Was Paul a Failed Apocalyptic Prophet?

Kevin Harris: Bill, I'd like to get your thoughts on an interview with Dr. Paula Fredrickson talking about the Apostle Paul. Fredrickson is a prominent historian of early Christianity and considered quite liberal, at least by evangelical standards. Have you interacted with her work? And if so, what can you tell us about her?

Dr. Craig: I really haven't interacted with Fredrickson's work because she hasn't written much on the resurrection of Jesus, which is my area of interest. I have seen her interviewed on some of these historical Jesus programs, where she recognizes candidly that something dramatic happened Easter morning, but she doesn't say what it is.

Kevin Harris: In the apologetics community, she's known for just that. She's best known for her statement to Peter Jennings when ABC interviewed her for a documentary. This was in 2000, The Search for Jesus. Commenting on the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, Fredrickson said, “I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That's what they say. And all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that's what they saw. I'm not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn't there. I don't know what they saw, but I do know that as an historian, they must have seen something.” That's always been considered significant being that it comes from a non-evangelical scholar who taught at Boston University.

Dr. Craig: Yes, this is a good statement about the post-mortem appearances of Jesus. She could have said something as well about the historicity of the empty tomb and about the transformation in the lives of the first disciples—what N. T. Wright refers to as the mutations in their Jewish beliefs. These also require explanations. Now, of course, someone who is a methodological naturalist cannot affirm the resurrection of Jesus as the best explanation of these facts. But I don't know where she stands on that issue.

Kevin Harris: We have some clips from her appearance on the Paulagia podcast. In this first clip, Fredrickson talks about Paul's remaining in Judaism even after his conversion to Christ. Clip number one.

Dr. Fredrickson: Something that's controversial currently in Pauline scholarship is trying to reconstruct the degree to which Paul himself continued to be Jewishly observant once he joined the movement. And I'm one of those people who work within a Paul-within-Judaism kind of rubric, given Paul's emphasis on the clear distinction between Jews and Gentiles that shape his letters, where Israel is Israel and the full number of the Gentiles is also going to be included in Israel's redemption—Romans 9:4 and 5. I think that there's no reason to think that he stopped living Jewishly just because he was trying to get pagans to become ex-pagans and worship the God of Israel. And he was also telling them that if they were infused with the pneuma, the spirit of Christ, one of the things that enabled them to do was also fulfill the law.

Kevin Harris: I'm not sure what she's referring to, Bill. She may be just talking about the theology there and the doctrine that's been handed down when she says the Spirit of Christ enables us to fulfill the law. Comment on that.

Dr. Craig: This is strange. Perhaps she's thinking of Paul's letter to the church in Rome where he says, and I quote, “For God has done what the law could not do. Sending his own Son, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” But that raises the question: what does it mean by the just requirement of the law? I don't think Paul means that the Holy Spirit enables us to keep the Jewish law, but rather that those who walk in the Holy Spirit fulfill the essence of the law, which is to love God and your neighbor.

I think it's very clear from Paul's letters that he thought that through Christ the boundary markers separating Jews and Gentiles, like circumcision, observation of the laws of clean and unclean, and Sabbath-keeping, had been broken down. Paul does not, of course, want to remove the separation between Jew and Gentile by bringing the Gentiles within the boundaries along with the Jews, but rather by erasing the boundary altogether. Paul could not be more vehement in his rejection of the need for circumcision for Gentile Christian believers.

The question here, I think, is whether Paul himself continued to observe the Jewish regulations, just as today some Messianic Jews who believe in Jesus continue to observe them without demanding that others do as well. Now, I don't have a dog in this fight, but when you read the second chapter of Paul's letter to the churches of Galatia, he seems pretty flexible about observing those boundary markers. When he was with Jews, then Paul may have observed those boundary markers so as not to cause them offense. But when he was with Gentiles, he may not have observed them.

In his first letter to the church in Corinth, he explains, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law, though not being myself under the law, that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law, not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ, that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings.” That's 1 Corinthians 9.

Well, that sure doesn't sound like someone who was zealous about continuing to observe the Jewish boundary markers. Paul can be flexible because, as he wrote to the church in Rome, “He is not a real Jew who is one outwardly. Nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal. His praise is not from man but from God.” That's Romans 2.

So I think it's far from clear that Paul continued to observe these Jewish boundary markers.

Kevin Harris: Fredrickson is considered one of the leaders in the Paul-within-Judaism school of thought, and she further defines that in this next clip. Here it is.

