Father Stephen De Young:So in just a few moments when we get started, we’re going to be picking up in St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse one, which is where we left off last time. If you’re someone here in Lafayette who usually comes to the Bible study in real space, in real time at the parish.

But before we do that, just to give some sort of background and catch us back up to where we’re going to be picking up tonight, the structure of First Corinthians is a little different than the overarching structure of some of St. Paul’s other epistles. Of course, notably the other one that we’ve talked about is St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. And St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, when we talked about it in this Bible study, we talked about how that overarching structure follows a general structure that St. Paul uses a lot in his epistles, which is that the first part of the epistle, he lays out what we would call doctrinal or theological considerations, not that it’s not topical, and we’ll talk more about that a little later about the fact that once again, St. Paul’s epistles are occasional documents, but he lays out sort of theological considerations, and then there’s a point in the middle of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans where he uses the word “therefore”. And that’s a place where he then transitions from laying out sort of the theological basis of his discussion, he transitions from that over to applying that more directly to the situation of the Christian community in Rome.

So, as we’ve already talked about in First Corinthians, when St. Paul is writing here to the Christian community in Corinth, he doesn’t follow that structure, that two-part structure with “therefore” as a pivot point for the epistle as a whole, but rather the epistle is sort of divided into a series of sections and he generally follows that structure within the individual sections. The beginning of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, within the greetings, he does what he always does in his epistles, and he lays out a series of themes and ideas that he’s going to come back to later on in the epistle. He introduces those ideas and then as he goes through, he returns to them sort of over and over again.

And then we saw that in First Corinthians there are then major sections that he begins, St. Paul begins each section by saying “now concerning… blank”, so there was “now concerning food offered to idols”, “now concerning spiritual gifts” was the last one that we just finished talking about, the last major section. And so, he’s had these series of sections addressing these various topics in the life of the Church of Corinth. And as we’ve seen, his major themes in his first epistle to the Corinthians have been related to sort of the two primary sins in any Jewish person of the first century’s mind when he thought about Gentile communities, that being idolatry and sexual immorality. And the two, of course, are seen as linked. And particularly with the Christian community at Corinth, these are primarily Christians who have come out of paganism and out of a pagan background. And so, both in terms of their lifestyle and that is centered especially around sexual morality, and in terms of what we would call their religion. They of course didn’t separate that off as a separate section of their life. But in terms of religious practice, there had not been for the community of Corinth the kind of clean break with their pagan past that St. Paul is here arguing is required for someone who’s going to be a follower of Christ. They were attempting to bring some of their previous way of life, their previous way of celebrating feasts, their previous ways of worship with them into the church and they were also, at least, minimally, allowing members of the community to practice a grossly sexually immoral lifestyle. So, both of these are things that St. Paul has argued needs to stop.

As I mentioned, we’ve just finished talking about this major section on spiritual gifts and now as we’re about to pick up in chapter 15, St. Paul is now going to turn to this chapter, chapter 15, as sort of the capstone of this epistle. If you look at the individual sections previously as sort of stacked on top of one another, First Corinthians 15 is going to be the denouement, the arrival point of St. Paul’s entire argument. Much of this we’re going to see when we get into it, it begins talking about the gospel and then particularly is going to center in on Christ’s resurrection from the dead and what that means in terms of our resurrection from the dead, the general resurrection.

And so, then there’s only one chapter left after this in First Corinthians, chapter 16 and that is St. Paul’s concluding chapter, which if you’ve ever read through one of St. Paul’s epistles, as you should, you’ll know that his conclusions tend to eventually become “Say hello to so and so, greet so and so, let so and so know I miss him, I’m sending so and so to see you. Send so and so here to see me.” And so this really is going to be sort of our theological high point for the book, which also means of course, that things are going to get a little deep, the text is going to get a little dense here and so I’m going to take my time a little bit going through it. I sincerely doubt that we will get through all of chapter 15 here in one sitting, but we will see what happens. I know for sure it’s going to be multiple episodes of the podcast.

