Episode 291: John Dominic Crossan – Paul’s Vision Beyond Violence

Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns. 

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas. 

Jared: We’re here to tell you that the first book in our themes of the Bible series, Violence & the Bible…for Normal People: A guide to biblical texts of terror, is now available to buy wherever you get your books! Written by Carolyn Blyth, biblical scholar and host of The Bloody Bible Podcast, this book is both accessible and engaging while dealing with one of the heaviest themes within the Bible.

Pete: Drawing on her lifelong love of true crime and mystery novels, Blyth tackles this sensitive subject with “Case Studies” to unpack the ways in which these biblical examples of violence continue to resonate today. Start reading the first chapter today while you wait for your copy to arrive by going to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/violencebook. 

Jared: And if you want to get even smarter about violence and the bible, Caroline is also teaching our February class called “Blood and Belief: Exploring the Biblical Texts of Terror” and it’s happening TONIGHT from 8-9:30pm Eastern Time. When you sign up you’ll get access to the live class, downloadable class slides, and you’ll get the recording afterwards in case you can’t make it.

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Pete: Well, folks, in today’s episode, we’re talking with our good friend, John Dominic Crossan about Paul, Jesus’s execution, a vision for new civilization and a whole bunch of other stuff—

Jared: Far-reaching.

Pete: And it was just so much fun to talk to this guy. 

Jared: Uh, Dom is Professor Emeritus at, uh, of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. Um, he’s, uh, been a Catholic priest, he’s done so many things, just, just, Google John Dominic Crossan. You also see the laundry list of books that he’s written. We couldn’t possibly name them all here, but the one we’re talking about today is called Paul the Pharisee: A vision beyond the violence of civilization. 

Yeah, this episode can get heady, so why don’t we introduce it a little bit?

Pete: Yeah, so Dom is talking here about Paul’s identity as a Pharisee. And we often think that Paul was a Pharisee, and that he’s not. But Crossan talks about Pauls’ theological evolution and that evolution is from a persecuting Pharisee to a Messianic Pharisee.

Jared: Right, and the noun stays the same. It’s a Pharisee through. And from that fact that Paul’s a Pharisee, we dive into these ideas, these ancient ideas of cosmic justice, and the significance of Jesus’s execution as a revelation of societal violence. And if Jesus’s execution reveals societal violence, then resurrection promotes a vision for a peaceful non-violent civilization. 

Pete: So we move from the things Paul would have believed as a Pharisee and Crossan connects these ancient concepts to contemporary social issues. And I think that’s such a huge insight that he’s giving us in this interview and in the book that he wrote. And I love this quote from the episode so be listening for it: God sent the Messiah at a time God knew he would be executed, to reveal the savage heart of civilization.

Dom: “Sometimes a certain act, an event can reveal the savage heart of a civilization, or of a people, or of a group, or of a person. That’s, I think, the heart of Paul. God sent the Messiah at a time that God knew he would be crucified in order to reveal to the nations, the savage heart of their civilization.”

Pete: Dom, we’re here, we want to talk with you about Pharisees and specifically Pharisees and Paul and—but let’s just start with what, what is a Pharisee, and what do we know about them? And if it’s not throwing too many questions at you—also, um, I’ve heard people say Jesus is a Pharisee or might’ve been a Pharisee. So just give us some traction here before we get into the big topic. 

Dom: Okay. And I have to start with serious damage control. If you go into chapter five of Matthew, Jesus says, don’t call people names. In fact, love your enemies. We all know that stuff. Now, how come by chapter 23 of Matthew, Jesus is calling [them a] brood of vipers going to hell. Every name he can call the Pharisees. Who changed their mind? Was it Jesus or Matthew? So you have to do serious damage control. Here’s the way I’d summarize it. It’s a little bit, um, too easy, but it holds. 

Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. That’s the three that Josephus gives us. The Sadducees represent the right wing, the collaborators with Rome. The Essenes, I would say, are the ones who are withdrawn into the desert. They’ve even withdrawn from their own people. They don’t follow the, the, uh, calendar anymore. And if you really want to separate from your own people, celebrate the 4th of July on the 6th or something. That’s—change the calendar and you’re gone, don’t go to the temple. So they’re the left way. 

