again corrects Plato that the great work of art does not embody Art, but defines it, like how a great sculpture might set off a new general movement (like surrealism). How does this help us understand Jesus and why the Philippian Christ hymn is invoking the Aristotelian concept of form/morphe?

In reversing Platonism with Aristotle, we more thoughtfully penetrate what was thought in the ancient Greek philosophical world when we go from Plato’s Being as “common” to Being as “defining,” like when we speak of a defining moment of someone’s career. The great painting doesn’t simply express the idea of art in an exemplary way, but redefines art, perhaps inaugurating a new movement (e.g., surrealism). The first time that you see an eagle soaring, it’s not just that nature as such presences through the eagle (“Now that’s nature!”), but the experience redefines what nature means to us. Likewise, everything changes when your beloved says “I do”—love for you is redefined. This is the sense of how Jesus is portrayed. As the Law incarnate (discussed below), Jesus (i) thinks of the essence of the Law Platonically as love of God above all others, demonstrated through loving your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:28-34). He then (ii) goes one step further to redefine love: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43-45). In this, Jesus is the very (re)definition of love. Similarly, while Platonically the traditional definition of marriage may be an expression of our society, following Aristotle’s thought marriage is not some nebulous unchanging entity, but is redefined in the light of LGBTQ+ rights.

So in the hymn Paul is quoting poetry about Christ in circulation before him, poetry based on an Aristotelian philosophical lens of morphe/form. The term morphe is not otherwise used by Paul. In the poem Christ is in the morphē Theou or form of God, the law incarnate living a life of love of God and neighbor to the point of love of enemy more than self, and proclaiming the stricter spirit of the law (adultery is even a lustful eye)—while not striving to be God, unlike the religious leaders who manipulated God’s words to their own ends (such as trying to kill Jesus even though they knew that it wasn’t God’s will: John 18:28). Jesus then became in the form of a slave morphēn doulou, with a slave to God being the highest human calling and the meaning of life, to the point of death on a cross to circumcise the hearts of men with his wrongful death and awaken the law written on people’s hearts—the kingdom of God within—even in the hearts of the hard-hearted Pharisees. Because of his obedience unto death despite terror (Gethsemane), God exalted Jesus to a high status that he didn’t previously have.

As previously noted, ancient philosophy (like religion) wasn’t just conceptual hopscotch, but the way or art of living. The wise person lived according to rational and ethical principles, phronesis, just in Jesus’ case he lived so as to be the Law Incarnate, love of God above all else and love of neighbor as self, to the point of love of enemy more than self. For instance, “citing the Cynic teacher Demetrius, Seneca observes that it is far better to possess only a handful of philosophical maxims that one continually follows and puts into practice than to have a vast and thorough knowledge of philosophy that is rarely or never used (Ben. [On Benefits] 7.1.3)” (Thorsteinsson, 2018, p. 16). Likewise, applying Walsh, ancient faith didn’t just entail holding a certain set of beliefs, but rather reflected one’s disposition toward life. In this regard, we read from the author of James:

Faith without Works is Dead

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from works, and I by my works will show you faith. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is worthless? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and by works faith was brought to completion. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead. (James 2:14-26)

Let’s consider this in terms of Paul. Paul gives a teaching and admonitions, just like the Stoic-Cynic itinerant preachers of the time. Paul is from the birthplace of the Stoic enlightenment, after all. There is nothing special in the way that Paul presents this. Compare this to the words of the Athenians about him in Acts 17:17ff. Heidegger notes that Paul characterizes the religious life not in terms of having certain ideas, but as follows: “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have laid hold of it, but one thing I have laid hold of: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14). In a previous article I looked at Paul through the lens of Satan, and I will do something similar here in terms of the Antichrist. But some preparatory remarks need to be said first.

To recapitulate, Homer said that the gods don’t appear to everyone enargeis (in their fullness). He gives the example of Odysseus encountering the young woman as the goddess incarnate while the man beside him, Telemachus, did not see here in such godhood. One example I often use is how a tourist may be experiencing Niagara Falls as a wonder of the world, whereas a years-long resident nearby sees it as having a noise pollution “look.” These types of philosophical ideas perfectly encapsulate the pagan soldier seeing Jesus as a son of God/innocent, whereas others simply see him as a convicted criminal. The Jews, by contrast, need a sign like the resurrection appearances. Paul says:

For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:22-25)

In order to understand Paul’s argument here, we have to understand the difference in ancient Greek thought between circumspection (insight) and the highest valued Greek philosophical mode of thinking, wisdom/theoria/contemplation:

1. For the ancient Greek philosophers we see this where circumspection (insight) ultimately deals with the goal not of logos (discourse), but of nous (mind)—where the discourse ultimately ends. With the doctor, for instance, he deliberates with the goal of making the patient healthy. At some point, the doctor will come to an insight, an aesthesis, a straightforward perception that shows him what he must do in order to cure the patient, at which point there can be action. The outermost limit of the deliberation is the eschaton, at which point the insight arrives, a straightforward perception, the point at which we “see states of affairs as a whole” (Heidegger, 1924-1925/2003 [PS], p. 110). This is the same as in geometry where a polygon is resolved into triangles, and the triangle is seen as a simple whole. For the doctor, it is never a question of whether to heal, since, as Heidegger says, this is the meaning/disposition/eidos of his existence, and hence already posited from the outset. The notion of the insight follows, among other things, the ancient Greek mathematicians. Heidegger comments: “The Greek mathematicians did not understand axioms as fundamental principles. What they had in mind can be seen in their paraphrase of the word: axiomata are koinai ennoiai. Plato used the word often; it means ‘insight,’ ‘to have an insight’ and indeed with the mind’s eye” (1955-1956/1993 [PR], p. 15). The soldier at the cross was studying all that had gone on with Jesus and had a flash of insight: he was God’s son/an innocent man.
2. For ancient Greek thinkers, the type of deliberative thinking above is subordinate to wisdom, which is comporting yourself to that which always is, and so is a remedy to disorderliness and fickly and erratically going from one distraction to the next. It is athanatizein, godliness/deathlessness, and Aristotle says that only gods (and animals) delight in solitude. In this regard, the nous of circumspection (insight) is different from that of wisdom in that circumspection (insight) only deals with things in the here and now, and hence with things that could be otherwise. The deliberation that results in the insight about how to treat the patient in front of us is entirely case-dependent, and occurs in the blink of an eye, a momentary look at what is momentarily concrete, which as such can always be otherwise. On the other hand, the noein in wisdom is a looking upon that which is aei, that which is always present in sameness, like the Platonic idea of Beauty or Justice. Time (the momentary and eternal) here functions to discriminate between the noein in circumspection (insight) and the one in wisdom/sophia. Heidegger indicates that wisdom happens through theorein, which means that there is no production involved in wisdom, but rather an idleness, a “not accomplishing anything … but a mere onlooking, a lingering with the object” (1924-1925/2003 [PS], p. 47) that most properly uncovers beings. The objects of wisdom are those things that always are, aei (the world, Heidegger, 1924-1925/2003 [PS], p. 48), and hence cannot be otherwise. The objects of wisdom are obtained through seeing with the actual eye and the mind’s eye, because seeing is the sense that allows for the greatest determinations of things. The eternal unchanging objects of wisdom are most highly prized because they bring calmness and order to the erratic soul. But what about Christianity?

So we are after the good life; and whereas for the ancient Greeks the good life is the erotic (eros: desire as lack) contemplative life that transfigures the thinker, the good life for the Christian is the agapeic (agape: desire as creative surplus) service to widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy as more important than self, which transfigures those others. In fact, it is integrating all of these comportments/attunements that leads to the complete life for Paul, hence he writes:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Philippians 4:8)

2. The Nature of Faith (Pistis)

These thoughts provide a context that allows us to consider what Paul means by faith (pistis). Today by “faith” we usually mean holding some ideas to be true (e.g., that Christ was crucified to pay my sin debt and that he was resurrected). This modern understanding really took hold in a path opened by the doubting Thomas and walked by Martin Luther. With Luther the meaning of truth morphed from being about the correctness of the proposition to being about certainty because what had to be free from doubt and absolutely certain was the salvation of the soul. What Paul had in mind by pistis, by contrast, was not just belief in the crucifixion and resurrection, but the Christian disposition as a whole and the kind of world that is encountered. We see an analogous form when we say that beings may present themselves to a schizophrenic as “conspiracy saturated.” Faith for Paul meant encountering the world “as” Christ saturated, such as hearing the cry of suffering of widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy in everyone that you meet. This actually un-veils the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy as a reaction against the “person-solipsism” of the Enlightenment with a restoration of “the context (e.g., schizophrenic; Christian; Jew; Muslim; etc.)” and how beings’ presence announce that context. We see this in an extreme sense with mental illness, religiousness, and so on, but the trick is to see how this approach is also the fundamental way that humans are in the world without knowing it. A good illustration of this is Heidegger’s example of the worn-out peasant shoes that presence/appear announcing a world of abject poverty:

The context/world of abject poverty evoked by the peasant shoes is obviously not being understood univocally, as Plato would have it, but analogically as with Aristotle. We see this in the fundamentally different way that the peasant shoes evoke the world of penniless toil and, by contrast, the world of abject poverty evoked by the homeless beggar’s sign (e.g., “Please help—God bless”). The peasant laborer’s world is one of terrible poverty despite backbreaking labor; by contrast, the beggar is in poverty while not working:

In this we can understand how in a productive seeing it’s not as Plato would have it—that the form/idea of Poverty is presencing in the same way through the shoes and sign—but the shoes and sign are evoking two different worlds of abject poverty.

Now, applying this, one of the more interesting debates in Pauline scholarship is the Pistis Christou debate. In Galatians 3:22 we read: “But the scripture has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through the faith of Jesus Christ [a] might be given to those who believe.” We are given the alternate reading for [a] “through faith in Jesus Christ.” The question then arises: which is meant by faith? Does salvation come through belief in Christ? Through Christ’s faithfulness? Or through some third thing? Kevin Grasso convincingly argues that faith in Jesus is grammatically impossible here, and the faithfulness of Jesus is grammatically unlikely, whereas a third option is the best fit for what saves: “the Christ Faith/Religion,” not anyone’s particular faith. In other words, you are saved by practicing the Christian faith. Why? In so arguing, Grasso has hit close to Heidegger’s reading in the 1920-1921 lecture course on religion published as Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.

2.1 The Inner Conflict

For Heidegger, Paul has renounced worldliness and fleshliness, but can only truly grow in such a disposition if God helps him. Paul says:

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that, when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, with my mind I am enslaved to the law of God, but with my flesh I am enslaved to the law of sin. (Romans 7:14-25)

Heidegger notes that Paul says: “‘Become my descendants!’ He renounces all worldly means and significance and yet fights his way through. By renouncing the worldly way of defending himself, the hardship of his life is increased. It is almost hopeless to enter into such a context of accomplishment. The Christian has the awareness that this factuality cannot be gained by his own strength, but comes from God—the phenomenon of the effect of grace” (Heidegger, 1924-1925/2003 [PS], p. 110). The resurrected Christ-in-you helps you to renounce the worldly and fleshly as you live out and participate in the Christ Faith, the manual for salvation.

Heidegger argues for Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:29-32: “There is little time left, Christ’s return is imminent, the Christian lives constantly in the only-yet, which increases his distress. [Why distress? Because before Jesus the Antichrist comes as a test to see whether believers will attain glory or be annihilated]. The compressed temporality is constitutive of Christian religiosity: a ‘just yet’; there is no time left to procrastinate. Christians should be such that those who have a wife have her in such a way that they do not have her, etc.” (Heidegger, 1924-1925/2003 [PS], p. 108). Why is there such an urgency? Like numerous scholars today, Heidegger thinks that 2 Thessalonians is authentically Pauline, and what you get if you put the two letters to Thessalonica together is a vision of anxiety at the coming of Jesus (Parousia) because the Antichrist comes first in the guise of God to deceive (particularly to deceive the Church). There is much debate, especially among conservative evangelicals, about whether Christians will still be on Earth to be tempted by the Antichrist, but Paul seems to think that they will be, as Alan Hultberg notes. In fact, scholars like Bart Ehrman don’t think that a rapture before or after the Antichrist is in the Bible at all. Ehrman comments:

At that point I had come to realize that the whole idea of a “Rapture” in which the dead would rise to meet God and then the living believers in Jesus would be taken up to meet them all in the clouds was a metaphorical description of how in the final analysis, however the end comes, God will make right all that is wrong in this world. The passage is ultimately about how God is sovereign. This world may be a cesspool of misery and suffering now, but God will overcome all that is evil and will repay all who do it, and he will reward his faithful, somehow or other. It was a passage meant to inspire hope, not a passage that was meant literally as a indicating a calendrical event that was to occur sometime next Thursday. (Ehrman, 2015)

In Paul’s view the punishment for a nonbeliever or a “Christian in name only” is annihilation, and so the true Christian life is about renouncing self and loving others so as to grow in one’s participation in the Christ Faith to be “leveled up” enough to recognize/discern the Antichrist when he comes. Paul thus contrasts those believers who are worldly and pleasantly await Parousia against true believers who are in angst at the imminence of the Antichrist test ahead.

It is in being implicated in the wrongful death of Jesus by the world that turned on him that circumcises our hearts, leading to a change of attitude (metanoia) and the indwelling of Christ in us that grows and prepares us for the test of the Antichrist’s deception. Heidegger comments on two types of believers: lost ones who have broken off works of love and simply pleasantly await the Parousia, and those working all the more fervently in angst to love others. In fact, maintaining purity was so essential for Paul that he instructed his churches not to even associate those with those “Christians in name only,” and once even instructed a church to kick out such a fleshly member. Paul says:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral or greedy or an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler. Do not even eat with such a one. (1 Corinthians 5:9-11)

Heidegger notes:

Thus the second letter to the Thessalonians is easy to understand, despite some difficulties. The situation has changed compared to the first letter: The words “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” are understood correctly by some (quiet[?]waiting), and incorrectly by others. Some leave off working, stand around and chatter because they expect him every day. But those who have understood him must be desperate because the need is increasing and everyone stands alone before God…. The event of the parousia is thus, according to its sense of events, directed towards the people who (cf. 2:10) can be divided into those who are called and those who are rejected. The rejected (άπολλύμενοι) have had their minds blinded by the Lord of this world, i.e., Satan. They cannot δοκιμάζειν (I Thess 5:21), i.e., test….

