St. Paul & Christian Theology

okay so we're gonna return now to the discussion of somebody who has been called by many scholars and historians the very co-founder of Christianity someone who by some historians assessments is really the inventor of Christianity based on the messages of Jesus but the one who really made it into the religion that we understand today and that is a person who began his life as someone named Saul of Tarsus Saul of Tarsus was a very rare person in the first century in the ancient world he was Jewish in terms of his ethnicity and religion but he was also a Roman citizen not too many Jews had achieved Roman citizenship but his father had achieved it somehow and he had inherited it from him what this means is that Paul sould was going to be able to very easily travel around the ancient world people don't mess with Roman citizens with you know identifying papers he'd bring the wrath of the legions down on you he was also well educated which means he had a Greek education he knew the opinions of the philosophers he could debate in their language he was a very high-level sophisticated worldly cosmopolitan person he's not just a sort of a hometown Jewish boy like even most of the priests of the temple typically were so this severe inching very worldly citizen apparently had the idea that he was going to become a High muckety-muck in the Jewish temple and was pursuing a career in that way and his method of advancement was to persecute and round up those who were enemies of the temple and undermining them and one of those enemies was the group of people that were following this messianic preacher named Jesus and so he is an early persecutor of the Christian faith ironically enough and he was persecuting a movement that was not yet called Christianity but do you know what the original name of the Christian religion was Oh children of pastors know the original name of this movement was called the way as in the way to eternal life the way to the true understanding of the laws of Moses scholars called this early movement that Jesus movement just to give it a meaningful sounding and descriptive name but it's distinguish it from Christianity which doesn't really exist yet because Saint Paul has not done what he's going to do and the name has not been coined according to a story that occurs early in Acts of the Apostles Saul of Tarsus has been persecuting these people who've been following the message of this you know now-dead preacher and he is on the road to Damascus he's just watched Stephen become the first Christian martyr I was stoned to death and he's on his way to Damascus looking for more followers to go and persecute and according to the story he tells he's out in the wilderness on the way there and this bright light comes beaming down from heaven knocks him off of his horse leaves him blinded flailing on his backside and he hears the voice of God coming down and saying Saul Saul why are you persecuting me this all says who are you he says I'm Jesus now knock it off Oh Saul of Tarsus and one dramatic moment by his own account is converted from being avid persecutor of this new movement to the most zealous supporter and promoter of this new religion not being able to go by his old persecuting name anymore he renames himself Paul from Saul and we know him as st. Paul and it is going to be the historical mission of st. Paul to take what began as just this little fledgling persecuted Jewish mystical movement and turn it into an international religion of great success to make of it something that would have more appeal then a weird Jewish religion would have and the Romans were kind of interested in Judaism but they thought the Jews are sort of weird I mean they have all these dietary restrictions and they circumcise themselves and they don't make statues of their gods and they're always causing trouble and this is just this little troublesome meddlesome backwater of the Empire so a little religious sect coming out of this Jewish religion it's not gonna have any broad international appeal in the Roman Empire until Paul essentially remarked it's it for a greco-roman audience that's what he does so first of all he doesn't change some of the language Jesus was not actually called Jesus by mom and dad his name was Yeshua which is a form of the name Joshua so is Yeshua and he was believed by his followers to be the Messiah a messiah all right unless it's way too weirdly Jewish for the greco-roman world at large so we need to put this into the international language that people understand and what is this international language of healing gonna be not Latin actually but Greek exactly Latin speaking Romans might rule the world politically but Greek is the language of intellectual life and it's the language of Commerce if you know a little bit of just low-level Koine Greek you can travel anywhere in the Mediterranean world at this time and be understood so he's going to turn his name into the Greek equivalents Yeshua becomes Jesus and the word in Greek that means the closest thing to Anointed One to Messiah is Christos so now he's Jesus the Christos and from this at a st. Paul who coins the term Christianity Paul begins going on these long missionary journeys three major trips he makes all over the eastern Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire preaching in every town he gets to attracting small groups of converts establishing a little Christian organization and then going on to the next town and continuing this process and he's one of the first ones to go beyond the realm where the Apostles had been preaching most of them had stayed in the Jewish world it was a Jewish religion for Jewish people about the laws of Moses and stuff didn't really occur to most of them to try to convert Greeks and Romans to it Paul is the one that decides to go international with it and so he begins preaching to a much larger audience and after he founds these churches and moves on he'll will get word that there's some dispute going on in the church or there's some question some confusion so he begins writing letters back to these churches to answer their questions and resolve conflicts and give them encouragement and these letters are known as the epistles of Paul and they are all collectively the oldest surviving Christian writings that we have before any of the Gospels are written Paul's epistles are written in Paul's epistles there are three major themes that he hammers on over and over again his letters are not really like the Gospels he doesn't quote Jesus almost ever he doesn't