Michael T. Zeddies, Communal Incarnation: The Corporate, Collective Jesus of Paul's Letters

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus
19 (2021) 217-259
Communal Incarnation: The Corporate, Collective

Jesus of Paul’s Letters
Michael T. Zeddies
Independent scholar, Chicago, IL, USA
[email protected]
Abstract
In his authentic letters, Paul describes a historical, human Jesus, but is strangely silent
about the events of Jesus’ life. At the same time, Paul describes the figure of Christ
using participatory language, and provides no reason to think that this collective
embodiment of Christ does not also apply to Jesus’ historical body. I propose that Paul’s
historical Jesus was therefore a corporate figure, embodied by the Jewish, pre-Christian
community to which Jesus the Nazarene belonged. I present the literary background
for this proposal, and explain how the evidence in Paul for a historical Jesus should be
interpreted in a corporate or collective sense. I also provide a typological derivation of
the name ‘Jesus’ in Paul.
Keywords
Jesus – Paul – incarnation – participation – christology – typology
Introduction
Simon Gathercole has argued, in a ‘thought experiment’ that considers only

the undisputed Pauline letters, without reference to the Gospels, that the apos-
tle Paul describes a Jesus who was historical, human and earthly, contrary to
renewed claims that Paul’s Jesus was an entirely heavenly figure.1 Gathercole’s
evidence against the ‘mythicist’ hypothesis seems convincing. Nevertheless,
1 Simon Gathercole, ‘The Historical and Human Existence of Jesus in Paul’s Letters’, JSHJ 16
(2018), pp. 183–202 (186).
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Paul’s portrayal of a historical Jesus figure still seems surprisingly slight, espe-
cially in comparison with the robust Gospel accounts. John M. G. Barclay, for
example, writes that ‘the number of facts about Jesus’ life which we could
glean from Paul’s letters is not large…The only facts about Jesus which are con-
stantly referred to are that he was crucified and that he was raised, although
even here we lack details regarding time, place and attendant circumstances.’2
Other possible references to ‘character traits’ apparently refer to ‘the whole
drama of the Incarnation and the cross’.3 Nikolaus Walter observed that there
is ‘no hint that Paul knew of the narrative tradition behind Jesus’.4 Paul does
seem to give his historical Jesus a birth and death, but the evidence is scant
that he knew details of a ministry and teaching.5 Even Gathercole cannot not
quite claim that the very few Jesuine teachings to which Paul seems to allude
can necessarily be attributed to the historical Jesus of the Gospels.6 The evi-
dence from Paul relates primarily to the birth and death of his Jesus figure.7
Alan Saxby has recently described ‘the awesome silence’ in Paul ‘surrounding
Jesus of Nazareth combined with a focus on the metanarrative of the mythic
Christ’.8 Reference to a historical ministry by Jesus also seems absent in other
New Testament writings, like the letter of James.9
Various explanations have been offered for Paul’s silence about the Gospels’
historical Jesus, but these have been contested.10 Paul himself provides none.
Those who assume that Paul knew traditions about the Gospels’ Jesus must
construct those traditions using the Gospels and Acts, and then connect them
somehow with Paul, yet Paul himself says nothing about his Jesus’ background
2 John M. G. Barclay, ‘Jesus and Paul’, DPL, pp. 492–503 (498).

3 Barclay, ‘Jesus and Paul’, p. 499.
4 Nikolaus Walter, ‘Paul and the Early Christian Jesus-Tradition’, in Alexander J. M.
Wedderburn (ed.), Paul and Jesus (JSNTSup, 37; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989),
pp. 51–80 (60).
5 James D. G. Dunn admits that ‘when we search out what Paul actually does say about Jesus’
ministry, the gleanings are indeed remarkably sparse’: see Dunn, The Theology of Paul the
Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 183.
6 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 198.
7 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, pp. 210–211.
8 Alan Saxby, James, Brother of Jesus, and the Jerusalem Church: A Radical Exploration of
Christian Origins (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), p. 218.
9 Saxby, James, pp. 209–35.
10 See for example Michael B. Thompson, Clothed With Christ: The Example and Teaching of
Jesus in Romans 12.1–15.13 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1991), pp. 70–76, where we already find
a few caveats. Frans Neirynck critiques Thompson, albeit briefly, in Neirynck, ‘The Sayings
of Jesus in 1 Corinthians’, in Reimund Bieringer (ed.), The Corinthian Correspondence
(betl, 125; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996), pp. 141–76 (145–46, 146–47 n. 25).
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

