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1. THE END OF HISTORY

The first Christian writer was a Jewish bully named Saul. A native of the city of Tarsus in southern Asia Minor, Saul went to Jerusalem as a youth to study in the school of the conservative Pharisaic scholar Gamaliel. Sometime around 34 A.D., Saul supervised a band of thugs who invaded the homes of members of the infant but already powerful Jerusalem Christian church -- the priestly establishment had been unable to attack the popular Christian leaders publicly -- abducting and imprisoning the occupants (Acts 8.3). Finished with this clandestine terror campaign in Jerusalem, Saul obtained letters from the High Priest (almost certainly Josephus Caiaphas, who was not removed until 37 A.D.) authorizing him to ferret out Christian sympathizers in the synagogues of Damascus, kidnap them, and bring them to Jerusalem to be flogged and jailed. Approaching Damascus, however, Saul was suddenly surrounded by a light from heaven so intense that it drove him to his knees. From within that light a voice issued the famous admonition: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9.4).

So appeared the risen Christ to the High Priest's zealously anti-Christian enforcer, and so began the career of the equally zealous apostle Paul, the most important and influential Christian of his or any day. Surviving shipwrecks and dungeons; eluding mobs of idolatrous pagans and conservative Jews; contending with magicians, demons, and Jesus' brother James, leader of the conservative Jerusalem Christian church, for three decades Paul relentlessly toured the Mediterranean world, organizing, counseling, and disciplining Christian communities from Damascus to Delphi.

In addition to his personal visits, Paul corresponded with the far-flung brethren. Of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament, seven are widely regarded by modern scholars as authentic (the others were written later under Paul's name; attribution to an eminent figure was a common and not necessarily deceitful means of invoking spiritual authority in the ancient world). The first of these authentic letters was written to the Christian community in Thessalonica, Greece. In that letter, Paul assured the faithful that "the day of the lord" would come soon, "like a thief in the night," so "let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and... put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation." (1 Thes 5.2-8). This letter was written around 50 A.D., and it is, by an overwhelming consensus of biblical scholars, the earliest text included in the New Testament.

In all his letters, Paul was strikingly reticent about Jesus the man, offering only a brief glimpse of the last supper and the otherwise unelaborated fact the Jesus was crucified and buried. And aside from a single personal conversation with the spirit of the Lord, Paul quotes Jesus only once, the two sentences found in his account of the last supper, in 1 Corinthians 11.24-25. But even as Paul was writing his letters, other Christian authors, whose names we do not have and whose texts are often only identified from their inclusion in later works, were trying to provide Jesus a voice and a history.

The most universally acknowledged of these hypothetical documents is the collection of Jesus' sayings known since the late nineteenth century as Q (for the German Quelle, or source). Originally written in Greek (this is assumed because the Q sayings in Matthew and Luke use the same phrasing too often for independent translations from Aramaic, the language Jesus probably used to address his followers), Q was composed in Palestine -- probably Galilee, judging from the few place names mentioned -- by the mid 50's A.D. It was later independently appropriated by the authors of the Luke and Matthew gospels; Q includes among its hundreds of familiar verses the Lord's Prayer and the sayings which Matthew assembles into the Sermon on the Mount.

Few scholars now doubt the existence of Q, despite the lack of even a fragmentary manuscript. More problematic, though now represented by much more concrete evidence, is another sayings collection known as The Gospel According to Thomas. The first evidence of this sayings collection was found in three cryptic papyrus fragment, pulled from the ancient rubbish heaps at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, in the late nineteenth century. In 1945, however, the entire 114-saying text of Thomas was discovered in a fourth-century codex (an early type of bound book) found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Many scholars now believe that key parts of Thomas had been recorded by 50 A.D., and represent the earliest form of many sayings found in the subsequent New Testament gospels. The Jesus of Thomas offers no miracles to prove his divinity or forecasts of his impending death and resurrection; instead he discusses "the kingdom of the father" in images as succinct and provocative as Zen koans. (To enter the kingdom, Jesus says in Thomas 41, "be as sly as snakes and as innocent as doves.")

Neither Q nor Thomas offer any narrative of Jesus' life. But an increasing number of New Testament scholars now believe that by the 50's A.D., several anonymous authors had also attempted to compose accounts of Jesus' ministry and death. The so-called Signs Gospel, which has been extracted from the John Gospel in the New Testament, gives what some scholars now regard as the earliest narrative version of Jesus' miracles (the "signs" proving that Jesus had been anointed by God), trial, execution, and resurrection. The non-canonical Gospel of Peter, which did not arrive at its finished form until the mid-second century, also contains an early stratum, sometimes called the Cross Gospel, which provides an account of Jesus' execution and resurrection probably dating from the 50's A.D. Several additional non-canonical gospels , known from papyrus fragments, are also thought to have been in existence by the 50's.

The earliest gospel now included in the New Testament canon is by the anonymous author later Christian tradition identified as the apostle Mark; most scholars agree that Mark was written shortly after the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 A.D. Working from both oral tradition and earlier written sources (including, perhaps, the Cross Gospel), Mark conveyed in a rapid, vivid narrative what the author describes in his first verse (Mk 1.1) as "the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

With this simple statement, Mark offers the disclaimer so often ignored by inerrantists intent on proving that the author of Mark did what he never intended to do -- give an historical picture of Jesus accurate in every detail. Instead the author of Mark wrote exactly what he promised. Gospel is the English translation of the Greek word euangelion, or "good news," and Mark provided the good news about a messiah whose history, however sketchy, was nevertheless fraught with a great deal of bad news: A public ministry spent almost entirely in the shadow of John the Baptist, from which Jesus emerged only long enough to be executed for revolutionary activities by the Roman authorities; rumors of libertinism and disreputable magical practices surrounding him and his followers; a rousing controversy that swirled around the disposal of his body and the claims that he survived his crucifixion.

Mark's literary transformation of the bad news into good news was masterful. The author created a politically sanitized Messiah suitable for consumption in the Gentile Christian communities to which the Mark gospel was directed, yet still faithful to the apocalyptic, inherently political expectations of Jesus' own Jewish flock. That this synthesis came at the expense of historical accuracy is hardly remarkable. Mark, like the gospels that preceded and followed it, was intended to lead the Christian faithful from the obscure events of a controversial life to a far greater truth, the past resurrection and imminent return of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah who had already interceded in heaven on behalf of men, and who would soon return and bring about the end of time and the beginning of the eternal age of God. The gospels are not about history; they are, by self-definition and deepest tradition, about the end of history.

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