Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

to visit the men and women in Jerusalem who had actually
     known the man Paul professed as Lord (Galatians 1:12).
    Why does Paul go to such lengths not only to break free from the authority of the
     leaders in Jerusalem, but to denigrate and dismiss them as irrelevant or worse? Because
     Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought,
     that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly
     get away with preaching them. What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his
     contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality.
     Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable
     to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’
     dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations
     of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a
     completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making:
Christ
.
    Although “Christ” is technically the Greek word for “messiah,” that is not how Paul
     employs the term. He does not endow Christ with any of the connotations attached to
     the term “messiah” in the Hebrew Scriptures. He never speaks of Jesus as “the anointed
     of Israel.” Paul may have recognized Jesus as a descendant of King David, but he does
     not look to the scriptures to argue that Jesus was the Davidic liberator the Jews
     had been awaiting. He ignores all the messianic prophecies that the gospels would
     rely on many years later to prove that Jesus was the Jewish messiah (when Paul does
     look to the Hebrew prophets—for instance, Isaiah’s prophecy about the root of Jesse
     who will one day serve as “a light to thegentiles” (11:10)—he thinks the prophets are predicting
him
, not Jesus). Most tellingly, unlike the gospel writers (save for John, of course),
     Paul does not call Jesus
the Christ
(
Yesus ho Xristos
), as though Christ were his title. Rather, Paul calls him “Jesus Christ,” or just
     “Christ,” as if it were his surname. This is an extremely unusual formulation whose
     closest parallel is in the way Roman emperors adopted “Caesar” as a cognomen, as in
     Caesar Augustus.
    Paul’s Christ is not even human, though he has taken on the likeness of one (Philippians
     2:7). He is a cosmic being who existed before time. He is the first of God’s creations,
     through whom the rest of creation was formed (1 Corinthians 8:6). He is God’s begotten
     son, God’s
physical
progeny (Romans 8:3). He is the new Adam, born not of dust but of heaven. Yet while
     the first Adam became a living being, “the Last Adam,” as Paul calls Christ, has become
     “a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45–47). Christ is, in short, a comprehensively
     new being. But he is not unique. He is merely the first of his kind: “the first-born
     among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). All those who believe in Christ, as Paul does—those
     who accept Paul’s teachings about him—can become one with him in a mystical union
     (1 Corinthians 6:17). Through their belief, their bodies will be transformed into
     the glorious body of Christ (Philippians 3:20–21). They will join him in spirit and
     share in his likeness, which, as Paul reminds his followers, is the likeness of God
     (Romans 8:29). Hence, as “heirs of God and fellow heirs of Christ,” believers can
     also become divine beings (Romans 8:17). They can become like Christ in his death
     (Philippians 3:10)—that is, divine and eternal—tasked with the responsibility of judging
     alongside him the whole of humanity, as well as the angels in heaven (1 Corinthians
     6:2–3).
    Paul’s portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it
     has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright
     bizarre to Jesus’s Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean into a divine,
     preexistent, literal son of God whose death and resurrectionlaunch a new genus of eternal beings responsible for judging the world has no basis
     in any writings about Jesus that are even remotely contemporary with Paul’s (a firm
     indication that Paul’s Christ was likely his own creation). Nothing like what Paul
     envisions exists in the
Q
source material, which was compiled around the same time that Paul was