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  • From: "Rick Frommich" <eugor3 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Paul on John the Baptist.
  • Date: Mon, 06 May 2002 08:53:01 +0000





From: "Jack Kilmon" <jkilmon AT historian.net>
Reply-To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: [corpus-paul] Re: Paul on John the Baptist.
Date: Fri, 3 May 2002 10:11:43 -0500


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick Frommich" <eugor3 AT hotmail.com>
To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 4:15 PM
Subject: [corpus-paul] Re: Paul on John the Baptist.


> I would like to submit a few quick questions, food for thought.
>
> Does Paul really use "Jesus" as a proper name or is it functioning more
like
> a title in the Pauline literature.

I think it is more of a title to Paul whose "Christ Jesus" manifest at the
crucifixion.

>
> If The Baptist is the fountain head of the Palestinian Jesus movement, as
> all four Gospels imply, how can it be that Paul knows nothing about John?
Or
> more specifically, How is it that in all of the material ascribed to Paul
> there is not a single word about John the Baptist.

JB is a part of the life of the living and historical Jesus of whom Paul has
little interest.

> [Actually there is no mention of the Baptist in the New Testament outside
of
> the Gospels and Acts]

We are talking about late 1st century writings and 2nd and 3rd century
edits, times of high christology. Jesus was probably a follower of JB before
"striking out on his own," not exactly what NT authors wish to convey. In
short, you cant have JB stealing J's thunder.

>
> Paul knows about Baptism but not the Baptist. I find that a bit strange.
> Paul associates Baptism with Jesus.

Paul knows about the baptist but is only interested in baptism. Paul knows
about Jesus but is only interested in "Christ Crucified."

>
> My Last question has to do with the controversy over the identity of the
> Christ. All four Gospels find it necessary to set the record straight
> concerning the Baptist NOT being the Christ. Yet in all of Paul's letters
> there is not the slightest hint of any controversy over who Jesus/Christ
is?
> Who was it that believed John was the Christ?

Yochanon bar Zekariya was an awesome presence and a much higher profile than
the Gospels relate. He had a large following, not only in Palestine but also
in Syria and Egypt which continued to exist for several centuries..in fact,
one JB sect continues this very day. In a time of high Messianic
expectation and hope, obviously many believed him to be the Messiah.
Apollos was a JB follower.


Jack




[RR response] As a matter of fact Jack, I do not think that Paul was
ignorant concerning John the Baptist at all. I believe that Paul
actually mentions him in every letter he has written and multiple times
at that. For Paul, the term “Jesus” was not a name but a title. It was
the title of one he believed to be Son of God, risen from the dead:
That is to say that he believed John the Baptist was The Jesus. This
was not only Paul’s belief but that of all of the people of “The Way”.
It is precisely for this reason that the first Gospel and it’s
imitators found it necessary to correct the notion after the events of
Paul’s death and the destruction of Jerusalem. All four Gospels from
four completely different areas representing groups of messianic
believers from all over the Mediterranean world agreed on two very
important points. 1.) That John was not the Christ/Jesus but rather the
Christ was one greater than the Baptist that had actually come after
him. 2.) That the Salvation of God had (for better or for worse) been
extended to the Gentiles

I am convinced that the answer to the question “Who believed that John
was the Christ is best stated like this:

Prior to the Advent of the written Gospel, specifically the Gospel of
Mark, all the people of “The Way” believed John to have been
resurrected, and all called him Christ/Jesus. Because of the Life,
teaching and subsequent death of the Apostle Paul, another role was
assigned to John. That role was one of Elijah the forunner. The reasons
for that dynamic change in the movement were many but the most
significant were as follows:

1. God’s judgment had fallen on Jerusalem and Palestine in the
form of Titus destroying the Holy City.

2. The people of the Way had to see this as phase two in Gods
great plan of salvation.

3. This destruction had happened not long after Paul’s execution
at the behest of Jews and Jewish Christians even though it was
at the hands of the Romans. Therefor God must have loved Paul
very much to visit such destruction upon his Jewish opponents.

4. The vast majority of the members of “The Way” were Greek
Speaking and many of those were Gentiles who had come to
believe because of Paul not John the Baptist.

5. There were those among the Jewish believers that had published
a false report that Paul had gone to Rome and been allowed to
preach under house arrest. This was an attempt on the part of
the faction referred to by Paul as the Christ party. Luke/Acts was
there attempt to cover up what really happened. It was necessary
to divert the blame because Jewish believers in Jerusalem played a
major role in Paul’s arrest and subsequent execution.