Paul sees these two types of people under the pressure of his preaching profession in life. The δέχεσθαι αγάπην (love as consummation) άληθέιας refers to a context of consummation that enables the δοκιμάζειν of the divine. Only on the basis of this δοκιμάζειν does the knower see the great danger that threatens the religious person: he who does not accept the consummation is not able to see the Antichrist (άντικείμενος έπι πάντα λεγόμενον θεόν) appearing under the appearance of the divine, he falls prey to him without realizing it. The danger only becomes apparent to the believer; it is precisely against the believer that the appearance of the Antichrist is directed, it is a “test” for those who know. The άπολλύμενοι believe (2, 11) the ψεύδος, they allow themselves to be deceived precisely in their highest busyness about the “sensation” of the parousia, they fall away from the original concern for the divine. That is why they will be absolutely destroyed—Paul does not recognize a mere post-existence of the damned far from God—and lose the ζωή. The appearance of the Antichrist in the guise of the divine facilitates the falling away tendency of life; in order not to fall prey to it, one must therefore be constantly on the alert.

The appearance of the Antichrist is not just a passing event, but something that determines the fate of everyone, including those who already believe. As άντικείμενος, who opposes the divine, he is the enemy of the believer, even though he appears in the form of the divine itself. Revelation (άποκαλυφθήναι) is only such for those who possess the possibility of discernment. Hence the admonition (II Thess 2, 3) that they should not be deceived. 2, 11: Those who are rejected believe the lie, they are not indifferent, they are very busy, but they deceive themselves and fall prey to the Antichrist. (1921/2023, pp. 99-101)

Since the crucifixion/resurrection enacted a levelling/factory reset, the believer must thereafter grow in this anti-worldliness/fleshliness to become holy/pure enough to be able to recognize and overcome the deception of the Antichrist. Heidegger notes that since Christ became identical with the law, the law died with him (likewise for Paul per Galatians 2:19). In order to escape the Antichrist as Antichrist, one must first have entered into the context of the religious situation; for the Antichrist appears as God. As previously noted, “faith” here does not merely mean a “holding to be true” of certain ideas, but rather growing in the Christ-faith. Hence, we read: “We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing” (2 Thessalonians 1:3). If faith were just taking beliefs to be true, a growing faith here would make no sense—but we can see clearly what is meant. Regarding the authorship of 2 Thessalonians, Heidegger adds:

If parousia depends on how I live, then I am unable to keep up the faith and love that is demanded of me, then I come close to despair. Those who think this way fear in a real sense, in the sign of true sorrow, whether they will be able to carry out the works of faith and love and persevere until the decisive day. Paul, however, does not help them, but only increases their distress (II Thess 1, 5: εν δείγμα τής δικαίας κρίσεως). Only Paul himself could have written this. The overloadedness (plerophoria) of the expression in the second letter has its very specific motivation and is a sign of authenticity. (Heidegger, 1921/2023, p. 94)

In Romans, Paul says the following:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who is faithful, to the Jew first and also to the Greek; for the righteousness of God is revealed in it from faith(fulness) unto faith(fulness) (ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν), just as it is written, “but the righteous one will live from faith(fulness).” (Romans 1:16-17)

Tim Gombis remarks: “Regarding ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν (“from faith[fulness] unto faith[fulness]”), there is nothing in the text of Romans that ensures any singular interpretation. Is this God’s faithfulness that elicits believers’ faith? Is it believers’ faith that grows, one step of faith at a time? Any interpretation fits here, frankly” (Gombis, 2013). We see then a “Christ Faith” approach is needed to go beyond the faith in Jesus/faithfulness of Jesus dichotomy that doesn’t fit the text syntactically or semantically. In this regard, in the Jewish Annotated New Testament Mark D. Nanos says:

Righteousness, or justice, cf. Heb “tzedek.” The one who is righteous … faith, see Hab 2.4, which can be translated, “But the righteous/just one out of faithfulness will live”; the verse here can refer to believers living faithfully, or to Christ as the “righteous one who lives out faithfulness.” To his faithfulness Jews and Gentiles are obliged to respond in faithful obedience. See Isa 51.4-5; 52.10; Ps 98.2-3; Rom 5.18-19. (Nanos, 2017, p. 288)

Nanos adds:

Faith (Pistis Rom 1.8) Paul uses pistis and cognates throughout the letter. The word is usually translated “faith,” but the alternative “faithfulness” is a better translation for its uses in the Pauline Epistles. Pistis does not signify mere acknowledgment of a truth claim; nor does it stand in contrast to works. Rather, it signifies loyalty and trust, which include appropriate behavior; hence, faithfulness. In 3.3, the NRSV recognizes that pistis tou theou is not “faith of God” but “faithfulness of God”; see 1 Thess 1.8-9. (2017, p. 287)

3. Two Key Interpretations of the Cross in Paul

Walsh accepts the growing body of literature suggesting that Paul is a source for Mark. For example, instead of thinking that the Lord’s supper goes back to an oral tradition of the historical Jesus, we should take Paul at his word: that he learned about this supper through the divination of Jesus. So Paul is an important key here.

Regarding Paul as a teacher, Heidegger notes: “We are confronted with a context that seems to be self-evident: that Paul gives a teaching and admonitions, just like the Stoic-Cynic itinerant preachers of the time. There is nothing special in the way he presents it. Compare the words of the Athenians about him (Acts 17:17 ff.)” (1921/2023, p. 71). As background, we are told in Acts that Paul starts out as a highly educated Jew, a student of the renowned Gamaliel from Tarsus, the birthplace of the Stoic enlightenment. Gamaliel holds a reputation in the Mishnah for being one of the greatest teachers in all the annals of Judaism. Paul’s claim on Gamaliel as his teacher is doubtful since Gamaliel preached tolerance of the Christians, whereas violent young Paul (as Saul) was their persecutor. There are similar questions as to whether Jesus ever met John the Baptist. Because of how teachings were recorded at the time, it is difficult to attribute any specific teaching directly to Gamaliel, but reliably attributed to him is the idea that he worked in “polysemy (multiple meanings) of concepts” and outlined different levels of students with a fourfold figurative sense in which students are fish:

1. A ritually impure fish: one who has memorized everything by study, but has no understanding, and is the son of poor parents.
2. A ritually pure fish: one who has learned and understood everything, and is the son of rich parents.
3. A fish from the Jordan River: one who has learned everything, but doesn’t know how to respond.
4. A fish from the Mediterranean Sea: one who has learned everything, and knows how to respond.

Similarly, regarding learning Paul famously said: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:11-12). The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (2013) notes that “it is clear Israelite writers, like their counterparts in Mesopotamia and Egypt, were particularly skillful in employing polysemy” (Noegel, 2013, p. 178). Ian Liddle comments adds:

‘Derash’ literally means ‘search.’ What we are searching for, when we look for something at the ‘derash’ level of understanding, is something deeper, generally an allegorical or a homiletic application of the text. The apostle Paul was accomplished at interpreting Scripture at the derash level. A good example is Paul’s treatment of the story of Sarah (who remains unnamed as such) and Hagar in Galatians 4. Paul compares these two women to two covenants. Hagar represents the law of Moses, received at Mount Sinai, which bears children for “slavery” (Gal 4:24) to the “weak and worthless spiritual principles” (Gal 4:9) of legalism, as practised by the Pharisees in “the present Jerusalem” (Gal 4:25). Sarah represents the New Covenant of “the Jerusalem above” (Gal 4:26), and she is the mother of all those who have faith in Jesus (both Messianic Jews and Gentile believers)—the “children of promise” (Gal 4:28) who are free. (Liddle, 2021)

Paul is twofold: Christian persecutor Saul had a major transformative experience and grew into the Christian Paul the Apostle. Saul was a starting point that had to be overcome to get to Paul. There seems to be a conceptual ambiguity in Paul’s understanding of the cross that is going to evolve into the duality of the penal substitution vs. moral influence theology that we see in Mark (if indeed Mark used Paul, which seems to be the case). The idea here is that we are guilty, but through a theological sleight of hand, accepting Christ makes our sin invisible to God because we clothe ourselves in Christ’s righteousness. Jason Staples notes that this is a very problematic reading of Paul. For one thing, Paul repeatedly notes that we will be judged on our actions (Romans 2:5-11; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Galatians 6:7-8; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; and so on). For another, the Torah provides mechanisms for forgiveness and atonement. If there is one thing that the God of the Old Testament can do, it’s forgive—just consider the penitential psalms or the story of Jonah.

It is of utmost interpretive importance that Paul claims a duality of presentation: he presented his message in a Jewish way to win the Jews, and in a pagan way to win the pagans (1 Corinthians 9:20-22). As has been well-documented in the more recent secondary literature, the idea of a dying rising god saving people was a common pagan theme, so it would make sense to see substitution in Paul presenting his message to pagans in one way (the judicial model outlined below) at a level of understanding that they would be comfortable with. But this superficial presentation would always have a more essential Jewish element of participation presented in another way (the participation model) to a different audience.

Although Colossians was not written by Paul, it is still an important early piece where we read not of debts being erased because of penalty payment, but instead that God forgives:

And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it. (Colossians 2:13-15)

In his lecture course on the differences between Paul and Jesus, Ehrman summarizes the two main Pauline lenses on the meaning of the cross thus:

1. One is the judicial model, which is justification by faith that brings about a not guilty verdict. The problem is that people disobey God, breaking his laws—everyone sins. Not necessarily in violating the laws of the Torah, but by failing to fulfill God’s wants. Like Adam, the penalty is death, and the penalty of sin is “death to God” for all time. The death of Christ is substitutionary, paying the penalty for you. Christ did not owe the penalty because he was without sin. But you have to accept the payment; if you decline it, the substitution doesn’t work. The resurrection shows that God accepted the payment of Christ’s death because death was no longer in effect—because it was overcome by Christ. You appropriate the payment by trusting in these things, which is justification by faith.
2. The other major model in Paul is the participationist model where sin is not primarily man breaking God’s laws, but sin as a cosmic power in the world trying to enslave people, forcing them to be alienated from God. Paul talks about being under the power of sin, being enslaved by it, and being liberated from it. You can try to fight sin, the Devil, and death, but they are stronger than you and so you will lose the battle. In this model we can be liberated not because a debt is paid, but because Christ’s death was a victory over sin. Christ conquered the power of sin because Christ conquered the power of death. The power of death is the greatest of powers because it most keeps you separate from God, and so if death is conquered, all of the subservient powers are also conquered. Great for Jesus, but what about us? You need to appropriate it, not through faith as in the previous model, but by making Christ’s death and resurrection your own in another way. In Romans 6 Paul says that this is done through baptism. Paul thought that when you were under the water you experienced a mystical union with Christ in his death and resurrection. The body of Christ that you are mystically unified with is Christ as well as the other believers that you become one with. You are submerged as Christ was buried, and are one with Christ and so participate with him in his victory. Sin and death no longer have power over you. (Ehrman, 2023)

Ehrman’s suggestion that “sin and death no longer have power over you” seems to somewhat miss the mark. For Paul is clear that Christ has interrupted sin with his wrongful death as God’s beloved, but this doesn’t simply erase the control of sin. To recapitulate from above, Paul says:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that, when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched person that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am enslaved to the law of God, but with my flesh I am enslaved to the law of sin. (Romans 7:15-25)

If Christ’s death and resurrection accomplished everything, then why does Christ have to perpetually advocate for us in intercession with God for us to be forgiven (in Hebrews 7:25; Romans 8:34)? There is movement away from interpreting Jesus’ death in Paul to be a substitution for us receiving God’s wrath. Pastor Emeritus Fred R. Anderson (not the Gary Anderson cited in Part A) notes:

Paul never uses sacrificial language to speak of what Christ accomplished on the cross. For Paul, the cross was God incarnate in the Son dealing with sin on behalf of the world — freeing it of sin’s power of death (Romans 8:3). Paul only uses the word “sacrifice” once: “For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). That can only rightly be understood in the context of Passover, when God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt. Paul uses the image to remind the Corinthians that Christ’s death freed them from their slavery to sin. Therefore, they were to clean out the corrosive residue that was threatening the church in Corinth. (Anderson, 2024)

It is Christ as love of God above all else, and love of neighbor to the point of love of enemy, that is a lens through which to view the entire law that Christ’s wrongful death circumcises our heart to reveal (what Paul calls the law written on our hearts). As noted earlier, it’s odd that Paul would be the great hero of Luke, and yet Luke apparently does not have Paul’s letters (since Acts contradicts Paul’s letters in many ways). But if the New Testament is operating in an economy of polysemy as elite educated authors exchange ideas in literary networks, maybe Luke saw something further and more essential in Paul, a moral influence cross rather than a penal substitution cross?

One of our earliest proclamations of faith in the salvific death of Jesus is the pre-Pauline creed/poetry (quoted by Paul) that says that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. This can be taken in at least two ways. On the one hand, it could mean that Jesus’ dying eliminates our sin debt; on the other, that his dying makes our hidden sins conspicuous so that we can then repent. Again, Ehrman’s contrast between the judicial interpretation of the cross with the participation understanding in Paul may miss the mark: there is obviously more to participation than just baptism.

Perhaps the most foundational statement of how Paul understands the cross of Christ is actually not original to Paul, but something that he is quoting from earlier Christians, namely the pre-Pauline Corinthian Creed/poetry. Ehrman comments:

I have a fuller analysis of this passage in my book How Jesus Became God, if you’re interested in seeing more of the ins and outs. Here I should say, though, that scholars have long recognized that Paul is not merely summarizing his preaching: he is actually quoting a piece of poetry, or possibly a creed, that had been in circulation among the Christians. You will notice that vv. 3-5 are very lapidary and direct and that you can divide the lines into two major parts, each of the parts having three statements, and that the statements of part 2 correspond to the statements of part 1. If you laid it out graphically, it would look like this:

That Christ died for our sins
in accordance with the scriptures.
and that he was buried;
That he was raised on the third day
in accordance with the scriptures,
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

See how that works? The first line of each part states the important salvific fact: Christ died, Christ was raised. The second line of each indicates that he did so in fulfillment of the (Jewish) Scriptures. And the third line of each provides the tangible proof of the statement (his death is proven by his burial; his resurrection is proven by his appearances). This is a very carefully and intentionally crafted statement.

It is widely thought that it may have been some kind of creed that was recited in the Christian churches, or possibly a statement of faith that was to be recited by recent converts at their baptism, a creed that is being quoted by Paul here (not composed by him when writing the letter). It is often thought to have been crafted by someone other than Paul. It was a tradition floating around in the church that encapsulated the Christian faith, putting it all in a nutshell.

Paul inherited this creed, just as he inherited the theology it embodies. He didn’t invent the idea that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation. That was the view of Christians before him. (Ehrman, 2016)

There seems to be a double sense here. On the one hand, this is usually understood as Christ dying in substitution for us. And perhaps this is an initial understanding that must be processed to a more essential level of Christ dying so that we can see ourselves in the world that wrongfully turned against Jesus, so that our hidden sin nature becomes manifest and we can have a change of heart (metanoia)—like what we now, from the distance of history, recognize as systemic defects that led to the execution of noble Socrates, and so civilized society no longer kills someone for being a Socratic gadfly. For Paul, the logic to this is that we are inherently good—the law is written on our hearts—but the heart just needs to be circumcised so that the fleshly, worldly foreskin is removed and the holy part can shine forth.