retell the parables of Jesus he doesn't do anything like that the Gospels are much more charming reading you have this very charismatic preacher that has this clever way with words and these insightful parables they're they're pleasurable reading Paul is a scholar and like scholars Paul explains things so his letters are more direct to the point they're drier reading perhaps for most Christians in most places but st. Paul is Christianity's first theologian he's the first one to go beyond just repeating the parables and wisdom of Jesus and to start explaining what it all means and that's what theologians do Theo's from the Greek word that means God in the word logos we've talked about before you know is this Greek philosophical term that means the mind and thought and wisdom that permeates the rational structure of the universe so a theologian is somebody who explains about God and that's what Paul does it has a lot of explaining as Gospels there are three main points that he spends his time explaining one of them is nothing new he reiterates the message of the Ministry of Jesus in many places but probably the the single best place where he says it and sums it up most beautifully is in the letter to the Romans verse 13 8 through 10 find your way to page 78 and the reader you remember the Sermon on the Mount to the Ministry of Jesus and that message right all right well when you're reading something and it's difficult and you're struggling and your essays not working out back in the day students used to go to something called cliff notes to explain it to them nowadays you just google things right okay well essentially cliff notes are pretty valuable study guides actually they don't substitute for reading the originals but they're very good at helping you understand things and Paul basically writes the cliff notes to the Sermon on the Mount oh no one anything except to love one another for the one who loves another is fulfilled the law the commandments you shall not commit adultery you shall not murder you shall not steal you shall not covet in any other commandment are summed up in this word love your neighbor as yourself love does no wrong to a neighbor therefore love is the fulfilling of the law the idea you were struggling to express clearly over the weekend in your essays if you did your reading for Paul you got it all summarized for you so the idea that love fulfills the law is one theme that he hammers over and over again this is nothing new this is what Jesus had talked about he had found a rhetorically rich way of bringing his audience to that Paul like a scholar just gets to the point explains me okay the other two ideas that appear over and over again in his letters are new things things that Jesus himself does not talk about in his ministry they're not really described or discussed in the Gospels these are his additions to the religion this is what begins to form Christianity as a unique belief system not just an offshoot of Judaism and they have to do with the kind of problems that he is encountering in the cities where he is preaching and with the problems that he has in trying to reach out to people outside the world to Judaism the question that comes up is how do Greeks and Romans and people that have not grown up as Jews how did they become Christians Jesus because he preached mostly to other Jews never had to deal with this question Jews had grown up with the laws of Moses and if they accepted the wisdom of Jesus they understood oh yeah all those laws have been following I still do the rituals and stuff they're still important jesus said he's not come to change you know one stroke of a letter of the law you just had to go to this deeper understanding that love is the ultimate purpose that fulfilled it so that's easy for a Jew but what if you're a Greek or a Roman and you want to follow this message of love God and love your neighbor and you want to live by this you know beautiful approach to life do you have to become Jewish first to be a follower of Jesus do you have to follow kosher laws you have to give up ham sandwiches and what do you think is the most problematic Jewish ritual for adult greco-roman men circumcision now most of you probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about circumcision but if you are a male and you were born in America you are most probably circumsized this means that when you look at yourself in the mirror in the buff that's not exactly how nature designed you you once had a little turtleneck of flesh on the end of your penis that got carved off when you were an infant now luckily you don't have to remember that and so you've never given it much thought now if you came from some other part of the world where they don't practice this then perhaps your uncircumcised I don't need a vote of hands I don't know who is it was not but it's something that's kind of curious the fact that we even do this at all if you're Jewish you have a good religious you know cultural reason to do this but in America we started the habit of circumcising infant boys in the late 1920s and our reason for doing it were reasons of Hygiene remember this is a time when most people lived on farms you took a bath maybe once a month whether you needed it or not you know people just weren't quite as hygienic and clean and hot showered all the time like we are today and so the idea was that little boys could keep their peepees cleaner if they didn't have that turtleneck of flesh catching grime and dirt and stuff in there from working out on the farm all day and so it's done for reasons of hygiene nowadays we don't really have those concerns but it's just become traditional has just become a habit some of you you know one day you're gonna you know become parents and if you have a son it's something you're gonna have to think about whether or not you want to continue with something that has become fairly traditional in America or decide that you know you're not going to do this for your son that's a decision you'll have to make so anyway Greeks and Romans are not circumcised and when you look at ancient Greek statues of the gods and so forth that are done you know and the glorious nude the ancient celebrated the nude form you will see the difference between a circumcised and uncircumcised penis so for Roman men the idea is that okay I'm really into this religion of love you're talking about here but you want me to take a knife and do what to like my favorite body part are you insane this religion is going nowhere outside the realm of Judaism if they're going to insist