And as I always remind everybody right now, not only the first podcast on First Corinthians, which has sort of my introduction, my brief introduction to the book, but all the way up through the first part of chapter five are all available on Ancient Faith, if you want to go back and listen to those.

So we’ll go ahead now and we’ll get started in St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 15, starting with verse one:

Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

So, a few points to make here. Clearly, St. Paul, what’s translated here as “moreover”, is really a transition, right? He’s changing topics. He’s finished his discussion now concerning spiritual gifts and now he’s going to address another topic. And so, he’s turning directly to not just some general sense of the gospel, but the Gospel which they heard from him. St. Paul spent more than a year in Corinth, in the Book of Acts, as we saw when we went through it. And so it’s important as we go through this chapter that St. Paul is not just someone who came and evangelized and got some people to pray and baptize them and converted them and then left. St. Paul was with them for an extended period of time. He has visited them since, as we mentioned last time, he has sent them at least one letter before this letter. And so, he has an ongoing relationship with them. And when he was living with them for that year, we have to understand that he had a pastoral relationship with them. We don’t often think about St. Paul as pastor, but while he was living with them, he would have been attending their weddings, he would have been praying at their funerals, he would have been baptizing the people and their children and the new people coming into the community. He was teaching them; he was preaching to them on an ongoing basis. He was living among them.  So, he has this close relationship to them.

And so, when he refers to “this gospel that I preached when I was among you”, he is calling to mind not just the contents of a gospel tract, as we might think about it, or a particular gospel presentation, or a summary of the gospel. He’s calling them back to everything that they heard from him over that time when he was living with them, alongside them, and ministering to them and their needs. And so, it’s that Gospel which they received and in which they stand by which they are saved if they hold fast to what he preached, unless they believed in vain. And now that last phrase is an introduction to what he’s about to talk about. St Paul is leaving open the idea… And again, we’ve talked before about how it’s translated here as “believed”, it’s the same root, it’s the same Greek word as “faith”. And we’ve talked about how faith is more about faithfulness than just sort of an intellectual idea or an intellectual assent, that some particular idea is true. So he’s talking about the possibility that their faithfulness has been in vain. That the preaching they heard from him, the stand they’ve taken based on that, that might all be in vain, it might be empty, is what the word translated “vanity” means that.

To use a metaphor common not only to St Paul. But to the Gospels, that it might not bear fruit. Nothing might come of it. And this, of course, is a possibility that St Paul wants to cut off. Now, a brief word about the word “gospel”, which sort of reiterate whenever we come to it, because we have a way we’re used to talking about “the gospel” at least a couple of ways that are not exactly the way St Paul used it in the first century. Probably the most obvious of those for we who are Orthodox Christians is we think about the gospel as the Gospel Book that sits on the altar. We think about the gospel in terms of the Gospel reading, which is the reading from that book. We think about the gospel in general as sort of the collection of the four individual Gospels which are in our New Testament. St Paul, of course, here is not referring to any of those books because those books have not been written yet. St Paul is writing to the Corinthians in the 50s A.D.; he’s a good 14 or 15 years before the first of the Gospels is going to be written.

So, when St Paul talks about “preaching the gospel” to them, he’s not talking about reading from any of the Gospels to them on Sunday and then preaching about it. He’s also, however, not using the word “gospel” the way we tend to think about it in our culture. I mentioned before, we have the idea of a gospel tract or a sort of short gospel presentation where we go to someone who is not a Christian and present to them, “well, here’s sort of our short summary of what Christianity is about.” And usually when we do that, most of what we’re talking about is the person who we’re talking to. If you look at sort of classic gospel tracts, it’s all about, “Well, you as a person, you’ve sinned, you’re separated from God. Here’s what you need to do to get right with God. Or here’s what you need to do to make sure that if you die tonight, you go to Heaven instead of going to Hell.” Or here’s what you need to do to be saved. We think of that as what the gospel is. But that also is not what St. Paul is talking about. St. Paul did not present the gospel to them in that way. We know that for sure because of what we’re about to read, where St. Paul is going to summarize the gospel that he preached to them.