The Pharisees represented the center in the first century. Josephus says that’s why they were the most popular. He’s right. So what you have is the messianic, let’s say a messianic Pharisee like Paul is opposing a non messianic Pharisee. They’re fighting for the center. And as you well know, your worst adversaries are those closest to you. The Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago was once asked in public, did he consider me a heretic? He said, “Oh no, no, no. I don’t care about Crossan. He’s an apostate.” 

Basically what you have to understand in the New Testament, and it’s terribly important, is there’s not a single thing said about the Pharisees there with all that vituperation and everything else, that’s worth a grain of salt. They were saying equally nasty stuff, if we had their, their texts from the first century, about the messianic Pharisees. So it’s a fight for the center. 

Now, granted that the Pharisees are the center, and that’s where the Messianic types are coming in. So if, uh, if, uh, a Pharisee like Paul, we have to see what, what else besides owning the center were they, what gave them the center, they would be opposing Paul. And quite the language would not be nice in both sides. 

So, what creates the center in Romanized Palestine? That’s the big question. What creates the center? What did the Pharisees hold that would make most people say, “Eh, we kind of like these guys? Yeah, they’re kind of, they’re weird academics, but we kind of like them.” Because the Pharisees claim, against Romanization and everything that looked like in the first century, there is a cosmic justice operation. It’s not just when you and I in the first century die, we go off before God and we’re judged to go off to heaven or hell. 

Ah, the Pharisee says, “At the end of time, there will be a great judgment of the entire human race. Everyone,” and it means the Romans too, “will have to stand before the judgment seat of God and publicly, publicly be seen for what they have done.”

Now to be honest with you, there’s part of me when I hear that that says, “Oh, come on, you’ve got to be serious. Everyone’s going to rise up out of the sea, out of the fish, out of the whales and be judged?” But then I think very seriously, wait a minute, that sounds awfully like what I hear on the evening news, that what we, the human species, homo sapiens, or insepiens if you want to be accurate, what we’ve been doing for at least the last 70,000 years since we quit Africa, has been basically destroying our world. It’s just that the bills are coming due now. 

So, all of a sudden, when I hear Paul talking, I’m not hearing, this is all at the end of time and we’ll all be judged. It seems that Paul is right when he says in 1 Corinthians 15:20, it has already begun with Christ. He is the firstfruits of this great big resurrection judgment.

So it’s not that I read him and said, “Oh, well, we’re off in the distance.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I insist what Paul holds as a Pharisee is cosmic justice. And anyone in the first century, who looked around and talked about cosmic justice would give you hope, would give you something to believe in at least. Because the Romans ain’t going away. Romans came. They never left. Thank God they never came to Ireland because they wouldn’t have left. 

So I can see why a huge mass of people who mightn’t be interested at all in the discussions, the academic discussions of the Pharisees—wait a minute, there is a cosmic justice. God hasn’t kind of quit on the world and left it to the Romans as some kind of a punishment. There will be a cosmic justice. So that’s, I think, the argument for the centuries, and that’s what Paul is talking about, cosmic justice. 

Jared: Whenever we, uh, then when we talk about the idea of, of, of Jesus, where does Jesus fit into that conversation? As far as um, what you can see from, from the New Testament. 

Dom: I’ve heard people say Jesus was a Pharisee. And to be honest with you, sometimes I don’t want to get into those arguments because I find them red herrings, big distractions of what Jesus was. If you want to think he was a Pharisee, fine. But the Pharisees were academics, doctorates, as it were, that had been to Harvard, if I may say so. So that doesn’t mean they were the only intelligent people in the first century. 

I grew up in Donegal. And we had people who were illiterate in two languages. They were equally illiterate in English and in Gaelic. I knew them. They weren’t dumb. And it would be a fatal mistake to think that illiteracy or non-literacy makes people dumb. So, no, I don’t think Jesus was an academic. I don’t think Jesus was a Pharisee. Paul is! Paul’s an academic. He’s a scholar. Jesus told parables. He’s the best, the best storyteller in the new testament until Luke arrives. Of course, I always remember that Jesus told fictions. They’re called parables. So if Luke is the second best storyteller in the New Testament, be very careful because his stories—like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son—are Paul on the road to Damascus, our story so brilliant that they’ve become cliche proverbs. If I say to you, I’m having a Damascus moment, you know what I’m talking about?