that adult Roman men have to circumcise themselves so this is question number one circumcision the basic question is do we have to follow all of the Jewish rituals and customs or is it okay to set some of these aside have we moved beyond it enough that we're not having to be bound by every detail of the letter of the law Jesus said he ain't comin to change one stroke of a letter so Jesus would seem to imply that you ought to be circumcised but then again the question didn't really come up with him now as you all know Paul's answer is that no you don't have to be circumcised and he you know releases the you know the necessity of having to do so this is something that he got into arguments they all met in Jerusalem the ones who hadn't been killed yet met in Jerusalem and around 49 ad and had the first apostolic council and this was the big debate are we gonna let Outsiders into this religion or is it just a Jewish religion and the other apostles were arguing well yeah you got to be circumcised we're all sorry I'm sorry right so you know that's how you do it Paul is worldly enough to realize that we're gonna have to rethink this and look at the long view and he ultimately wins his argument and so the necessity of circumcision is going to be set aside now in reading Paul's letters you may have found them a little bit tedious and dry so let me try to zero you in on critical lines that you can mark and make sure you review and study look on page 75 we're at the letter to the Romans chapter 2 starting in verse 25 circumcision indeed is a value if you obey the law but if you break the law your circumcision has become uncircumcision so if those who are uncircumcised keep the requirements of the law will not their uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision then those who are physically uncircumcised but keep the law will condemn you that have the written code and circumcision but break the law this is rather cumbersome writing this is not exactly elegant essay style but who is Paul writing this - he's writing to lower-class Romans poor Romans who are not fancy sophisticates well-educated types he's got to keep it as simple and clear as possible for the couple of people on the receiving end of this letter who are gonna be reading it out to everybody else so Paul is always very aware of his audience of what they know what their background is and how to speak and communicate to them but Paul is in fact a well-educated scholar and an elegant writer when he's able to be so after very you know slowly and carefully going through the the differences here he then sums it up with more eloquence here for a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly nor is true circumcision something external in physical rather a person is a Jew who is one inwardly in real circumcision is a matter of the heart it is spiritual and not literal it's a little better set so this is his argument why circumcision really isn't necessary what is necessary is that you keep the inner deeper meaning of the law that you make sure you live by the law of love do you think Jesus could have agreed with this why do you think so because he was thank you we might edit that one out he was kind of strong on you know the priests thing more being more concerned about traditions rather than very good he was always a Lim bassing the Pharisees for being all obsessed with all the details of ritual and not understanding the spiritual hearts that's supposed to be underneath it all in all of his sermons he finds ways to a jointly bypass all of these technicalities and get to a spiritual core that was the real value that he believed all these rituals were in fact trying to lead you to so if Jesus had preached to Greeks and Romans and these questions that come up I can see Jesus probably agreeing with Paul on this one so this is the easy thing to deal with Jesus I think could have gone along with this obviously love was what mattered love God love your neighbor more than physical rituals and such so from this point on Jews continue to be circumcised as they still are today Christians in the Middle Ages were uncircumcised in America it's only the 1920s that we started doing it for medical hygiene reasons the second issue is a little more complicated it will require a little more explanation first of all let me just ask you some open-ended rhetorical questions if your grandfather robbed a bank and killed a guard and making his escape should you have to go to jail for it no you didn't aid or abet him or anything like that but should you be punished for the crimes of your ancestors nobody believes that okay do you believe that when you commit some bad act that a stain gets on you that needs to be washed off in a physical way your criminal acts don't physically mark you maybe your soul but not your body we have trouble believing that do any of you bring live animals to your place of worship on Sunday morning or Saturday slit their throats drain their warm frothy blood into a bucket and slop it up on the sides of stone altars none of y'all do that your children okay and last question does anybody believe that if you do something bad you can get somebody else to take the blame for you and that's somehow legitimate now if you do something bad you got to pay for it yourself right okay so in the modern world these are ideas that seem barbaric and very archaic to us but these were common ideas in the ancient world the idea that the gods will punish the descendants of people who offend them is stated throughout the Hebrew Bible Yahweh says I will curse the third and fourth generations of those who hate me the curse on him fell on his son Canaan and all of his descendants to be slaves to the descendants of his two brothers so the Old Testament biblical God will in fact blame you for what your grandpa did now that's not unique to the Hebrews actually the Greeks have the same kind of an idea any of y'all ever read any Greek tragedies or seen Oedipus or Antigone performed all of those characters in Greek tragedy that have awful awful things happen to them are all descendants of a family that begins with a guy named Cadmus in Cadmus offends the gods back in the day and all of his descendants are still being punished for it so the Greek gods do the same kind of thing this is just kind of a standard idea in the ancient world everybody was very interested and who was your father and who was your grandfather and your ancestry and you know people when they introduced themselves you know said I am the son of and you know we still have that in some of our