Dr. Fredrickson: I think a lot of it has to do with the Protestant Reformation. Not to run back quickly to the 16th century, but when Luther and people sympathetic with him began facing off with the late Renaissance Roman Catholic Church, what they did was appropriate a lot of the rhetoric that was against Jews. It's called the contra judaeos or adversus judaeos rhetorical tradition in Christian scholarship, where Jews are always a kind of antitype to Christianity. And what Luther did is reappropriate that and aim it at the Pope and say that Catholicism was a religion of works righteousness and that Jesus and Paul had already fought against this type of religion. So that makes the Pope the enemies of Jesus and of Paul.

So there's this idea that if Paul and Jesus stood for anything, it was against works and against the law because that's the way the Protestant revolution was framed. That idea of Paul as a law-free gospel is something that's boilerplate because the roots of modern New Testament scholarship trace directly back to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. So that way of looking at Paul is part of the intellectual inheritance of the whole discipline.

Kevin Harris: I'm a non-specialist in this area, but that doesn't sound right to me. I'm sure that cultural tangents like attitudes toward Jews or the Pope could have arisen during the Reformation, but it seems to me that the Reformation came out of a good understanding of Paul and Galatians and Romans and the rest of his writings.

Dr. Craig: What Fredrickson is saying is that Reformers like Luther appropriated traditional anti-Jewish polemics and directed them instead at the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. But to say that this affected their attitudes toward Jesus and Paul seems to get things exactly backwards. It would seem that their attitudes toward Judaism were there first and then got redirected against Catholicism. The question is whether their attitudes toward Judaism and Jesus and Paul were justified or not.

Kevin Harris: In this next clip, Fredrickson talks further on Paul's alleged remaining in Judaism. Clip number three.

Interviewer: A big part of this idea is that Paul didn't ever convert from Judaism because he simply came to believe that Jesus was the correct version of Judaism going forward.

Dr. Fredrickson: Right. That's something that was put forward by a scholar in the mid-20th century, Johannes Munck, where he did a book called Paul and the Salvation of Mankind. The first chapter of the book is “The Call,” not “The Conversion”—the call. Looking at what happens in Damascus as the reception of a prophetic call, which is the language that Paul himself uses.

If you think of what's going on in the year 34, let's say, is when Paul joins the movement, there are only two religious options. There's Judaism and there's everything else. Christianity as a separate movement doesn't exist yet. So what is he going to convert to—paganism? Of course not. So of course he's still within Judaism.

And what he's doing—he's telling these pagans that they have to stop worshiping their own gods and worship the God of Israel. That's a Jewish message. He's telling them that the Messiah has come and he's about to come back. Messiah is a very Jewish message. He's saying that there's about to be a general resurrection of the dead. Only Jews are talking like that. I mean, what he's doing is Judaizing a pagan population in the name of Christ. And that's why I think the Paul-within-Judaism is a good corrective to five centuries of rhetorical misnomer.

Kevin Harris: Some of that sounds right on the surface. Laypeople tend to think of Jesus as being the correct version of Judaism or the fulfillment of Judaism. And by the way, it's rather strange to hear her say that Paul was a Judaizer, given what we tend to think of the Judaizers in the letter to the Galatians.

Dr. Craig: Yes. As I said, it was clearly not Paul's aim to get the Gentiles to observe the traditional Jewish boundary markers. He saw no reason to impose those upon Gentile converts. So, of course, Paul and the other early disciples were Jews, but they were Messianic Jews. They believed that Messiah had come and that his kingdom had dawned, and they invited people to come into that kingdom by faith.

Now, whether Paul in his personal life continued to observe those Jewish boundary markers is difficult to know. But at least we can say that he did not regard them as saving. Even for Jews, you are not saved through observing those boundary markers.

Kevin Harris: So, what does all of this mean so far for resurrection apologetics? Here's her answer, clip number four.

Interviewer: So for me, what's radical about that is the implication for resurrection apologetics because they often lean very heavily on Paul having had a very drastic conversion and a sudden, drastic 180-degree turn in his thinking.

Dr. Fredrickson: Yeah. When you think of it, Acts is written by somebody we call Luke. It's probably late 1st, early 2nd century, and Luke takes liberties with his material that today we would grant only to a writer of historical fiction. We know from reading Josephus that some of the stuff Luke is just making up. We know from reading Paul's letters that he gets Paul wrong.

Paul says that he had his call experience in Damascus, and then he goes away for three years to Roman Arabia, and then he goes back to Damascus, and he doesn't go up to Jerusalem until after that period. Whereas in Acts, he goes immediately to Jerusalem as soon as he can after his experience. It's a head-on collision in terms of what did he do after he received his call.