But the word “gospel” that we translate as gospel, evangelion is a word that was commonly used in the ancient world, particularly in the Roman world, and is a word that was generally used in the Roman world in the plural evangelia. What that word referred to was when an important personage, usually an important personage in the Roman government, but not necessarily a senator, the Emperor himself, a general, was coming to a city, he would send a herald ahead of him who would read or announce the evangelia, literally, we would translate “gospels”, the gospel of that person who was coming to visit. And so, they would read the list of the accomplishments, chiefly military victories which that particular person had accomplished so that the people of the city could prepare themselves to properly meet and receive this personage.

In fact, it was expected in Roman culture in particular, that if the person who was arriving had just achieved one of these victories so if you are in a city that was near the Roman frontier and a Roman general had just won a victory in some proximity to you and now was coming to the city victorious, the city would be expected to prepare what the Romans called a triumph. That was a noun, not just a verb. And a Roman triumph was essentially a huge parade that when the people got word that this person was coming, saw him out on the horizon, they would go out to meet him. They would make this parade out to meet the victorious personage and then escort them back into the city with much fanfare and singing and dancing and celebration and in the case of the Romans, obviously pagan sacrifices. But this would be a huge event and a huge celebration.

And so, this is the word that the apostles pick up to describe the announcement and the proclamation that they’re making, what they’re doing when they go from city to city. They are proclaiming the evangelion singular, the report of the victory, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They are coming to tell what Christ has done. So the proclamation of the gospel is about what Christ has done, what he has accomplished, the victory that he’s accomplished, not about something about the people and what they need to do. Now, who Christ is, what he’s accomplished, and the fact that he’s coming, once that has been announced, that entails some things that the people need to do. That then clues in the people that they need to prepare to receive him. But those preparations are not themselves the gospel. So that’s the thing that follows on after. This is why when we see the apostles, for example, in the Book of Acts, proclaim the gospel. They preach the gospel, and the response is, then “What must I do to be saved?” The response of the people is, “In light of what you’ve just told me, what do I need to do?”

So, the Gospel has its consequence that people become faithful disciples of Christ, that they live their life in a certain way, that they prepare to receive Him when he comes in a certain way. It’s all entailed by the gospel, but it’s not the gospel itself. So, St. Paul is calling them back to the message he delivered to them, the message of who Christ is and the victory that he’s won. He’s saying to them, “Look, this that I proclaimed to you, you believed it, you accepted it. This is your whole purpose in gathering together as a community there in Corinth.” He’s described all the problems they’ve been having and trying to help them through them. But the whole purpose of them having a community, having a church, having an assembly there in the first place is this Gospel that he’s proclaimed to them, this fact of who Christ is, what he’s done, and that he’s coming. And so, he’s reminding them of that and saying, there’s this possibility, there is this possibility, that all of this may have been in vain, may have been empty, may not ultimately be fruitful, may ultimately not be worthwhile. And that’s what he’s now going to set out to try to prevent.

So, verse three: 

For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over 500 brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.

So here St. Paul is expanding on what he was referring to when he mentioned the “gospel that he preached.” He’s saying, “This is what it was.” And so, note he says that he delivered first of all what he also received. Now we have to take this, what he means by “having received the gospel.” We have to take this in the context of what St. Paul says, for example, in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians; he is very clear there that he did not receive this gospel, he did not receive this report of who Christ is and what he’s done from any human being. He is not saying here then, “Well, here is what I, St. Paul was taught by the other apostles who knew Jesus, because I didn’t while he was alive. I learned this from them. And now, I’ve handed it on to you, so I got it second hand. You’re getting it third hand.”