last names embedded in our language as well so your family lying your ancestry what your ancestors did their great noble deeds reflects well on you you carry the honor of that four generations and their misdeeds you carry the shame of that four generations okay so that's idea number one that the ancient world just saw a little bit differently idea number two worshipping gods in the ancient world as we've said before the primary act of worship and antiquity was not praying to your God your primary act was sacrificing to your God you could sacrifice animals or grains crops some cultures you could put honey on the altar or flowers anything with the principle of life in it was a worthy sacrifice and there's a lot of different reasons to sacrifice but the basic general reason is that the gods give you the gift of life and you offer a little bit back to show your gratitude so Greeks Romans Egyptians Babylonians Hebrews everybody had temple rituals where they sacrificed animals and burned crops on the altar we know of other non biblical cultures sacrifice practices and rituals only in little scattered fragments and details unearthed by archaeology and so forth we know the basic practice of slaughtering bulls and sacrificing them to Zeus in gods like that for the Hebrews we actually have a rich and detailed account of how they did their sacrificing because of a book called Leviticus Leviticus probably doesn't show up very much in sunday-school sermons but for historians it is an incredibly fascinating thing the name Leviticus is derived from the word Levites and the Levites were one of the tribes of Israel in the ones that traditionally were associated with the priesthood the priests were drawn from the Levites from the sons of Levi so Leviticus is a priestly manual that describes how you go about doing sacrifices and it's all kind of strangely matter-of-fact really when you start getting down to it so just starting in Leviticus chapter 1 the Lord summoned Moses and spoke to him for the tent of meeting saying speak to the people of Israel and say to them when any of you bring an offering of livestock to the Lord you shall bring your offering from the herd or from the flock if the offering is a burnt offering from the herd you shall offer a male without blemish you shall bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting for acceptance in your behalf before the Lord you shall lay your hand on the head of the burnt offering acceptable in your behalf is atonement for you the bull shall be slaughtered before the Lord and Aaron's sons Dupree shall offer the blood dashing the blood against all sides of the altar that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting the burnt offering shall be flayed and cut up into its parts the sons of the priests Aaron shall put fire on the altar in arranged wood on the fire Aaron's sons the priests shall arrange the parts with ahead and suet on the wood that is on the fire of the altar but its entrails and its legs shall be washed with water then the priests shall turned the whole into smoke on the altar as a burnt offering an offering by fire of pleasing odor to the Lord now nowadays will we talk about sacrifice we need a more internal kind of thing that we personally give up you know time or things we value for a higher cause but in the ancient world sacrifice was literal you took animals from your flock that you valued and you stab them and drain their blood and slaughtered them and you took pieces of their guts and their thighs and you seared them on this hot altar stone and the odor wafted up to the gods and was a pleasing odor the Greeks do the same thing the Greeks believed that when they sacrifice bulls to Zeus like on the eve of a great battle that the gods literally like fuel to themselves they consumed the sacrifice and and strengthen them and charge them up to help you in battle the next day here it says that it's a pleasing odor to yave do you think the biblical God is actually like eating these sacrifices do they think of it that way well Leviticus 3 verse 16 after describing another thing with a goat then the priests shall turn these into smoke on the altar as a food offering by fire for a pleasing odor in Leviticus 3:16 ends with all fat is the Lord's that's probably not in a little plaque in your sunday-school anywhere this is part of ancient very archaic kind of religious practice they did essentially think that their sacrifices was pleasing in its odor that in a very ancient world they sort of consumed these things that you fueled God with it but there are other reasons for sacrifice as well chapter one is all about how to sacrifice animals chapter 2 is all about grain offerings if you're a farmer then you don't have a lot of animals but you've got bushels of wheat and stuff that you can burn on the altar so going to the temple you're gonna have roasting meat on the altar you're gonna have sizzling fact on the altar smells good right and you're gonna have bread baking on the altar y'all ever driven by the Morita bread factory before it closed when they're baking bread oh you rolled down the windows and that smell was amazing the smell of baking bread and roasting steak are some of the great delights of our olfactory senses in the life of human beings so it must have been awesome going to the temple when the when the rich men are sacrificing and a lot of animals and stuff because remember the people get deep most of this the entrails all the guts and stuff that gets burned up on the altar the fat gets burned up on the altar and some of the steaks get cooked on the altar for the Lord and some of the steaks are given to the priests but the rest of the meat the people eat that stuff I mean they're not stupid they don't burn up the whole cow on the altar they burn up the stuff that you're not really gonna eat anyway but all of these gizzards and hearts and fat sizzling on the altar smells awesome doesn't it okay so this is what ancient religious ritual was about got to eat meat that day it's a barbecue there's other reasons as well as time goes on they start looking inward more introspectively about this and there are other reasons you can sacrifice you sacrifice to ask favor and you also make in Leviticus is very concerned with the details of this you make sacrifices of atonement you would tone for your sins now the way this works technically is that when you commit a crime it's not just that you ought to feel guilty inside but you're literally tainted there's a little stain that gets on you from your bad acts you can't see it people