According to Doherty, the writers of the New Testament epistles occasionally refer to the Christ as savior, but far more often they assign this role to God himself. As Doherty notes, "This does not speak for a strong sense of immediacy for Jesus in the minds of his followers, or for the role he had played in the historical events of Calvary and the rising from the tomb." Simply to illustrate his point, not to make it, Doherty cites Titus 1:2-3.
Ted begins by trying to argue context: "The passage is a greeting in a personal letter . . . . I wouldn't expect a lot of detail . . . ." However, the issue is not the number of details. The issue is a particular detail.
As Ted notes, the author of Titus does refer in the very next verse to "Christ Jesus our Savior." He is also apparently correct to point out that Doherty might be overstating his case. At least in the ASV and King James translations, the word savior appears only about a dozen times, and only one of those occurrences is in a document generally accepted as authentically Pauline. Furthermore, all the others are about equally divided as to whether they identify the savior as God or as Jesus.
The problem is: This is not what one would expect if Christianity had begun among people who were saying that a man named Jesus, whom they had known personally, was the savior. If that had been the case, there is no obvious reason why, within a few decades, the savior's identity would become ambiguous. The ambiguity would be quite understandable, on the other hand, if the movement had begun among believers in a divine being whose distinction from God was never quite clear in the first place, and whose saving activity had occurred (unseen) in a spirit world witnessed only by those gifted with divine insight, rather than in this world, where witnesses would have had a very clear memory of exactly who the savior was.
As noted, Paul uses the word savior only once, and even then it is not obviously relevant to Doherty's point. It shows up in the letter to the Ephesians:
For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. (Eph. 5:23)
Of course, this doesn't mean Paul has nothing to say about salvation. In the KJV, that word appears four times in Romans, three times in II Corinthians, and twice each in Ephesians and I Thessalonians. On none of those occasions, though, does he clearly identify the agent of salvation. The word "saved" shows up about twice as often, and with similar lack of specificity about just who is doing the saving.
Now, we may suppose that Paul assumed his readers would know good and well who the savior was. Very well. They knew it was God, or they knew it was Jesus, and in either case Paul didn't need to remind them. If it was Jesus, though, can we reasonably assume that Paul would have thought it superfluous to say so, on every single occasion that he had for mentioning salvation?
Granted, it is part of the mythicist argument that Christianity underwent a dramatic change sometime between the first and third centuries. But some things surely did not change, and among those things was the role of ministers such as Paul. Their function would never have been only to tell their flocks new things. It would also have been to reinforce ideas they already believed, especially unconventional ideas. There would have been nothing unconventional about God saving people from their sins, given a supposition that salvation was even a possibility. But the notion that some man could do it by any means, crucifixion or otherwise, would have been preposterous. Of course people have always believed preposterous things; but when the whole world around them says it is preposterous, they need be told, over and over again by whomever they consider authoritative, that they are right and everybody else is wrong. Paul would have understood this.
Now, as Ted notes, Paul does make it perfectly clear that Jesus had a vital part in the salvific scheme: "Paul repeatedly stated that it was the actions of Christ's death and resurrection which enabled salvation to happen—a salvation which the scriptures reveal comes through faith in it for all men, Jews and Gentiles alike." Yes, but enabling salvation is one thing. Being the savior is another. The destruction of a building by an arsonist is enabled by gasoline, but that doesn't make gasoline an arsonist.
The remainder of Ted's article on this issue does
not address the issue but goes off on several tangents, and so we'll move on to
the next article.
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This page last updated on June 15, 2015.