The Radical Teaching of Jesus: A Teacher Full of Grace and Truth: An Inquiry for Thoughtful Seekers

The Radical Teaching of Jesus

A Teacher Full of Grace and Truth: An Inquiry for Thoughtful Seekers

Duncan S. Ferguson

The Radical Teaching of Jesus

A Teacher Full of Grace and Truth: An Inquiry for Thoughtful Seekers

Copyright © 2016 Duncan S. Ferguson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Section One: The Terrain

Chapter 1: Accessing the Teaching of Jesus

Chapter 2: Accessing the Teaching of Jesus

Chapter 3: Accessing the Teaching of Jesus

Section Two: The Teaching

Chapter 4: The Method of Jesus’ Teaching

Chapter 5: The Message of Jesus’ Teaching

Chapter 6: The Mission of Jesus’ Teaching

Section Three: The Translation

Chapter 7: God in the World

Chapter 8: God’s Presence in the World

Chapter 9: God’s Presence in the World

Bibliography

There are innumerable books about Jesus. The reason is obvious: we can never finish with him, and every age must encounter him anew.

—Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, xi

With gratitude to honest and thoughtful writers and teachers who have sought to understand Jesus

Preface

There are numerous and excellent resources available for the study of the Gospels and the life of Jesus. One might legitimately ask whether another resource is necessary. It is a good question and could be answered either way, but I think the better answer is a tentative yes. One fundamental reason is because Christians of every generation and culture generally feel that they must make an effort to understand the life and teachings of Jesus within their framework. His importance for each generation and setting is hard to overstate, and the meaning of Jesus must be claimed and owned as each generation engages in worship, study, and reflection. Others outside of the Christian family also want credible and contemporary accounts of this extraordinary person. It appears that there is always a new perspective that can be helpful and enlightening.

It is the case that a conscientious seeker can generally find these excellent resources; they are available in the great libraries and even online, although some guidance for finding the resources may be a requirement.¹ These resources are vast, located in many places, and written in several languages, and it is not easy to gain access to them all in one place. Even as one uses world-class libraries, it is difficult to know just what to select to answer one’s questions and inquiries.² Still another part of an affirmative answer about the need for new resources is that nearly every book about Jesus has a particular point of view, growing out of a specific time and place, and they are usually targeted toward a particular audience. For example, one may find a book written by a scholar on an important but narrowly focused subject designed for other scholars.³ Or one may find a book for lay people designed to nurture faith, but lacking the details of historical background and context.⁴ There are many fine books designed for a particular culture or ethnicity suggesting the relevance of the teaching of Jesus for the particular setting.⁵ Or, one may find a book that attempts to invite the contemporary and thoughtful reader into the range of difficult, even overwhelming issues, which surround any attempt to interpret the life of Jesus.⁶

The category in which I would like to make a contribution is the teaching of Jesus, although in this category there is an abundance of thoughtful works.⁷ I have been greatly informed and enriched by them, and to a large extent, my dedication is to these authors and teachers. For the past several decades, there has been a multitude of books about Jesus and his teaching that take into account the complex issues of the intricate balance of faith and history, the rise of a new consciousness, and the resulting phenomenon of the emerging church (nearly a new Reformation). These books continue to be published, but more recently with slightly less frequency.⁸ My goal is to put the emphasis on Jesus the Teacher (Rabbi) and enable the thoughtful seeker to discover this wealth of information and insight found in the teaching of Jesus. I will stress the charismatic nature of his teaching, but will also suggest that Jesus is a compassionate healer and radical prophet who taught in these roles as well.⁹ My hope is that readers may find a way of understanding Jesus of Galilee and his extraordinary teaching that has integrity, is credible, and is life–giving. From this base, good decisions about Jesus can be made.