That’s absolutely not what he’s saying or what he means here. And in terms of just to clarify, since I just referred to Galatians while I’m talking about First Corinthians, we need to always keep in mind when we’re reading the Scriptures, when we’re reading the New Testament in particular, that we have St Paul’s epistles, that we have in the Scripture. As we’ve mentioned before, we don’t even have all of them because he mentions epistles that we no longer have. So, we have what we have from St. Paul. But this doesn’t make up the sum total of everything St. Paul ever did and said and taught. It does not give his answer to every question he was ever asked when he lived in these various cities. It does not describe every word that came out of his mouth during his life. We don’t have his interpretation of every verse of the Old Testament, though, from St Paul’s mastery of the Old Testament, I’m sure at some point in his life he commented on virtually all of it. We don’t have all of that. Everything that we have in the New Testament is a reflection of the apostolic preaching, meaning the apostles lived their lives, they preached and they served in these communities, in these cities. And what we have in the New Testament, then, are documents which reflect that teaching. They are not totally inclusive of it, but they reflect it. And so we get pieces of it. And the pieces we get are pieces that we get for a particular reason.

I mentioned when I was doing the introduction tonight that all of St. Paul’s epistles are what are called occasional documents. What that means is that they are not sort of treatises. Treatises existed in the ancient world, there are lots of them. Philosophers wrote them all the time and they would have titles like “Concerning This” or “On This Topic”, and then they would just address a topic in sort of a theoretical way. That’s not what St. Paul’s Epistles are. St Paul’s epistles are written to real communities, of real humans, sinful humans struggling to be Christians in the first century A.D., in the Roman world, who are experiencing all kinds of problems, all kinds of problems with sins that they’re falling into, with factions and strife developing in the Church. All of the problems that we still have in our churches today.

It’s one of the very reassuring things. The fact that we still have all these problems shows that we’re the same church. But St. Paul is writing to them, not just to give them a theological lecture and explain in an abstract way “On the Nature of Good” or “Here is how the movements of the heavens work”. That’s not what St. Paul is doing. St Paul is taking what he’s preached to them, what he’s taught them. He’s taking the truth of Christ and he’s applying it to their very particular situations. That’s why each of his epistles is different, because even when we have, in a couple of cases, two epistles to the same person or to the same city, they’re coming at different times, they’re coming into different situations. And so, they’re addressing different problems and different issues, even though they’re addressing them from the same viewpoint, the same standpoint, and with the same Christ.

So, what we see reflected in any one of St. Paul’s epistles is going to be consistent with what we see reflected in any other of St. Paul’s epistles, because they’re both proceeding from the same perspective. He’s not going to say in one place, “Well, it’s really critically important that you understand that I did not get the Gospel from any other human being, including the other apostles.” And then sort of turn around and in another of his epistles say, “Oh yeah, I got the Gospel from those other guys in Jerusalem, and now I passed it on to you. I kind of got a second hand, but don’t tell anybody.” That’s not at all what he’s saying. When he says what he received, when he says he received the Gospel, when he says he received the report of who Christ is and what he had done, he received it from Christ himself. That’s who he received the Gospel from.

He not only encountered Christ on the road to Damascus, we all remember that scene where he’s knocked off his horse, Caravaggio painted a series of beautiful paintings about it. We all are familiar with that event. But if you read the Acts of the Apostles closely, as we did when we went through it, there were at least two other times just in the Acts of the Apostles where Christ appeared to him. So St. Paul has had this relationship with Christ. He’s seen him, he’s talked to him, he’s conversed with him. He knows who Christ is first-hand. And it’s his first-hand knowledge of Christ that he’s passed on to the Church at Corinth. So they’ve received it through him, but he received it from Christ himself. And that’s what makes St. Paul an apostle.

And so he begins with, that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.” So two points here. The first being “according to the Scriptures”, it could probably be better translated “in accordance with the Scriptures”, because when we say “according to the Scriptures”, that might give us the idea that St. Paul is doing exegesis. St. Paul is reading the Old Testament. He read a bunch of Old Testament passages about the Messiah, and he came to the conclusion based on his interpretation that the Messiah was going to die for the sins of the people. And so that must be what Jesus did, because Jesus is the Messiah. And that’s not at all what St. Paul is saying. St. Paul is saying that this is what Christ did. He died for our sins, number one. And number two, that him doing that was in accordance with the Scriptures. It was in accordance with the way the Scriptures had talked about, had prophetically spoken of the Messiah and what he was going to do. And so, he’s making clear that this is not a point of disjunction.

