Communal Incarnation: The Corporate, Collective Jesus of Paul’s Letters

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Michael T. Zeddies
Keyword(s):  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Paul's Letters

Abstract In his authentic letters, Paul describes a historical, human Jesus, but is strangely silent about the events of Jesus’ life. At the same time, Paul describes the figure of Christ using participatory language, and provides no reason to think that this collective embodiment of Christ does not also apply to Jesus’ historical body. I propose that Paul’s historical Jesus was therefore a corporate figure, embodied by the Jewish, pre-Christian community to which Jesus the Nazarene belonged. I present the literary background for this proposal, and explain how the evidence in Paul for a historical Jesus should be interpreted in a corporate or collective sense. I also provide a typological derivation of the name ‘Jesus’ in Paul.

Jesus and Paul

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-170
Author(s):  
Donald Senior
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Pastoral Letters ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Paul's Letters

The writings of Paul form a major part of the New Testament. This includes not only the so-called undisputed letters of Paul but also other letters attributed to him in antiquity that might have been written by later disciples of Paul citing him as author to evoke his apostolic authority. This chapter describes what we know of Paul’s life, beginning with his strong Jewish identity as well as his roots in the Greco-Roman world. Paul himself cites his inaugural visionary experience of the Risen Jesus as a decisive turning point in his life, leading him ultimately to be an ardent proclaimer of the gospel to the Gentile world. Paul’s letters to various early Christian communities in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world served as extensions of his missionary efforts. Although fashioned in a different literary form than the gospel narratives, Paul’s letters also portray Jesus’s identity as both rooted in Judaism and exhibiting a unique transcendent character and purpose. Paul’s Christology focuses intensely on the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection. The so-called deutero-Pauline Letters extend Paul’s theological vision; in the case of Colossians and Ephesians, situating the redemptive and reconciling role of Christ within the cosmos, and, in the case of the Pastoral Letters, bringing Paul’s exhortations about the life of the Christian community to some of the developing challenges of the late first-century church.

Paul’s Letters: Temple Imagery as Religious Identity

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-95
Author(s):  
Eyal Regev
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Positive Approach ◽  
Jerusalem Temple ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Paul's Letters ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines Paul's analogy of the Christian community as a Temple, and his referring to Christ as a sacrifice. Most scholars simply take it for granted that for Paul, the Church is the new Temple and that belief in Christ takes the place of the sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem Temple. Recently, however, there has been growing recognition of a more positive approach to the Temple cult in Paul's letters. According to this trend of thought, Paul does not aim to set apart his addressees from the Temple cult, and his use of the cultic metaphors is constructive. Some also argue that Paul uses cultic language because it offers a common idiom for Jews and Gentiles, since Paul's cultic language is not distinctively Jewish. He uses Temple imagery to illustrate God's acceptance of Jews and Gentiles alike—a sense of belonging to God.

On the Evidence for the Creative Role of Christian Prophets

1974 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 262-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hill
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Creative Role ◽  
Sayings Of Jesus ◽  
The Church

It has become almost a commonplace in New Testament scholarship to attribute to Christian prophets in the early Church a creative role in respect of sayings which the Gospel tradition presents as dominical utterances. The authority, among modern scholars, for this view is to be found in the formcritical analyses and conclusions of Rudolf Bultmann. Christian tradition, he affirms, took over certian Jewish materials and put them on the lips of Jesus (e.g. the Marcan Apocalypse): the Christian community also revised or reworked elements from older traditions (e.g. the interpretation of the Sign of Jonah in connection with the person of Jesus, Matt. xii. 40) and even formed logia which reflect its own interests and concerns. Such logia are ‘inauthentic’ (in the sense that they are not genuine dominical sayings) and, according to Bultmann, they may originally have gained currency as utterances of the Spirit in the Church, without their ascription to Jesus being initially intended. Sayings like Rev. xvi. 5 (in which the risen Christ speaks) and Rev. iii. 20 show clearly the process of the creation (or, reformulation) of such logia (den Prozeβ der Neubildung solcher Herrenworte). These sayings would only gradually (erst allmählich) have been regarded as prophetic words of the historical Jesus. ‘The Church drew no distinction between such utterances by Christian prophets and the sayings of Jesus in the tradition, for the reason that even the dominical sayings in the tradition were not the pronouncements of a past authority, but sayings of the risen Lord who is always a contemporary for the Church.’

Walter Scott and Waterloo

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-277
Author(s):  
Graham Tulloch
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
British Press ◽  
Paul's Letters

Walter Scott responded very quickly to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and within a few weeks he was at the site of the battle. Even before he left Britain, publicity about his projected poem The Field of Waterloo had appeared in the British press and it was soon followed by publicity for his prose account, Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk. Faced with a battle quite unlike anything he had written about before, Scott tried, with mixed success, to find a new way of writing about this new kind of warfare. Media coverage of the poem was extensive but most critics disliked the poem and believed he should stick to medieval topics. Paul's Letters were also covered extensively in the print media but were well received, partly because they looked forward to new ways of memorialising war which would dominate the remembering of Waterloo for the coming century.

“Proclaiming Together”? Convergence and Divergence in Mainline and Evangelical Evangelism, 1945-1967

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-76
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Berg
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Relative Priority ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Mainline Denominations ◽  
Convergence And Divergence ◽  
Protestant Christians ◽  
Dividing Line

By now, it is a commonplace of the American religious scene that the majority of the nation's white Protestant Christians are split into “two parties.” The ideological dividing line runs between “mainline” denominations—Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians—and a bevy of conservative denominations and groups, but it also cuts through the mainline itself, which contains a substantial contingent of conservatives.Among the two parties' numerous disagreements, theological and political, few have run deeper and longer than their difference over the meaning and importance of evangelism, the activity of “proclaiming the gospel” to those outside the Christian community. Is the church's prime call in this regard to seek conversions to the Christian faith, or is it to show the love of Christ by working for charitable goals and social justice? A well-known 1973 study of Presbyterian clergy found that the greatest polarization between self-described “conservatives” and “liberals” came over the relative priority of evangelism and social action. Indeed, the fight over these goals was an important (though by no means the only) factor precipitating the “split” early in this century.

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