The earliest Christian preaching we can date made a claim that ought to have ended the movement before it began: a man executed by the Roman state on a cross was the anointed king of Israel and the Lord of the world. Two thousand years of gilded altar crosses and pendant chains have dulled the edge of that sentence. If we want to feel it again, we have to hear the word the way a first-century listener heard it.

Cicero, defending the elderly senator Gaius Rabirius in 63 BCE, told the Roman people that the very name of the cross should be kept far from a citizen, from his body and even from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears (Pro Rabirio 16). In his prosecution of Verres a few years earlier, he had called crucifixion the cruelest and foulest of punishments (In Verrem 2.5.165). These were courtroom speeches, and Cicero knew how to work a crowd, but an orator plays to what his audience already feels, and what this audience felt was revulsion.

The punishment belonged to slaves, to bandits on the roads, to rebels in the provinces. Martin Hengel’s short and unsettling study, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Fortress, 1977), gathered the ancient testimony, and the picture that emerges is of a death built to be watched. Crosses stood at roadsides and city gates. The victim was stripped, exposed, and frequently denied burial, so that the body became a public notice about what happened to people of no account who forgot their place.

A crude drawing scratched into plaster on the Palatine hill in Rome has stayed with me since I first saw a photograph of it years ago, long before I had any reason to write about it. A man with the head of a donkey hangs on a cross; a second figure raises a hand toward him; the Greek letters underneath say that Alexamenos worships his god. Scholars usually date the graffito to around 200 CE, though the estimates wander a good deal and I would not lean on any single year. Its joke required no explanation, and that is what makes it valuable to a historian, because whoever scratched it into the wall of what was probably a training school for imperial page boys expected every passing slave to get it at a glance.

Paul had already named the problem a century and a half before the graffito, and he used a word with teeth. A skandalon was the trigger stick of a trap, the thing that springs when you step on it. “We preach Christ crucified,” he wrote to Corinth, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23), and in Galatians he spoke of the skandalon of the cross (Galatians 5:11) as something he refused to remove even when removing it would have spared him persecution.

Scattered and Gathered

The followers did what frightened people do. Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, reports the flight in five Greek words: “And they all forsook him, and fled” (Mark 14:50). The evangelist had already prepared the reader for it by putting a line of Zechariah on Jesus’ lips, about the shepherd struck and the sheep scattered (Mark 14:27, citing Zechariah 13:7), which tells us that the community remembering the scattering had needed scripture to make the memory bearable.

Luke gives the mood of those days in a single sentence spoken by a disciple on the Emmaus road to a stranger he does not recognize: “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). The verb is in the past tense, and the past tense carries the whole of the disappointment. Whatever these men had expected from Jesus, a Roman cross had cancelled it.

Then something gathered them again. The earliest written testimony is Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, which he says he “received” and “delivered,” the technical vocabulary of handed-down tradition: Christ appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all to Paul himself. If Paul received this formula when he first came into contact with the movement, it reaches back to within a few years of the crucifixion, and that dating is about as firm as anything in the field gets.

I should be careful about the phrase “every tradition agrees,” which I used in the book, because the agreement covers less ground than it sounds. The sources agree that the scattered followers became convinced Jesus had been raised and had appeared to them. They disagree on nearly everything around that conviction: where the appearances happened (Galilee in Mark’s promise and in Matthew, Jerusalem and its environs in Luke), who saw him first (Cephas in Paul’s list, the women or Mary Magdalene in the Gospels), and what kind of body was seen. What the appearances were in themselves lies beyond the reach of historical method. What the historian can say is that a group which had dissolved in fear on a Friday was, within a short span, a community again, and that it explained its own existence by pointing to the risen Lord.

Waiting in Jerusalem

The regathered followers settled in Jerusalem, the city that had handed their teacher over, and they waited. Acts opens with a question that tells us what they were waiting for: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). Luke wrote decades later and had his own reasons for shaping the scene, so the wording belongs to him, yet the expectation it records fits everything else we know about the earliest community.

The firmest evidence comes from a fossil. Near the end of 1 Corinthians, writing in Greek to a largely Greek congregation, Paul drops in an Aramaic phrase without translating it: marana tha, “our Lord, come” (1 Corinthians 16:22). A Greek-speaking church in Corinth had no reason to pray in Aramaic unless the prayer had come to them already old, already sacred, from the Aramaic-speaking believers of Judea. It is the voice of the Jerusalem community preserved like an insect in amber, and what it asks for is the Lord’s return.