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communal incarnation 219
or home, and never connects him with narratives of a public ministry, such
as we find in the Gospels about the historical Jesus. Following Gathercole’s
methodology of using only Paul’s undisputed letters, we remain unable to link
Paul’s portrayal of a historical, human Jesus to an individual person, a ‘figure of
human history’ in Gathercole’s terms, like the Gospels’ Jesus.11 More work must
be done to determine the historical identity of Paul’s Jesus. We must therefore,
at least provisionally, distinguish the Gospels’ historical Jesus from the figure of
Jesus in Paul’s letters. To assist with this conceptual distinction, I will hereafter
refer to the Gospels’ Jesus as ‘the Nazarene’, a Markan appellation, used lately
by Ernst Käsemann.12 I will use the name ‘Jesus’ solely to refer to the figure of
Jesus in the authentic Paul. It is this latter figure whom we must identify.
Gathercole presents his methodology as an example of a ‘counterfactual
approach to history’, since we do in fact possess other nt writings to use as his-
torical sources, in addition to Paul’s authentic letters.13 However, Gathercole’s
method is not counterfactual, when considering the best evidence for early
Christian faith. Paul’s undisputed letters are generally held to be our only
sources for that faith clearly written before 70 ce, and in general, modern
historiography favors sources written closer in time and proximity to events
than later ones.14 Of course, the Gospels (and Acts) may attest to earlier tradi-
tions, perhaps even to hypothetical texts, but we must still favor earlier sources
and extant texts over later sources and hypothetical ones when investigating
the past historically, all other things being equal. The Gospels, as historical
documents, are themselves interpretations of events, that historians must in
turn interpret contextually.15 The Gospels’ historical context includes the fact
that they were composed after Paul’s career, not contemporary with it, and

12 Ναζαρηνός, Mk 1.24; 10.47; 14.67; 16.6; see for example Ernst Käsemann, On Being a Disciple
of the Crucified Nazarene: Unpublished Lectures and Sermons (trans. Roy A. Harrisville; ed.
Rudolf Landau and Wolfgang Kraus; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), throughout.
14 Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 5th
edn, 1992), p. 158; John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in
the Study of History (London: Routledge, 6th edn, 2015), p. 74; Arthur Bellinzoni, The New
Testament: An Introduction to Biblical Scholarship (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), p. 18;
Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer on Historical Method (New York: Knopf,
2nd edn, 1969), p. 90; Udo Schnelle, The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings
(trans. M. Eugene Boring; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), p. 16.
15 Jens Schröter, From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of
the New Testament Canon (trans. Wayne Coppins; Baylor–Mohr Siebeck Studies in Early
Christianity; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), pp. 21–32, 33–35, 38–42, 47–48; Chris
Keith, Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee (lnts, 413; New York: T&T
Clark, 2011), pp. 61–69.
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are thus in many ways secondary to Paul as sources for understanding earliest
Christianity. As Kathy Ehrensperger writes,
[W]hatever stance concerning the reliability of the Gospels as sources for

factual historical information one advocates, we are dealing with a wide
scholarly consensus that the Gospels in their literary form have emerged
after the undisputed letters of Paul. The issue at stake, then, is that the
historically later literary traditions, the Gospels, are used to substantiate,
prove, and evaluate the historically earlier literary tradition (Pauline Let-
ters). There are significant problems in such a use of sources. Using the
later to substantiate an earlier source seems anachronistic at best. The
differences between the sociopolitical contexts of the Gospels as literary
traditions and of the Letters of Paul are significant.16
Ehrensperger goes on to treat Paul’s authentic letters as primary sources for