can't see it but God can see it and as you all learned in Sunday school God does not allow sin in his presence so if you're tainted with sin if your village is full of sinners God don't want to be near you and so you can't get the blessings of yaver so you got to wash those taints of sin off and the only way to wash it off is through the power of God but God don't want to be near you because you're tainted with sin you're in this catch-22 so what you've got to do is find some vicarious means to access a little bit of God's power to wash it off and where's the most convenient place to find the living power of God around you here on this world you know Church yet the sanction Hebrews in the blood of animals the gods give us the gift of life they make the animals live as well the phrase the lifeblood exists for that reason well originally the whole idea is that we and all the animals are alive because God has given us this and that living power of God is in the blood that courses through our veins the ancients would have seen people stabbed in war they'd bleed out and when enough blood leaves them they die so the Living energy that kept them alive must have been in the blood and that's the same with animals so the reason that they're draining off this warm frothy blood and slapping it on all sides of the stone altar is that it's got God's divine power in it and you need to get some of that in the temple that's how you get it there that's why you bring the animals still living to the entrance of the tent of meeting you can't kill it the night before and bring bucket of old blood their the the life force will have gone from it you need it fresh and frothing and they will string up these animals slit their throats and as the heart is still beating its pumping out this blood into these buckets and they see this as the Living force the energy of God coming out with it all right so that's what you've got to access and then you use this blood ritually to wash away the taint of your sins and clean you up and that's what you've got to do to stay right with God we don't know they don't describe that and apparently as long as you're slapping it up on the Stein's the sides of the altar that's fine but we do know of other religious cults in the ancient world where you use the blood directly to cleanse you of your sins and become reborn the cult of kibble II remember them right when they baptize themselves it wasn't just a little you know dunk of water or something they went underneath a grate and they brought a live bull over the top of it slit their bellies open and all the blood of the bull just washed down through the grate and you took a blood bath in this and that's how you cleansed yourself so that kind of thinking does definitely exist in the ancient world they don't describe that precisely in Leviticus they always talked about slopping it up on the altar and that's for the whole community apparently the you know we all benefit from the effects okay the third question I asked to respond to that but he ever heard the phrase scapegoat before what is the scapegoat yeah someone that you blame for somebody else's crime something that takes the blame for it so we use that metaphorically today I'll bet you've already guessed where the scapegoat comes from it's in Leviticus chapter 16 in it's an actual goat on page 47 we're at Leviticus 16 which is a very special ritual of atonement called a scapegoat and you do this when your town is just full of sin and you got to do like a mass per Gatien for everybody so you take a couple of goats you take the first one to the entrance of the tent of meeting you slit it's throat rains blood etc as has been described at 16 verse 20 when he has finished atoning for the holy place in the tint of meeting in the altar he shall present the live goat then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel and all their transgressions all their sins putting them on the head of the goat and then sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness so you literally put everybody sins on this poor hapless goat and you drive him out of town and he takes all the sins with you well what they tell us is that you speak your sins over the goat and you put the sins on them I remember having an Orthodox Jewish kid in my class years ago who told me that they still do something similar I think it's that Rosh Hashanah where they go to a lake with a loaf of bread and they pick off pieces of bread speak every bad thing they don't over the past year throw it in the lake for the fish to eat and you know consume the sin now of course he doesn't think it's literally happening it's something you do metaphorically as a way of reminding yourself of all the bad things you did and reflecting upon it and you know thinking about being better for the new year but these rituals were much more literal in the ancient world so three things that we have trouble accepting literally today that you blame the descendants of somebody for their ancestors crimes that the Living blood of animals washes the taint of sent off of you and that you can put your sins on some animal and send it out of town to carry it away with you but all of these things are the necessary religious background to understand Paul's second major contribution to Christianity when Paul is preaching to Greeks into Romans about Jesus he meets with a lot of laughter a lot of ridicule because Jesus lived fairly recently in history and the story that he was somebody that had been crucified by the Romans in that this is the God that you worship that's absurd to them crucifixion is how the Romans executed the lowest of criminals the scum of the earth traitors against the Empire and rebellious slaves who you know rose a hand and violence against their masters this is a gruesome awful you know miserable way to die a humiliating and painful death in a guy that we killed that way is the god you worship it just sounds ridiculous it's like you you know going home from college and telling your parents he had joined this new religion and we worship this guy that you know got electrocuted and they you know Sparky up and tell a c---ten years ago he's my god now parents gonna be freaking out that'll happen to you in college right so this is how this sounds that's analogous to how this sounds to Greeks and Romans and they ask a pretty good question if Jesus really was divine himself if he really was somehow God you know within him why didn't he use his divine powers to oh I don't know save himself from the crucifixion wouldn't that have been well the purpose