Paul’s own early letters share the same horizon. In 1 Thessalonians, usually dated around 50 CE and the oldest Christian document we possess, he comforts believers grieving over members who had died by assuring them that “we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord” will not have any advantage over the dead (1 Thessalonians 4:15). The first-person plural matters. Paul expected to be among the living when it happened, and a few years later he could still tell the Corinthians that the appointed time had grown very short (1 Corinthians 7:29).

American historians of religion have a name for what happened to the followers of William Miller when 22 October 1844 passed without the return of Christ: the Great Disappointment. Some Millerites went back to their farms; others reread their charts and found a new date; a remnant rethought the whole matter and became, in time, a durable church. I raise the comparison with some hesitation, because the Jerusalem believers never fixed a date that we know of, and the delay of the Lord pressed on them slowly over decades rather than falling on a single night. Still, the shape of the problem is similar, and it explains why a movement built on expectation needed, within its first generation, something more than expectation to live on.

Explaining It to Those Who Had Not Seen

The people who had walked with Jesus in Galilee carried their reasons for faith in their own memories. They had heard him teach, eaten with him, and, by their own account, seen him alive after his death. A Jew in Damascus or a freedwoman in Corinth had none of that, only a report about a man she had never met who had died in a way her neighbors found disgusting, and the report needed to make sense to her before it could ask anything of her.

For a Jewish hearer the difficulty had a chapter and verse. Deuteronomy 21:23 declares that a hanged man is accursed of God, and by the first century that text had been drawn into discussions of crucifixion. The Temple Scroll from Qumran applies the Deuteronomy passage to traitors executed by hanging on a tree (11QTemple 64:6–13), and the Qumran commentary on Nahum recalls a ruler, usually identified with Alexander Jannaeus, who “hangs men alive” (4Q169). A crucified Messiah, on this reading of scripture, was a contradiction in terms, a king under God’s curse.

The objection survived well into the second century. In Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, written around 160 CE, the Jewish interlocutor concedes that scripture speaks of a suffering Messiah but balks at the manner of death, because the law calls the crucified accursed (Dialogue 89–90). Justin may have composed Trypho’s lines himself, and I cannot tell how faithfully they reproduce any real conversation, but an apologist does not invent an objection he finds hard to answer unless he has met it.

The Greek and Roman hearer stumbled differently. Lucian of Samosata, mocking the Christians of his day, described them as worshipping “that crucified sophist” and living by his laws (The Passing of Peregrinus 13). To a cultivated pagan the problem was taste as much as theology: gods and heroes did not die like runaway slaves.

So the movement faced a set of questions it could not wave away. Why was a crucified man the Messiah? How could his death be good news rather than a defeat? If the law cursed him, what did that mean for the law? Where did Israel stand, and what about the nations who were now hearing the message? None of these questions could be answered by pointing at an empty tomb in a city many of the new converts would never visit.

Turning the Curse Inside Out

The letters answered the objection by walking straight into it. In Galatians 3:13 Paul quotes the very text that condemned a crucified Messiah, “Cursed be every one who hangs on a tree,” and turns it into the mechanism of rescue: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.” The curse is granted in full. Jesus did fall under it, Paul says, and he fell under it on behalf of others, so that the verse which should have disqualified him now explains what his death accomplished.

A judo throw works in a similar way, using the attacker’s own weight to put him on the mat, and the comparison is less frivolous than it sounds, because Paul does the same thing again with the pagan objection in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians. He accepts that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (1 Corinthians 1:18) and then declares that God chose what the world counts foolish in order to shame the wise, so that the folly of God is wiser than men (1:25, 27). The embarrassment stays exactly where it was, and what changes is the value Paul assigns to it, in the way a minus sign set in front of a number leaves the digits untouched and reverses what they amount to.

One small textual detail shows the move at work, though I hold the reading loosely. The Christ hymn of Philippians 2:6–11 is widely regarded, since Ernst Lohmeyer’s study of 1928, as an older composition that Paul quotes. In verse 8 the line runs that Christ “became obedient unto death, even death on a cross,” and a number of commentators have suggested that the final phrase, which disturbs the balance of the poetic lines, is Paul’s own addition to the hymn he inherited. If they are right, we can watch the apostle taking a received text about humiliation and pressing the cross into it, as though the hymn had not said the hard part loudly enough.

From there the letters build outward. The death of the Messiah becomes a reconciliation: “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10), and “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Proof that God loves us, in Romans 5:8, rests on the fact that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. In Galatians Paul can say that he will boast of nothing except the cross (Galatians 6:14), which is a remarkable thing for anyone in the first century to have put in writing, and which only makes sense if the scandal had been transformed, inside his communities at least, into the center of their faith.