Kevin Harris: Bart Ehrman says kind of the same thing—Luke didn't get his facts right. I'm also surprised that she dates Luke that late. I thought that the trend was to date the Gospels much earlier, like even before 70 AD—John A. T. Robinson and things like that. But comment on what she said.

Dr. Craig: The interviewer clearly has an axe to grind here by trying to minimize the dramatic change in Paul's life. Paul's experience of a resurrection appearance of Jesus upended his entire life. He was a vicious persecutor of the early Christian church, and suddenly he became a follower of Messiah Jesus and the most ardent missionary of the Jesus movement. So the question remains: How do you explain this 180-degree turnaround in the life of this Pharisee and persecutor of the early Jesus movement? It is simply irrelevant whether you label this event a conversion or a call. The point is you've got to explain this change.

Now, to be honest, I'm perfectly open to there being ostensible historical conflicts between Paul's letters and Luke's book of Acts. But this one that Paula Fredrickson is talking about is completely invented. What does Paul say in his letter to the churches of Galatia? This is what he says: “But when he who set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and again I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [or Peter] and remained with him fifteen days.”

Now, I'm astonished that Paula Fredrickson could say that Paul went away into Arabia for three years. That's not what he says. He says that after he returned from Arabia, he remained in Damascus for three years before visiting Jerusalem.

Now, what does Luke say in the book of Acts? Here's Luke's account: “And in the synagogues, immediately he proclaimed Jesus, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’ All who heard him were amazed and said, ‘Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called on this name? And has he come here for this purpose, to bring them bound before the chief priests?’ But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him. But their plot became known to Saul. They were watching the gates day and night to kill him. But his disciples took him by night and led him down over the wall, lowering him in a basket. And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him.”

Now, it sure sounds to me like, according to Acts, Paul spent considerable time preaching Messiah Jesus in Damascus until he was forced to flee. So there is no conflict here between Paul's letters and Luke's account.

Now, obviously, Kevin, as you note, Fredrickson does not believe that Luke was a traveling companion of Paul. But as you say, I think that the evidence is very compelling that Luke and Paul were traveling companions on Paul's missionary journey around the Mediterranean cities and then back to Jerusalem. And therefore, I think it's very difficult to concoct conflicts between Luke's account of Paul's exploits and Paul's own accounts in his letters.

Here, for example, is a great illustration of the concord between Paul and Acts. Remember we saw in the account in Acts how the disciples in Damascus, becoming aware of the plot to kill Paul, lowered him in a basket over the wall and he escaped their hands. In Paul's second letter to the church in Corinth, chapter 11 verse 32, he writes, “At Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped his hands.”

This is a remarkable confirmation of the accuracy of Luke's narrative on this little detail in Paul's own letters. So I think her effort to show conflicts between Paul and Luke here is futile and desperate.

Kevin Harris: Well, she has some more. Here's more on Fredrickson's critique of Luke. Next clip.

Dr. Fredrickson: I would take Paul at his word before I went with Luke. So Luke is picturing Paul as this bloodthirsty, you know, running deputized by the chief priest to go into the diaspora and round up missions and drag them back to Jerusalem. I mean, the chief priest didn't even have authority outside of the city of Jerusalem. The Dead Sea Scroll community is 12 miles outside of the city, and he doesn't even have authority over that. I mean, it's fantasy.

But what Luke is doing is embroidering on this idea of persecuting. The word can mean prosecute as well as persecute. It's hard to know what Paul is doing, running around and doing what. He never says. It's infuriating. But I tend to think that if he himself received the synagogue disciplinary punishment of 39 lashes—he says in 2 Corinthians 11 that he received that five times—I think when he was prosecuting followers of Jesus that he probably was subjecting them to the same type of synagogue discipline, and that's what he meant. And when he says he does it huperbolé (to the maximum), what he might mean is to the maximum number of blows or to the full extent of the law or something like that. He's not talking about executing anybody.

Kevin Harris: She's saying that Luke falsely depicts Paul as operating outside of the reach of Jewish authority and falsely depicting him as a bloodthirsty executioner. How do we answer that?

Dr. Craig: We ask, what does Paul himself say in his authentic letters? In his letter to the churches of Galatia, this is what Paul says: “For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people. So extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.”

And then in Philippians chapter 3, he writes, “If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.”

So where's the inconsistency here? Fredrickson admits Paul may have been involved in prosecuting Christians and having them whipped with 39 lashes—20 lashes to the back and 19 lashes to the chest. I think that's bad enough, whether or not he was responsible for their execution.