hadn't been explained yet is the whole point wouldn't it have been a good time to demonstrate that you're actually divine and full of power when the Romans nail you up there call upon that divinity and pull those nails out and throw them in the faces of the Romans demonstrate that your God that get their attention must start listening to your sermons after that and think about it it's actually a very good question I mean if God really wanted to communicate an important message for Humanity and God can choose any method that he wants why would he choose this peculiar method of being born the son of a poor carpenter in the backwaters of the Roman Empire to grow up poor in a downtrodden you know miserable kind of a place to attract a dozen followers and then get killed young it's 2,000 years later has the whole world been converted to Christianity yet no is this God's most efficient plan I mean why not make yourself born the Emperor right and then you can like command everybody to obey properly and to follow good moral laws imagine some emperor coming along and saying from now on no more violent conquests we're gonna live by the law of loving God and loving your neighbor everybody be nice to each other by order of the Emperor so you know that would get your attention when he pulls you know he could have pulled himself off the cross grew to a hundred feet tall and spoken to every human on the planet you know in their minds and the voice they understand and say hey enough kill enough steel and don't be violent love God love your neighbor I'm coming back boom you're converted the whole word into one afternoon it just seems bizarre to Greeks and Romans that this character from the you know back waters of the empire from basically from the Roman point of view bit low is somehow your God so he's gonna have to have a pretty good explanation to explain the crucifixion how do we make sense of this horrible early end to the Ministry of Jesus particularly to the greco-roman world and to Jews that are still skeptical that Jesus was who his followers are now claiming that he was in this triggers Paul's most brilliant work of scholarly synthesis drawing upon his rich detailed knowledge of Mosaic law and Jewish tradition drawing upon his knowledge also of the greco-roman world in the language that they understand he puts together an explanation that is designed to appeal to anybody in his audience in the answer the explanation he gives is what any of you with the church upbringing learned a long time ago why did Jesus died on the cross for your sins Jesus died to atone for your sins you are redeemed by the blood of the Savior now many of you learned those words in church but most people don't really think about what that means what do you mean that I'm guilty of sins that I didn't actually commit but if I believe in Jesus his blood somehow atones for it and makes it okay for me to go - how does that work technically in a concrete way why does that work well that's why this background is necessary Paul lives in a world where people sacrifice animals on a regular basis in that life blood the show of gratitude to your gods the atoning for your bad crimes this is standard in their thinking and the idea that people can inherit the sins and the shame of their ancestors is common in their world and in the Jewish world in particular is this scapegoat idea as well and all of these are put together in his explanation it is st. Paul who contributes to Christianity the notion that the death of Jesus was not just this unfortunate into a promising young ministry but that it was part of God's cosmic plan all along and that it takes care of problems that happened all the way back at the beginning of time all the way back to the time of Adam for the ancient Hebrews the story of Adam and Eve was an etiological tale that explained why life was so hard and why God was mad at us all the time but they didn't really understand it in the terms that Paul is going to explain it in and those terms are a phrase called original sin in the idea to put it simply as this Adam and Eve were put in the garden they're given one rule to follow by page 3 of the Bible they broken their one rule guy gets pissed off and not only cast them out of the garden but also death comes into the world because of their sin they're cast out and they're cast down below the line of death and by about page 6 or 7 of the Bible the human race is pretty miserable full of sin and violence so much so that God decides we're getting rid of these folks he sends a big old wake-up call called the flood but God is also merciful and compassionate and he wants to try to save humanity wants to try to help them improve so he picks the most righteous person he can find at this time a guy named Noah and he gives him instructions on how to survive and through the sons of Noah the world is then repopulated the human races recreated Noah right after the flood the first thing he does when he gets off the boat before he gets drunk is he sacrifices and that's very important in the Jewish religious memory because after the flood the sacrifice of Noah is the recognition that humanity is required to worship God you're required to you need God you can't just ignore God and do whatever you want you must reckon with God's rules and so this sacrifice is going to be the beginning of a little better relationship between God and His people a relationship that you recall from earlier lectures is called the Covenant God puts the first sign of the Covenant in the sky after the flood and what is that the rainbow alright time goes on for a while God decides all right it's time to get on a little better working relationship with my people and I really like this guy Abraham I think I can work with him the ancient Hebrews of course thought of themselves as the children of Abraham Abraham was some early tribal leader that was a founding member of their cultural identity his story begins at Genesis 12 and the whole rest of Genesis is just him in the next three generations after him and his family line some of which we've talked about just to make sure that Abraham is really on board with all this you didn't give him a little test what's that test got a sacrifice Isaac waited a hundred years to get his son Isaac's like a little cute 11 12 year old boy and God says take your son Isaac whom you love and sacrifice him to me it's kind of weird that Abraham isn't shocked by the suggestion apparently human sacrifice was not a completely unknown thing in the very very early Hebrew world you'll find places