While the book is for everyone with an interest, I do hope to reach a particular group of people, those who struggle with affirming orthodox creedal statements about Jesus, but still want to pursue a religious life and to find a way to understand Jesus that works for them. Partly out of personal choice and because of my work as both an academic in the field and a minister to cultured despisers¹⁰ or at least cultured doubters, I encounter many who cannot accept traditional ways of understanding the Christian faith. Many of these people are in the church, but troubled by the categories in which the Christian faith is framed and the dated sound of the liturgy. Of course there are many outside of the Christian family who struggle as well and long for a satisfying spirituality and a possible connection with transcendence.¹¹ These cultured doubters are asking whether they can, with integrity, stay in the Christian family, and others who are seeking a credible spirituality but unable to find Christian churches which provide them with what they consider to be an authentic pathway. It is on the pathway and the practice that Jesus offers where I put the emphasis.

The purpose of this book is therefore twofold. It is first to assist Christians who are seeking a deeper and more profound faith and way of life. It is to help those within the Christian family who are searching to find a way to understand and follow Jesus. They want a way that is informed by the classical understandings of Jesus and, at the same time, one that comes to the quest for understanding with a twenty-first-century consciousness and a desire to practice the teachings of love and compassion. They want to find a way that enables them to have integrity in their lifestyle and coherence in their worldview. Second, it is to assist those pilgrims outside of the Christian family searching for a spiritual center and hoping and willing to find guidance from Jesus whose universal teachings on truth and love attract them. The book is not essentially an apologia nor is it polemical in tone, although it has a positive spirit about the value of knowing about Jesus. It is essentially an attempt to offer credible information and thoughtful perspectives that will help readers make good decisions regarding their interpretation of Jesus, and, in many cases, about life.

The book, then, is based upon an informed understanding of the Bible and recent historical scholarship, a careful description of Jesus as a compassionate healer, charismatic teacher, and radical prophet, and sensitivity to the content and intellectual currents of contemporary life. The goal is to present the material in an accessible way for the educated reader. It will be relatively brief and succinct, avoiding unnecessary academic detail, although my goal is that the finest scholarship will guide what is written. There is a sincere effort to have integrity with the historical challenge of gaining access to the Jesus of history, to enable the thoughtful seeker to understand the life, teachings, and interpretations of Jesus, and to offer a helpful way to assist those who seek to build a life based on the one who is described by the Gospel of John as filled with grace and truth. I will place this person, Jesus, in the context of first-century Galilee in a Jewish setting, a context that is broader that the village of Nazareth and yet not fully Jerusalem. Rome is in the background, and context is very important in grasping his life and teachings.

I have been writing this book for about fifty years, as a campus minister in my early career, as an academic for many years which involved teaching courses on Jesus, and as an administrator in the church structures and higher education. In all of these settings, the model of Jesus as one filled with grace and truth¹² has been a guide. This phrase captures my presuppositions and shapes my hermeneutical method.

The book unfolds in the following way. Section 1 will focus on how to navigate the difficult terrain of history. It will speak to the ways we gain access to Jesus by a careful study of the Gospels, the historical context of the life of Jesus, and how Jesus understood his vocation as intimately connected with the kingdom of God. In section 2, we will go directly to the teaching of Jesus and explore his method of teaching, the topics in his teaching, and the radical character of his teaching. In section 3, we will attempt to translate the teaching of Jesus for our time and place in history by reviewing his teaching about how God intersects with world, the nature of the human response, and how it is that we are able to sustain a love-centered life.

I have lived with some fear and trembling in writing about Jesus. The topic is so important, and for me, at least, quite difficult. It is important to me in that I want to find a credible and satisfying way to understand the life and teachings of Jesus, in part through my writing, but also to assist others as they seek a well-informed and authentic way of understanding the person of Jesus. I have some fear that I might fail in these endeavors, especially in reference to others who may not appreciate an orientation that is open and searching rather thoroughly confessional in tone. I am keenly aware that in using methodologies and suggesting ways of understanding Jesus that are not always traditional I run the risk of harsh judgment by those who are deeply committed to traditional views. Of course, I run the risk in the other direction as well in that I do attempt to find a way to stay in the Christian family. It does seem to be the case that our religious feelings and convictions are very intense, and to offer alternative views may threaten and offend. I have no desire to cause discomfort to those for whom I have great respect and love although some discomfort leads to learning. I hope for open and free conversation in a safe place as together we seek to find our way.