I think you’re a prodigal son. You know what I’m saying? I’m like a good Samaritan, you know what I mean. So what I really want to insist is Jesus operates on a different level. I said in one of my early books that he was illiterate and was shocked to find that people thought I was saying he was dumb. That’s the time when illiterate people in Vietnam were teaching us a lesson. So I think Jesus was illiterate. He could never have been a Pharisee. Paul is. Paul’s an academic. 

Jared: What are, what are some of these other distinctives? You talked about cosmic justice, but what are some other distinctives of the Pharisees of the center that would align with Paul?

Dom: Well, one the most interesting things is, again, Josephus. If you really want to know about the Pharisees, Josephus, who says, in effect, he was a Pharisee, or at least he followed all their teachings. He says that in his biography. You can go to Josephus and you can pretty much trust what he says about the Pharisees, by the way.

So it’s not that I’m making all of this up. I’m depending on Josephus. He says they are the most faithful transmitters of the tradition. And it’s really, really terribly ironic because, you know, in one sense, it’s, it’s, it’s they are the inventors of tradition. If I was a Sadducee, I’d say, show me, show me in the Torah. Are the prophets, are the wisdom writings, where you find this, this cosmic justice at the end of time, just show it to me.

And of course you’d lose the argument. You might pull up some symbolic ones that might be construed, like bones, dry bones in the Valley of the Bones. But no, it just wasn’t there. It was a creation about 160 years before Jesus, at the time of the Maccabees, to explain where is the justice of God when you’re looking at the battered, executed bodies of a martyr.

They would have said, don’t give me this Deuteronomic theology, that God punishes the wicked and rewards the just when Antiochus has just turned it upside down by saying, if you obey God, you die. If you disobey God, you live. So of course, the whole question of the justice of God was central from about 160 on. And the Pharisees are heirs of that. 

Pete: And Paul was too. 

Dom: Paul was too. Paul says he was a Pharisee, proudly was a Pharisee, naturally Luke Acts agrees on that. So. He certainly was a Pharisee. But the point of my book, Peter, is that it was not that he was a Pharisee but he got over it like a bad cold. It was that he always was a Pharisee. And in fact, I would say his Pharisaic faith was the pivot that made him able to go from being a non-Messianic Pharisee to a Messianic Pharisee without having a neurotic breakdown as it were. 

Pete: So he was a non-Messianic Pharisee. 

Dom: Oh, sure. 

Pete: And, and explain that. It’s not that he was, I mean, I’m thinking of, of, um, Acts, you know, chapter nine and all that and how he was, you know, sent up to, to, to find the Jews or bring them back cause they’re following the “wrong” Messiah. I would have thought that Paul had messianic notions, but the, the, the, what, how that was filled was different in this risen Jesus that he had a vision of. But you’re saying, that’s interesting, you’re saying that he’s, he went from non messianic Pharisee to messianic Pharisee. Can you explain that? 

Dom: Um, and I’d like to come back to, you alluded a couple of times there in effect to the message, to the Damascus road and to Luke. So we will have to talk about Luke in a few minutes, at least that’s very important, how to handle Luke Acts with some integrity. Erm, Paul himself, when he, when he declares who he was before, tells you he was a persecutor. Now, please hear persecutor from Paul and don’t make him a mega-persecutor doing renditions from Jerusalem to Damascus and back. That is rubbish. I’m sorry to put that. 

He didn’t do that in the first century under the Romans. The high priest could not have executed, maybe lynched somebody. But could not have executed somebody in Rome and Jerusalem. Had no authority, no authority, outside whatever little authority they had within the temple.

Maybe if you broached the, uh, if you were a Gentile and you went into the court of the Jews, maybe they could have you executed. But to go to Damascus and bring people back, that’s not even good fiction. If somebody was writing a novel today and pulled that, and I was the editor, don’t do that. That’s not possible.