Law, Israel, and the Nations

Once the cross had been made the center, the other questions had to be answered from that center, and the letters show Paul working them out under pressure, often in the middle of a quarrel. If the law had pronounced the curse and the Messiah had borne it, then the law could no longer be the boundary that decided who belonged to God’s people. “Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law,” he writes in Romans 3:21, and in Romans 10:4 he calls Christ the telos of the law, a word that can mean its end, its goal, or both at once. Interpreters have argued over which sense Paul intended for a long time, and I do not think the Greek settles it; he may have wanted the ambiguity.

The question of Israel troubled him more than any other, and it is the one place in the letters where his argument visibly struggles. Romans 9 through 11 opens with anguish, Paul saying he could wish himself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of his kinsmen (Romans 9:3), and closes, after three chapters of turning the problem over, with the declaration that “all Israel will be saved” (11:26) and a doxology about the unsearchable ways of God. Whatever one makes of the resolution, the man who wrote these chapters did not regard his own people as discarded.

The nations followed from the same root. If belonging no longer ran through circumcision and the food laws, then a Greek in Corinth stood before God on the same footing as a Jew in Jerusalem. The gospel was “the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16), and in Galatians the old divisions of ancestry, legal status, and sex are declared irrelevant to standing in Christ (Galatians 3:28). That conviction is what turned the expectation of a Jewish sect, waiting in Jerusalem for the restoration of the kingdom to Israel, into a message that could be preached to dockworkers in Corinth and to households in Rome that had never seen Judea.

All of this was written before any Gospel we possess. The letters date, on the usual reckoning, to the 50s of the first century, and Mark to around 70, so the theology of the cross reached the churches of Greece and Italy in letter form a full generation before those churches had a written account of Jesus’ life. In The Comforter I argue that the Pharisee who wrote the seven undisputed letters, the man who lists his credentials in Philippians 3, is Manaen of Acts 13:1, one of the men later merged into the composite figure the tradition calls Paul, but for the point being made here the identification changes nothing, since the letters did their work whoever held the pen.

The Paraclete’s Task

The Gospel of John, written later than Paul’s letters and in a very different idiom, puts into the mouth of Jesus on his last night a promise about who would carry on after him. “The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). A chapter later the same figure is given a second duty: “he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses” (John 15:26–27). The Greek word is parakletos, the one called alongside, an advocate who stands next to you in court. The King James translators rendered it “Comforter,” and English-speaking Christians heard it that way for centuries.

The farewell discourse also admits something the other Gospels pass over quickly, which is that Jesus did not finish saying what needed to be said. “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). Someone would have to say them later, to people who had not been in the upper room.

The letters did both parts of the Paraclete’s work as John describes it. They taught, at length and often with impatience, what the death of the Messiah meant for Jews and gentiles, for the law and for daily life in a mixed congregation. Witness came with the teaching, Paul repeatedly setting his own experience of the risen Christ alongside the tradition he had received. All of it arrived in a form that travelled. A letter could be folded, carried by a trusted courier, Phoebe of Cenchreae being the likeliest candidate for Romans on the strength of the commendation in Romans 16:1–2, and read aloud to a gathered church, as Paul demanded of the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 5:27). It could be copied, and the copies could be carried further still.

Which brings up an uncomfortable question for a historian, and I will leave it with the reader rather than pretend to settle it in a blog post. The Hebrew name Menahem means “comforter,” and Volume 5 of Unmerging Origins argues that the Pharisee behind the letters bore a form of that name. Whether the Johannine author knew this, or whether the coincidence is only a coincidence, the evidence does not allow me to say. What can be said is that the task John assigns to the Comforter, teaching what had not yet been taught and bearing witness to what had been seen, matches with striking precision what the letters accomplished in the decades after the crucifixion.

The same Gospel ends its resurrection scenes with a blessing pronounced on people who were not there: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29). That blessing was addressed, in effect, to everyone who came after the first generation, to the slaves and artisans of Corinth and Rome, to their children, and eventually to readers in places the apostles never imagined, and the scandal of the cross reached all of them through pages written by a man who had to explain a crucifixion he had not watched to people who would never meet anyone who had.

Sources

Scripture quotations follow the Revised Standard Version. Ancient sources cited: Cicero, Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo 16 and In Verrem 2.5.165; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 89–90; Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus 13; the Temple Scroll (11QTemple 64:6–13); Pesher Nahum (4Q169). Modern works: Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); Ernst Lohmeyer, Kyrios Jesus: Eine Untersuchung zu Phil. 2,5–11 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1928).