The Gospel of Mark goes to great lengths to demonstrate that all of the
foundation Apostles failed to understand The Jesus and in the end all
deserted him. Mark’s message is couched in cryptic symbolism drawn from
the teaching of Paul. The Marken Jesus reflects Paul’s teaching on
every subject the writer addresses: The greatest commandment is to love
God and finally to love ones neighbor. One should give Caesar his due
and God what belongs to God. All food is clean. The law and Sabbath are
no longer neccessary elements of faith. According to Mark Peter mirrors
the rock like soil that eagerly recieves the word only to fade and wither
under the threat of persecution. Mark like Paul sees Peter ass stubborn
and unreliable and in the end unfaithful. All of the disciples deserted
the Jesus when he needed them. The Marken Jesus prays exactly like Paul
prayed “Abba father”. The parallels between the Marken Jesus and Paul are on
nearly every page of the first Gospel.



Does Paul really use "Jesus" as a proper name or is it functioning more
like a title in the Pauline literature.

The evidence indicates that “Jesus” is a title not a name.

In the letters of Paul one cannot help but notice that the order of
the names Jesus and Christ can be reversed. This in itself would tend to
indicate Jesus is not a proper first name. One would expect to see the
name first when presented with Christ, as with “Alexander the
coppersmith”. The absence of the definite article between Jesus and
Christ in Paul’s constructions also indicates that he is using Jesus as
a title and not as a proper name. Conversely when Paul talks about
others that have two names he never places the second name first. For
example he never calls John Mark “Mark John” that would be absurd. Nor
do we ever see Paul refer to a person’s title without the definite
article and before his name i.e. “copersmith Alexander. If Jesus is the
name of the person and Christ the title we would expect a definite
article at least some of the time. It is worth noting that English
translations often reverse the order of the Greek words to make it more
palatable. To the ear of one who’s native language is English, Jesus
Christ merely sounds like a common name followed by a surname. The
order Christ Jesus often becomes Jesus Christ when translators render
it into English. In the Pauline letters alone the formula Christ Jesus
appears some 86 times while the opposite order, Jesus Christ only
appears 68 times. I would add that the formula “Jesus the Christ” does
not appear in the Pauline Corpus. I find this particularly telling as
it is a construction that would make it clear that Paul regarded Jesus
as a personal name and not a title.
A second item that needs to be looked at closely is controversy
over the identity of the Christ figure. The name of Jesus appears
several times in each and every letter ascribed to Paul. It appears in
almost every conceivable context and yet there is not the slightest
hint of any controversy over who Jesus/Christ is. This is most
interesting in light of the fact that all four Gospels apparently found
it necessary to affirm that John the Baptist was not the Christ. One is
left to wonder who it was that believed John was the Christ. Obviously
the belief was wide spread as it is corrected by all four Gospel
writers in each of their respective communities over the span of
several years when these documents came into being. Suddenly with the
onset of the written Gospel comes the necessity to state in
unquestionably clear terms that John was not the Christ. To this writer
such evidence points to a major shift in the Jesus movement just after
70 CE.

If we move back in time to the letters of Paul, the earlier
evidence shows no trace of any controversy over the identity of Christ.
We must ask ourselves if it is possible that Paul had never encountered
controversy on the Jesus Vs John issue. Searching the Pauline Corpus
for references to the Baptist reveals that he is not mentioned by Paul
at all. Paul knows about baptism and extols the virtue of being buried
with Jesus in baptism: Yet there is nothing whatever about a Baptist or
John the baptizer. It is simply inconceivable that someone so involved
in the movement as was Paul, both as persecutor and propagator, could
not have known how it began or who it was that started the reformation.
I would therefore contend that Paul uses the title Jesus with reference
to one he believed to be the Christ and founder of movement called “The
Way”. Further I would suggest that that person had to be John the
Baptist, whom Paul and the rest of the movement apparently believed to
have been raised from the dead by God. Paul does not mention the
earthly life of the Christ because he believes that it is wrong to
“regard Christ after the flesh”.
If I am correct about the Jesus of Paul, that prior to the
writing of the Gospels it was John who was regarded as the Christ, it
should hold true that none of the material that pre-dates the Gospels
would mention the Baptist as they too would have held him to be the
resurrected messiah. Again our thesis stands up. There is no mention of
John the Baptist in any New Testament material outside of the Gospels
and Acts. So then it would appear that prior to the writing of the
Gospels the consensus within the Jesus movement was that John was the
Christ/Jesus and I would further maintain that this view was unanimous
among messianic believers in the Jesus movement. Hence Paul’s use of
Jesus was not as a proper name but as a title like Christ. The
following passage in Acts seems to confirm this:

18:24 Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria,
came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, well versed
in the scriptures. 25 He had been instructed in the
way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spoke
and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus,
though he knew only the baptism of John.