understanding earliest Christianity, noting that ‘This is not to deny that there
may be earlier traditions remembered in the Gospel narratives; establishing
this, however, requires more hypothetical grounds than the early literary wit-
ness of Paul’.17 Thus, Gathercole’s method is simply good historical method,
when considering the earliest evidence for Christian faith and practice.
The Gospels do not seem to even mention Paul, much less try to contradict
him, and so in many ways there is simply no need to directly reconcile their
testimony with his. Furthermore, when they do depict the Nazarene as the
risen Christ, they emphasize the disciples’ doubts, not their faith.18 The earliest
Gospel, Mark, in its original form (as we have it) apparently did not portray
the risen Nazarene even appearing to anyone, and the next-earliest Gospel,
Matthew, ends by describing certain disciples’ doubts about his resurrection
(although some do worship him).19 Even in later documents like the Gospels
of Luke and John, and the Longer (and Shorter) Ending of Mark, references to
apostolic faith in the Nazarene’s resurrection are mingled with references to
16 Kathy Ehrensperger, ‘At the Table: Common Ground Between Paul and the Historical
Jesus’, in James H. Charlesworth, Brian Rhea, and Petr Pokorný (eds.), Jesus Research: New
Methods and Perspectives (Princeton-Prague Symposia Series on the Historical Jesus, 2;
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), pp. 531–50 (534). I am grateful to Prof. Ehrensperger for
providing me with a version of her article.
17 Ehrensperger, ‘At the Table’ (537–38).
18 J. David Woodington, The Dubioius Disciples, Doubt and Disbelief in the Post-Resurrection
Scenes of the Four Gospels (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), pp. 1–21, 174–77.
19 Mk 16.8; Mt. 28.9, 17. Schnelle advises that an original ending of Mark’s Gospel may well be
lost (Schnelle, History and Theology, pp. 206–207).

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doubt, and failures to even recognize his risen appearance.20 In hypothetical

sources like Q or a pre-Markan passion narrative, resurrection appearances of
the Nazarene are not even postulated.21 In comparison, Paul is emphatic that
his Christ appeared to Cephas, James, and the rest, and to Paul not long after-
wards, and that he proclaims their gospel.22 Thus, reconciling the authentic
Paul with the earliest Gospel testimony suggests that the gospel he and his con-
temporaries proclaimed was something different from faith in the Nazarene’s
resurrection. Acts does depict both Paul and the apostles proclaiming the risen
Nazarene, but Acts is quite late, perhaps even from the early second century, and
the speeches it puts in the mouths of the apostles are regarded as invented.23
Like the Gospels, it too is an interpretation of past events, that must in turn
be interpreted historically, and scholars generally regard its account as sec-
ondary to Paul, and frequently fictional, portraying Paul in ways very different
from Paul’s own self-portrait.24 Scholars generally agree that we should, at least,
favor Paul’s account when he and Acts contradict.25 Yet even as a supplement
to Paul’s gospel or to his self-account, Acts should still be viewed with extreme
suspicion: as Paula Fredriksen writes, ‘Luke…can and does take liberties with
his material which today we would grant only to the historical novelist…Thus,
in the absence of independent evidence…we should not import his material to
fill in (much less dictate the outline of) information we have from Paul.’26 Again,
following well-established historical methods, to best understand Paul and the
gospel of the early church, we must turn exclusively to the authentic Paul, with-
out any presuppositions regarding the referent of the name ‘Jesus’ in his letters.
Preliminaries: the Source of Paul’s Gospel
Turning to that evidence for Paul’s Jesus, one notices that Paul insists he did not
receive his gospel from a human being, but directly experienced a revelation of
20 Mk 16.9–14; Lk. 27.11–43, 52; Jn 20.8–16, 20, 24–29; 21.1–14.

21 Schnelle, History and Theology, pp. 182–85, 207.
22 1 Cor. 15.1–8.
23 Schnelle, History and Theology, pp. 260, 260 n. 2, 270. On the date of Acts, see also Patrick
Hart, A Prolegomenon to the Study of Paul (MTSRSup, 15; Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 75–76.
24 Schröter, From Jesus, pp. 38, 42–47, 48, 209, 219–25, 275; Bellinzoni, New Testament, pp.
269, 277, 301; Paula Fredriksen, ‘Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox
Traditions, and the Retrospective Self’, JTS 37 (1986), pp. 3–34 (5, 7–9); Philip Rousseau, The
Early Christian Centuries (Pearson Education, 2002; repr., Oxford: Routledge, 2013), p. 24.
25 Fredriksen, ‘Paul and Augustine’, p. 7; Schnelle, History and Theology, 16.
26 Fredriksen, ‘Paul and Augustine’, pp. 18–19 (19). See also Hart, Prolegomenon, p. 83; J. Albert
Harrill, Paul the Apostle: His Life and Legacy in Their Roman Context (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), pp. 7–11.

