Paul: The Cross and the Gentile Network

Season 2 · Episode 14

Full episode description

The shift sounds small. It is not small. Jesus, in the synoptic gospels, preaches the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God. Paul, writing earlier, preaches the death of Jesus as the centre of the message. The kingdom recedes. The cross takes its place. Christianity inherits Paul’s emphasis, not Jesus’s.

Part 2 of Paul reads what he did with his contested authority:

• the fight at Antioch, where Paul confronted Peter over whether Jewish and gentile Christians could eat together
• the theology of the cross as the new centre of the gospel, replacing Jesus’s own preaching
• the five major pictures Paul uses to say what the cross achieves, including substitution, victory, reconciliation, and ransom
• the argument that the crucified one was the Son of God in a way that redrew the boundary of Israel
• the gentile inclusion that broke with the requirement of circumcision and made the Jesus movement portable
• the apocalyptic urgency that ran through everything Paul wrote, the conviction that the end of the world was five minutes before midnight
• the network of urban communities he built across the eastern Mediterranean, held together not by a place but by his letters

Paul built Christianity as a network of cities long before it was a religion of empire. The letters that hold the network together become, two centuries later, the bones of the New Testament.

The next episode turns to those letters as crisis correspondence, and to the six letters in his name that he probably did not write.

Not from tradition. From evidence.