In the previous part I noted that seeing ourselves in those who killed Jesus on the cross is the vehicle through which the Holy Spirit can make conspicuous and convict us of our sin nature, resulting in a repenting metanoia or change of heart/mind (opening our eyes in the language of Adam and Eve). When we say that the world turned on Jesus, we don’t have in mind a collection of individual sinners, but rather systemic or corporate sin, like misogyny in our culture (institutional sexism) in the recent past and still around today. In this way B. Brandon Scott notes the meaning of Paul’s citation that Jesus died for our sins:

“For our sins” indicates why the Anointed died. “Sins” does not indicate my and your personal, individual moral failings. It is OUR sins, not my individual sins or moral failures. For example, in our culture, systemic racism is an example of “our sins,” the sins of the people. In Judaism our sins are the corporate offenses of the people against the covenant. The context is God’s covenant with Israel…. Martyrdom remains a powerful metaphor. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he was honored as martyr because it made sense of his senseless assassination. In 1998 a statue of the Martyr, Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled in Westminster Abbey. King the martyr stands in a line tracing back through the Christian martyrs, Jesus the martyr, and the Maccabean martyrs. They all died for our sins…. We are all implicated in the martyr’s death. (Scott, 2024)

One clue is that Paul says that the Law is written on the hearts of the gentiles, which is evidenced when they follow the law without it being given to them (as it was given to the Jews) via their conscience. All people have this inner light, it just needs to be un-covered (a-letheia) by something that circumcises the sinful skin from the heart.

So we can see how the Corinthian creed/poetry indication of scripture can be taken in two ways: we have the substitution “accursed” interpretation of the “hung on a tree” passage in Galatians 3:13 via Deuteronomy 22:23 in Ehrman’s reading, or a moral influence “cursed” reading per Daniel R. Streett. Joel Marcus helpfully notes that we have records of other Jews who were crucified by the Romans, but were not seen as cursed; so this lowers the prior probability that Ehrman’s reading is correct. Let’s explore this.

Streett elaborates:

(1) When Paul says that Jesus “became a curse,” he is saying not that God cursed Jesus but rather that Jesus condescended to the humility of the cross, was executed by his countrymen in a miscarriage of justice, and was considered by his people to be under a divine curse. (2) When Paul cites Deut 21:23, he does not intend to say that all crucified victims are de facto cursed. Rather, for Paul and his contemporaries, the charge and its validity matter. Because Jesus was innocent, he was not under the curse of Deut 21:23. Paul likely cites the passage to explain how Christ’s death brought special humiliation in the eyes of the Jewish people. (3) Finally, I have argued that Gal 3:13 is not intended to explain the mechanism of atonement, that is, some behind-the-scenes divine transaction. Rather, the text is meant to emphasize the extent of Christ’s suffering in order to redeem his people. (Streett, 2015, p. 209)

Elsewhere, Streett clarifies:

Paul deliberately says that Christ “became a curse” rather than “became accursed.” His language evokes the OT covenantal threat that sinful Israel would become a curse and a byword among the nations. Paul is not, therefore, claiming that God (or the Law) cursed Christ, as is so often claimed. I adduce two key linguistic parallels from early Greek texts (Protevangelium of James and Acts of Thomas) to demonstrate that “becoming a curse” refers to a loss of social status as opposed to becoming the object of divine wrath…. Paul does not cite Deut 21:23 in order to establish that everyone who is crucified is divinely cursed. I examine early Jewish (and Christian) readings of Deut 21:23 to establish that no one believed crucifixion per se brought God’s curse on the victim. Indeed, Paul slightly but significantly modifies the wording of the verse (changing κεκατηραμένος ὑπὸ θεου to ἐπικατάρατος) to steer the audience away from this misunderstanding…. Modern readers miss the point of Paul’s statement because they approach the text with questions about the mechanics of [penal substitutionary] atonement. I urge that the passage should rather be read as a description of the status loss (“becoming a curse”) that Jesus underwent in order to redeem Israel. The passage is thus akin to Phil 2:5-9 and other texts which do not provide a theory of atonement so much as they describe the social texture of Christ’s shameful death. (Streett, 2014)

Like Paul on this point, in Mark we can have a substitution reading of Mark’s use of Isaiah 53, or a moral influence one via Jewish scholars who sometimes address the conservative Christian appropriation of Isaiah 53 for penal substitution by arguing that the suffering servant in Isaiah is Israel:

Isaiah 53 is a prophecy foretelling how the world will react when they witness Israel’s salvation in the Messianic era. The verses are presented from the perspective of world leaders, who contrast their former scornful attitude toward the Jews with their new realization of Israel’s grandeur. After realizing how unfairly they treated the Jewish people, they will be shocked and speechless…. Indeed, the nations selfishly persecuted the Jews as a distraction from their own corrupt regimes: “Surely our suffering he did bear, and our pains he carried…” (53:4). (Roth, 2011)

So we can see both the substitution conservative reading of Isaiah 53, as well as a moral influence one as presented by Marshall Roth, which stresses the transformation of the nations when they realize how they’ve treated Israel.

This idea of double and triple senses that can be pressed though to a more essential core can be seen in various concepts in Paul that have multiple aspects, like faith in Christ vs. Christ’s faithfulness Pistis Christou debate with Grasso discussed above. Grasso notes:

Let me conclude by discussing one more potential implication of my understanding of the pistis Christou phrase. Once we admit that the noun pistis may mean a system that can be adopted, this then becomes a possible meaning in other places as well, and reading Paul’s quote of Habakkuk 2:4 in this way makes a lot of sense, both of the context and the reason why Paul seems to “misquote” the actual verse. A version like the ESV translates Paul’s quote as “The righteous shall live by faith,” which is normally understood to mean that the righteous person will live according to the principle of (their own) faith in Jesus. However, such an English translation disallows another reading of the Greek that is actually much more natural: “The righteous one from the faith will live.” In other words, it would mean that the person who is righteous by virtue of being a part of the faith (i.e., the Christ-faith) will be the one who lives. Given that it is through the Christ-faith that the righteousness of God is revealed (Rom 3:21-22), this makes perfect sense. Adopting the Christ-faith leads to righteousness. Thus, the righteousness of God is not only revealed from (ek) the (Christ-)faith, but it is also for the sake of (eis) the (Christ-)faith (Rom 1:17), since it is those of the faith who will benefit from it, i.e., they will have life. Hence, the righteousness of God is revealed both from the faith and for the faith…. As we said above, Paul seems to “misquote” Habakkuk, and it is precisely at the point of deciding whose “faith” (pistis) is in question. While the Hebrew says the righteous person “by his faith” will live, the Septuagint says that the righteous person “by my faith” will live. In other words, the Hebrew is referring to the righteous person’s faith, and the Greek is referring to God’s “faith.” The two letters in the Hebrew that would represent either “his” or “my” look very similar, so the confusion is understandable. What is far less likely from a textual perspective is that Paul was reading a version that totally omitted the pronoun. In other words, he probably wasn’t reading a version that looks like his quote. Instead, I suggest, Paul took out the pronoun to make a point—the faith being referred to is not anyone’s faith in particular. It is the faith concerning the Messiah, the Christ-faith, that reveals God’s righteousness, and the person who has become righteous by adopting this faith will live. This is the faith that Paul preached (Gal 1:23) the one that tells the story of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah who was indeed faithful to God’s plan of salvation. It is adopting the Christ-faith that leads to obedience, and this faith calls people everywhere to respond in faithfulness to Jesus as the messianic king. (Grasso, 2020)

As Grasso notes, the LXX for Habakkuk 2:4 that the New Testament writers were working from does not have in mind the faith of the person, but God’s faith or faithfulness: “but the just shall live by my faith (or faithfulness).”

So which brings salvation for Paul? Knowledge of who Christ is is important, for if you don’t see Jesus as the specially beloved of God who wrongfully died and was resurrected, this does not hit home as hard, merely being like the wrongful death of Socrates or John the Baptist. Socrates’ death was a slap in the face of a good man; while Jesus’ death is a slap in the face of God. God gave the world his beloved Jesus, and the world executed him in a worse manner than the arch criminal Haman. Jesus was faithful to the will of God despite terror. It is the experience that the world actually crucified as a criminal God’s specially chosen one that is salvific, “opening your eyes” to your hidden sinfulness. As I noted in a previous article, Jewish sacrifice, unlike those of the ancient Greek/Roman salvation cults, was never understood as substitutionary.

Many readers are so mesmerized by what Jesus did for the world that they miss the other side of the coin: what the world did to God’s especially beloved (agapetos) Jesus. There is a penal substitution aspect that is a starting educational point that must be outgrown the more that you learn. There is true substitution—we exchange places with the world that turned against Christ, seeing ourselves in them. Thus, we can see the conservatives’ so-called “progressive Christian heresy” that denies the penal substitution interpretation of the cross. As James McGrath comments:

Probably even more helpful than “Moses” was 4 Maccabees 6, which presents a martyr praying “Be merciful to your people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs” (4 Macc. 6:28-29). Clearly there were ideas that existed in the Judaism of the time that helped make sense of the death of the righteous in terms of atonement. But the New Testament does not use the language of punishment and exchange in the way 4 Maccabees does…. Paul can talk about sacrifice (and discussing what sacrifice meant in the Judaism of this time would be a subject of its own), but he prefers to use the language of participation. One died for all, so that all died (2 Corinthians 5:14). This is not only different from substitution, it is the opposite of it. Jesus is here understood not to prevent our death but to bring it about! This fits neatly within his understanding of there being two ages, with Christ having died to one and entered the resurrection age, and with Christians through their connection to him having already died to the present age and thus made able to live free from its dominion. One point is Biblical, the other is moral. First, the Bible regularly depicts God as forgiving people. If there is anything that God does consistently throughout the Bible, it is forgive. To suggest that God cannot forgive because, having said that sin would be punished, he has no choice but to punish someone, makes sense only if one has never read the penitential psalms, nor the story of Jonah. And for God to forgive, all that the Bible suggests that God has to do is forgive. The moral issue with penal substitution is closely connected with the points just mentioned. Despite the popularity of this image, to depict God as a judge who lets a criminal go free because he has punished someone else in their place is to depict God as unjust…. I will not try to argue that penal and/or substitutionary imagery is never used. But the case can be made that it is neither central to the bible as a whole or to the theology of specific writers…. For instance, the Levitical background to Hebrews … helps us understand that the imagery there is of purification of the sanctuary so that God can dwell in the midst of a sinful people. (McGrath, 2010)

4. Approaching the Literary Form of Gospel

All of this polysemy makes sense if we distinguish a lower exoteric interpretation of early Christianity from a deeper esoteric meaning for those who can see beyond the surface (Mark 4:10-20). This is reflective of the notion of multiple levels of initiation and the principle of growth as one becomes educated—as was the norm with ancient religions.

Let’s return to an earlier point. Jesus predicts his passion and resurrection multiple times, but the disciples can’t understand. This makes sense for an audience with an uneducated Jewish peasant fisherman’s understanding of Jewish sacrifice, who would think of the humane sacrifice of the pure goat and the other half of the ritual, the inhumane death of the scapegoat pushed over a cliff. In the grand scheme of things, these sacrifices were temporary and so had to be repeated every year. To use Aristophanes satirical concept, Jesus as an “excessive sacrifice” of God’s beloved would not (in the minds of the uneducated peasant disciples) fulfill and cancel out the Temple cult any more than the high priest killing 100 pure goats and 100 scapegoats would make further sacrifices unnecessary next year.

So, in one sense, “Gospel” means good news as propaganda about Jesus:

Mark has a reproduction of a piece of Augustan imperial propaganda and his setting it beside a tailored scripture quote. “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” closely matches the formula found on a monument erected by the Provincial Assembly in Asia Minor (1st century BCE): “Whereas… Providence… has… brought our life to the peak of perfection in giving us Augustus Caesar… who, being sent to us and to our descendants as a savior (soter)…, and whereas… the birthday of the god has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel (euaggelion) concerning him, let all reckon a new era beginning from the date of his birth.” (Helms, 1989, p. 24)

If we emulate Walsh’s approach, in a second sense we have “gospel” as the satire/parody image from Aristophanes’ the Knights (424 BCE). In Knights the comic character Paphlagon proposes an “excessive sacrifice” (paralleling the Gospels’ sacrifice of God’s most beloved agapetos) of a hundred heifers to Athena to celebrate good news: euaggelion (Aristophanes, Knights, lines 654-656)—as though cultivating favor from the divine is now reducible to cultivating the greatest bribe for the god.[1] We see further evidence of lampooning the idea of “good news” in the Old Testament. Jesus as the beloved (agapetos) excessive sacrificial messenger of God is put to death for delivering/proclaiming God’s word (logos) by New Testament writers working from the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Old Testament), which uses the word in 2 Samuel 4:10: “when a man told me, ‘Saul is dead,’ and thought he was bringing good news [euaggelia], I seized him and put him to death in Ziklag.”

The special nature of the cross, the most brutal and humiliating of ancient punishments, has always considered the effect on people (the soldier in the Gospels) of looking upon the victim. For example, Walsh comments: “[T]he unnamed protagonist of Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria, identified only as “Euripides’ kinsman,” is literally crucified during the play’s last two hundred lines, and the shrieks he emits as he is stapled to the cross seem to have brought the audience no end of delight” (Walsh, 2023, p. 186).[2]

As previously noted, with the miraculous darkness falling over the land, the Roman soldier at the cross (unlike the Jewish peasants) gets it: truly this is God’s son/an innocent man. In Mark the soldier recognizes Jesus as the “exemplary soldier” following orders despite being terrified.[3] In Luke, the soldier sees the forgiveness and mercy of a paradigmatically wrongly convicted man who nonetheless loves his enemies.

Again, we have two interpretations of the tearing of the veil. On the one hand, we have the penal substitution reading where the sin debt is paid and hence man is reconciled to God. On the other hand, we have a world that turned on and executed God’s specially chosen and beloved as a criminal, and so the tearing would suggest the Temple cult is rendered null and void because no animal sacrifice could ever make up for the horrific thing that humanity did to Jesus: “Then the people as a whole answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!'” (Matthew 27:25). Whether this sentence is original to Matthew or a later scribal interpolation is disputed, but it seems thematically appropriate. One of the consistent ad hoc rationalizations seen throughout the Bible is the problem that the Jews saw themselves as God’s specially beloved and chosen people, and yet they were constantly being conquered by other nations. The Bible’s answer to this conundrum is that the Jews were constantly sinning/falling away from God, so being conquered was their punishment. This was accounted for in Jesus’ time with the Roman conquest and Jewish apocalypticism, and was even more of an issue when the Gospel authors lived, when the kingdom of God on Earth predicted by Jesus and the apostles not only failed to materialize, but Rome was still solidly in power and had destroyed Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple. Interestingly, in Matthew we have the emphasis on God’s terrifying anger, and in Luke the tearing of the veil has been moved in sequence.