Luke is making Paul, as he does, a super-persecutor. He starts in Jerusalem. He’s so good in Jerusalem, he says himself in Acts, that he’s sent to Damascus. And what we would call a rendition, to bring them back. Leave that aside for a moment. Stick with Paul. 

Paul says he was proud to be a Jew, circumcised, a tribe of Benjamin, the whole thing. Nowhere does he say, “and I quit.” Nowhere. He says he was a Pharisee. That tells me then he had faith in this cosmic justice we’re talking about all of that. Then he says he was called by God. And called by God for the nations, I’m going to, I’m really sorry that in the book, I translated that the ethne as Gentiles, I was, I was just going with the flow and not thinking. When Paul talks about Jews and Greeks, okay. That’s a valid distinction. But Jews and ethne makes no sense. I mean, whether they like it or not, the Jews were an ethne for, for the Romans. They were a people. That’s an ethne. 

So it’s as if we were talking about Americans and the people of the world, whether we like it or not. So Paul’s, I don’t want to say conversion because that has been abused to mean from a Jew to a Christian. Paul’s conversion, if you want to use that term, is from a persecuting Pharisee to a Messianic Pharisee. And that means we’re going to have to talk very seriously of what the fact that Jesus as a Messiah meant for Paul.

Jared: What I’m hearing you say is, we need to recognize when we talk about Paul’s conversion, it is not like Paul was, uh, was a pharisaical Jew and then became a non pharisaical Christian in that conversion. 

Dom: Yeah, I mean, Jewish and Christian scholars today insist, and they are right, and I agree, we should not use the term Christian for Paul, but, you know, you may all say, well, we shouldn’t use the term Jew, because those terms as we use them today represent separate religions.

What we’re talking of is the first part of the first century during the life of Paul. I’ve created a new word, messianic is simply anglicized Hebrew or Aramaic, Messianic. I’m making a word, “Christic,” and the analogy of Messianic, it’s anglicized Greek. Anglicized Hebrew, anglicized Greek. He’s a Messianic Christic, because he is a Messianic.

And the Greek word for Messianic is Christic, so I’m not going to get lost in language. So for Paul, it’s absolutely fundamental that he is a Pharisee who is now, in my language, a Messianic Christic Pharisee. And how those come together is the core of who Paul is. That’s the heartbeat of Paul. 

Jared: Would you say then that the, the outcome of this is that this pharisaical understanding of the, uh, cosmic justice now gets infused with the life and work, the resurrection of Jesus now, is part of that cosmic justice work. And that is, that, that’s what makes this Christic is we’re taking this pharisaical understanding of cosmic justice and now we’re tying it to this, uh, the event of Jesus and saying these are tied together somehow. And this is Paul sort of working out how that is, that they’re tied together. 

Dom: Exactly. Thank you, Jared. That’s perfect. And that is what makes it Christic. Otherwise, we’re talking about a Jew who might say, well, he was Jew. He was a nice guy, you know, and one poor, another poor Jew on a Roman cross. What else is, is there? But that’s the way it is. That’s fine. That’s fine. But that’s not Paul. So what we have to explore a little bit then, more, why is this so important for Paul? 

Pete: Right. 

Dom: And the key verse in all of Paul almost for this is the 1 Corinthians 15:20 when he says, and he’s talking of course about the resurrection of the dead. By the way, in English, that’s a dangerous term, the resurrection of the dead. Very often I hear people understanding that, meaning the resurrection of the dead one. No, no, it’s plural in Greek. It’s anastasis nekron, genitive plural. So anytime you get resurrection, if you’re not talking about Jesus, it’s of the dead ones. Paul couldn’t possibly imagine Jesus as resurrected, using that term, except as not just part, but the inauguration, the beginning of the whole process. Now that’s the mind blowing thing he says. It’s like, he’s almost say, well, are you saying Paul, then the end of time has already arrived? Yeah. You have to be sympathetic with Paul because if he was here today, we’d say, “Paul, there’s been 2000 years since you said that.”

Pete: Yeah. Well, he didn’t think that.