I will primarily use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible for quotations, although on occasion I will use other translations that seem more accurately to capture the meaning of a verse or section of the Bible. I will use CE or Common Era instead of AD, and BCE instead of BC for dates, and generally refer to the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible, although there may be times in treating traditional Christian views that I will use the term Old Testament.

1. Broad-based summaries of the resources are available in several places. An example is the work by Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus. Even this volume has a clear point of view in suggesting what resources to consult.

2. I learned this lesson in the marvelous library of Princeton Theological Seminary.

3. See, e.g., the superb work of Brown, Birth of the Messiah. A more recent book is one by Allison, Constructing Jesus.

4. See the more popular book in the framework of American evangelicalism, Keller, Jesus the King.

5. See, e.g., Prothero, American Jesus.

6. See the monumental work of Meier, Marginal Jew, in

4

vols.

7. Among them is the fine book of Abernathy based on the lectures series of Perrin, Understanding the Teaching of Jesus. The classic work by Manson, Teaching of Jesus, remains a reliable guide.

8. An exceptional recent work is by Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth. Still another book, published in

2013

, has received the attention of many readers. It is by Aslan and entitled Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan draws more upon the history of the time of Jesus than he does upon the New Testament documents as he develops his views.

9. With Jesus, the medium is often the message.

10. The phrase is borrowed from Schleiermacher, the great theologian of the nineteenth century, who desired to reach out to honest doubters who had trouble accepting the Christian faith and religion in general. See On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.

11. I have a particular interest in writing about Jesus in a way that is interesting and helpful to the religiously unaffiliated.

12. John

1

:

14

.

Section 1

The Terrain

Gaining Access to the Teaching of Jesus

Section 1, in three chapters, will address the challenge of gaining access to the historical Jesus. The terrain is complex and demanding. Nearly all agree that a full understanding of the Christian faith and ways of living the Christian faith are linked to the Jesus of history. At an earlier time in history, it was thought that this access came almost exclusively through the reading of the New Testament. This collection of writings is essential to understanding Jesus, but it is now widely accepted that most of these writings came years after the time Jesus lived. The writers’ primary goals were not essentially biographical in character, nor did they possess the contemporary tools of historical scholarship. What they wrote were more like extended sermons designed to inform and nurture the early followers of Jesus. Chapter 1 explores how this change in historical understanding meant that the search for the historical Jesus began to look behind and through the New Testament and other sources to gain access to the Jesus of history. Chapter 2 continues the quest by exploring the historical setting in which Jesus lived. It is out of this context that his teaching was shaped and framed. In chapter 3, we turn more directly to the person of Jesus and give attention to his sense of vocation centered in his understanding of the kingdom of God. His teaching grows out of Jesus’s understanding of his life mission. Historical study of the Gospels, an exploration of the context of first-century Palestine, and an attempt to understand the vocation of Jesus represent the challenging terrain that must be crossed to gain a trustworthy understanding of his teaching.

In the beginning was the performance; not the word alone, not the deed alone, but both, each indelibly marked with the other forever. He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet in Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. He looks like a beggar, yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle. He speaks about the rule of God, and they listen as much for curiosity as anything else.¹

1. Crossan, Historical Jesus, xi.

1

Accessing the Teaching of Jesus

The Possibilities and Limitations of History

The Difficulties of Access

Historical study is a complex undertaking resting on a rocky terrain that makes our trek to the teaching of Jesus demanding. There is a popular view of history that suggests that historians are expected just to tell us what happened in the past. In part, that is what they do, and at an earlier time in history, there was movement within the discipline of history, based in Germany, which maintained that historians should describe the past as it actually happened. The motivation behind this movement was admirable in that it called upon historians to tell the story of history objectively and without the interference of bias, unfettered as they often said. Historians have heeded this guidance, but the challenge of following it, as most historians have discovered, is very difficult and not always the only goal of writing history.

