Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] A Particular Problem with a Crucified Messiah by Bart Ehrman in my previous post I started to show that most Jews rejected Christian claims about Jesus because Jesus was just the opposite of what the Messiah was expected to be. The Messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow God's enemies and set up a new kingdom on earth in which God's will would prevail.
[00:00:27] Jesus was and did none of that. He was a lower class peasant who was arrested, humiliated, tortured and executed. He did not destroy God's enemies, He was crushed by them.
[00:00:39] Paul is the first Jewish persecutor of the Christians that we know by name.
[00:00:43] There is really no doubt that he was bent on wiping out the followers of Jesus since he himself says so, and says so to his own shame. In Galatians 1:13 he did not gain any glory for this rather despicable past. Despicable in both his eyes and the eyes of the Christians. Presumably his reasons for hating and opposing the followers of Jesus were comparable to those of other Jewish persecutors.
[00:01:09] But Paul gives us another even more specific hint of why Jesus in particular could not be the Messiah, at least as he thought prior to becoming a follower of Jesus.
[00:01:19] The hint comes in his exposition of his Gospel message in his letter to the Galatians.
[00:01:25] Galatians is a short but very difficult letter, arguably the most profound and dense letter of Paul's to survive.
[00:01:33] Most of the basics about the letter are pretty easy to get one's mind around, even if specific things said in the letter are highly complex. There are verses I still don't fully understand, even though I've been reading the letter for 45 years.
[00:01:47] In terms of the basics. This is a letter that Paul has written to the Christians in the region of Galatia, which was in Central Asia Minor modern Turkey. Paul himself started the various churches in that region converting former pagans. There's no evidence that any Jews were converted and then left to go to other missionary fields.
[00:02:07] After he left, a group of other Christian missionaries arrived. These other missionaries claimed to represent the views of the apostles of Jesus, such as James and Peter, who were in charge of the church in Jerusalem. Moreover, they claimed that Paul had corrupted the original Christian message as proclaimed by these Jerusalem apostles.
[00:02:27] Paul's message was that a person can be made right with God by believing in Jesus, death and resurrection, and it did not matter if the person was a Jew or a Gentile.
[00:02:38] In the view of these Christian opponents of Paul, this was absolutely wrong. To be a follower of the Jewish Messiah. You had to be Jewish.
[00:02:48] In the view of these other apostles, Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people. In fulfillment of the Jewish law.
[00:02:58] Following Jesus meant first adopting the ways of Judaism. They appear to have argued their position by pointing to the Jewish Law itself. When God gave his covenant to Abraham, that is, his agreement to be the God of his descendants if they would agree to be his people, he ordained that these descendants should all be circumcised if they were males. God in Genesis 17 calls this an eternal covenant, one that would never end.
[00:03:25] God had not changed his mind.
[00:03:28] If Gentiles wanted to join the eternal covenant to be God's people, they obviously had to be circumcised.
[00:03:35] And so Paul's Judaizing opponents insisted that pagan converts to Jesus be circumcised and keep all the other requirements of the law, such as observing the Sabbath, eating, kosher, and so on.
[00:03:49] Paul completely disagreed and found this view outlandish.
[00:03:53] He wrote his letter to the Galatian Christians who were in danger of accepting this alternative gospel in order to urge them in the strongest possible terms not to do it.
[00:04:04] Anyone who was circumcised, thinking that this was needed to be put into a right relationship with God, completely misunderstood the gospel.
[00:04:14] Being right with God was not a matter of following the Jewish law. The law could only bring a curse. A person was made right with God by by believing in Jesus, death and resurrection, and nothing else.
[00:04:29] In the context of Paul's argument in Galatians 3, he indicates that the law brings a curse on people because people do not follow it, even if they try to. Presumably, the law itself says that anyone is cursed who does not abide by all that it requires.
[00:04:47] But Paul says Christ himself removed the curse of the law by himself becoming a curse, that is, by being cursed by God.
[00:04:56] And why was Christ cursed by God? Because he was crucified. That's Galatians 3, 11, 14.
[00:05:05] Paul has something very specific in mind, as shown by the fact that he quotes a verse from the Law itself to demonstrate his point. The verse is Deuteronomy, chapter 21, verse 23. Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.
[00:05:20] In Deuteronomy itself, the verse is making fairly obvious the point that any corpse left to hang on a tree is known to suffer a horrible, accursed fate.
[00:05:29] Paul takes the verse to mean that God himself has actually cursed such a person.
[00:05:34] And how did Jesus die? Not by being stoned or strangled or beheaded. He was specifically hanged on a tree. He was crucified. This shows, for Paul that Christ stood under God's curse. But since he was the Christ, he must not have been cursed for anything that he himself had done. He didn't deserve it. He must then have been cursed for the sake of others. He took the curse that others deserved and he bore it himself, removing it from them. That is what brings salvation and that's what the Christian Paul thinks.
[00:06:09] But it provides a hint of what the formerly non Christian Jewish Paul also thought.
[00:06:16] Before Paul was a follower of Jesus, he was an enemy of the followers of Jesus. It was not simply because Jesus was the opposite of what a Messiah would be. It was even more than that. It was that God had clearly not bestowed his blessings on Jesus. He had literally cursed him. The Christians were calling the cursed one the Messiah.
[00:06:37] That for the non Christian Paul was blasphemous. To think that a person who died, specifically the death of crucifixion, was God's Saviour was ludicrous and scandalous.
[00:06:50] Paul changed his mind. Of course. He apparently changed it because he later had a vision of Jesus in which he came to think that God must have raised him from the dead.
[00:06:59] That thought transformed Paul and one can argue that it transformed all of Christianity with it.
[00:07:06] But before Paul experienced this transformation, he knew that Jesus could not be the Messiah because he had been hanged on a tree.