Dom: He didn’t think that. He didn’t think that because—but he is making a claim that even the stretch of time doesn’t invalidate it. He thinks it is going to happen and be all finished within his own lifetime. He’s wrong. But that doesn’t invalidate the claim. It just invalidates the timing. Like if, if you said, I’m going to go for a doctorate and have it in two years, takes you five years, well you still got your doctorate. You don’t want people to come and say, “Well it was five years. You said two years but it’s five years.” Get over it, I’ve got the doctorate. So, it’s the same, you can batter Paul, and maybe Jesus too, by their sense of time, but it’s their sense of claim that we have to—

Pete: How distinct was Paul’s understanding then, as a Pharisee, of resurrection than what he had left behind?

Dom: That really is what he has to explore for himself, because he’s brought two things together now. You think, if I was, let’s say I was a Pharisee debating with Paul, amicably, I would say, “But Paul, you, you know, there’s no such thing as an individual resurrection. Resurrection is a cosmic phenomenon for the whole world. How can you possibly talk about Jesus? That makes no sense.” We can talk about, say, a senator. That’s one. But a senate is the whole people. This makes no sense to me, Paul. Paul’s answer, but you have to justify it. “It has begun with Jesus.” Now, at least I get that you’re not saying that the general resurrection is Jesus, but you are, you are saying he is the first fruits of those who have slept. You’re claiming it has begun with Jesus.

Now, now, Paul, I got a bigger problem. I’m looking around. What’s his face is still over there in Rome. And Tiberius is, is, is still the emperor. He’s dying, but he’s still around. Um, we still, Paul, this isn’t funny. No, this is some kind of a joke, a Jewish joke, maybe that, that the Messiah has arrived, show me. I’m open.

Pete: And made a public spectacle. Right? Of, of the powers that be and that sort of rhetoric, which is powerful, but might not be squared with what’s actually happening when you look over to Rome and you see Tiberius still on the throne. 

Dom: And here’s where Jesus and Paul are saying the same thing in different language. Jesus says the kingdom of God has already arrived. Jesus, are you trying to be funny? You know, we, we know what that means. There’ll be peace on earth. They’ll be beating their swords into plowshare, their spears in the pruning. You excuse me, Jesus. I don’t hear the angel chorus. You know, where’s the peace?

This is funny as a joke, Jesus. And then the answer from Jesus and for Paul, it only starts if you started. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Where’s that in the tradition, Jesus? We were waiting for God to do it for us. That’s what John the Baptist said. Pray, hope, be ready, God will come and do it. And we know what happened. The cavalry came and executed him. And Jesus said, the kingdom is only here in so far as we enter it or take it upon us. Wait a minute, you mean it ain’t here if we don’t? You got it. And Paul saying is exactly the same thing. There ain’t no resurrection if you ain’t resurrecting. And the Corinthians said, what?

And tried to beat back into Plato for safety and said, well, we’re talking about souls. Don’t bring in the stuff about bodies. The challenge of Paul, that makes him the terror of the New Testament, honestly. He’s very radical, but he’s also very right. 

Jared: So, say more about that because, I mean, I’m going to ask it as a question, you know, you talk about a vision beyond the violence of civilization. Is that tied to this idea? 

Dom: Yes. Yes. The, the original title, subtitle of the book, to be honest with you, the title was the same, Paul the Pharisee, but I submitted it to the editors as “A vision of post-civilization”, you know, if I said a vision of new creation, everyone would have yawned because we’ve, we’ve heard that term, we know, but it’s, it’s absolutely what Paul means. If you would try to imagine, if you and I would try to imagine what our world would look like today, if there were no arms.

Just imagine, nobody’s making arms, selling arms, using arms, anything. Just try and imagine what a new creation would look like. Paul is really imagining it. And after two thousand years I’m beginning to see that he was right, that it wasn’t kind of a dreamy, lovely idea, wouldn’t it be really beautiful if we all kind of love one another. But that we have maybe no, no other choice of specific sustainability because we have escalated every other thing we have invented for weapons of mass destruction, which we’re just holding on using to attack on the time, but you know all this stuff. 

