Doherty explains the specifics of Paul's gospel in great detail, and I will not attempt to reproduce his material here. What I will present is my take on how we got from that gospel to the one we are all familiar with.
The savior in whom the first known Christians had their faith was not a man who had lived in Galilee or anywhere else in this world. He was a mythical figure inhabiting a spiritual realm thought to be in many ways parallel to the one we recognize with our senses. Such a belief was consistent with Platonic philosophies that were prevalent at the time. The savior was a godlike person who died and was raised back to life in that spirit world to redeem humanity from its sins. There were similar savior cults throughout the Middle East during the early first century, and they had probably existed in various parts of the region for quite a few years before the Common Era.
There was also a proliferation of messiah cults within Judaism. One of them, in Jerusalem, was a group of Hellenized Jews who thought the savior-god was their messiah, hence the name Jesus ("Yeshua" = "Yahweh is salvation"), the Christ ("messiah" = "anointed one"). Some of its leaders were referred to as "brothers of the lord." Other leaders were called apostles. The qualification for apostleship apparently was having had a vision or other divine revelation about the savior. Since the atoning act did not occur in this world, there was no way but by revelation to learn about it, or to be told about it by someone who had already gotten the revelation.
Meanwhile, there were sects promulgating various teachings attributed to assorted prophets or other spiritual leaders sometimes called teachers of righteousness. These movements were likely somewhat analogous to the one inspired by the writings of Kahlil Gibran, especially The Prophet. The teachers might or might not have been thought to be real people. Unlike Gibran's work, though, the teachings generally were not written, but were passed on by oral tradition. And likewise, the ideas of most Christian sects were transmitted orally until Paul came along.
Paul was a Hellenized Jew who, according to his own testimony, persecuted Christians until one day when he had his own revelation about Jesus. (He himself never claimed to have had a vision. Nor does he say that when the revelation came, he was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians. That story arose after he was gone.) It was revealed to him, he said, that God had arranged for his son to experience a death and resurrection to atone for the world's sins, and that this was accomplished in fulfillment of the messianic prophecies in Jewish scripture. So far, this was similar to what the apostles in Jerusalem were telling their followers. Paul, however, got the notion that the atonement was for anybody who believed in it irrespective of whether they also became Jews. A Christian needed only to believe that the Christ had died and been raised from the dead for the redemption of sin. Peter, James, and the other Jerusalem apostles believed otherwise.
According to Paul, there was a confrontation between himself and the Jerusalem apostles several years after he began his ministry, the outcome of which was an understanding that he could tell Gentile converts whatever he wished while Jewish converts were obliged to get their instructions from the Jerusalem church. We don't know what Peter or any of the others in Jerusalem actually had to say about any of this, because if they wrote anything, those documents did not survive. Neither did anyone who knew those men, except Paul himself, write anything that survived. The only Christian documents known to have been written during the first century are Paul's letters and most of the other New Testament epistles. The epistles attributed to Peter and James are of unknown authorship.
This accord between gentile and Jewish Christians was workable at least until the Jewish War, during which the Jerusalem temple was destroyed. After that, gentile Christians loyal to Rome would have been nervous about associations between themselves and Jews.
At some point during the later first century, certain stories about one of those teachers of righteousness acquired some messianic elements and a martyrdom, and some Christians found the stories easier to relate to than Paul's ethereal account of unseen events in an unseen world. We don't know whether the stories were first presented as history or parable. They could well have originated as the latter, but in the retelling there was likely no particular effort made to keep anybody from supposing the former. Captivating moral stories do not routinely come with the disclaimer, "You musn't get the idea that any of this actually happened."
Jewish Christians would have had nothing to do with a man who claimed also to be God, but the notion would have been palatable to many gentiles, especially those not versed in the Hellenistic philosophy that had informed Paul's thinking. We do not know how or when the Galilean Jesus stories evolved, or over how many years they evolved, or when they were first put in writing, or what those first writings consisted of. The existence of the books we now call the gospels is not unambiguously confirmed until the middle of the second century. They might have been written much earlier but not have been immediately accepted by most Christians, who continued to believe in Paul's otherworldly Christ. The merger between the two views occurred by a kind of evolution throughout the second century and into the third. By this process, it came to be believed that Paul and the other epistolary authors had been writing about the same Jesus whose ministry was reported in the gospels.
Once the Galilean Jesus became orthodox, writings that clearly disputed it would have been, at best, ignored and allowed to vanish from the historical record. The possibility that they would have been actively sought out and destroyed, at least in some places on some occasions, cannot be dismissed, but we do not have to assume that it ever happened. Their disappearance can be accounted for easily enough by supposing that church leaders of the third century and later would have been concerned with preserving only those documents that were consistent with the new orthodoxy. Other writings would have disappeared from simple neglect, as just about all ancient documents did anyway.
This page last updated on August 4, 2010.