Kevin Harris: Up next, the conversation turns toward the textual reliability of the New Testament. Clip number six.

Dr. Fredrickson: The Gospels are being recopied constantly if we're correct in that they are written sometime after 70 to around 100. That's the orthodox guess for when these Gospels are written. And then they're recopied and recopied. And Bart Ehrman has done this fabulous book on the orthodox corruption of Scripture. I mean, copyists make mistakes or they deliberately improve the texts that they're copying. Nothing's easier than to fix a manuscript in a manuscript culture. These texts are unstable, and they probably don't get as stabilized as they do until the 4th century when the imperial government actually gets behind the idea of a stable New Testament and you have those four Gospels as the canonical core of the collection.

But then what happens with Erasmus and the scholars of the Renaissance is that they look at Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and they discover that the Latin that the church has been using for sixteen centuries has additions in it that the Greek didn't have. So even then, the text is unstable, and once you get the printing press, there's a different kind of stability. So they're plastic in the sense that they're infinitely malleable. Do they contain traditions that might reliably go back to the historical Jesus? I have to think so, or else they would be worthless in terms of reconstructing the history.

Kevin Harris: She says several times in that clip that the New Testament documents were unstable, but says she thinks they can be reliably connected to the historical Jesus. As you comment on that, Bill, I guess we need to distinguish between textual reliability and historical reliability. Textual reliability—the abundance of manuscripts that we can compare and put together the original, the earlier the better, the more the better—and historical reliability, which would be, do the New Testament documents pass the test of historicity?

Dr. Craig: Exactly. And everybody, including Bart Ehrman, whom she cites, recognizes that we today have the text of the original New Testament with over 99% accuracy. The New Testament contains about 138,000 Greek words, and of these, only about 1,400 remain uncertain. And all of these concern minor items, even trivialities. No doctrine hangs upon them.

They concern things like whether, in the first epistle of John, the author writes, “We write this that our joy may be full,” or does he say, “We write this that your joy may be full.” And in Greek, just as in English, the difference between “your” and “our” is just a single letter of the alphabet, and nothing hangs upon which reading you adopt.

So the text of the New Testament is reliably established. We can be confident that when we read our Greek New Testament today, we are reading the document that was written by Luke, written by Paul, written by Matthew or John, with 99% accuracy.

And Bart Ehrman knows this. I remember several years ago I heard Ehrman being interviewed on a Lutheran radio program, and he was describing how the text was so malleable, how all these copyist errors—hundreds of thousands of copying errors—had arisen over the centuries. And finally the interviewer said to him, “Well, what do you think that the New Testament originally really said?” And Ehrman said, “Well, I don't understand what you mean.” And the interviewer said, “Well, you've explained how all of these changes were made, all these copyist errors and things. What do you think the New Testament originally said?” And Ehrman said, “Well, it said pretty much the same thing that our text says today.” And the interviewer said, “But you said it's been changed.” And Ehrman said, “Yeah, but we've been able to reconstruct the original text.”^[1]

So it is astonishing. I'm really surprised that Paula Fredrickson would bring up this old canard.

Kevin Harris: She talks about the different personalities of Jesus in this next clip. Here it is, number seven.

Dr. Fredrickson: I think probably Jesus really was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He probably really did die in Jerusalem. I think the original community really did settle back in Jerusalem very shortly after the crucifixion because Paul says that the community is living in Jerusalem as well. So there are those points of contact where you can put your foot down a little bit more firmly, but there's a lot of stuff that we can't adjudicate at all.

I mean, look at how Jesus comes across as a personality in the Gospel of John as opposed to how he comes across as a personality in the Gospel of Luke. Either he has multiple personality disorder or these Gospel writers are pursuing a different image of Jesus, and we as historians have to try to sort through what's the most plausible.

Kevin Harris: Well, aside from that being kind of obnoxious—multiple personality disorder—I'm curious what you think about the different personalities of Jesus presented by Luke and John.

Dr. Craig: I think that what she's saying is no small concession. The synoptic Gospels at least give us a very reliable account of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The question she's raising is how different John's presentation of Jesus is. And most scholars do think that John's portrait of Jesus is more enhanced theologically than the synoptics, that it reflects his understanding of who Jesus was.

Nevertheless, John's Gospel also contains a great deal of historically reliable information which has been verified archaeologically by digs in Jerusalem.

Kevin Harris: Couple of more clips to look at today. The interview takes another turn. Next, she talks about Jesus and Paul as failed apocalyptic prophets. Here's the clip.