We saw how earlier on in St Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, when he was using his sort of grand analogy about baptism, he talked about how, quote, “our fathers were all baptized into Moses in the sea and the cloud.” Now “our fathers” makes it sound like he’s talking to people descended from that generation, people of Jewish ethnic extraction. But later in the same chapter he says to the same people, “Consider Israel according to the flesh”, meaning they aren’t those people. They aren’t according to the flesh, according to descent, according to genealogy, descendants of those people who came out of Egypt with Moses. Nevertheless, those people who came out of Egypt with Moses are their fathers. Because they’ve been brought into, sacramentally through baptism, through receiving the Holy Spirit, through the Eucharist, they’ve been made part of that community. So those are now their forefathers and fathers.

What St. Paul is calling the Scriptures, what we would call the Old Testament, is now their text. It is now the text about the origin of them as a people. And so Christ’s death for their sins, and as he continues, the rest of the Gospel is according to the Scriptures. It is in accordance with the Scriptures in this sense, in the sense that as St. Paul was so keen to argue in Romans, there is one people of God, and so they have now, though they were pagans, they have now been brought into this people. And so what Christ does, he does in accordance with the Scripture, because there is this continuity, and this continuity is a gift that they’re given by Christ as they’re grafted into the people.

The second point is concerning the phrase that “he died for our sins”. This is something we say so often, we may have been singing songs about it since we were children. We say it so much that we perhaps haven’t thought much about what it means. Or maybe we even have a wrong-headed idea of exactly what it means. “For” can have a lot of meanings, the Greek preposition just as much as the English one. But the way St. Paul uses it and what he’s getting at here, is not in the sense that it’s often taken in the West, that Christ is somehow punished for our sins. We have to remember that death, and this is going to become increasingly clear even right here in First Corinthians 15, St. Paul does not present death as a death penalty. He does not present death as the punishment for a transgression. “You broke a rule, now God is going to kill you.”

He never presents it that way. He presents death as an enemy of humanity. He presents death as something which reigns over humanity because of sin. But death is not, in St Paul’s usage, even in this very chapter, is not something God does or executes. So, he is not saying that God executed Christ for our sins instead of executing us. One of the most obvious reasons theologically why that’s not true is that we still die physically. We still experience physical death. Christ is victorious over death; we still experience physical death.

And as we progress through this chapter, the main focus of this chapter is going to be about the resurrection. So St. Paul’s not denying the reality of physical death, but we’ll see as we go forward exactly what that means. What it means that “Christ died for our sins”, is that he did not die for any of his own because he didn’t have any. One of the basic principles of the Torah, one of the basic principles of the Law is that the soul that sins shall die, not his son, not his brother, not his uncle, right? The one who commits the sin suffers the consequences of the sin. It’s one of the basic principles. And so, Christ, as someone who had no sin, not only had committed no sin, but had no sin. Remember in St. John’s Gospel, he says, “The prince of this world is coming”, referring to the devil, “He finds nothing in me”. He has no claim on Christ. Christ also says in St John’s Gospel, “No one can take my life from me. I lay it down and I can take it up again.” So, Christ dies voluntarily. So he does not die as a result of anything he did. Each of us dies for our own sins, each of us sins, and each of us dies as a result. Because, as St Paul said in his Epistle to the Romans, “The wages of sin is death.” One follows after the other. One is the consequence of the other.

So Christ dies, not as a consequence of some sin he committed. He committed no sin even though he was executed as a condemned criminal. Rather, he dies because of our sin, because of our sinfulness, because of the sin and death that we’ve brought into the world. Christ dies because of that. That is why. That is what he dies for. And as we’re going to see, as we continue in the passage, St. Paul is going to expand on what he means by that, on what it is that Christ’s death does in response to our sin.

