No. 4 on Doherty's "Top 20" list is Paul's failure to credit Jesus for the Christian concept of brotherly love. His primary exhibit is:
1 Thessalonians 4:9
"Now, about brotherly love we do
not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love
each other." [NIV]
Even Ted admits that this is a bit of a puzzle. I also agree with his suggestion that Doherty overstates his case a bit when he says, "Paul's statement is an exclusion of any . . . assumption that Jesus had taught about love." It is not inconceivable that to Paul's way of thinking, if they heard it from Jesus then they heard it from God. It would, however, have been inconsistent. While Paul's Jesus was undisputably divine, Paul nowhere suggests that he thinks God and Jesus are one and the same being.
Ted then tries to find an attribution to Jesus elsewhere, as if that would explain this particular anomaly.
Just 8 verses prior to the one in question, Paul appears to give credit
to Jesus:
4:1-2 "1Finally then, brethren, we request and exhort you in
the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us instruction as to how you ought to
walk and please God (just as you actually do walk), that you excel still more.
2For you know what commandments we gave you by the authority of the Lord
Jesus."
I don't see even an apparent crediting there, and Ted concedes right away that it's not obvious: "This could be interpreted as Paul passing along Jesus' commands from either an earthly ministry or through revelation." Sure, it "could be" interpreted either way, but this exercise is about the most probable interpretation all things considered. There is nothing to suggest that Paul here intended to attribute any teaching to any earthly teacher.
According to Ted, if we assume an attribution to revelation, this creates anomalies of its own.
Paul describes Jesus as having not lived to please himself (Rom 15:3), being a servant to the Jews (Rom 15:8), sinless (2 Cor 5:21), and meek and gentle (2 Cor 10:1), and in Thessalonians Paul praises his readers for being imitators of the Lord in 1:6. Paul appeals to Jesus' conduct as an example others should imitate, yet in this passage Paul doesn't tell them to love one another in accordance with Jesus' example.
But Ted is paraphrasing rather loosely, to put it charitably. Here are the cited passages, with context:
Rom. 15:2-3
Each of us is to please his neighbor
for his good, to his edification. For even Christ did not please
Himself; but as it is written, "THE REPROACHES OF THOSE WHO REPROACHED YOU FELL
ON ME."
Rom. 15:7-9
Therefore,
accept one another, just as Christ also accepted us to the glory of
God. For I say that Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on
behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the
fathers, and for the Gentiles to glorify
God for His mercy; as it is
written, "THEREFORE
I WILL GIVE PRAISE TO YOU AMONG THE
GENTILES, AND I WILL SING TO YOUR NAME."
II Cor. 5:20-21
Therefore, we are
ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg
you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made Him who knew no sin
to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of
God in Him.
II Cor. 10:1-2
Now I,
Paul, myself urge you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ--I who am meek
when face to face with you, but bold toward you when absent! I ask that when I am present I need not be bold with the
confidence with which I propose to be courageous against some, who regard us as if we
walked according to the flesh.
None of those statements clearly and unambiguously implies that Paul is characterizing a man who had recently lived in this world. Obviously, if we assume that he is talking about such a man, then the inference is perfectly reasonable, but the question on the table is whether Paul ever says anything that warrants that assumption. "Paul appeals to Jesus' conduct," Ted says, but that is not quite what Paul is manifestly saying. He is not referring to specific behaviors but rather to attitudes. He is describing not a way of living but an idealized character, which could just as well exist as a Platonic ideal as to be embodied in a human being living in a world that to Paul was anything but ideal.
But, on any interpretation, is it not equally anomalous that "Paul doesn't tell them to love one another in accordance with Jesus' example"? No, because in the spirit world, Jesus had no occasion to exemplify the kind of behavior Christians are supposed to exhibit by loving one another. He was not a man living among men and interacting with men. He was a spiritual entity interacting with other spiritual entities, and he was not obliged to love any of them -- or at any rate not all of them, as a Christian is obliged to love all other Christians.
Ted's subsequent appeals to "other early documents" are similarly unconvincing and in any case are irrelevant as responses to what Doherty is saying about Paul on this particular issue. Ted's references to Q are especially off the mark. Scholars are not quite unanimous even on whether Q actually existed. As best I can understand the relevant arguments it very probably did, but even on that assumption, the document cannot prove anything. It does not exist now and therefore cannot be evidence for anything. Even supposing that a reconstruction of its contents would be accurate, that reconstruction depends entirely on inferences from the contents of existing documents, i.e. the canonical gospels and perhaps one or two others. It follows then that we can get no more information out of Q than we already have in extant writings.
Ted goes on at some length about the Didache and concludes: "These indicate that the author was familiar with and was relying on the teachings in the gospel. It is therefore likely that the doctrine of brotherly love which he stresses as being the doctrine of the maxims was also known to have been part of Jesus' message in his gospel." OK, but so what? Unless the author of the Didache was a contemporary or predecessor of Paul, his beliefs have no bearing on how we should understand Paul. Ted also cites Clement of Rome as crediting Jesus with the love commandment, but Clement was certainly writing at least 50 years after Paul, and everybody in this debate agrees that by that time, the gospel stories were at least beginning to circulate, whether or not they had yet been put in writing, and that at least some Christians were thinking that the stories were factual accounts of their religion's origin.
In concluding this section, Ted says, "Each of 1 John,
the Didache, and 1 Clement stress this commandment as a cornerstone of the
message of Jesus, with the latter two strongly linking the message with Jesus as
the kind of teacher we find in the gospels." Well, yes, we know that, and we
knew it before we ever heard of Earl Doherty, and Doherty himself is almost
certainly aware of it. But the Johannine epistles, the Didache, and I Clement
were all written near the end of the first century if not somewhat later, very
probably after the gospels were written or, at the very least, after their
constituent stories began circulating within some Christian community. So, sure,
by that time, at least some part of the Christian community was convinced that
their religion had been founded by a man known as Jesus of Nazareth, who lived
and died in Palestine and who, during a short ministry, did and said certain
things as told in the canonical gospels. That much is not in dispute. What is in
dispute is whether that is what Christians were thinking 50 or more years before
the Johannine epistles, the Didache, and I Clement were written. More
specifically: What is in dispute is whether it is reasonable to infer from
Paul's writings that that was what he was thinking.
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This page last updated on June 15, 2015.