Jesus as the Passover lamb has no penal substitutionary sense and is concerned with overcoming systemic corporate sin, like that of the enslaving Egyptian society. Jude 5 is an early Christian account that indicates that the Jews were saved from Egypt, but then many were destroyed for being ungodly. Similarly, Jesus’ sacrifice can open your chains/eyes, but it’s then up to you to accept it. We thus see the Exodus generation failing to reach the promised land, but a way out of punishment being delivered with Moses holding up the eye-opening symbol from Eden, the serpent, and John’s Jesus identifying with this raised serpent by being raised on the cross (Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14). Both Moses’ serpent and that of Jesus are destined for destruction (2 Kings 18:4). Moses’ serpent brought salvation to those that looked at it, like Jesus on the cross. In both cases, people could take something so good and make an idol out of it, like the penal substitution interpretation of the cross as opposed to the moral influence reading. Thom Crowe explains that penal substitution belittles salvation by making it merely a transactional event, a legal barter made by Jesus for us, not a transformational redemption rather than a physical resurrection.

Having an initial literal level to a religion as well as a later figurative one for initiates was common in the ancient world. Carrier notes that Plutarch gave Clea, a priestess of the mysteries of Isis, a text “On Isis and Osiris” that explained the higher levels symbolism embedded in the exoteric stories that are to be overcome. Mark, for instance, has Jesus say: “When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything comes in parables, in order that ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven'” (Mark 4:10-11). Jesus wasn’t just being a jerk—the world needed to torture and kill Jesus to truly experience the depths of their hidden depravity made conspicuous, and so experience God’s love for humanity even in the face of this.

5. The Incarnation of Jesus (or Jesus as the Law Personified/Incarnate)

It seems pretty conclusive that Jesus is understood as the embodiment of the Law. For example, Joseph Tkach notes:

What other prophets implied, Jeremiah made explicit: the deep connection between God’s Spirit and Torah (meaning law, way or instruction). But what is the nature of that connection? The answer is found in the New Testament where Jesus spoke of himself as not abolishing the law but fulfilling it (Matthew 5:17). In like manner, Paul spoke of Jesus in this way: “For Christ is the end [telos] of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4). Telos, which means “end” or “purpose,” speaks to the fulfillment of the goal to which a thing is related. For Paul, the Torah is fulfilled in Jesus because he is the embodiment of the law. (Tkach, 2015)

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Jesus is the personification of the law, Law Incarnate, as love of God and neighbor, including enemy more than self, as a lens through which to interpret all other laws more strictly[4] (e.g., adultery includes a lustful eye), such that the world that turned on Jesus and wrongfully executed him did not just transgress some laws, but rather the Law. To recapitulate from my first article, just as “The philosophical sage was first and foremost the incarnation of wisdom and moral virtue” (Thorsteinsson, 2018, p. 27), Jesus was the law incarnate giving a new interpretation of the law (e.g., love of enemy)—”LIVING LAW,” what the Stoics called ‘the living image of all the virtues’ (virtutum viva imago), a ‘truer exemplar’ (certius exemplar) of a sage than previous ones. Regarding the Stoic Musonius on the philosopher being the “living law,” we read:

‘In general’, he says, ‘it is of the greatest importance for the good king to be faultless (anamarteton) and perfect (teleion) in word and action, if, indeed, he is to be a “living law” as he seemed to the ancients, effecting good government and harmony, suppressing lawlessness and dissension, a true imitator of Zeus and, like him, father of his people’ (8.64.10-15). Here Musonius refers to the necessity of being ‘perfect’ and a true follower of the laws, similar to Jesus’ reference to commandments of the Jewish law (Mark 10.19), as well as his demand that the rich man be perfect in his devotion (‘You [only] lack one thing’ [hen se hysterei], 10.21). (Thorsteinsson, 2018, p. 50)

We are unaware of our sinfulness and need it disclosed to us. Just as Mark’s crucifixion narrative creatively recapitulates Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, the conversion of the soldier who has his eyes opened at the cross seems to be haggadic midrash as a homily on Psalm 19. So, we read:

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving/restoring/converting (Hebrew mə·šî·ḇaṯ; “turning” in the LXX the New Testament writers would have been working from) the soul; the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes[5]; … But who can detect one’s own errors? Clear me from hidden faults. (Psalm 19:7-12)

Grant Richison comments:

Paul’s answer is that the law was given “because of transgressions.” This is from the Greek word parabaseōn, a word that can mean “breaks, violations, breaches”…. One purpose of the law was to show the Israelites what actions were sinful so they could avoid them. God, in His grace, gave them the law to show His own standards for their right and wrong behavior.

Paul may also mean something else by the phrase “because of transgressions,” however. It’s true that the law showed the Israelites God’s standard for right and wrong. More than that, though, the law showed the Israelites that they wanted to do what was wrong and were unable to obey God’s standard perfectly. Or, as Paul put it in Romans 5:20, “the law came to increase the trespass.” God instituted the law, in part, to show the Israelites, and all of us, just how sinful we really are. Only lucidly sinful people know they need to repent and be saved from their sin; the law convinces us of how much sin we have to be saved from. (Richison, 2000)

Richison adds: “The law is like a mirror that reveals our dirty face so that we can wash it in the blood of Christ. We do not wash our face with the mirror. That is not the purpose of a mirror. The purpose of the law is to show us that we are bankrupt morally…” (Richison, 1997, p. 65).

In this regard, Paul talks about parabasis, ton parabaseōn charin, to create transgressions (Strong’s New Testament 3847), i.e., that sins might take on the character of transgressions, and thereby the consciousness of sin might be intensified and thus the desire for redemption aroused (Romans 5:20; Galatians 3:19). This is the literary reason behind the story of the world turning against Jesus that I spoke of previously. In fact, the apology/defense for God here is that the Law was given in full knowledge that the people would pervert it while simultaneously claiming to adhere to it, specifically so that Jesus would come on the scene and, with his unjust torture and execution, reveal their hidden vileness and awaken the law written on their hearts: “But law came in, so that the trespass might increase, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). The Law was given “because of transgressions”—its real effect was to provoke and enhance them, with Jesus as the law incarnate:

So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. Did what is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin that was working death in me through what is good, in order that it might be shown to be sin, so that through the commandment sin might become sinful beyond measure. (Romans 7:12-13)

In other words, the world turning on the law incarnate in Jesus made our sinfulness conspicuous and disclosed the law written on our hearts, inspiring repentance. Justification didn’t come through the law (for otherwise Christ died in vain, per Galatians 2:21), but rather the wronging of God’s logos incarnate (Jesus) made possible recognition of the lowly state that you were in. Christ taught the spirit of the law, as opposed to the letter of the law as strict beyond measure and impossible to follow (e.g., adultery is even a lustful eye) to awaken people by the degree to which they missed the mark.

In this way, as with the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt in Exodus, the primary issue isn’t personal sin with penal substitution, but the larger issue of corporate sin and corporate bondage (e.g., systemic racism, poverty, etc.), the release from bondage of which light we understand Jesus as the Passover lamb (which has no penal substitution sense) and the pure goat/scapegoat of Yom Kippur—the excessive inhumane suffering of the scapegoat. Rabbi David Rosenfeld points out that this prompts us to ruminate on the consequences of our sins. We are invited to look beyond Jesus as a super Yom Kippur blood magic sacrifice to a more essential meaning of the two Yom Kippur goats.

To recapitulate, we can think of repentance/change of heart (mind) as metanoia or transformation/change of outlook, which Saul underwent himself when he became Paul. In truly experiencing that the world unjustly tortured and killed God’s anointed only son Jesus, we see ourselves in these persecutors, which convicts us and transforms us: our sinful self-centered worldly disposition is crucified, the old man is dead (Romans 6:6-23), and we become allergic to revulsive sin by putting on our new selfless Christ nature (Ephesians 4:22-24). Paul’s eyes (perhaps a seed was planted by the forgiveness of dying Stephen) had the scales fall from them and he finally saw clearly for the first time in his life (Acts 9:17-19). He came face to face with the reality of how evil he had become, and it broke his spirit, changing the trajectory of his life forever. Coming face to face with your sin inspires transformation (Psalm 32:5; 2 Corinthians 7:8-10). Metanoia/repentance is not just being sorry, but a total transformation of outlook and approach whereby one’s former thoughts and actions appear vile to you—revulsion that makes you allergic to sin. For instance, Paul writes: “I grieved you with my letter, I do not regret it. Although I did regret it (for I see that that letter caused you grief, though only briefly), now I rejoice, not because you were grieved but because your grief led to repentance, for you felt a godly grief, so that you were not harmed in any way by us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:8-10). Coming face to face with your sin— seeing yourself in the world that wrongly tortured and crucified God’s specially loved one (agapetos)—circumcises the heart and reveals the law written on it, which is a catalyst for transformation/repentance: metanoia. In this regard, Ehrman’s claim that Paul did not have the focus on repentance that the historical Jesus had is wrong. For if not as a word, then certainly as a concept metanoia as repentance/change of mind is very important for Paul. Eckhard J. Schnabel argues:

Paul rarely uses the terms metanoia/metanoein (“repentance”/”repent”), but word statistics should not be accorded too much weight. Besides using these terms to describe the process of returning to God by regretting one’s transgressions, Paul uses other terms and phrases in order to express the need to, and the reality of, changing mind and heart, outlook and behavior. It can be demonstrated that Paul knows the Jewish doctrine of repentance, that his missionary preaching calls for repentance, that his theological discourse presupposes repentance, that his rhetorical discourse in his letters includes the discourse of repentance, and that his ethical discourse entails exhortations to repentance.” There is no basis for the argument that Paul avoids the terms metanoia/metanoein because of antipathy to the term devalued by the penitential practices in contemporary Judaism, as Johannes Behm alleges, or merely because for Paul “metanoia is comprised in pistis, the central concept in his doctrine of salvation,” or because this term “did not stress sufficiently God’s action in salvation.” The relative scarcity of the terms metanoia/metanoein in Paul’s letters should not be accorded too much weight. Inferences from word statistics are, at least in this case, not helpful. Paul does use the terms metanoia/metanoein. He also uses other terms and phrases in order to express the need to, and the reality of, changing mind and heart, outlook and behavior. We have seen that Paul knows the Jewish doctrine of repentance, that his missionary preaching calls for repentance, that his theological discourse presupposes repentance, that his rhetorical discourse in his letters includes the discourse of repentance, and that his ethical discourse entails exhortations to repentance. Christians are people who have repented of their sins and who have committed themselves to living for God, and they are people who continue to repent of sins they find themselves doing, continuously committing themselves to doing the will of God… [There is a] continued necessity of exchanging secular standards for the standards of the will of God, changing the patterns of perception concerning what is acceptable behavior, regretting false thinking and wrong behavior, returning to faith in God and in Jesus as the basis for proper Christian behavior, all the while relying on the power of God and his Spirit who continues the transformation of the justified sinner (Schnabel, 2015, p. 159)

It’s very important to look at Jesus from the point of view of being the law incarnate/personified because this nudges us to think of the mirroring function of the law in ancient Judaism, namely how it makes conspicuous both what we are doing well and how we are falling short (which God did for the Jewish people in giving the law to Moses, thereby showing the people how corrupt they had become). James comments:

For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing. (James 1:23-25)

There is an interesting fascination with the image of the mirror in antiquity as that which reveals and amplifies, and this makes sense, for while our eyes are the source of all seeing, they are unable to see themselves without a mirror. In this regard we have the Greek myth of Narcissus (where our word narcissism comes from), who fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water with tragic consequences. It is when we see ourselves in the people/world that turned on Jesus that we come to a mature image of who we are and the degree to which we are missing the mark in our lives. We realize, for instance, that while we consider the ancient Romans feeding the Christians to lions for sport in the stadium to be horrific, we understand that if we were Roman citizens at the time, we probably would have cheered along with everyone else. Evil is primarily a not-seeing-oneself. Paul thus contrasts the partial vague reflection of ourselves that we usually see with the fullness revealed by experiencing the loving sacrifice of Jesus:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a riddle (ainigma) in reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:11-12)

In philosophy thinking is synonymous with the mirror-based “reflection” metaphor and we see ever more clearly what was always already there the more that we reflect on something. Because of this, White notes:

‘By the law is the knowledge of sin.’ (Romans 3:20). In order to see his guilt, the sinner must test his character by God’s great standard of righteousness. It is a mirror which shows the perfection of a righteous character and enables him to discern the defects of his own. The law reveals to man his sin. (White, 1973/2001, p. 20)

6. The Difference between Jesus and Paul

In his lectures on the difference between Paul and Jesus, Ehrman offers the following summary:

6.1 Similarities

• Jesus and Paul were both first-century apocalyptic Jews, and there was a cosmic battle going on between the forces of good and evil with people taking sides. This was all according to God’s plan, and a judgment was coming in which there would be rewards and punishments where the dead would be resurrected and judged depending on the side that they took. A cosmic figure from Heaven would come as God’s chosen judge. Jesus thought that the end would be experienced by some of his followers, not necessarily in his lifetime, and Paul thought that he would be alive to see it. There was urgency because people needed to be saved from the coming judgment.
• You fulfill the law by loving God above all else and loving your neighbor as yourself. (Ehrman, 2023)

6.2 Key Differences at the Core of the Messages of Jesus (J) and Paul (P)

• J: God forgives those who repent. / P: God requires atonement. Atonement is when someone pays your debt for you, while forgiveness is when the person who is owed forgives the debt.
• J: It’s all about Jesus’ teachings on how to live. / P: It’s all about Jesus’ death and resurrection.
• J: The need to return to God. / P: The need to turn to Jesus.
• J: The need to behave as God demands. So, you don’t even need to know the message of Jesus as long as you’re doing the right thing. / P: The need to believe in the atoning death of God’s messiah.
• J: Keep the Torah. / P: The Torah is irrelevant: you start obeying God only after being saved through faith and baptism because then you can follow the law since you are no longer enslaved to sin.
• J: Jesus is the human prophet. / P: Jesus is the divine sacrifice. (Ehrman, 2023)

For example, in Mark 10, Jesus said that to get into Heaven you must keep the commandments, and to really get rewarded you must sell everything that you have and give to the poor. Jesus’ disciples did do this, leaving everything behind in order to follow Jesus. This was enough for salvation and seems historical because it speaks against the bias of Mark to promote the crucifixion/resurrection as salvific. Ehrman argues that for Paul this was irrelevant for salvation and what mattered instead was faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, as well as literally unifying with Christ through baptism. I outlined Paul well enough above to show that Ehrman is quite wrong in his understanding of the complexity and nuances of Paul’s position. In any case, Jesus talks about the sheep who get into Heaven because they helped those in need. The goats did not help the needy, but focused on themselves, so they don’t get in. Ehrman argues that Paul would not have taught these things, and that the historical Jesus did not teach the death and resurrection. Rather, Jesus teaches not himself but the Kingdom, and he begins his ministry by saying: “This is the time of fulfillment. The reign of God is at hand! Metanoia, and believe this Good News!” (Mark 1:14-15). These are Jesus’ first recorded words in Mark 1:15. The main emphasis is for you to repent to God so that he will forgive you. This is reflected in the Lord’s prayer as “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”; a loan being forgiven doesn’t entail that it’s being paid by someone else. By contrast, Ehrman says that Paul did not teach forgiveness and repentance, but instead substitutionary atonement and the blood of Jesus.