Dr. Fredrickson: Well, they were both saying—I mean, every apocalyptic prophecy so far has failed. Thank God, right? If the world ends, we're probably going to end it, not God, unfortunately. So in the sense of—I mean, that's a rhetorically dramatic way of saying it—that Christianity succeeds precisely as its prime prophecy fails.

But if you look at the material, both Jesus and Paul are talking about an imminent establishment of the kingdom of God sometime in the mid-1st century, or a little bit earlier in the case of Jesus. And that didn't happen.

Kevin Harris: Sounds like she only has a very few eschatological interpretations in mind—maybe some Left Behind rapture stuff. But at any rate, can't we acknowledge that Jesus said, “All authority has been given to me now,” and that Jesus sits at the Father's right hand until all his enemies have been put under his feet? Help us through the failed prophets accusation.

Dr. Craig: This is the subject matter that I am currently studying for my Systematic Philosophical Theology. I am on the locus on eschatology, and just this afternoon before doing these podcasts I was reading a book in which the author is defending the historical credibility of the Gospels in portraying Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet.

He says the consensus among New Testament scholars today is that Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet and that this was an invention of the early church that came after him. Well, now it's evident that Paula Fredrickson disagrees with that, and that's good. She recognizes the historical credibility of the Gospel portrait of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet.

Now, what do we mean by that? Well, Jesus and Paul were apocalyptic in the sense that they accepted a temporal polarity of two ages: the present evil age and then the age to come in which the kingdom of God would be fully realized. And many of their sayings talk about the kingdom of God as something future, something coming. For example, Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” So many times, talking about the kingdom of God, it is something future.

But they also talk about the kingdom of God as having already dawned in the person and ministry of Jesus, just as you said. As the Messianic king, Jesus already embodies the kingdom of God. So, for example, he says in Luke 17:20 and 21 that the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, for the kingdom of God is among you, or within you.

And the consensus among New Testament critics is that Paul and Jesus accepted a sort of tension of “already but not yet.” The kingdom is already here—it is dawning—but it's not yet fully consummated. And you notice that many of the parables of Jesus envision a long delay before his second coming. And Jesus himself said that no one knows when it will happen, including himself. He didn't know when the second coming would occur.

Jesus did say that this gospel must first be preached to all the world, and then the end would come. So the end could not come until the gospel has been fully preached to all the world. So I think neither Jesus nor Paul taught that the second coming would occur within that generation.

Kevin Harris: That's going to be a very interesting section when you get through with it, Bill. We have one more clip. This is how Fredrickson ends the interview. Check it out.

Dr. Fredrickson: Well, one takeaway is how absolutely fundamental Christianity has been for the formation of Western culture. I mean, we're still living with the consequences of things that happened between the 1st and 5th century. And I think it's important for people to have a sense of that and to understand why that's the case. Because Christianity succeeds in ways that can be reconstructed. It isn't a sudden miraculous flow of peace, love, and justice after Constantine.

Kevin Harris: She joins many scholars we've talked about who recognize the amazing, world-changing impact of the Christian faith. I'm not sure what she means by her statement that Christianity succeeds in ways that can be reconstructed, but at any rate, give us your thoughts on what we've covered today, if you would.

Dr. Craig: Yes. I think that what we have seen is that whether or not Paul continued to be an observant Jew in his own personal life, he was very flexible about that depending upon the audience with which he was. And whether he continued to observe these boundary markers personally or not, he certainly did not regard them as means of salvation. For Paul, the only means of salvation was through faith in Messiah Jesus. And Paul believed that in Messiah Jesus, the kingdom of God had dawned within human history, and then he was constrained to preach the gospel throughout the Roman Empire so as to usher in the fullness of the kingdom of God. And I think that this eschatological expectation characterized Jesus of Nazareth himself, and that they would both be one in thinking that there is this tension between “already but not yet.” The kingdom of God has dawned but has not yet fully been consummated.

And then finally, the issue of New Testament textual reliability is really a non-issue. The text of the New Testament has been established with 99% certainty, and her alleged contradictions between Luke and Paul, I think we have to say, are really just imagined.

So I think it's been an educational interview, if only by way of correction of the many mistakes that she makes.

Kevin Harris: Are you looking for a deep dive into a philosophical systematic theology? Dr. William Lane Craig's Systematic Philosophical Theology, Volume 1 and 2A, are now available. Subsequent volumes will be coming over the coming months and years, and your financial support helps make this possible. If you haven't picked up your copy, be sure to visit wiley.com, Amazon, or wherever academic books are sold. And thank you.^[2]