The reasons for the difficulty are many and varied. The first and most obvious one is that those who do the work of history bring their own pre-understanding to their work.² They read the records of history through the sun glasses of their own outlook. This reality becomes especially evident in dealing with religious history and in particular for those religions which are based on events in history and the recordings of these events. The records of these events have become foundational for belief and practice. The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are rooted in people and events of the past and affirm that these people and events carry divine significance. Those who read the accounts of Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, especially if they are adherents to the faith traditions that formed around these figures, have a clear point of view. Faith enters into the reading of the life and teachings of these great religious leaders. As faith entered into the discussion, the issue of the nature and interpretation of history became a fundamental concern, and hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, became a separate discipline.³

At stake was the question of whether historical study could accommodate the notion of the supernatural entrance into the flow of history. If the work of history is to describe as accurately as possible what has occurred, and to base the description on natural causes and conditions, then it becomes difficult to say, on the basis of history, that an event happened because of divine intervention and that God sent the resulting religious truth for the good of humankind. For example, the historian may say that Moses taught ethical principles in the Ten Commandments, but finds it difficult to say on historical grounds that Moses received from God the plates at Mt. Sinai on which the Ten Commandments were listed. A historian might say that Jesus was crucified, but apart from the presupposition of faith, one cannot on the basis of historical study say for your sins. It is equally difficult for the historian, apart from a faith orientation, to say that Muhammad received the Word of God in his trances in a dark cave in the hills above Mecca, but a historian could say that Muhammad and his followers believed that he did.

If the presence of presuppositions in the work of a historian makes the task of historical study complex, so too does a second factor, namely that history is written in a particular time and place and is generally targeted toward a well-defined audience. The words of the historian or commentator on the meaning of events are shaped by the needs, assumptions, and understandings not only of the author, but also the reading public. Winston Churchill’s several-volume history of the Second World War has a distinctly British point of view, and he writes to help the British people understand the nature and causes of this many-faceted conflict. For our purposes, as we explore the teaching of Jesus, it is important to realize that the New Testament documents are written to guide and nurture the new Christian community. The Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, while intimately connected with the life of Jesus, are not biographies disciplined by the methods of contemporary historical scholarship, but extended sermons to bring guidance and faith to the Christian church that was forming. Faith is clearly present as a presupposition, and the events recorded allow for divine intervention and include what are called miracles or events that are outside of scientific ways of description and explanation. A. E. Harvey’s book Jesus and the Constraints of History underlines this point and even captures the message in the title of the book.⁴ As a way of compensating for this tension, theologians and biblical scholars spoke about two kinds of history, sacred and secular.⁵ It was possible in the category of sacred history to postulate the entrance of the divine into the flow of human history, and much of the Christian theology in the middle of the twentieth century spoke directly about God’s acts in history, a story told in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

A third complicating factor in the writing of history is the scarcity and complex character of historical records. It is difficult to find sufficient records to trace fully what actually happened prior to the age of the audio-visual recording of the history with direct access to decision-making in councils and parliaments, influential speeches, and key events. But even with modern technology that records in sight and sound major historical events, it is still not easy for the historian to discern all that happened and to ascertain the full meaning of the events. For example, we do have several recordings of the shooting of President John F. Kennedy, but there is still a measure of doubt about who was behind the murder and how it may have influenced the pattern of American life.

For our purposes, we must face these challenges in our goal to access the teaching of Jesus. For centuries, the Christian community and most of Christendom accepted the accounts as recorded in the four Gospels as being an accurate account of what he said and did. With the rise of the historical-critical method in historical research, beginning in the late eighteenth century and reaching maturity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it wasn’t long before the New Testament and the Gospels in particular began to be studied using the methodologies of critical-historical research. There were those within the Christian community who continued to maintain that the records were accurate, and in fact were divinely guided and protected so that there would be a trustworthy account. According to the view of this more conservative tradition, the Scriptures were understood, at least in their original form, as being divinely inspired and in some cases even inerrant. There are many evangelical and orthodox Christians who still maintain this high view of Scripture and of the New Testament in particular. In fact there is a whole spectrum of positions in regard to the level at which the Bible and the New Testament in particular records and preserves for the believing community a trustworthy record and an authentic interpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus. The Bible continues to be the authority on matters of belief and practice.⁶

The mainstream of New Testament scholarship, while fully appreciating the New Testament as a source of information about the life and teachings of Jesus, view the record as having the limitations of a human effort to record sacred events for the benefit of the new Christian community. Those with this perspective would view, for example, that one basic task of New Testament scholars is to attempt to discern which of the words that are recorded in the Gospels as coming from Jesus were originally spoken by him or were inserted by others who thought they best represented what he said.⁷ The answers vary across the spectrum. The other Abrahamic cousins, Judaism and Islam, deal with the same issue. The Jewish community speaks about the authenticity of Torah (Law, or first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible) and the Muslim community trusts the record of the Qur’an. Indeed, the faithful followers of Islam believe that the Qur’an is the Word of God.