My criticism aside, Ehrman’s distinction between the cross/resurrection religion of Paul and the repentance/kingdom religion of Jesus at first seems a particularly fruitful one. If we develop his argument a bit, it should be pointed out that Paul has an odd construction in Galatians 3:1 where he says that the Church[6] has been “bewitched” even though Christ had previously been presented to them “as” crucified: “proegraphē estaurōmenos,” which suggests that there were others who were not preaching a crucified Christ, but rather one that presented Jesus’ message from when he was alive. Ehrman points out that there were many Christians who Paul vehemently opposed, like the “superapostles” and “false apostles,” who weren’t the Peter and the twelve that Paul respected.

How does Mark try to cover the historical Jesus with passion/resurrection theology? Mark awkwardly has Jesus predicting his death and resurrection to disciples that can’t understand, which probably means that, historically, Jesus’ death wasn’t on anyone’s radar, which is why the disciples clashed with the arresting party. As Jerry Sumney recently showed, there is a great deal of pre-Pauline cross material in Paul, so Paul is probably closer to Peter and the twelve than is traditionally thought, especially cross material. So, there were probably “purists” preaching Jesus’ message from before he died, which lends weight to the idea that Jesus didn’t think his death was salvific or that he was the Danielic Son of Man. This would explain why a salvific cross is absent from Q (if such a source existed).

What Paul seems to mean is that Christ was killed by rulers who had been possessed by the evil demons (archons of this aion) analogous to Matthew saying that Satan entered Judas, who then betrayed Jesus. There seem to be different factions (Jesus divided?), those who followed the teaching of Christ before he died, and those who focused on the moral influence death, such as Peter and the twelve and Paul, who taught a crucified Christ.

This is fine in terms of literary criticism, but the highly prized historical criticism piece is more murky. The idea that being a caring person would lead to salvation hardly originated with the historical Jesus. But it goes further than that; we need to supplement Ehrman’s reading. If we suppose that Mark is in dialogue with written sources like Paul’s letters and Hebrews[7], then just as the Gethsemane/Elijah material explicated previously seems to be Mark’s satirical take on Hebrews 5:7, the Barabbas release pericope in Mark seems to be lampooning the Yom Kippur imagery of the bloodbath in Hebrews[8], showing the absurdity of Jesus as pure goat/scapegoat (both were considered part of one sacrifice) if not God but a Roman leader (Pilate) was doing it, releasing evil Barabbas and killing noble Jesus. We see the absurdity of the historically cruel Pilate releasing Barabbas, a known killer of Romans, and killing Jesus instead in an act of substitutionary atonement. Rather, Psalm 51:15-17 reads: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” In this regard Matthew 5:3 says “blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Conversely, the humane death of the Yom Kippur pure goat and the horrific death of the scapegoat gets people to confront the implications of their sin, since unlike the scapegoat, the Jewish practice of sacrifice usually killed animals in a humane way. Analogously, as previously asked, how does penal substitution, whereby an innocent child in Africa is horribly punished and killed for the crimes of a felon in Chicago, serve justice?

Robert M. Price paraphrases John Dominic Crossan’s views on scapegoat imagery:

John Dominic Crossan has drawn attention to the singular importance for early Christian typology of the Leviticus 16 scapegoat ritual, tracing its development, as it picked up associations from Zechariah, on its way to the composition of the gospel narrative of the mocking, abuse, and crucifixion of Jesus….

Crossan describes the scapegoat ritual as it was being practiced in early Christian times by reference to Yoma 6:2-6, the Epistle of Barnabas chapter 7, Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho 40, and Tertullian’s Against Marcion 3:7. The goat was led out of the city walls. A crimson thread of wool was divided, half tied to a rock, half between the goat’s horns. Along the way, the goat was abused by the crowd shouting, “Bear [sins] and begone! Bear and begone!” The crowd spat at it and goaded it along with pointed reeds till it arrived at the ledge where it was pushed over (Crossan, p. 119). Barnabas implies that in his day the woolen thread was tied onto a thorny bush, no longer a rock, a significant change (no less significant even if this was a misunderstanding, already marking a slippage of the “piercing” motif from the reed-poking to the wool-tying). Even without reference to a passion narrative of any sort, Barnabas and the Sibylline Oracles (8:294-301) apply the ritual in all its details to the death of the savior Jesus. Barnabas and others also attach to it the typology of Zechariah 12:10 (“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him as one weeps over a firstborn”) because of the catchword “piercing,” derived from the reeds and thorns of the scapegoat ritual. From this it was a natural step to page through Zechariah to 3:1-5 and to associate the scapegoat-savior Jesus with the high priest Jesus (Joshua). There Jesus/Joshua is clothed in a crown (turban) and robe, which Barnabas, et. al., “recognized” as an expansion of the two bits of crimson wool from the scapegoat ritual. Once this connection was made, it was easy for the wool motif to be segregated to the robe, the crown assimilating to the thorns to which the other thread had been tied, resulting in a crown of thorns (Crossan, p. 128). From these roots, as the passion narrative begins to form, the piercing motif takes several forms. When Jesus becomes a mock king (as in the Roman Saturnalia games or the mockery of Carrabas in Philo, Flaccus VI), the reeds that once poked the scapegoat have become the reed sceptre of the mock king (which his mockers seize and use to hit him) as well as the mock crown of thorns and the scraping bits of the scourging whip. Then, in a full-scale crucifixion narrative (involving, of course, the driving of the scapegoat Jesus outside the city walls), the piercing motif takes the form of the nails of crucifixion and finally the piercing lance of Longinus. (Price, 2005)

So the scapegoat, though not fit for sacrifice, is magically infused with the intentional sins of the people and then violently killed by pushing it off the cliff—and is broken apart as it falls, as the Mishna Yoma 6:6 teaches. For Rabbi David Rosenfeld this means that by causing a horrific inhumane death for the scapegoat animal (Jewish tradition otherwise promotes humane animal sacrifice), we can see in the scapegoat the excess of violence that our past sins have caused—arousing our guilt and inspiring true repentance.

7. Paul’s Conversion (9:1-21)

Price comments on the duality of Paul’s conversion in Acts, again referencing a further duality of (1) Jewish haggadic midrash and (2) Greco-Roman mimesis:

1. Haggadic midrash:

   As the great Tübingen critics already saw, the story of Paul’s visionary encounter with the risen Jesus not only has no real basis in the Pauline epistles but has been derived by Luke more or less directly from 2 Maccabees 3’s story of Heliodorus. In it one Benjaminite named Simon (3:4) tells Apollonius of Tarsus, governor of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia (3:5), that the Jerusalem Temple houses unimaginable wealth that the Seleucid king might want to appropriate for himself. Once the king learns of this, he sends his agent Heliodorus to confiscate the loot. The prospect of such a violation of the Temple causes universal wailing and praying among the Jews. But Heliodorus is miraculously turned back when a shining warrior angel appears on horseback. The stallion’s hooves knock Heliodorus to the ground, where two more angels lash him with whips (25-26). He is blinded and is unable to help himself, carried to safety on a stretcher. Pious Jews pray for his recovery, lest the people be held responsible for his condition. The angels reappear to Heliodorus, in answer to these prayers, and they announce God’s grace to him: Heliodorus will live and must henceforth proclaim the majesty of the true God. Heliodorus offers sacrifice to his Saviour (3:35) and departs again for Syria, where he reports all this to the king. In Acts the plunder of the Temple has become the persecution of the Church by Saul (also called Paulus, an abbreviated form of Apollonius), a Benjaminite from Tarsus. Heliodorus’ appointed journey to Jerusalem from Syria has become Saul’s journey from Jerusalem to Syria. Saul is stopped in his tracks by a heavenly visitant, goes blind and must be taken into the city, where the prayers of his former enemies avail to raise him up. Just as Heliodorus offers sacrifice, Saul undergoes baptism. Then he is told henceforth to proclaim the risen Christ, which he does. (Price, 2005)

2. Mimesis:

   Luke has again added details from Euripides. In The Bacchae, in a sequence Luke has elsewhere rewritten into the story of Paul in Philippi (Portefaix, pp. 170), Dionysus has appeared in Thebes as an apparently mortal missionary for his own sect. He runs afoul of his cousin, King Pentheus who wants the licentious cult (as he views it) to be driven out of the country. He arrests and threatens Dionysus, only to find him freed from prison by an earthquake. Dionysus determines revenge against the proud and foolish king by magically compelling Pentheus to undergo conversion to faith in him (“Though hostile formerly, he now declares a truce and goes with us. You see what you could not when you were blind” [lines 922-924]) and sending Pentheus, in woman’s guise, to spy upon the Maenads, his female revelers. He does so, is discovered, and is torn limb from limb by the women, led by his own mother. As the hapless Pentheus leaves, unwittingly, to meet his doom, Dionysus comments, “Punish this man. But first distract his wits; bewilder him with madness… After those threats with which he was so fierce, I want him made the laughingstock of Thebes” (lines 850-851, 854-855). “He shall come to know Dionysus, son of Zeus, consummate god, most terrible, and yet most gentle, to mankind” (lines 859-861). Pentheus must be made an example, as must poor Saul, despite himself. His conversion is a punishment, meting out to the persecutor his own medicine. Do we not detect a hint of ironic malice in Christ’s words to Ananias about Saul? “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16). (Price, 2005)

Ananias rightly points out that Paul can’t simply be let off the hook for all the atrocities that he committed against the Christians, and so will suffer out his days in such things as denying the fleshly urges and dying for his faith. In this regard a Christian doesn’t simply get let off the hook by Jesus’ death, but must take up their cross daily as a taking responsibility for their sin. It is becoming dead to yourself, a living sacrifice. The holy life in its denial of self is creating for oneself punishment for one’s sins.

8. Returning to the Philippian Christ Hymn

Given the above conclusions, let’s return to the Philippian Christ Hymn and see if we can penetrate more deeply still.

Paul quotes that Jesus was in the form (morphe) of God, but did not strive to be equal to God. What then does form mean if not identity? Paul is quoting form/morphe in Aristotle’s sense as one of his main terms. Jesus being the law incarnate preached the spirit of God’s law that allowed him to defend against Satan’s knowing misuse of scripture for his own advantage. This is just like Adam and Eve striving to be like God, or like the Jewish leaders who would later scheme and twist God’s word to get Jesus killed—who remained a servant to God’s will until the end:

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,

so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'”

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'” (Matthew 4:5-7)

In order to understand morphe for Aristotle, Heidegger notes that Aristotle came out of Plato: “The relation should be clarified by four limit-concepts or images: temporal Being is an ‘imitation’ (mimesis) of the extra-temporal; the extra-temporal is the ‘paradigm’ (paradeigma), while the temporal is the after-copy (eidolon); the temporal ‘participates’ (metexei) in the extra-temporal (methesis); presence (parousia) of the extra-temporal in temporal beings” (Heidegger, 1921/2023, p. 31).

To think this, we need to think of Parmenides’ dictum that thinking and Being are the same. So, for example, if I try to make the concept of movement intelligible through fractions, movement as a thought is impossible. As Plato noted, movement contains the contradictory predicates of simultaneously being present in, and absent from, a location. Thus, using fractions, in order to cross a distance, I must first reach halfway between. But, in order to reach that middle, I must first reach the halfway to that middle, and so on to infinity. Movement can’t be thought. Zeno presented such paradoxes.

Plato began to solve this riddle by dividing reality into the aiestheton (sensory beings) and noeton (ideas). Sensory beings weren’t nothing, ouk on, but me on, deficient with respect to the primary image (paradeigma). Being is thought of as what is always already before the mind’s eye as that which renders things intelligible, e.g., having similarity in view by the mind’s eye to encounter things as similar. For instance, having grapeness before my mind’s eye allows me to have a successful trip to the grocery store. Aristotle clarified movement with the notion of stretching, which allows movement to be intelligible. Let’s explore this.

As previously noted, Ehrman contrasts the message of the Kingdom with the parable of the rich young man who is saved by upholding the law and giving everything to the poor, in contrast to Paul, who says that if salvation comes by the law, then Jesus died for nothing. For Ehrman salvation for Paul comes through pistis (faith) in Jesus and his crucifixion/resurrection—that is, through your take or point of view or opinion (doxa) on whether or not Jesus saves through these things. Ehrman has incomplete analysis here. Heidegger highlights a basic connection between pistis (faith) and ethos by underscoring that pistis essentially concerns an attitude, comportment, or posture (Haltung), not simply a certain stock of cognitive contents (convictions, beliefs, etc.).

As already noted, the ancient Greeks stress the presencing or appearing, and so it is in the soldier at the cross being overcome by the “look/eidos/morphe” of Jesus that the transformation arises, the suffering presencing of Jesus whose death we are implicated in, and through which we are transfigured. Notice that no resurrection is required here, and Mark does not have resurrection appearances. By contrast, Paul says that without the resurrection you are still in your sins and your faith is in vain, for you need Christ in you to combat the worldly/fleshly (similarly, see John 16:7-8) and, ultimately, the Antichrist. The primary sense of doxa theou in the Greek is not one’s opinion about God, but the glory of God—in Jesus’ case, his invisible glory of the cross. The dóxa theoú (“the glory of God”) in the New Testament is exactly the same as the kévod-adonaj (“the glory of the LORD”) in the Old Testament. Our transformation is not just active, but also being transformed (metamorphousthe, Romans 12:2) as the truth of the cross washes over us. Here Paul talks of an anakainósis or renewing: a renewal or change of heart and life. Anakaínōsis (from 303 /aná, “up, completing a process,” which intensifies kainō, “make fresh, new”; see 2537 /kainós) is, properly, a new development or renewal achieved by God’s power. We have a similar statement of God renewing us in Titus 3:5.

So, picking up on the earlier theme of the personification/incarnation of the Law’s grundbegriffe/basic concepts love of God and neighbor, we can see this with the use of the term morphe/form in the Philippian Christ hymn. Let’s briefly consider this.