So then St. Paul goes on, “And then he was buried and then he rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures.” So it’s important to note that St. Paul includes Christ’s burial. He does not sort of skip over that. We talk all the time about Christ’s death and resurrection because those are sort of the key events and his entombment, we skip over. St. Paul here, though, is being very keen to talk about the way that Christ is fulfilling the Scriptures. He dies according to the Scriptures; he rises again according to the Scriptures. And so Christ’s burial is of key importance in this because of course, it’s in Christ’s burial that he fulfills the Sabbath. We’re going to see the law, the Torah, is going to come up explicitly near the end of this chapter. But one of the basic principles of the Torah, of course, is the Sabbath and the Sabbath regulations. And so, Christ’s fulfillment of the Sabbath is sort of a symbol of the reality of his fulfillment of the whole law. And of course, fulfillment doesn’t mean he got rid of it. Fulfillment means he filled it up to overflowing. So Christ finishes all his work, on the 6th day he rests in the tomb. On the 7th he rises again to new life and a new creation. And that whole new creation idea is again something that St. Paul is going to get into as we continue in the passage. But this mention of the importance of his burial is St. Paul planting the seed for that, for this idea of that Sabbath fulfillment and new creation theme. And then of course, “Christ rises again to new life in accordance with the Scriptures. This is also a part of that continuity, not of discontinuity.

You may also have noticed sort of the framing here, the way St. Paul is condensing the gospel into this series of events, or breaking it down into this series of events. This sort of structure is, of course, going to become the basis of the credal statements of the early Church, which are at first used at baptisms and of course culminate at the First and Second Ecumenical Councils in the Nicene Creed, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. This is where scripturally. that idea of a creed as a summary of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, this is where it comes from, places like this passage and St. Paul’s summary of it here. So then St. Paul lists these appearances of Christ after his resurrection that he “was seen by Cephas”, that of course, is St. Peter. “Then by the twelve. After that he was seen by over 500 brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that he was seen by James. This, of course, is St. James, His brother, the first bishop of Jerusalem, then by all of the Apostles, then last of all, he was seen by me also as by one born out of due time.”

Some of you may have heard of, maybe not anymore, he used to be more important, I think, to the history of theology than he is now. In the middle of the 20th century, there was a German theologian named Rudolf Bultmann who was part of sort of a more well, I mean, all German theological movements are liberal, but he was part of a sort of liberal movement. And he was famous for saying things like “Who could possibly believe in miracles in an age when we have the radio?” So a sort of, now quaint, statement regarding technology. He famously commented on this passage that he found it very curious that St. Paul thought listing all these witnesses gave more validity to his claim because he was already in this mode that unfortunately, a lot of our friends who are of a more liberal theological bent are of not thinking of Christ’s death and burial and resurrection as actual historic events that took place in actual time and space. And so for him, the idea that you point to some guy and say, “Well, this person saw Jesus after he rose from the dead, he can tell you what he saw”, that made no sense to him, because these things aren’t, for Rudolph Bultmann, real things that really happened in the world at a place, at a particular time. They’re just sort of theological principles that God brings new life out of death. And maybe there is some kind of bodyless afterlife type thing, heaven maybe, but none of this is, quote-unquote, “real”. It may be true, but it’s not real. But of course, that’s not St. Paul’s perspective. That’s why Bultmann found it so curious. St. Paul’s perspective is this is stuff that happened within living memory. You can go and ask all of these people. He appeared to more than 500 people at once, and most of them are still alive. Some of them have passed away. But you can go talk to them. You can go ask them what they saw and who they saw and who Christ is. If you don’t believe me, go ask them. They’ll tell you the same thing. They will proclaim to you the same gospel. They’ll tell you about the same Christ and tell you about the same things that he did.