For many still faithfully engaged in Christian churches and mission, it has been difficult not to take into account the work of the critical-historical study of Scripture and of the Gospels in particular. This more progressive side of the Christian community acknowledges the human character of the Bible, but believes it still points to the foundational belief that God spoke to the human family in many ways and especially in Jesus.⁸

Methods of Historical Study

A very brief summary of the range of research strategies in the historical-critical approach to the New Testament and especially the Gospels might be helpful at this point.⁹ There are the usual disciplined inquiries that one does for nearly any historical study. To understand the events and literature of the past, it is necessary to understand the historical context that enables the reader to discern the point of view and line of thought of the writer and the historical events that are described. In a sense, there are two contexts which need examination, first, that of the writer and, second, that of the events which the writer describes. The writer’s work is examined internally in terms of how a particular passage fits into the piece of writing and links to the chapter, page, and preceding and following paragraphs. There is a study of the language used by the writer, and it is examined from the perspective of the philosophy of language, linguistics, the meaning of words, and the syntax and details of grammar. In addition, there is the study of the trends of thought that may have influenced the writer, with an eye on assumptions and point of view. Then, there is a careful scrutiny of the external context that includes the time and place in history of the events described. Did the writer’s point of view cause a partial distortion of the historical events being described or did it open up a valuable perspective on these events? What do other historians say about the same period of time? Historical study, as does all critical inquiry, has built into it a check and balance system, with historians carefully scrutinizing the work of their colleagues.

There are other research strategies that are more specific in character than the general study of context. They are not exclusively orientated to biblical study but are closely associated with the study of the Bible. The list is long, but let me mention five in particular.¹⁰ The first is textual criticism, the task of sorting through the available copies of the texts that exist and seeking to find the most authentic text.¹¹ In some cases, the best text may be the oldest one and therefore closer to the time of the original writing, but its age does not always assure that it hasn’t been changed by scribes who have copied the text. Part of the task is to find a text that does not appear to be altered either because of an honest mistake such as missing a line, or one that has been altered to represent better a particular theological perspective. Examples of both accidental and purposeful change of the texts of the New Testament are numerous.

Another historical method is the study of the writing as a literary work of art, an approach that is called literary criticism. More recently as it developed exclusively in reference to the study of Gospels, two subcategories have emerged called narrative criticism and social-scientific criticism. Literary criticism is a more general term and often contains aspects of the other historical-critical approaches. It attempts to establish the meaning of a text by a careful study of the historical and literary environment. For example, a historian might study how the author of Matthew’s Gospel was influenced by references in the Hebrew Bible. Or, on a slightly different tack, the historian might study how the King James translation was shaped by the English used at the time of the translation of the Bible.¹² The subjects of this study are to determine authorship, the resulting issue of authenticity, collaboration and derivative sources, revision, chronology, genre and even such details as the use of words, sentence structure, and paragraph construction. Because of the wide range of concerns grouped under the category of literary criticism, the term does carry some ambiguity. The terms, narrative criticism and social-scientific criticism narrow the scope of this strategy somewhat. For example, narrative criticism focuses on the literary dimensions of the individual Gospels with an emphasis on the place of story, including the metaphors and symbols of the story, as a means of articulating an important religious truth. A theological orientation, called narrative theology, grew out of this emphasis. One reputable scholar maintains that we should avoid the tendency to just look at an individual verse or saying of Jesus and miss the larger flow of the narrative. He argues that in an oral society, the narrative was told to the new Christian community, but unlikely read because of illiteracy. It was the meaning of the story, not just a key verse, which was central.¹³ Social-scientific criticism studies the Gospels from the perspective of their social world.¹⁴ A well-received and widely read book by John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, as the title implies, uses the social-scientific methodology and places Jesus in the first-century context of the peasant class.

