Did St Paul Get Jesus Right?: The Gospel According to Paul by David Wenham

Author:David Wenham [Wenham, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Essays, Theosophy, Christian Theology, General
ISBN: 9780745962481
Google: okoSAE9OcL8C
Amazon: 0745962483
Barnesnoble: 0745962483
Publisher: Lion Books
Published: 2010-06-15T13:15:29+00:00

Jesus’ use of the word “Abba” does not necessarily prove that he understood himself to be divine in the way that Christians later came to present him as the second person in a divine Trinity. Indeed Jesus may well have taught his disciples to pray to God as “Abba” too: some people think that the Lord’s Prayer, the model prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, began in Aramaic with “Abba”. And Paul, as we have seen, speaks of Christians calling God “Abba”. But Paul is clear that this Christian experience of God as father comes from Jesus and through his Spirit: it is “the Spirit of his Son” that brings Christians into a wonderful relationship of intimacy with God as “Abba” alongside Jesus – as his brothers and sisters.

So it would be wrong to claim that the use of the word in itself prove that the user is divine. But what is quite clear is that this usage goes back to Jesus and began in his own distinctive experience of God. So when Paul thinks of Jesus as God’s Son this is not his idea at all, but one of the essential ingredients of Christianity that has its roots firmly in the ministry and teaching of Jesus.

The resurrection again

And then there is the resurrection of Jesus. For Paul the resurrection was vital to his faith as a whole. At the end of his first letter to the Corinthians there is a long discussion of the Christian hope for resurrection after death; he speaks of Jesus’ resurrection as key evidence not just for the idea of resurrection in general, but for the whole of the Christian faith. He says: “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith”.9

Specifically, Paul links the resurrection of Jesus to his divinity. In his famous letter to the Christians in Rome Paul begins by referring to the “gospel of God” – the Christian good news. He speaks of it in thoroughly Jewish terms, talking about the “Holy Scriptures” of the Old Testament and about Jesus as descended from the Jewish king David. And then he speaks of Jesus as “marked out as Son of God in power… by resurrection of the dead”.10 He does not mean that Jesus became Son of God through the resurrection, but he does mean that the resurrection of Jesus declared to all who would hear that Jesus was Son of God, as well as the Jewish messiah and Lord of everything.

Then in his letter to the Christians in Philippi Paul speaks of Jesus’ amazing humility in becoming human and dying by crucifixion, and goes on to say: “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”11 The language here about knees

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