Notice also here, it’s kind of important that he mentions St. James because this appearance to St. James, the brother of the Lord, by Christ after his resurrection is not actually recorded anywhere in the Scriptures, in the New Testament other than this mention here and another vague mention in Galatians that it happened. But it’s not narrated to us the way many of Christ’s resurrection appearances are narrated to us. And we read those in the Eothina gospel readings at Orthros on Sunday mornings. But this particular appearance is not narrated to us. And there is in the church the teaching. The memory of the event that after his resurrection. Christ appeared to his brother St. James and set him up as the overseer, as the bishop, of the church in Jerusalem. Some of, especially our Protestant friends, because that event is not narrated in the New Testament, will sort of reject it out of hand, or will say. “Well, that’s a tradition, that may be true,” but here we have a good example of a place where this event in the memory of the Church fills in a sort of obvious blank in the Scriptures, because what we see in the Scriptures about St. James, the brother of the Lord, is we see him in the Gospels. We see him in the Gospels not believing in his adoptive brother’s Messiahship, not believing in his divinity, not accepting what Christ is saying, trying to persuade him to go home and be quiet. We see him not believing and then we see him as the Bishop of Jerusalem. We see him presiding at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. And in between that the only thing we have to explain this change is the fact that St. Paul refers to Christ after the resurrection having appeared to St. James. So even if we didn’t have this memory of the Church that this is what happened, you could basically come to the conclusion that that’s most likely what happened just by reading what is in the Scriptures.

And so this sort of strong line that sometimes gets drawn between “Well, this stuff is actually in the Bible in black and white, so I kind of have to believe it. But anything that isn’t there, ehhh, it’s whether I like it or not, whether it sounds fishy to me or not”, doesn’t really hold up. We receive the teaching of the apostles that I mentioned that’s reflected in the New Testament Scriptures. We receive that as a whole. We receive that collective memory within the Church of the Gospel and of the Faith as a whole, not sort of as certain pieces that we have to accept, some pieces that are negotiable, some pieces that are indifferent, and then some pieces that we should just ignore, but we receive it as a whole.

Also, a note on that last comment, last of all, that he, Christ, was seen by me, by St. Paul as by one “born out of due time”. “Born out of due time” is a very nice, polite translation here in the new King James/Orthodox Study Bible. I think it’s the ESV or the RSV, which are basically the same thing that has “abnormally born”—that’s even being polite. The word that St. Paul literally uses here is a word that’s used for an abortion. That’s what it means by “born out of time”. And it is probable that what St. Paul is doing here is he is using a slander that his opponents use to describe him. I’ve mentioned before especially in some of the introductions to St. Paul’s epistles and when we were working our way through Acts, the fact that we have some physical descriptions of St. Paul and they’re not pretty. He was very short, he was bow legged, he had severe eye problems. It is likely that with the particular condition, he probably had his eyes sort of ooze fluids almost continuously, so he was nearly blind. Remember from the book of the Acts of the Apostles how many times he was stoned, beaten, flogged, imprisoned. He was not in good physical shape, and he was not particularly pretty to look at.

That’s not how he came and preached the gospel. He wasn’t a good looking, charismatic guy going around starting a new religion like it was his own cult. That is the opposite of St. Paul. Everything that St. Paul accomplished, he accomplished because of the power of Christ and Christ’s gospel, not because of anything he lent to it with his personal appearance or preaching style or anything else.

And so it seems that due to these issues with his physical appearance and physical infirmities and even disabilities, that his opponents were probably referring to him as an abortion or a miscarriage or something similar as an insult. And so St. Paul sort of grabs it and takes ownership of it, and says, “Sure, I’ll put myself last on the list. I’m the last one who Christ appeared to.” It’s very clear that he’s an apostle, that Christ appeared to him, that Christ gave him the gospel. But he says, “Hey, yeah, there’s nothing special about me, something powerful about me. Feel free to not believe me. Go talk to St. Peter, go talk to St. James, go talk to these 500 other people. They’ll tell you exactly what I told you.”

And so you see, once again, we saw all the way back at the beginning of this epistle, St. Paul talking about the fact that he sort of wasn’t looking for fans, he wasn’t looking for followers of him as a person. He didn’t want people saying, “Oh, I am of Paul.” He said, “What did Paul die for you? Did Paul rise from the dead? Were you baptized into Paul?” And of course, none of these is true. And so we see this again here that St. Paul not only wants to make it clear that this is a gospel he received directly from Christ himself, but he wants to make it clear that they shouldn’t believe it or follow it or live by it because of something about St. Paul that has impressed them. They should believe it because of something about Christ, who the gospel is all about, that has impressed them.