So Paul gives us a vision that I summarize in the book by saying the message from Paul is, “you guys ain’t on the Titanic. You’re the iceberg.” Just to summarize it for me. He has a glimpse of a change, so that for Paul, it’s, yes, it’s right to say it’s Christ against Caesar, or as I’m showing on behind me, Paul against Caesar, but it’s really creation against civilization.

It’s far deeper. It’s, it’s the vision of civilization in Genesis 1. And what we have done in creating human civilization. So when I said post civilization, I was trying to ask us to imagine in our language, what Paul would mean by a new creation. What would it cost us? What would we have to change? How deep would we have to go?

Jared: When you’re saying this, it’s, it’s, uh, reminding me of what we talked about earlier with the Essenes, who are sort of, uh, we’re leaving civilization, we’re gonna, we’re gonna leave all of this. What makes Paul’s vision different than that vision of, we’re just gonna hightail it out of here and leave all that behind and start over out in the, in the wilderness?

Dom: Cause again, this is the center. We ain’t leaving. We’re changing. That’s the center again, and that’s why the Pharisees aren’t going. Now, after 2,000 years of rebellions and everything against Rome, they retreat into their own sanctity, the sanctity of the home and the sanctity of the synagogue. And they don’t even want to keep Josephus.

Josephus is [unintelligible] by Christians because, oh, that’s suffered by wars. No more, no more. We almost destroyed ourselves. The great irony, of course, is that when the Jewish people are seceding from warfare, the Christians are busily preparing for Constantine. We pass like ships in the night going in opposite directions.

Pete: Dom, you said something before that I, I would like you to unpack a little bit more, cause I think it’s very profound and it’s made me think a little bit too, that for Paul, it’s about creation versus civilization, almost like that’s, that’s the deep thing that he’s getting at. And, um, riff on that a little bit more, but then also, I mean, maybe tie that into why it’s not a waste of time to read Paul today.

Dom: Alright. [Chuckling]

Pete: That’s a lot. Let me leave Paul aside for a moment and go back and take a re-look at the first chapters of Genesis. What scholars distinguish as the priestly tradition say in Genesis 1, basically, goes straight to Genesis 5. In between is Genesis 2 and 3. Which is not about original sin. There’s no mention of sin in there. There’s no mention of disobedience in there. There’s no mention of anything in there except here’s how human beings got into the mess they are, or the state they are. 

The Jewish exegetes never came up with original sin in there. That’s one of our inventions. They did see that Adam gave us bad example, but not a genetic stain. Bad example, maybe, but not genetic stain. And it’s not about sex, that we owe to Augustine, as you all know. The first time sin is mentioned in the Bible is in Genesis chapter 4, I think it’s verse 7. And it’s about murder. It’s about fratricidal murder. It’s about violence. And if you read through Genesis 4, all the way from Cain down to Lamech, about five generations later, you watch the escalatory nature of violence.

Cain kills Abel as we all know. God tells him, Sin is waiting like a feral beast at your tent, ready to pounce, but you can’t beat it. So it’s not something that we just can’t do anything about. God tells Cain, you can lick it. You can beat it. And then God tries to stop the escalation of violence by warning that like the desert blood feud that your tribe will take seven of mine and God’s no, no, I mark you so it won’t happen. God’s tries desperately has a word Genesis four to stop the escalation of violence. It doesn’t work. So Cain’s descendant about five generations later, good old Lamech. Lamech announces, “You hit me, I’ll kill you.” Oops. And he boasts about it, that’s escalation, and it’s, it’s Lamech’s children who invent civilization.

Oh, by, by the way, Cain, Cain invented the first city, just in case you, I missed that. I’m speaking very literally, Genesis 4 is the most accurate summary of the Neolithic revolution that’s ever been written. I mean that absolutely literally. And the people who did it knew exactly what they were doing.

Now, Genesis 1, which is the opening overture to the Bible. I want you to read that first and everything through it, gives you an ideal of humanity created in God’s image and likeness. Never discusses what will happen if we don’t act in God’s image and likeness. Will there be punishments? Of course not. If you act against your nature, your destiny, you punish yourself.

