Introducing Jesus, the Christ: Paul as Memorial Entrepreneur

The closest thing we have to a surviving author who was an eyewitness to the life of Jesus is the Apostle Paul, who, before engaging in his missionary work, met two of the apostles. ... Still, one of the most striking features of Paul's surviving letters is just how little he actually tells us about Jesus's life prior to his death.

"Thinking with" Jesus

I was born in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, on the seventy-eighth day of Jimmy Carter's presidency. Five years earlier, on Saturday, June 17, 1972, my mother was not yet fifteen when five men were arrested attempting to fix a malfunctioning wiretap at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Watergate exerted a weight on American culture that may explain some features of my early experiences, for example why one popular sitcom from my childhood featured Alex Keaton, a Young Republican who toted a lunchbox with Richard Nixon's likeness, and why so many political scandals during my lifetime tend to be known as This-or-That-Gate.

Watergate — and especially the memory of Watergate in late-twentieth-century American political discourse — offers an interesting way to think about Paul as Jesus's "memorial entrepreneur." On the twentieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Michael Schudson noted: "While Watergate may be a significant factor when people think back on their formative political experiences, it has regularly seemed to commentators all but invisible in daily American life." Those two descriptors — "significant factor" and "all but invisible" — seem incompatible. But there they are, side-by-side in a relatively bland statement whose accuracy can hardly be challenged. Yes, Watergate shook American political institutions to the core, such that, as 1973 and the first half of 1974 unfolded, the future of American constitutional government seemed increasingly imperiled. But no, it has not had any lasting or fundamental effect on the American political institutions it threatened.

The parallel, with Watergate and American politics on one hand and Jesus and Paul on the other intrigues me. It would be foolish to suggest that Jesus is "all but invisible" in Paul's letters. If anything, Jesus is conspicuously visible in Paul's writings. Paul uses Jesus's name, Iesous, 213 times in the thirteen letters that bear his name. If we ignore the six letters whose authenticity Pauline scholars question, that number drops to 142, which is still quite significant. Not surprisingly, he uses the word Christos ("anointed one, Christ") even more often.

Even with all these references to Jesus, Paul is famously silent about Jesus. Very little of Jesus's teaching appears in Paul's letters, and when Paul does include something that sounds like Jesus's teaching, he doesn't usually bother to tell the reader, "Hey, this comes from Jesus." For example, when Paul instructs his readers in Rome, "Bless people who harass you — bless and don't curse them" (Rom 12:14), his words remind us of Jesus's teaching in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount and Luke's Sermon on the Plain:

Despite the similarities between Paul's instruction in Romans and Jesus's in Matthew and Luke, nowhere does Paul give any hint that he's passing along teachings of Jesus. In fact, Romans 12 is one of those rare chapters where Paul doesn't mention Jesus's name, even though echoes of Jesus's teaching are especially resonant in this chapter. In other words, here in Romans 12, where it might have been easiest for Paul to point out for his readers that Jesus stands behind and authorizes his moral instructions, he doesn't. If Jesus is there, he is invisible, all but forgotten as the source of the profoundly difficult instruction, "Bless people who harass you — bless and don't curse them" (Rom 12:14).

Let's return to Watergate. Michael Schudson notes the deplorable state of Americans' knowledge of the details of the Watergate scandal and the resignation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States. In the twenty-five years since Schudson's book, that knowledge has only further degraded. Watergate is a public event, and it offers "tools ... for a society's thinking out loud about itself, not only at the time but in retrospect." As a public event, Watergate is arguably a foundational component of American political memory. Even if the majority of Americans today can't remember when the Watergate burglars were arrested (17 June 1972), when Nixon resigned from office (8 August 1974), or what, precisely, led to his resignation, they do understand comparisons of contemporary events to Watergate via the "-gate" suffix (e.g., "Bridgegate," or "Emailgate," or "Faceliftgate") or comparisons with Richard Nixon. Watergate, as a public event, provides "cultural forms" for American political discourse and activity, and these forms "store and transmit information that individuals can make use of without themselves 'memorizing' it." The memory of Watergate affects the way many people perceive, understand, and react to events in the present even if knowledge and discussion of Watergate itself is largely missing and inadequate.

The parallel with Paul and Jesus is instructive. Scholars disagree and debate whether Paul's knowledge of Jesus's life and teachings was inadequate, but no one can deny that such knowledge is almost completely missing from Paul's letters. Bart Ehrman calls the apostle Paul the "closest thing we have to a surviving author who was an eyewitness to the life of Jesus," and yet Paul, Ehrman notes, is almost useless as a source of knowledge about the historical Jesus. He provides a list of things we learn about Jesus from Paul. I'll quote that list in full; it won't take long:

Jesus was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4). ... He was born as a Jew (Gal. 4:4). He was descended from the line of King David (Rom. 1:3). He had brothers (1 Cor. 9:5), one of whom was named James (Gal. 1:19). He had twelve disciples (1 Cor. 15:5). He conducted his ministry among Jews (Rom. 15:8). He had a last meal with his disciples on the night he was turned over to the authorities (1 Cor. 11:23). Paul knows two things Jesus said at his last supper (1 Cor. 11:23-25). Paul knows two other teachings of Jesus: that Christians should not get divorced (1 Cor. 7:10) and that they should pay their preacher (1 Cor. 9:14). Jesus appeared before Pontius Pilate (1 Tim. 6:13; this datum is found only in a letter Paul probably did not himself write). Jesus died of crucifixion (1 Cor. 2:2). Those responsible for his death were Judeans (1 Thess. 2:14-15).

This comprehensive list is in complete contrast to the list of things Paul doesn't say about Jesus: "to make a complete list, all you would have to do is cite virtually any story in the Gospels, and it would be something Paul doesn't tell us." It is difficult to know how much weight to put on Paul's silence...