where human sacrifice does in fact take place in the Hebrew Bible there's a story called Jephthah's daughter a Hebrew general has a great victory he promises that he'll sacrifice the first thing he sees when he gets back to his farm thinking that you know some cow or you know goat or something would be the first thing to run out his daughter is the first thing that runs out to greet him and he goes through with his vow and he sacrifices his daughter so it's not completely unknown so Abraham is not shocked now does Abraham complain or try to get out of it no never questions okay off to Mount Moriah they go to sacrifice them at the last minute it turns out God was just kind of punking him a little bit just a little test stops him at the last minute and it doesn't make him go through it they just want to make sure he's actually willing to do it and so having proven his loyalty Abraham now becomes the beginning of a working relationship a steady covenant interaction between him and his descendants and God in the promise to Abraham is that in return for your loyalty and exclusive worship I will make you the father of Nations your descendants will be a mighty mighty nation you're not going to be a bunch of ragtag nomads forever what is the second sign of the Covenant circumcision this is when the ritual of circumcision is believed to begin in Jewish history at the time of Abraham not gonna draw a picture of that circumcision okay so then time goes on and because of the famine they end up in Egypt they apparently get a little bit too comfortable in Egypt God's got to roust him and get him out of there again which is why God hardens the Pharaohs hearts and makes life hard to get his people motivated to get moving again we understand archaeologically about the Hyksos invasions and why Semites became unwelcome but the Hebrews making sense of their world and their history saw it as God basically give them to kick in the rear to get moving of course we need a hero to get him out of there again and that's gonna be Moses there is going to be great demonstrations of the power of God plagues of Egypt parting of the Red Sea and on their way to the Holy Land of course the dramatic encounter happens on Mount Sinai Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God which historically makes sense they're on their way to conquer the Holy Land and establish a nation they're gonna need their own law code to follow they're not going to be under Egyptian law anymore and the codes of tribal nomads isn't really suitable for the complexities of city life so that's when they get this moral law code the Ten Commandments and all the ritual stuff that follows as well in Leviticus so look what's really happened here the human race has basically just screwed it up and because the entire human race was still locked up in Adams loins we were unborn but within our ancestor Adam his sin tainted and contaminated the whole human race and so we were born according to Paul unable to not sin it's it's like if you're you know grandfather had worked at Chernobyl during the meltdown you know you might have been born you know some you know six-fingered mutant or something like that you would have been had the radiation poisoning that would have been passed down through the generations and that's what sin is sort of thought of as and so God is basically working to scrub the human race clean again so we wake them up with Noah we test their loyalty with Abraham we give them a moral law code to live by with the Ten Commandments given to Moses and all that sacrifice law in Leviticus which is also part of Mosaic law it's not just the Ten Commandments all that Levitical sacrifice law is important because when you do inadvertently break the laws and taint yourself with sin he doesn't want things to get so bad that he's got to sin dramatic you know death floods to you anymore he wants to give you a means by which you can clean yourself up and stay right with God and stay in his presence and that's why the Levitical sacrifice laws are there and then they like Kings they get conquered by Babylonians and they write the Bible down in the written Hebrew Bible then freezes this much of history in place but as we've discussed thinking still goes on beyond the time with the written text ideas of an afterlife have come into the world and are held by many groups at the time of Jesus nothing in Moses says anything about going to heaven by the time of Jesus the ideas around the question is how do you really get there is it like the Pharisees we're strict adherence to ritual gets you there or the zealots who are gonna claim that dying for the cause you know make you a martyr and get you to heaven or these scenes who are obsessed with ritual purity and ascetic rituals and being Hermits jesus said love God and love your neighbor was the whole point of it all but that doesn't quite answer the question really of how you get to heaven and then Paul comes along and says history isn't done yet this is the first you know 80% to the story but there was one chapter left and that's what the life of Jesus was about when we left off with our Hebrews in the written Bible they had a moral law code and sacrificed laws to stay clean but they still died and went to Sheol as we saw in the book of Job when you die there's just the underworld that you go to and so the final chapter according to Paul was the death of Jesus and the death of Jesus on the cross was not just an unfortunate end a gruesome execution Paul explains that the death of Jesus was in fact a sacrifice just like in Leviticus now in Leviticus when you go through you'll find that there are varying degrees of sacrifice required for varying sins for a small sin turtledoves blood might be enough for a bigger saying you might need a goat for a really big sin you know you might need 10 cows or something in this results of the later prophets Amos and Micah are talking about what is it that you want from us God you know 10,000 cows rivers of oil how much do we need to sacrifice to get you on our side again to make our lives go well and get back to fulfilling the Covenant promise what is gonna be required we've been slaughtering cows and spilling blood for centuries we still don't have our homeland our Empire is long gone we spent most of our history under other empires rule what is still missing this you know attitude is on the minds of the Jews and Paul is ready to answer that question the whole problem to sort of paraphrase it was that all of these sacrifices of animals getting a little bit of God's power was just