It’s called consequences. If you think you’re a bird and go up to a high building and take off, God will not beat you to death with the pavement. It’s not a punishment, it’s a consequence. The idea of Genesis 1 is we must run the world for God, according to the Sabbath way of life, the Sabbath is about justice.

We know that from the Sabbath day, the Sabbath year, the Sabbath jubilee. It’s about time beating to the rhythm of justice. That’s the vision of creation. Are we free not to do it? Of course we are, but we’re not free to avoid the consequences of our destiny. So there’s nothing about punishments in Genesis 1.

Not a worry about what if we don’t operate according to the image and likeness of God. So creation is the ideal, over against that almost immediately comes violence. Violence is the sin. When I hear that Jesus takes away the sin of the world, that’s what I’m thinking about. It ain’t about sex. It really isn’t. It’s about violence. 

Jared: I need you to go back about 25 years and tell my youth pastor that. 

Pete: It’s not about beer either, apparently, right? So, yeah. 

Dom: Honestly Jared, I, I got it from reading Genesis. I really did. It took me a long time before I really got, got it because I’m reading Genesis two and three, having been, you know, taught by Augustine and maybe Luther, and I’m seeing it.

Of course, it’s all about punishment and original sin and everything else. And then you start focusing on Genesis four, and I only got into that because I was reading some stuff about the Neolithic revolution and everything else. Hey, that’s what’s going on. So Genesis one was written, I think last, by the way, I think Genesis one was written after the Babylonian exile when they’re organizing the Hebrew scriptures and this is put up front. So you read through it. These are the glasses you put on so you read everything through, so you recognize the consequences are more important than punishments. 

Now, and when I come to the, to today, I see what we’re doing as consequences. And sometimes the worst consequences may be from people who are kind of not evil, maybe people who will invent artificial intelligence, who may be lovely people with good intentions, I don’t know, may give us the most disastrous thing we ever could imagine.

So, it’s just being very, very careful with our consequences.

Jared: Can you connect the dots then for, uh, you know, we started with talking about Paul’s vision beyond the violence of civilization. So, you know, we talk about violence in Genesis. And then can you tie that to, to Paul’s vision as a, as a Pharisee and, um, the things that we’ve been talking about before, because when I kind of think I’m leafing through all the things Paul talks about, there are things that are not just about violence. It doesn’t seem just centered on violence. 

Dom: The execution, I’m using execution instead of crucifixion because we’ve domesticated crucifixion as if it was just, you know, a bad day for Jesus kind of, but no. It’s all over by Friday, by Friday evening. So it’s not bad. Um, execution. Jesus was executed. Legally, publicly, but legally is the key thing, by the Roman Empire, which vaunted its own justice, law, order, and civilization.

That’s what it said. They looked across the Irish sea and said, well, if I go over there, they’re not even civilized, civilizable. If we can’t conquer them, we can’t. So here’s, let me look at the first three chapters of Corinthians. I want to hear what I called the heartbeat of Paul before very carefully. In the first three chapters of Corinthians, the subject is the execution of Jesus. He’s focusing on the execution, not the resurrection. That comes up in chapter 50. On the execution of Jesus.

And he makes this startling statement, which we all love because it’s so paradoxical. The wisdom of God is stupidity. The, the, the wisdom of divinity is stupidity for humanity, and the wisdom of humanity is stupidity for divinity. Let me keep it in a nice little, like that. Now, you know, if I take that as a general statement, Paul has just negated the whole Bible.

Which teaches in Torah, and prophecy, and wisdom, that of course we can understand one another. We may not like it, we may want to get away from it, but yes, we can really understand what God is saying. So if everything that God’s wisdom is ours, then we can’t talk to one another. So I take that not as a general statement, but as a very specific statement about the execution of Jesus.

Mm hmm. And here’s where I hear Paul on violin. He says, okay, let me back up, put it this way. I think this is the vision that sears the very soul of Paul. It’s rock bottom basic. For me, for Paul, and understanding Paul, he’s asking himself this question, and it’s not a question I would even ever ask myself, so I know I’m not inventing it.