Here we have Apollos proclaiming Jesus but only knowing about the
Baptism of John. I would suggest that for Apollos as with Paul, John
was Jesus, The Salvation of God. The missing ingredient in the teaching
of Apollos was not his knowledge of a successor but rather the gift of
the Holy Spirit. Mind you, in this instance we are looking at a
document much latter than the letters of Paul: A document that often
stands in direct opposition to what Paul has to say about himself, yet
within this document there is clear evidence that one could proclaim
Jesus accurately while only knowing about the Baptism of John. This is
only further evidence that “Jesus” was first used in the movement as a
title for the resurrected Baptist.

The next logical question seems to be, who then is the Jesus
about which the Gospels are written? What could have caused the
movement to re-evaluate their faith to the point of changing the very
object of their devotion and worship. The Gospel text themselves offer
us a clue to this mystery. The Jesus was someone who so greatly
surpassed John in his achievements of spreading the faith that the four
Gospel compilers all chose to regard him as the kinsman redeemer. One
who was so great that even John would not be required to hand over the
movement to him but only to acknowledge him as the one that would come
after him. He was somehow “The stronger of John” that would come after
him and baptize with holy spirit. For Paul this was the Baptist whom
Paul believed to have been raised from the dead. For the Gospel
compilers on the other hand the Jesus, [The Salvation of God] was Paul.
The loosing of the sandal harkens back to the Story of Ruth and how
Boaz became the kinsman redeemer to her. Putting the sandal on the one
coming after, as Mark does, makes him the real heir. In comparison,
John, great as he was, was not fit to loosen the thong of the real
redeemer’s sandal. Thus the First Gospel begins the task of extolling
the praises of the Jesus whom John was thought have preceded. But now
the title has been given to another, a greater than John. The one who
did so much more than John has to be regarded as the Christ [anointed]
by virtue of his accomplishments. It was Paul that now had been given
the title the Jesus, “salvation of God”, and Christ.
For over two thousand years an acceptable understanding of the
events surrounding the historical Jesus has been slow coming. One reason
is that there is a major snag in the way scholarship has approached the
puzzle of Jesus in history. That snag has been to interpret the older
material of Paul’s epistles in light of the Gospel material which came
into being after the fall of Jerusalem, around 70 AD. What Paul writes
concerning Jesus and the movement has to be re-evaluated as though
nothing else were known of Jesus at all. Likewise, The Gospel material
needs to be interpreted in light of Paul’s enormous impact on the
movement and the developments that took place within the movement during
the forty years prior to the destruction of Jerusalem; forty years that
correspond to the entire Adult life and ministry of the Apostle Paul.
The tendency to interpret Paul’s writings in light of the later Gospel
material has caused researchers to make assumptions about the Jesus of
Paul that were not logical or historical. The New Testament research upon
which we base our current understanding of the historical Jesus, has
bypassed the very first principle of scientific investigation,
“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" "plurality should not be
posited without necessity”. Also known as “Occam’s razor”. The point is
that all things being equal the simplest solution is likely to be the
right one. We have postulated a third person between John the Baptist
and the Apostle Paul upon which we confer all of our theological
baggage. A man with a first name that was actually a title and not the
personal name of a the man the Gospels were writing about.

Because of this predominant tendency in New Testament research, it is the
contention of this writer that many obvious clues have been either
totally overlooked or disregarded in the process of uncovering facts in
the development of the Jesus movement: A movement that began in Palestine
and quickly spread to key cities in and around the Mediterranean Sea.



2) If The Baptist is the fountain head of the Palestinian Jesus
movement, as all four Gospels imply, how can it be that Paul knows
nothing about John? Or more specifically, How is it that in all of the
material ascribed to Paul there is not a single word about John the
Baptist. [Actually there is no mention of the Baptist in the New
Testament outside of the Gospels and Acts] Paul knows about Baptism but
not the Baptist. I find that a bit strange. Paul associates Baptism
with Jesus.


3)My Last question had to do with the controversy over the identity of
the Christ. All four Gospels find it necessary to set the record
straight concerning the Baptist NOT being the Christ. Yet in all of
Paul's letters there is not the slightest hint of any controversy over
who Jesus/Christ is? Who was it that believed John was the Christ?

The evidence indicates that there was no controversy at all before
Paul’s death, therefore we can conclude that all the people of “The
Way” followed the same Christ/Jesus. Since all four Gospels seek to
correct the belief that John was the Christ, I submit that prior to the
Gospels the unanimous leader of the movement and the subject of all
titles was John the Baptist. It seems to me that “Jesus” was a title
best understood by Jewish believers while Christ lent itself to those
whose native tongue was Greek.

The evidence we have concerning the historical Jesus of the Gospels is
really quite substantial. We know more than we ever imagined and we
have letters, the autographs of which were from his own hand and those
of his closest friends. These letters are not without modifications
however for just as Matthew and Luke find it necessary to amend the
words of Mark many of Paul’s letters are filled with the leaven of his
Jewish opponents.

Respectfully,

Rick Richmond





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