The Philippian Christ hymn/poetry isn’t mainly about the incarnation of God or a great angel, but rather Jesus’ mindset being born again from god form (morphe) to human servant form (morphe), which is going from striving for the paradigmatic knowledge of good and evil (e.g., Jesus filling full of meaning the prohibition against adultery by saying if your eye lusts after a woman you have committed adultery), to the morphe of man that is the servant par excellence. For Paul this mirrors the transformation of attitude in the believer. Hence, Jesus says that the son of man doesn’t come to be served but to serve, to die, which is Haggadic midrash of Jesus as the new and greater Son of Man. We have in Mark, echoed in Hebrews, the struggle in Jesus’ mind in Gethsemane desperately trying to get God to change his plan, but resolutely deciding to remain obedient. Jesus says that unless one is born again in this way, he/she can’t enter the kingdom of God—and this includes Jesus.

We know that the Philippian Christ hymn/poetry is about a change of attitude because that is how Paul introduces it. To enter the kingdom of God, one must overcome the god morphe/form gone wrong, like Adam and Eve who innocently and curiously sought equality with God via knowing good and evil. One must overcome this to be born again or created anew in the morphe of the human, which is the servant who, even though he desperately wants to disobey God’s plan, is obedient like Christ in Gethsemane. The desperate prayer in Gethsemane may have originally been envisioned as being granted (compare Hebrews 5:7, where Jesus’ prayers were “heard”—not answered, but heard). The contrast is powerful. Jesus disagreed with God, but is determined to follow God’s will. The Jewish leaders, by contrast, knew that it was against God’s will to kill Jesus, and so they found a loophole by getting Pilate to do it. Hence, the Philippian Christ hymn/poetry reverses the Genesis account, as James Dunn also argues. It perplexes people that God would kick Adam and Eve out of Eden for such a trivial transgression, but it is this minor sin that grows into the greatest sin: manipulating God’s word to defy his will. As McGrath points out, this is not a high Christology because the hymn says that Jesus was given the divine name after the resurrection, not beforehand.

To recapitulate, in order to see this we need to interpret the key word form or morphe in the poem, which occurs twice, in an ancient Greek philosophical way. As I noted above, Ritenbaugh comments:

The first word we need to consider is form in verse 6. It is the Greek morphe, for which English has no exact equivalent. Unlike “form” in English, morphe does not mean “shape.” It is a philosophical term that means “the outward expression of an inner essence.” We can derive an illustration of this definition from figure skating. One might say, “I went to the Winter Olympics, and the figure skater’s form was outstanding.” What is meant is that skater’s swift, rhythmic grace, and coordinated movements were an outward expression of his inward ability to skate expertly. (Ritenbaugh, 1994)

Similarly, in the movie Hook when Captain Hook sees Peter Pan fighting with sportsmanship and honor, he says good FORM, as opposed to when he sees someone acting deficiently, in which case he says bad FORM. So Jesus was also in the morphe of God as the law incarnate with his ministry of signs and wonders, but in the morphe of a slave when he went to the cross. Let’s consider this with a brief analysis of the philosophical Greek words morphe (form) and phusis (nature or inner principle).

Heraclitus says physis kryptesthai philei: “nature loves to hide.” The job of the thinker is to disclose this being/nature of beings out of hiddenness, “a-letheia.” For example, with phusis for the ancient Greeks, fire strives up, and the stone strives down, kata phusin, according to their nature: “When a body moves towards its place, this motion accords with nature, kata phusin … [such as when a] rock falls down to earth. However, if a rock is thrown upward by a sling, this motion is essentially against the nature of the rock, para phusin” (Heidegger, 1968 [WT], p. 83).

To recapitulate from earlier, Heidegger argues that “Being” for the ancient Greeks basically means “presence,” and so Plato says that with the beautiful thing beauty is “present.” (I present a series on how Heidegger wields Hegelian phenomenological method to address philosophical issues elsewhere.) Similarly, with the piece of chalk materiality is always co-present. Presence means movement as presencing, and so with the beautiful mansion, beauty is presencing through it, it is Beauty incarnate, the universal presences through the particular. This is physis as eidos (Plato) and morphe (Aristotle). Heidegger, commenting on Aristotle’s Physics 193 a 31-b3, says that the universal is not divorced from the particular, but presences through it, which is conspicuous in incarnate (so to speak) cases, such as when we say that “this is truly Nature” when we see the eagle circling, or that “this is truly art” when we encounter the van Gogh (Heidegger, 1998c [PA—Phusis], pp. 21-22). “Incarnate” is meant to describe the experience and is not making any theological claims. For example, with Aristotle reversing Platonism, the van Gogh painting doesn’t just fall under and express the Platonic idea art, but is art incarnate, defining/creating Art anew and perhaps inducing a new movement (impressionism, cubism, etc.).

So, with the so called “gorgeous” mansion, Being is experienced in terms of movement (i) presencing beautifully for one person, (ii) presencing gaudy for the next, and (iii) merely presencing if it is encountered as the average house (houseness is merely present in the average house) if you’ve lived in it for a long time and are used to it. Niagara Falls presences very differently to the tourist as opposed to someone who lives beside it. In this regard Protagoras said that “Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, of those that are not, that they are not” (Pantōn chrēmatōn metron estin anthrōpos, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de me ontōn hōs ouk estin [cited in Plato’s Theaetetus, 385E ff.]). Heidegger comments here that “man receives and preserves the measure of that which presences and that which absences” (1938/2002, p. 79). So, for example, a triangle “appears” in a limited way to the child learning her shapes, but still presences better than before she learned them, and appears in its fullness (enargeis) when she grows up to be a mathematics professor. The being-true of beings, the true beings (in the sense of exemplar or “true-friend”), were of course the most proper beings (the on alethes are the kuriotata on).

The other half of the determination of phusis (besides morphe) is hyle. Heidegger comments that hyle is dunamis (power, potentiality, possibility, appropriateness), material for production. We say that the wood that has been selected is “appropriate” to the making of the house. More specifically, dunamis has the quality of movement, in this case being-at-the ready-to-be-enacted, in the sense that a runner poised on his marks on the starting line is ready to go (Heidegger, 1931/1995 [EAF], pp. 187-188). Speaking of dunamis, Werner Marx speaks of ‘”possibilities’ press toward their ‘actualization,’ energeia” (Marx, 1971, p. 111). Morphe is a greater degree phusis than hyle is. The poised runner (dunamis), for instance, is not indifferent towards the enactment of the running (energeia), but precisely has this in view in itself, and in this sense has the entelecheia in itself. It is this poise in which the end and the dunamis lie stable before the work is enacted that is the stable presencing. As peculiar as it initially sounds, Aristotle can say actuality (energeia) is prior to potentiality (dunamis). If we keep in mind the presencing of nature as the circling eagle or houseness as the mansion, hyle as material for production is now understood to mean that which is so constituted so that it can be passed beyond itself in a productive seeing that produces the universal (e.g., this specific Picasso painting produces the surrealism movement).

Jesus was in the form/morphe of God, the Law incarnate, meaning that he had an exemplary understanding and expression of the two fold Law Love principles (i.e., to exist in such a way that your life exemplifies the love of God, which is demonstrated, for example, when you love your neighbor to the point of seeing your enemy as lovable and more important than yourself). And he saw the rest of the Law though this twofold lens—e.g., teaching the “more strict law,” not the letter of the law, concerning adultery, but understanding that the spirit of the adultery prohibition is not just the sexual act, but that by looking at someone lustfully you have committed adultery. But Jesus did not strive for equality with God, as the Jewish religious elite did when they tried to outsmart God with a loophole by having Pilate kill Jesus when God forbade them to do it. They thus broke the third commandment, thou shalt not misrepresent and pervert God’s will. In Christian theology, kenosis (Kénōsis, lit. ’lit. ’the act of emptying”) is the ‘self-emptying’ of Jesus’ own will and becoming entirely receptive to God’s divine will. John the Baptist displayed the attitude when he said of Jesus: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).

Jesus as “a-letheia” (the truth) dis-closing or un-hiding incarnate is, as the Philippian Christ hymn says, also in the form (morphe) of the slave, self-sacrifice incarnate. The later Plato in the Parmenides dialogue calls entities homoiomata, likenesses in which ta paradeigmata, i.e., ai ideai or ta eide, are expressed. Earlier I note how with haggadic midrash/mimesis everything about Jesus is portrayed as “expressing/evoking” earlier scriptures (e.g., the crucifixion narrative recapitulating Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22; Matthew presenting Jesus as the new and greater Moses; and so on). It is true in a Jewish sense and a Greco-Roman sense (e.g., Jesus as the new and greater Dionysus in John’s gospel). (Price [2005] provides numerous examples of the New Testament commenting on Old Testament narrative by rewriting it.)

As Luke says, it is not a penal substitution interpretation of the cross, but a moral influence one, where the soldier sees the suffering Jesus and undergoes a transformation of repentance: “truly this was an innocent man,” “truly this was the son of God” in Mark. As Paul says:

I grieved you with my letter, I do not regret it. Although I did regret it (for[b] I see that that letter caused you grief, though only briefly), now I rejoice, not because you were grieved but because your grief led to repentance, for you felt a godly grief, so that you were not harmed in any way by us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death. (2 Corinthians 7:8-10)

As the Gospel of John summarizes, Jesus is the “truth (aletheia).” In one sense he is true as “correct” in that he is the specially loved (agapetos) by God making him the appropriate one for the world to turn on. Moreover, he is truth in the sense of un-hiding or re-vealing (aletheia), and so, for example, the Book of Revelation in the New Testament has the literal title in Greek: the “Apocalypse of John.” The word apocalypse means re-velation, that which is un-covered. It comes from the Greek word that literally means to pull the lid off of something. There are two senses. Jesus is true in the sense of a “true friend,” and true as in a “great truth of the human condition.” Jesus is revelatory in these ways as Law itself presences through his life. In the double climax, Jesus lives the aporia of the clash between the two principles of the law with his Temple tantrum (God’s righteous indignation against the Temple vs. love of neighbor including enemy) resulting in eventual arrest, and resolves the contradiction by dying for his enemies. Why does Jesus say that he’s the only way to God? Because he is God’s especially beloved (agapetos) and so it is only by the world destroying Jesus that the offence against God is complete, unlike the death of noble John the Baptist, which is not transformative in the way that being implicated in Jesus’ death is. You must have faith in who Jesus is.

9. The Gospels as Bios: Subversive Biographies and the Shadow of Socrates

The parallels[9] between the portrait of Jesus and that of Socrates are pervasive and well known. For example:

• Both were considered outsiders and were persecuted by the establishment.
• Neither left writings, but their followers did.
• Neither advocated violence, but rather worked through a peaceful grassroots movement.
• Both willingly and resolutely faced death.
• Both exposed hypocrisy among the ruling establishment.
• Both ministered to the common people.
• Both were unjustly accused of crimes against God and were condemned.
• Jesus was sinless; Socrates had impeccable character.
• Both had prophetic utterances spoken about them concerning their mission.
• Both could have escaped death but didn’t.
• Both of their deaths were purposed for a greater good.

Keeping this in mind, in considering the form of writing of the Gospels, Walsh distinguishes a civic biography from a subversive one:

While the civic biography is a type that is organized around the dominant social values, which are presupposed even in the breach (as in the case of imperfect or vicious subjects), subversive biography gives voice to those who are on the margins of power, and more or less subtly undermine or challenge the conventional ideology…. But the difference between the two biographical traditions is not solely a matter of emphasizing the subject’s facility with words versus his capacity for action. For the active hero manifests his virtue in the public sphere, the world of war and statecraft; whether he wins or loses, the measure of his character is his conformity with the dominant ideals of society and culture. He is a central player, part of the system: he is a model for those who would govern. The Socratic type, on the contrary, is at the margins of society, puckish and nonconformist. In relation to the powers that be, he is the underdog despite his sharp wits; indeed, it is precisely because he is politically weak that he must rely on clever ripostes and arguments to defend himself. In so doing, he tends to upset inherited beliefs and thereby threatens the establishment ideology. Thanks to the critical edge of his commentary, he is seen as subversive, not because he may wrest political control from his adversaries but because he seems to undermine the values on which society depends…. Therefore, it is natural that Socrates acquired enemies in high places. But hovering at the edges of his critique is the idea that the virtues, as popularly conceived, are faulty and that a revolution in values is needed. (Walsh, 2023, p. 180)

Why would the Synoptics make sense as Greco-Roman elites writing about Jesus? Walsh explains:

The story of a Galilean peasant resurrected like Romulus was also timely. Beyond engaging the topoi of historiography, bioi, the novel, and paradoxography, the gospel writers are crafting their narratives after the Jewish War (66-73CE) in an era when, as discussed in the previous chapter, Judean sacred texts and interpretation were of evident great interest to the rest of the Empire. Roman imperial campaigns offered ample opportunity for cultural elites to engage in creative projects aimed at critiquing or propagandizing the Empire. Flavian material imagery famously championed the victories of the Jewish War, while authors like Josephus offered companion commentary on certain events. (Walsh, 2023, p. 154)

So, for instance, in paradoxography we may have a tale of a woman giving birth to a monkey, contextualized among many witnesses and during the reign of so and so.

We have seen the use of satire in the Gospels, from the lampooning of Yom Kippur with the absurdity and unjust releasing of Barabbas by Pilate, to the gross illegality of Jesus’ trial. Such style fits with other subversive biographies like Aesop. Walsh comments:

Aesop was a representative of ethical actions in some measure through his observations, teachings, and commentary yet, at the same time, he emerged as a subversive symbol who transgressed the norms of the dominant culture, to comedic effect…. Aesop eventually finds himself a house slave again, this time of a philosopher named Xanthus, who, humorously, proves no match for Aesop’s shrewd mind. Aesop’s wit earns him his freedom and, like Phaedo, Menippus, and Epictetus, he rises from the position of slave to honored statesman hobnobbing with philosophers and the court of the Lydian King Croesus, who sends him on a number of diplomatic missions, including to Delphi. His death there is occasioned by the city’s collective fear that Aesop, esteemed and ever-observant, would reveal to the outside world how morally corrupt their city had become. He is framed for theft, accused of impiety, and sentenced to death as a common criminal dragged through the streets from the safe house of the Temple to Apollo.38 In the wake of his forced suicide, Aesop received many posthumous honors—Phaedrus, for instance, tells us that Lysippos crafted a statue of Aesop, standing in front of the Seven Sages in Athens.39 And, of course, there is the long tradition of his treatment in literature. (Walsh, 2023, p. 187).

The question arises for Paul: if he wanted to avoid the Antichrist, why didn’t he just teach suicide for himself and his followers to be with Jesus? For one, you can’t do acts of love for God and your neighbor if you kill yourself. And suicide is considered a violation of the commandment “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17). The prohibition against murder is found in the Ten Commandments, the heart of the Hebrew law (Exodus). Paul thought that it was his mission to care for/cultivate and present his churches to Christ at his Second Coming. Accepting 2 Thessalonians as authentic with its Antichrist seems to make the best sense of Paul’s extreme purity theology as levelling up the believer so as not to be deceived.