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Jesus (Gal. 1.1, 12). When he does explain how he received his knowledge that
Jesus died, was buried, and was resurrected, he says he received it ‘in accord-
ance with the Scriptures’ (κατὰ τὰς γραφὰς, 1 Cor. 15.3–4, nrsv).27 Paul’s lan-
guage clearly describes these events in past historical time, and yet, as Seyoon
Kim notes, Paul apparently depicted Jesus’ crucifixion directly to the Galatians
(at Gal. 3.1), claimed his own body bore the marks of Jesus (Gal. 6.17) and the
‘putting to death’ of Jesus (νέκρωσιν, 2 Cor. 4.10, Kim’s translation), and stated
his aim was to ‘participate’ in Jesus’ suffering and become ‘conformed’ to his
death (κοινωνίαν, συμμορφιζόμενος, Phil. 3.10, Kim’s translation).28 At 2 Cor.
4.10–11, Paul expands this language to include all Christians, writing that they
are ‘always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may
also be made visible [φανερωθῇ] in our bodies. For while we live, we are always
being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made
visible in our mortal flesh.’ For Paul, all Christians participate in Jesus’ death
and resurrection (Rom. 6.3–6).
Of course, this Pauline language of embodiment and participation has long
drawn the attention of scholars and theologians.29 Yet that language, when
considered in isolation, only ever describes Jesus’ death in terms of the com-
munity. That implies that although Paul understood the death of Jesus as a
historical event in time, it was also a collective event, shared and experienced
by many. Consequently, I have recently proposed that the name Jesus in Paul
does not refer to the historical Nazarene, but rather to a corporate figure,
embodied by the Nazarene’s Jewish community, and its shared historical expe-
rience.30 That proposal does not seem immediately implausible: it is unrelated
to the mythicist hypothesis, and takes seriously the Nazarene’s historical exist-
ence.31 We are, of course, conditioned by the other New Testament writings,
27 Unless otherwise specified, direct translations of Scripture will use the nrsv.
28 Seyoon Kim, ‘Jesus, Sayings of’, DPL, pp. 474–92 (486, perhaps using the web). Kim is
otherwise sympathetic to the idea of implicit references in Paul to Jesus tradition.
29 As a recent example, see Klyne Snodgrass, ‘The Gospel of Participation’, in Alan Avery-
Peck, Craig A. Evans, and Jacob Neusner (eds.), Earliest Christianity within the Boundaries
of Judaism (Festschrift Bruce Chilton; Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 413–30. See also the essays in
Michael J. Thate, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and Constantine R. Campbell (eds.), “In Christ” in Paul:
Explorations in Paul’s Theology of Union and Participation (wunt, 2/384; Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2014).
30 Michael T. Zeddies, ‘Communal Incarnation: A Reinterpretation of Paul’s Christology’
(paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Region of the sbl, Notre Dame,
IN, 2 February 2018).
31 Besides the criticisms Gathercole mentions at Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 185, it is worth
pointing out that Mark’s stories about the Nazarene often resemble tales about the
Tannaim: see Bruce Chilton, Darrell L. Bock, and Daniel M. Gurtner (eds.), A Comparative