Paul asks, God knew from all eternity, from all eternity, that when God sent the Messiah, The greatest empire the world had ever known would execute him. Why did God send the Messiah at that time? That’s what sears his soul. That’s what inspires his vision. That’s what inflames his mission. To get that out. He calls it the mystery. That’s his term. The mystery of God. The mystery of the wisdom of God is the wisdom of that, you know, I don’t know what verb to use, honestly, that God allowed, that God permitted, that God decreed, that God decided, choose the verb, that the Messiah would be executed. 

Now, honestly, I don’t even think like that. It’s not even a question I ever even dreamt of asking. I would, I would ask, what happened in Jerusalem that, that week that, you know, all that stuff I’d ask. What about Pilate? I’ve never really thought, honestly, why did God? But Paul has an answer. It was to reveal the savage heart of civilization.

Do you see what you did? Do you see what you do? And then Paul says, then this is the key quotation. None, none of the, none of the rulers of the world got it. If they got it, of course, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of Glory. So it’s like, and I’m thinking of examples, very recent in our history in this country, sometimes a certain, an act, a certain act, an incident, an event can reveal the savage heart of a civilization, or of a people, or of a group, or of a person.

That’s, I think, the heart of Paul. God sent the Messiah at a time that God knew He would be crucified in order to reveal to the nations, to the nations, the savage heart of their civilization. Now, what comes immediately from that, by the way, and only from that for Paul, is that oh, but yes, yes, yes, but God knowing that, knew that that would release into time the end time resurrection.

Ah. So it’s like the two sides of a divine coin, the execution would reveal our savagery. The resurrection would reveal God’s justice already operational. So you can almost see the frames of first Corinthians, first Corinthians one to three and first Corinthians 15, the execution. Because I think if you were to ask Paul, look, Paul, if, if Jesus had spent his life healing people and telling parables and had died, you know, in his own, own bed in Nazareth of old age, would he have been the Messiah? Paul might’ve said, Oh yeah, but then he would have ascended into heaven. The resurrection was only necessary because of the execution of the Messiah.

Pete: Well, Dom, I, I have several questions that I’d love to ask. The problem is we’ve really come to the end of our time. I would love to pick this up again with you, because I think, um, just in closing my, my feeling Jared is that, um, you’re, you’re giving us an angle from what’s to see the good news, the gospel, right? And it’s not just about drinking beer or having sex. It’s about the world and the systems and sin with a capital S, right? 

Dom: Right. The evening news. Yeah, exactly. Right. 

Pete: So, so maybe we can get to that at a future time, Jared. But for now, thank you so much for being with us, for taking the time again, for bringing your family members with you, sitting in the back, watching you. That’s great. And, um, yeah, just, uh, we’ve had a wonderful time and I’m sure our viewers here who are watching this live have enjoyed this as well. 

Dom: I would love to do this, because I know we didn’t finish.

Pete: No, you know we’re, we’re barely getting started, but that’s the nature of a podcast.

Jared: But I would say, I just appreciate kind of where you ended with this, with this understanding of the, of the execution and resurrection and the significance, because a lot of our listeners are moved away from this substitutionary atonement, uh, understanding of the, of the death and the resurrection of Jesus and are, are really trying to grasp for then what is the significance. And I just thought you did such a beautiful job articulating, uh, something that I think is more faithful to the context, uh, that we find Paul in and sort of how Paul’s wrestling with these realities around him.

So, I thank you so much for that as an inspiring way to end. 

Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give. 

Pete: And if you want to support us and want an all access pass to our classes, ad free livestreams of the podcast, and a thoughtful community of people asking tough questions about the Bible and faith, you can become a member of our online community, the Society of Normal People at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. 

Jared: And lastly, it goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People. Don’t forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Joel Limbauan, Savannah Locke, Melissa Yandow, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Lauren O’Connell, and Naiomi Gonzalez.

Pete: Do you play shuffleboard? 

Dom: [Laughs] 

Pete: I need to ask you that. Please say no. [All laughing]

Dom: No. Okay. Good. Good. Good. 

Jared: Don’t judge the shuffleboard. 

Pete: Hey, you know what? Hey, it’s my filter, man. I got to deal with it. 

Jared: Okay. 

Dom: Oh, no. That’s a fate worse than death.