10. Conclusion

I’ve here aimed to test Walsh’s argument that the New Testament writings are not the product of a literate ancient person acting as a mouthpiece for the oral tradition of his community, but rather the product of literary elites. I disagree with Walsh on at least one important point: I think that the New Testament writers seem to be experts in Jewish literature as well as Greco-Roman works. We saw this in this section with the Aristotelian theme of the Philippian Christ Hymn that Paul quotes. The Gospels only truly stand forth as what they are if we suppose a context of highly educated Greco-Roman writer networks and ancient writing practices. Again and again, the elite model brings to life the texts in new and meaty ways. But another point about ancient religion is worth noting.

Ancient religion was not primarily about ideas that individuals take as true, but permeated the everyday world:

But how does a god make himself manifest? In the Greek language the word theos, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “O theoi. theos gar kai to gigno’ skein philous” — “O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerenyi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theos.'” And an event referred to as being theos could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.” “Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. (Calasso, 2002, pp. 5-6)

To recapitulate, Homer says that the gods don’t appear to everyone enargeis, radiantly, and so the woman presenced in her goddess fullness to Odysseus, but not to Telemachus even though she was beside him. So, for instance, the mansion might appear like houseness incarnate to one person, but gaudy to the next. Or, Niagara Falls might give the look of “wonder of the world” to the tourist seeing it in person for the first time, or conversely offer the aspect/look of noise pollution to the Niagara Falls resident who has lived there his entire life.

The departure of the gods seems to coincide with the interiorizing of man (e.g., moods like boredom become something lived out in our inner life, as I will explain below). This is realized with the completion of the divorce of man from others and that of the city/dwelling (polis) and honor-seeking Achilles contrasted with the self-sacrificial agape of Jesus.

Boredom is a prime example for Heidegger. For instance, though the rise of ancient Greek thinkers led to an interiorization of life, we still see vestiges of a time of ek-statikon, ecstatic, being outside of oneself. For example, take the mood of boredom. Aristophanes in the Archarnians has one character say: “I grown, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I don’t know what to do. I write, I pull at my hair, I figure things out as I look to the country, longing for peace” (lines 30-32). He does not name that he is bored, but he describes the symptoms. Similarly, Euripides’ Medea describes men becoming fed up or bored, such as those who had had enough of their families, and then acting unfairly (lines 244-246); but again, boredom as an emotion is not named. Moods back then weren’t what took place merely in our inner lives, but as our ek-statik (ekstatikon) being in the world. Thus the being-outside-of-self that I noted earlier with the schizophrenic and religious disposition was once basic to how everyone was “in the world.”

Romanticism is not just a return to the imagined purity of the geist of the volk, but to rethink the human as one not divorced from the world that the interiorizing of thinkers and philosophy created (starting with Hippocrates). For instance, we read where Romanticism writer Charles Dickens (in David Copperfield) gives a clear example of this with youthful romantic love: “I was sensible of a mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else … it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wild flowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud” (1850/2015, chapter 33 [“Blissful”]).

In ancient times this loss of being-in-the-world played out in history as the slow isolation of man from his city (polis), whereas in earlier times there was no distinction between the two. And so, briefly outlining this movement:

The Greeks (tyrants excluded) embraced and celebrated the drive to compete, to be the best, to achieve virtue, excellence, and glory in the eyes of their peers and Gods. This is arete….

A citizen’s first duty to his polis was to fight and to die if needed for his country…. Thus the polis took on a defensive tendency during the archaic period. As the poleis grew prosperous, the meaning of arete expanded to serving one’s polis in all aspects of life, whether defending the polis, winning glory for the polis in athletic competition, or guiding the polis through politics….

For the first time most men, as citizens of the polis, had a say in whether or not they would go to war and which laws they might pass. Through eunomiachin, they were now empowered politically, economically, and socially. They all shared the power of a king with each other, meaning they could now all compete for arete. The playing field was now level.

Only the Gods and nomoi now ruled a citizen of the poleis. Herodotus claims in the third book of the Histories that ‘Custom (nomoi) is king of all.’ Demaratus tried to inform Xerxes that the Spartans’ ‘master is the law and they’re far more afraid of it than your men are of you. The words of Demaratus are misleading. The Greeks did not fear the law in the same sense Xerxes’s troops feared him. The law gave a citizen his power to speak and to be heard. The law guaranteed the citizen his land. Illegal actions could indeed result in punishment from men and gods, but the Greeks loved their laws, the children of their ideals, above all else. Plato and Aristotle reiterate Herodotus when they describe the ideal state as one that controls every detail of a citizen’s life. In the Greek mind, there was no distinction between the state and the citizen. (Walker, 2014, pp. 7-8)

We see polis as the city-state of ancient Greece, but thereby miss the crucial point: polis is opposed to apolis/deinon, existential homelessness. Just as we have soma/sema (body/prison) in the Greek, we also have polis/polos, the polis as the pole—that around which everything turns. When Anaximander gives the statement on Being that I noted earlier, dike (justice/jointure) and adikia (injustice/out of joint), he is using Greek law language in the sense that the laws were the children of the ancient Greeks, the ownmost expressions of who they were. The Greek notion of polis does not mean what we think of, a city-state, but rather “the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way … the abode of the essence of humanity” (Heidegger, 1942-1943/1998b [P], pp. 89-90). Paul’s understanding of church reflects the ancient Greek polis framework.

The polis was where things appear as they are, pelei. But the polis is also the home of the counter essence of the abode, polla ta deina … pelei, “manifold is the uncanny” (Antigone 332, in Heidegger, 1942-1943/1998b [P], p. 90). It was in reflecting on this that Heidegger had the horrific failing of his Nazi period, trying to connect the German people to their state with such things as the Hitler Youth. Not being at home (apolis/deinon) remains a crucial issue today as we continue to strive to be in the warmth of the hearth fire (parestios/PARA hestia). Heraclitus said, warming himself at the stove, “even here gods come to presence” (Heidegger, 1998c [PA], p. 270).

God’s presencing in this way taken philosophically doesn’t mean supernatural superstition, but encountering the numinous in the life that the person unconsciously creates for herself. So, for instance, we may get this concept of “home” poetized in Chantal Kreviazuk’s “Feels Like Home” song and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Similarly, when Paul defines the Church, he doesn’t mean a building or a collection of people, but a polis whole that completes its members. In “My Church” Maren Morris expresses this by finding this Church in numinous car driving experience. Maren also does so in the companion song “80s Mercedes.” Getting lost in a song provides a rich experience that allows us to see what the ancients experienced as the divine in everything. One might get ready for a debate by blasting the uncensored version of “Get Back” by Ludacris. Friedrich Nietzsche thus says that a life without music would be a mistake.

As Nietzsche said, we killed God, meaning as eternal recurrence, a favorite Gospel song can go from presencing holy to presencing irritatingly just by playing it on repeat fifty times in a row, such that the holy is not objectively encountered in an Other, but rather it is the person being ek-static and projecting themselves onto another (like when we encounter boringness as a characteristic of a book analogous to plot and setting, or when the schizophrenic experiences the police “as” conspiring against him).

Arete as virtue, excellence, and glory with the ancient Greeks, personified by Achilles, was transformed by Christianity into selfless love (agape) of Jesus as love of widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy as more important than self. On the other hand, the love mandate was also present in Paul, so the Gospel writers may simply have been creatively recapitulating Paul’s ideas and putting them on Jesus’ lips. Importantly, Achilles said that it was better to work as a day laborer for little money than to lord over all of the wasted death (a reference to the ancient Greeks’ tragic view of the underworld). The wishful thinking Christian view of the afterlife was much more appealing than that of Homer, and indeed even Socrates tried to unravel the problem that Homer created. Do we live a life of self-realization that satiates for a while, but the emptiness inside demands the quest to begin anew? Or do we live according to an other-realization model where I self-empty by caring for widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy as more important than myself?

As I noted above, I reported on the 2024 New Insights into the New Testament (NINT) conference on the apostle Paul on the Secular Frontier blog. For the remainder of this essay I will note a few takeaways from that conference.

Since the apostle Paul is one of the most influential writers in history, it is important even for secularists to study him. Paul was an apocalyptic thinker who believed that the end of the age had begun and would be realized in his lifetime. He called the resurrected Jesus the “first fruits” (1 Corinthians 15:23) of the general end-time harvest of souls that was underway.

Common belief was that God had made a covenant with the Jews, and that the Jews kept their end of the bargain by keeping God’s law. It was thought that the occurrence of bad things (like the Jews being repeatedly conquered) was God’s punishment in return for breaking his law. Around 200 years before Jesus, some Jewish thinkers started to think that evil forces were controlling people and opposing believers by preventing them from keeping the law, and that this is why bad things happened. Though the world had the appearance of one where God isn’t in control, apocalyptic thinking was that God will soon destroy these evil forces and set up a utopia like Eden. Paul and Jesus were apocalyptic thinkers.

Paul was a highly religious Greek-speaking Jew and a scholar of scripture. In his early life he followed the approach of the Pharisees, trying to follow the law to the fullest. Ehrman suggests, wrongly in my view, that Paul encountered Christians claiming the blasphemy that a crucified criminal was the messiah, the figure of power and grandeur predicted in scripture. Jesus did not destroy the enemy and set up a kingdom, but was humiliated and tortured to death. Ehrman suggests that Paul thus persecuted the church for blasphemy. Despite what Acts states, it is unlikely that Paul was commissioned to do this by the high priest, for the high priest lacked the jurisdiction; but Paul says himself that he tried to destroy the Church.

Saul/Paul had a vision of Jesus, and this led to him following Christ, though Paul was a Jew beforehand and remained so afterward. He was a Jew who came to believe a correct understanding of scripture was that the messiah was to be killed and raised. Paul thought it was part of God’s plan for Jesus to be horrifically tortured and killed. Followers of Christ believed that Jesus died, not for his own sins, but for the sins of others. One way of understanding this is vicarious substitutionary atonement—but is another interpretation of Christ’s death as saving possible? Did Jews have an understanding of sacrifice that was the same as the pagan notion of sacrifice, which is appeasing the gods’ wrath?

Paul thought that Jesus would return to destroy God’s enemies and set up God’s kingdom in Paul’s lifetime. Paul did not invent the idea that Jesus’ death brought about salvation, but learned this from other followers of Jesus (e.g., the Corinthian creed/poetry that Paul quotes). Paul’s innovation over mainstream Judaism is that Paul thought that salvation did not come through following the Torah law and Jewish festivals, but through belief in the death/resurrection of the messiah. Paul says that if righteousness comes by the Law, then Christ died for nothing. The resurrection of Jesus proves that salvation comes through belief in Christ’s death rather than through the law, and so gentiles don’t need to keep the Law/become Jews to be saved. Without this key teaching, Christianity would have remained a sect of Judaism and would not have grown to what it became. But does this reading really make the best sense of the resurrection? Were it correct, why would Paul say that if the resurrection is not true, then the cross is of no effect? (“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins”—1 Corinthians 15:17). If the cross dealt with sin, then why does Paul say that you are still in your sin without the resurrection?

Presenter James Tabor has a bit of a different take on Paul’s apocalyptic thinking. In Tabor’s reading, Genesis was the dust prototype of death and decay that would later be replaced by a cosmos of spirit (pneuma).

Let me proceed to summarize a few gems from Tabor’s presentation. The salvation is cosmic because all of the forms of existence are passing away: being male/female; Jew/Greek; slave/free; rich/poor; etc. The setup of this world is passing away (1 Corinthians 7:29-31). Those who are in Christ have a new spiritual body waiting for them in Heaven. Although Tabor doesn’t say so explicitly, presumably the pneuma of Christ in you indicates to God who gets the new resurrection body, like the lamb’s blood on the door indicated to God which houses were to be passed over in Egypt. In this regard Christ was the ultimate Passover lamb of God (1 Corinthians 5:7). Jesus is Passover incarnate. Just as God freed the Jews from the evil of slavery at the hands of the Egyptians, Jesus’ death frees us from the evil of slavery to sin, opening our eyes and breaking Satan’s spell (e.g., when the soldier who tortured and killed Jesus had his eyes opened to Jesus as innocent and wrongly killed). Christ’s spirit (pneuma) enters into you in baptism as the opponent of Satan’s temptations par excellence to help you resist Satan in a way that you can’t achieve on your own, and this spirit grows (you grow in your faith) through various works, such as studying scripture, self-denial, caring for widow/orphan/stranger/enemy, participating in the Lord’s supper (the Eucharist), and so on. Another nuance that Tabor adds is that, for Paul, it’s not everyone who will be raised in the end of days resurrection, but only Christians and the dead in Christ (1 Corinthians 15:23).

There is nothing in someone being raised from the dead that proves that the end times general resurrection had begun. In the Hebrew scriptures we have:

• The prophet Elijah prays and God raises a young boy from death (1 Kings 17:17-24).
• Elisha raises the son of the Woman of Shunem (2 Kings 4:32-37) whose birth he previously foretold (2 Kings 4:8-16).
• A dead man’s body that was thrown into the dead Elisha’s tomb is resurrected when the body touches Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:21).

There must have been something special about what Paul saw as the resurrected Jesus. And for the end time, bodily resurrection makes little sense because people’s bodies are eaten by animals, lost at sea, burned, and so on. It makes more sense that, as Tabor says, Jesus left his physical body behind like discarded clothes and put on his new spirit body. This would explain why Paul has no empty tomb story, which was later invented by Mark as a common apotheosis (person becoming god) trope, which Walsh and Price point out we see in Chariton’s novel.

It’s interesting that Acts, roughly two-thirds of which concerns Paul, says that Jesus’ death is not substitutionary atoning. Does Acts simply contradict Paul’s letters, or are we misinterpreting Paul’s letters as advocating vicarious atonement? For Ehrman, Paul believes in the vicarious atoning death of Jesus, in contrast to the repentance that led to forgiveness taught by the historical Jesus. Again, is this a contradiction, or is Paul not being interpreted correctly here?

Paul was also an apostle of the cross who explicitly stated that he resolved to know nothing among his readers but Christ and him crucified, and he quoted the creed/poetry that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. Why, then, does Paul say if the resurrection is not true, then the cross is of no effect? (“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins—1 Corinthians 15:17”). If the cross dealt with sin, why does Paul say you are still in your sin without the resurrection?

To begin to unpack this, let’s ask why the apocalyptic Pharisee Saul violently persecuted Christians. Let’s also ask why, when he converted and became the apocalyptic Christian Paul, he received many lashes from the Jews on three separate occasions. Ehrman hypothesizes that the violent response to Christians by the Jews was due to the blasphemy that they were proclaiming as a crucified messiah. But this seems unlikely, for in the Judaism at the time there were many views of what the messiah would be, and so one more would hardly warrant violence. The solution seems to be how Jesus was attached to the end times.

