Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

both the “Christ” and the “power of God.” Why should we think that Paul (or his predecessor) first imagined Christ to be incarnate Wisdom—especially since he does not call Jesus this anywhere else in his writings? And what does he call him? Typically, he calls him Christ. This, not Wisdom, was Paul’s earliest understanding of Jesus upon his conversion.

Paul calls Christ the wisdom of God in the Corinthians passage because he is trying to make a specific point, that the crucifixion of the messiah is a stumbling block for Jews and foolish for Gentiles. We have already seen the reason Jews stumbled over the claim that the messiah was crucified: this was not at all what was supposed to happen to the messiah. But for Paul, rather than showing that Christ was “weak” when he was crucified, the cross shows forth God’s true “power.” So too Gentiles thought that the idea of an executed criminal as the revealer of God was ridiculous. But for Paul it was, by contrast, a sign of God’s “wisdom.” That is why Jesus is the wisdom of God, not because he is an embodiment of the Jewish traditions about the Wisdom figure.

Moreover, it is important to note how Paul phrases this entire passage: his emphasis throughout is precisely on “Christ” and his crucifixion. This is an important point because Wells himself admits that the Jewish traditions about Wisdom include no reference to Wisdom ever being or becoming the messiah. There is no way to move, then, from the idea that God’s Wisdom became incarnate to the notion that this one was specifically the messiah. It is quite easy, however, to move in the other direction. If Christ was crucified—the main point Paul makes about him—it may seem to be “foolish,” but God’s ways are not ours, and for God this evident foolishness is in fact “wisdom.” Paul, in other words, did not start out as a Christian thinking that Wisdom had become incarnate; he started out thinking that Christ had been crucified.

It should not be objected—as Wells does—that the poetic passage in Colossians that I quoted at length shows that Paul understood Christ as Wisdom incarnate. There is a fatal objection to this view. Paul almost certainly did not write the letter to the Colossians. It is one of the forgeries in Paul’s name, written after his death, as critical scholars have recognized for a very long time.21 And to argue that the passage derives from a pre-Pauline tradition is problematic. Colossians is post-Pauline, so on what grounds can we say that a passage in it is pre-Pauline?

In short, the idea that Jesus is in some sense God’s Wisdom stands on the margins of Paul’s thinking. It is certainly not the first thing that popped into his mind when he became a follower of Jesus. It was a later theological reflection. The first and primary thing that Paul came to think of Jesus was that he was the messiah, and a crucified messiah at that. This is the tradition about Jesus that we can trace back to the time even before Paul converted to be a follower of Jesus sometime around the year 32 or 33. The Christians who proclaimed this view did not originally think of Christ as incarnate Wisdom based on the books of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon. They thought of Christ as the one who had been crucified.

And this was not based on the reflection that a wise man was said to have died a “shameful death” in a passage of the Wisdom of Solomon, a book that did not become part of the Jewish scriptures. It was based on the fact that everyone knew that Jesus had been crucified. Those who believed he was the messiah therefore concluded that the messiah had been crucified. And as a result they redefined what it meant to be the messiah. It meant one who suffered for the sins of others. This view seemed ridiculous to most hearers. But the followers of Jesus argued that it was one of those paradoxical truths that showed that God’s ways are not human ways and that what seems foolish to humans is wisdom for God. Once they began to make that claim, years after Paul had been converted, they began to press it even more and (possibly) came to think of Jesus as God’s Wisdom itself, the one through whom God made the world. But this was not the earliest belief of the Christians or of Paul.

Was Jesus an Unknown Jew Who Lived in Obscurity More Than a Century Before Paul?

G. A. WELLS HAS argued that Paul did not understand Jesus to be a real flesh-and-blood Jew who recently lived as a teacher in Palestine and was crucified by the Roman authorities in the recent past. Instead, Wells contends, Paul understood Jesus to have been a supernatural being who lived in utter obscurity some 150 years or so earlier, who was crucified not by the Romans but by the demonic forces in the world.22 In part Wells derives this view from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where, as we have just seen, he refers to God’s wisdom: “We speak a wisdom of God that is hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7–8).

The fact that the “rulers” did not grasp the hidden mystery of who Christ was shows that he lived in utter obscurity. He was not a well-known teacher. Moreover, for Wells, Paul gives no indication that Jesus lived in the recent past. Paul simply indicates, says Wells, that Jesus started to “appear” to people in the recent past, after his resurrection (appearing to Paul himself, for example). But that does not mean he had recently lived. On the contrary, even though Jesus was a descendant of King David, Paul gives “no