treating the symptoms of the problem washing away the individual sins you've committed but it doesn't get rid of the original problem the original sin that started all of this hardship in the first place and we'll the power of God from 10,000 cows be enough to wipe away the cosmic whammies sin that began all the world suffering how about a million goats how about a billion turtledoves that's not enough how are we gonna get enough of God's concentrated power to wipe away original sin we were gonna find blood potent enough to do that why because the direct blood of God Himself not vicariously through animals and little bits and drabs and stuff we need pure concentrated divine power in the life blood of the Son of God himself in that according to Paul that's why Jesus died not as an unfortunate into his ministry but as part of God's plan to atone for the sins of Adam those who believe in this and have faith in this therefore get the same benefit that you would get if you happen to go to a temple service and see a cow sacrificed you get atonement for your minor sins and you you know get a steak dinner or something that night but now by having faith in this you get the benefit the efficacious effect of the blood of God himself atoning for the sins that all of us have inherited so it is a masterpiece of Jewish Theological thinking he has taken elements that all of his Jewish audience is completely familiar with and accepts as just a common piece of reality and woven them together in a way that explains the death of Jesus as an admirable thing as something to cherish into treasure as something that completes their historical traditions and sometimes when he's talking to the Greeks in the Romans he'll we use some of their language later in Romans he says in talking about the crucifixion and the resurrection of the Dead lo I show you a mystery you shall not die you shall all be changed and his word mystery is mysterium which is the same way that you refer to the mystery cults of the ancient world so for the Greeks and the Romans he's going to emphasize the nature of Christ being like a dying resurrecting mystery cult figure and you guys have got lots of religions where some you know mythological you know primordial deity dies and resurrects and you believe you benefit from that well all those things you were hoping to find in some esoteric religion happened recently in history just a few decades ago the real thing occurred and so Christ becomes a dying resurrecting mystery cult figure in the way that Paul in the early church start trying to communicate it to the Greeks into the Romans so Paul's language he repeats these ideas in multiple places will just zero in on a couple of them 77 chapter 5 verse 12 therefore just as sin came into the world through one man and death came through sin and so death spread to all because all have sinned and he kind of goes off on a sidetrack they're talking about death moving on a bit verse 18 therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all for justice by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous verse 23 for the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord you know say that in another 15 or 20 places throughout the letter he repeats himself multiple times to make his point clear to people that are not necessarily very sophisticated in the audience so this is Paul's contribution Jesus and his sermons and the synoptic Gospels does not talk about himself as a sacrifice for your sins he doesn't talk about Adam he talks about the laws of Moses and how you fulfill them by loving God and loving your neighbor it's after the fact that Paul comes along with the explanation to make sense of what happens with the death of Jesus and to try to make all of this appealing to overcome the objections and the the sort of shameful qualities that Greeks and Romans would have viewed this as and so the answer is that Jesus has atoned for our sins words that every good Christian learns to memorize in church but when you really think about literally and technically what they mean are kind of strange and we've been looking at weird things in the Hebrew Bible and now in the Christian world that we can explain in a variety of ways we can look at historical context often we can take things and look at it metaphorically or so forth but here you have something kind of bizarre what Paul proposed in this theology was just one simple logical step forward from things that everybody commonly believed in his day but you live in the modern world where you don't slaughter animals and slop their blood around where you don't blame the descendants of people who've committed crimes and where you don't put your sins on hapless animals and send them out into the world that seems ludicrous to us and yet the core belief of Christianity is based on these things things that we don't consider realistic today so it ends up becoming simply in an act of faith you have faith in this idea but logically in the modern world it's maybe hard to reconcile so you'll have to think about that for yourself there's a nice lather little parallel he puts on the end of this notice how every dramatic encounter between one of these patriarchs in God takes place on a mountaintop Noah's Ark lands on Mount Ararat Abraham goes to Mount Moriah sacrifice Isaac Moses goes up Mount Sinai to get the commandments and what's the analog for this in Jesus where does he give his most important Sermon on the Mount exactly fulfilling a pattern fulfilling prophecy and creating basically making the final chapter in the long trek to go from what original sin had dumped us into to finally finding a way to get beyond the line of death and to not just stay clean and have this life go well but to return to paradise which is now not a Garden of Eden somewhere but a life in heaven with God so that becomes the good news the message that the early church begins to promulgate Paul very early in this tradition formulates this theology the synoptic Gospels are written sort of before this becomes necessarily widespread and they seem to have written the historical memory that they had but by John's Gospel this theology has become the standard belief of all Christians and it becomes the standard article that Christians must hold today if they are to call themselves Christians

Channel: George Brooks

Views: 16,996

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Keywords: Brooks, Valencia, St. Paul, Christianity, Humanities

Id: BZhX3Jfnz2k

Length: 61min 57sec (3717 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2016