The process of human evolution (so to speak) starting with the initial opening of eyes with Adam and Eve dis-covering their nakedness, and then completing with converts receiving the mind of Christ by way of the wrongful crucifixion of God’s specially beloved agapetos, was thus apocalyptic in the sense that it completed the story of humanity. As the serpent in Eden noted, man had become a god in terms of knowledge. And as Origen noted in Contra Celsus 4.40, Adam’s story is on a superficial level an origin story, but more essentially has to do with humanity in general, and so Christ as the second Adam completes the process of humanity’s eyes being opened and thus being godlike in knowledge. Nowhere in the Old Testament is Adam interpreted in terms of inherited sin, and this has prompted many modern scholars to move beyond the substitutionary atonement model of Christ to the moral influence one.

The substitutionary atonement idea here is that we are guilty, but through a theological sleight of hand, accepting Christ makes our sin invisible to God because we clothe ourselves in Christ’s righteousness. Staples notes that this is a very problematic reading. For one thing, Paul repeatedly notes that we will be judged on our actions (Romans 2:5-11; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Galatians 6:7-8; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; etc.). For example, John Barclay notes that Paul’s directive to members of his churches to give to the poor Christians in Jerusalem is at once economic, political, and theological. Moreover, the Torah provides mechanisms for forgiveness and atonement. If there is one thing that the God of the Old Testament can do, it’s forgive. Just consider the penitential psalms or the story of Jonah.

The history of the Jews is the repeated breaking of the Torah covenant, and as a solution, God says that he will write the Law on people’s hearts to solve the root problem: sinful Inclination, that stubborn, rebellious, and disobedient heart that all people have.

Paul’s gospel is the promise of inward transformation being fulfilled. Justification is neither a legal way by God, through substitutionary atonement, to declare someone as righteous even though nothing has changed, nor a rescue of believers from the penalty of sin by giving sinful people a pass. Rather, it is being transformed into a doer of justice so that you can meet the standard of judgment. The Torah covenant is only applicable until one dies, and since Christ has died, he escapes the old covenant and lives outside of it. Jesus puts the Law into the hearts and mouths of those who listen to him, and as they invite his spirit into them. But what does this mean?

Sinful disposition is overcome by accepting Christ’s faithful spirit and so learning to love God and neighbor beyond all else, which Jesus calls the essence of the law in the Gospels. Passages such as the expiation/propitiation passage in Romans must be understood literally as the mercy seat of the ark, and so Jesus is literally the place of God’s glory. The death of Jesus un-covers the corruption of the system, just like the unnecessary death of noble Socrates.

We see in Luke/Acts the notion of literary pairs in death, so the forgiving death of Stephen in Acts mirrors the same of Jesus in Luke that causes the soldier to “see” that Jesus is innocent and has been wrongly killed. Similarly, in Josephus we see that the John the Baptist of history was killed because the numbers of his movement had become a political threat. This is morphed in Mark to John’s humiliating death for morally chastising the Jewish rulers, which pairs exactly with Jesus’ even more tortuous and humiliating death because he ran afoul of the Jewish rulers. In the NINT conference it was noted that Paul’s claim that the Jews killed Jesus may very well be historical.

Benjamin White is one of the top and most respected Pauline scholars in the world. White’s NINT talk is about how mathematics is used to help decide which of the New Testament letters are authentically written by Paul. I would like to highlight one point that he makes about 1 Thessalonians 2: 14-16. This passage reads:

For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last.

This is an important text for mythicists to dismiss as an interpolation (as Carrier has dismissed) because it says that the Jews killed Christ. The mythicist claim is further that references to destruction in the verses identify the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, and so is post-Paul. Either it was an interpolation, or it was original to 1 Thessalonians, which makes that entire letter inauthentic. The anti-Judaism in the text reflects something that the movement later grew into over time.

White disagrees and does not find reason to dismiss it as an interpolation. Paul seems to be a first-century apocalyptic Jew navigating through other Jews, like the Pharisees and Essenes and the the hated superapostles, and we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that these groups were always going after one another as to which of them were the true people of God. It is certainly possible for Paul to speak, among gentiles, badly of the Jews that he thought killed Christ. Note, too, that Paul thought that the apocalypse was underway: he speaks of the resurrected Christ as the first fruits of the general resurrection harvest of souls at the end of the age, so he thought that the judgment of the enemies of God had begun, and so need not be referring to post-70 CE destruction of Jerusalem. Relatedly, in a later presentation in the NINT conference, Joel Marcus points out that Paul says that the Jews are beloved by God because they come from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but are enemies of God for rejecting Jesus and his message (Romans 11:28). It would make sense, then, that the Jews were persecuting the Christians because the Christians were saying the corrupt Jewish elite wrongfully killed Jesus.

The apocalyptic Pharisee Saul/Paul believed that the end times were imminent because he saw the first of the end time general resurrection: the risen Jesus. Accordingly, Paul searched the Greek translation of the Old Testament (LXX) and came to believe that he was a central player in this drama as the one who was prophesied by scripture to bring the gentiles to the Jewish God, at which time history would end. Expanding on Ehrman, also notice the language from the Septuagint, Acts, and Paul.

For example, regarding eyes being opened, Paul would have seen himself in a passage in the Septuagint (LXX) that included Isaiah 42:6-7, which was so important to the early Christian movement that it was recapitulated in Acts 26:5-18, Paul being the great hero of Acts. In Ehrman’s translation and emphasis, we read: “The Lord God, have called you in righteousness, and I will hold of your hand and strengthen you: and I have given you as the covenant to a race, as a light to the nations/gentiles: to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out from bonds those who are bound and them that sit in darkness, and from the prison house those that sit in darkness” (LXX Isaiah 42:6-7, NET as modified by Ehrman). Acts rewrites this to describe Paul’s conversion: “I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen…. I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:15-18, NRSV, emphasis Ehrman). So there is going to be an opening of eyes that completes what was started when Adam’s eyes were opened and he shamefully realized his nakedness. Adam’s eye-opening was not a fully godly eye-opening, and so God asked Adam, “who told you you were naked”? Nakedness in itself is not evil since we are all naked multiple times during the day, but rather it is when our nakedness encounters the judging eye of the Other that we feel shame. Christ’s unjust crucifixion opens our eyes completely to his innocence and what Justice is; and so in the believer it is a godly mind of Christ that grows out of a worldly standard, like an oak tree emerging from an acorn. For example, at the arrest in Mark there is a naked young follower of Jesus (Mark 14:51) who is as guilty in the eyes of the world as the guilty naked Adam for associating with the criminal Jesus, but the young man reappears in the empty tomb in Mark (16:5) clothed in pure white clothes: righteous in the eyes of God who vindicated Jesus by the resurrection that overrules the flogging and execution, which is to say overrules the judgment and punishment of the world. God’s justice outshines human justice.

It is the godly figurative opening of eyes that is the key issue, as apocalyptic Pharisee Saul’s eyes were opened by his vision of Jesus and he became Paul, or the soldier in Luke whose eyes were open to the innocence of Jesus—a completion of the “eye-opening” started in Eden, where sinful Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened to their nakedness, the issue of their questioning/doubting of God’s words that evolved into the twisting of God’s words by the Jewish elite who conspired against Jesus.

Of course, in this we see that the Jewish notion of sin is only superficially appeasing God’s wrath with sacrifice (unlike the intended appeasement found in other ancient religions). Coming to really see yourself so that there can be real change is the true message since sacrificing a ram can be a mere gesture where one will just go on sinning. We see this with the binding of Isaac, where the sacrifice would be a powerful and meaningful sacrifice for Abraham, unlike a meaningless ram that he actually ends up sacrificing, for killing Isaac would destroy the future promise God that gave to Abraham. And God wanted obedience, not blood, and so Isaac was spared. In this regard we read:

And Samuel said, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obedience to the voice of the Lord? Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice and to heed than the fat of rams.” (1 Samuel 15:22)

Jesus criticized contemporaneous teachers for similar practices. Matthew 6 notes three religious activities—fasting, public prayer, and giving to those in need—that people often use to look good in front of other people rather than to honor God. As in 1 Samuel 15, the problem is not the offerings, but the disobedience of God’s commands and the desire for the approval of people rather than the approval of God.

This is very much captured in the religious philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas in “Totality and Infinity” (1961) and “Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence” (1974), as well as in Jacques Derrida’s response to Lévinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” (1967). The face-to-face relation is a concept in the French philosopher Lévinas’ thought on human sociality as it relates to the Bible. It means that, ethically, people are responsible to one another in the face-to-face encounter. Specifically, Lévinas says that the human face “orders and ordains” us. It calls the subject into “giving and serving” the Other. It is the suffering face of widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy that awakens an infinite responsibility in me.

Notes

[1] Like the ‘pure goat’/scapegoat, the issue is the repentance that the sacrifice occasions, not the propitiation of the sacrifice, because otherwise the newly clean person will be emboldened to sin again with the knowledge that Hitler could have been exonerated on his deathbed with a brief prayer. Even a demon believes in Jesus and the cross (James 2:19), so belief is merely a facilitator for repentance.

[2] Perhaps the reason that the account of the death of John the Baptist in the Gospels differs from the one in Josephus is that early Christians invented details to make John’s death more humiliating as a literary pair with Jesus’ death.

[3] In a similar spirit, we read: “Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving in the army gets entangled in everyday affairs; the soldier’s aim is to please the enlisting officer” (2 Timothy 2:3-4).

[4] Repentful/transforming as metanoia—having a mind/heart transformation—is coming to experience the world as Christ did with this twofold love lens, what Paul called having “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16) that allows us to cultivate the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:19-23).

[5] Compare: “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white robes to clothe yourself and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see” (Revelation 3:15-18-15; Psalm 19:8). Laodicea was well known throughout the region for its production of eye salve that was used to treat a number of eye diseases. Jesus offers salve that could cure spiritual blindness. Symbolically speaking, if the Laodiceans had applied the eye salve that Jesus offered, they would have been able to see their lukewarm condition and subsequently repent. Ellicott’s commentary helpfully summarizes:

They were blind; they were proud of their intellectual wealth; they boasted of their enlightenment. (Comp. Colossians 2:8.) Self-deceived, they thought, like the Pharisees, that they saw. (Comp. John 9:40-41.) Better would it be for them that they should receive the anointing of the Holy One (1 John 2:20), which would teach them all things, and especially reveal to them their self-ignorance. This anointing might be painful, but “the eyes of their understanding would be enlightened” (such is the remarkably parallel thought in the Epistle to the Ephesians), and they would be enabled to see and appreciate things spiritual. (Comp. John 9:7; John 9:25; 1 Corinthians 2:10-14; Ephesians 1:18; Ephesians 5:19.). (Ellicott, 1897/2015, p. 550)

Psalm 19:8 uses enlighten for phōtizousa, spiritually enlighten or imbue with saving knowledge. We see a similar light metaphor in Psalm 119:104-105. So, not “here” physically (as in Psalm 13:3), but morally; the whole nature of one who lives in the light of truth is illuminated. Eyes were likewise opened in Eden for Adam and Eve.

[6] The Church served a similar role that the polis did for the early Greeks. There was not separation between polis and individual.

[7] Jesus, the high priest, figuratively sprinkled his own blood in the holy place in Heaven (Hebrews 9:11-12, 12:24). This means that the blood of Christ is sprinkled on our hearts (our body being God’s temple), birthing an opportunity for true repentance: “let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Hebrews 10:22). The Psalmist says: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10). Paul gives the image of God circumcising humans’ hearts. Uncovering the holy heart from its sinfulness is precisely the element that we also see in good Gentiles. In this way, we read: “and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us” (Acts 15:9). The kingdom of God is within, hidden even in the hard hearts of the Pharisees (e.g., in Luke 17:21 NKJV, where the adverb entos means inwardly, or when used substantially, means the inside, as opposed to ektos, outerly or the outside). Many more modern translations than the New King James Version, such as the NRSVUE (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition), render “entos” here in Luke 17:21 as “among you” as a better translation choice, although “within” or “inside” is listed as a possible alternative translation. In this case, the preferred choice of the NRSVUE as “among” is incorrect because, analyzing Luke 17:21, if the verse says that the kingdom of God is neither “here (hode)” nor “there (ekei),” then obviously it isn’t “among” us: “within” or “inside” us is the better translation, and it fits exactly with the New Testament imagery, such as that (in Paul) of the heart as the true holy of holies that needs to be circumcised to reveal the law written on it (see also: 2 Corinthians 3:3; Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26; Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10). It is the law hiddenly written on our hearts that is awakened by the crucifixion, such as with the soldier at the crucifixion in Mark and Luke (“Truly this was the son of God/an innocent man”). Our heart is the true holy of holies that resides in our body, which is the temple of God (1 Corinthians 6:19; 1 Corinthians 3:16), really hidden in the hard hearts of the Pharisees. Ephesians teaches that “Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (3:17). Jesus is not simply the scapegoat in the sense of one tainted with sin who is not worthy of sacrifice, like Barabbas, but rather is the pure sacrificial goat (without blemish in Leviticus 22:20-21; also priest without sin in Leviticus 21:16-21), sinless, as priest expectation in Leviticus and a pure scapegoat (cf. Isaiah 53:4-8). Why is the new covenant in Hebrews sealed by Jesus’ blood? The Levitical sacrifices could not change the hearts of men (Hebrews 9:9-10), but Jesus’ sacrifice completely saves mankind from their sins (Hebrews 7:25), changing them from the inside out (Hebrews 8:10).

[8] Liane Feldman comments that the animals of the Yom Kippur ritual are each meant to address two different kinds of sin:

The Day of Atonement ritual as a whole is designed to remove the accumulated contamination, caused by the impurities and sins of the Israelites, from the tabernacle. This contamination was understood to physically accumulate in the tabernacle, and different types of contamination required different procedures for removal. The scapegoat is part of one such procedure and has a specific function: to remove the contamination caused by the intentional sins of the Israelites from the tabernacle complex by physically carrying the contamination into the wilderness. The scapegoat is laden with the Israelites’ iniquities and sent to Azazel after the priests complete the two other purification offerings in this ritual. As the scholar Jacob Milgrom has argued, the first two purification offerings serve to clean up and remove contamination caused by the impurities and unintentional sins of the Israelites; however, their intentional sins cannot be removed in the same way. In fact, the contamination caused by intentional sins is so severe that it cannot be neutralized at all. Instead, it must be physically relocated to a place far away from Yahweh and his tabernacle. This is why the scapegoat exists…. Despite the fact that it appears only once in the Hebrew Bible, the idea of a scapegoat existed throughout the ancient world. Scapegoat-like figures are present in several Mesopotamian and Hittite texts that predate the Hebrew Bible. This concept also appears in the New Testament and is used in at least two places to describe Jesus, the Gospel of John (John 18:14) and the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 9:11-10:18). (Feldman, n.d.)

[9] Walsh points out that we see, for instance, accounts of Alexander in the Alexander Romances that are not about him being a great warrior, but as unattractive and getting by on his wits and helping his friends. Similarly, we have traditions like Herodotus talking about the weird and wondrous things happening on the outskirts of the Roman Empire (e.g., demons, miraculous births, and healings).

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