The mention of dependence between the Gospels leads to another historical methodology called source criticism. The objectives of this aspect of historical research are primarily three in number: (1) to trace the development of the document, observing how various sources contributed to the document’s final form, as for example Mark’s influence on Matthew and Luke, and Luke’s acknowledgement of using sources in the writing of his Gospel (Luke: 1:1–4); (2) to evaluate the historical accuracy of the writing in light of its dependence on and reliability of sources, as for example how another source, perhaps the earliest source, often called Q (German for Quelle or source), may have shaped the Synoptic (Greek for viewed together) Gospels; and (3) to determine the interdependence of the documents, as for example in the case of the Synoptic Gospels.

Another historical research methodology is called form criticism. Its goal in the study of the Gospels is to analyze the way that human experience is verbally expressed. This strategy uses a methodology that is common in understanding folk material and focuses on how the patterns of communication govern human experience. The premises are that folk memory is both the primary vehicle of tradition and is preserved in small units. Isolating these units (forms) of the primitive tradition and discovering their usage in the life of a community (life situation) have the potential of revealing how the Bible came to be in its present form. Smaller units (pericopes) have been cast in several forms including a pronouncement (often following a miracle), a narrative such as a story or parable, a legend, an aphorism, and a myth.¹⁵ The scholars who contributed the most to this methodology are Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, both influential New Testament scholars in the early to mid-twentieth century.¹⁶

I will mention one other research methodology used in many areas but essential in biblical study. It is called redaction criticism or the study of the way that the biblical authors and the scribes who copied the manuscripts edited and revised the manuscripts on which they were working. It is apparent that the material they received has been arranged and altered to fit an ordered structure to express their own theology or that of the church of their day and in some cases changing the original quite substantially.¹⁷ One example is the way that the final chapter of the Gospel of Mark essentially closes (or the original has been lost) at 16:8, but additional verses have been added (vv. 9–20). It is also the case that the authors of Matthew and Luke redact the account from Mark that they use in their accounts.

With these various methodologies, biblical scholars attempt to access the life and teaching of Jesus. The outcomes of these disciplined and thoughtful quests, across decades and even centuries, have been very helpful although quite varied.¹⁸ As I have briefly introduced thoughtful students and laypersons to these historical methodologies and inquiries, I have discovered a range of responses. Some, heavily invested in the life of the church, are somewhat threatened and want to stay well within traditional Christian teaching, and I have referred them to excellent scholars who continue to maintain that historical scholarship does not necessarily challenge a faith orientation and in fact can make it more credible as one adjusts to the constraints of history.¹⁹ Others have said that they do find it more difficult to affirm traditional creedal statements about Jesus, but nevertheless find insightful and helpful resources within Gospels as they seek a spiritual pathway and a foundation for their ethical convictions. Still others just want to learn, letting the facts speak for themselves, and they ask if there are other resources beside the Gospels for learning about the life and teachings of Jesus.

Sources apart from the Gospels

In answering this last inquiry, I always mention the references to Jesus in the New Testament apart from the Gospels and note Paul’s writing in particular. It would be hard to overstate the influence Paul has had on the understanding of Jesus, and a multitude of books have been written describing and interpreting Paul’s views.²⁰ It is important to note that Paul emphasizes in his writing the Christ of faith or the post-Easter Jesus. He is more interested in interpretation and the meaning of what Jesus said and did than he is in biographical facts of the life of Jesus. But there are many references to the humanity of Jesus in Paul’s writing. For example, Paul speaks of the birth of Jesus (Rom 1:4; Gal 4:4), that Jesus was fully human (Phil 2:6), and gives considerable attention to his death (Gal 1:3; Rom 5:6–18; 1 Cor 1:30; 5:18; 15:3). Paul builds his theology on the resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor 15:5–9) that underscores the problem of historical study in treating events outside of the natural cause and effect sequences of historical description. For Paul, this event happened in time and space, as did the healings and miracles. Of course, he makes reference to the ethical teaching of Jesus as well and speaks directly about loving one’s neighbor (Rom 13:9–10; 15:1–3). There are references as well