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particularly the Gospels and Acts, to identify the Nazarene with Paul’s Jesus,
but those other writings were all written after Paul’s authentic letters. When
considering those letters alone, there is nothing in them that specifically
connects the name ‘Jesus’ to the Nazarene. Again, Paul never appears in the
Gospels, and his character in Acts identifies Jesus as an individual perhaps only
at Acts 13.23–31, in a speech which scholars regard as fictionalized.32 A corpo-
rate or communal understanding of Paul’s Jesus cannot be dismissed out of
hand, and we shall first explore its possibility, before showing how Gathercole’s
own evidence demonstrates its veracity.
Collective representation of religious figures, and corporate interpreta-
tion or ‘democratization’ of messianic texts, was not unusual in Second
Temple Judaism, and was often connected to an angelic or spiritual iden-
tity.33 For example, 1Q28b (Rule of the Blessings [appendix b to 1qs])
Handbook to the Gospel of Mark: Comparisons with Pseudepigrapha, The Qumran Scrolls,
and Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Since no one argues that the Tannaim were
mythical, there seems no inherent reason to suppose that the Nazarene was mythical,
either.
32 Eve-Marie Becker, The Birth of Christian History: Memory and Time from Mark to Luke-Acts
(abrl; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 98–100. John Eifion Morgan-Wynne
explains that although elements of Paul’s speech at Acts 13.16–41 may have been based on
pre-Lukan tradition, references to the Gospel story are Luke’s work: see Morgan-Wynne,
Paul’s Pisidian Antioch Speech (Acts 13) (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2014), pp. 211–212.
Morgan-Wynne does assume that the description of the Nazarene’s burial at Acts 13.29
accurately depicts Paul’s belief, expressed at 1 Cor. 15.4, that Christ was buried (Morgan-
Wynne, Speech, 107). However, that assumption simply begs the question of whether Paul
identified Christ with the Nazarene. The character of Paul describes Jesus as the Nazarene
at Acts 22.8 and 26.9 but elsewhere does not, and C. K. Barrett has explained that Paul’s
conversion story ‘shows in its threefold form (9.1–19; 22.6–21; 26.12–16) Luke’s disregard of
nice verbal accuracy’: see Barrett, “The Historicity of Acts,” NTS 50 (1999), pp. 515–534 (532).
33 See for example Joachim Becker, Messianic Expectation in the Old Testament (trans. David
E. Green; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), pp. 68–78; Hartmut Stegemann, ‘Some Remarks
to 1QSa, to 1QSb, and to Qumran Messianism’, RQ 65–68 (1996), pp. 479–505 (501–503);
Annette Steudel, ‘The Eternal Reign of the People of God: Collective Expectations in
Qumran Texts (4Q246 and 1qm)’, RQ 65–68 (1996), pp. 507–525; Gerbern S. Oegema, The
Anointed and His People: Messianic Expectations from the Maccabees to Bar Kochba (JSPSup,
27; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), pp. 115–16; William M. Schniedewind, Society and
the Promise to David: The Reception History of 2 Samuel 7:1–17 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 89–90, 106, 115–18, 161–63; Andrew Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish
Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology (wunt, 207; Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2007), pp. 227, 227–28 n. 123, with a caveat at pp. 291, 291–92 n. 323; Matthew
S. Harmon, She Must and Shall Go Free (bznw, 168; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 39, 83 n.
129, 152 n. 97.

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declares that the community’s members are like a heavenly angel.34

Baruch 3.37–4.1 describes how a divine Wisdom, embodied in the Torah,
could manifest the deity in a corporate incarnation, among the earthly
community of Israel.35 Israel was regarded collectively by various writers
as the true Adam and the son of God, and Paul connects those collective
terms to both Jesus and the church (1 Cor. 15.45–49; 2 Cor. 1.19; Gal. 3.26).36
Very recently, Marcel Krusche has written of the ‘tendency in the Second
Temple period and afterwards to collectivize the divine promises to David’,
noting that this tendency also extends to the Suffering Servant figure of
Deutero-Isaiah.37 By the third century ce, rabbis taught that the messianic
prophecies of the Bible applied not to an individual, but to the Jewish peo-
ple collectively.38 A corporate or communal concept of incarnation seems
to fit within this background. Indeed, Paul himself employs corporate rep-
resentation directly at Gal. 3.29–4.3, referring to the heirs (κληρονόμοι) of
Abraham as a single heir (κληρονόμος). And at Gal. 4.21–31, he describes the
offspring of Hagar and Sara as children (τέκνων, τέκνα), yet each also as a
single child (ἕνα, ὁ).39
Themes of messianic incorporation, participation, and solidarity in Paul’s
works and his scriptural sources have been emphasized by N. T. Wright, whose
34 1Q28b/1QSb iii 22, iv 24–25; James H. Charlesworth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, ‘Blessings
(1QSb)’, in James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek
Texts with English Translations, I, Rule of the Community and Related Documents (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), pp. 120, 126–27.
35 Sean A. Adams, Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah: A Commentary Based on the Texts in
Codex Vaticanus (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 42–43, 113–116.
36 Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Jesus Monotheism, I, Christological Origins: The Emerging Consensus
and Beyond (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), pp. 237–39. Elsewhere Fletcher-Louis writes
that there are several texts where Adam is given ‘an identity which is recapitulated by
the righteous of subsequent generations, in Israel as a whole and in specific communities
within Israel’: see Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Luke-Acts: Angels, Christology, and Soteriology
(wunt, 2/94; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1997), p. 144. Fletcher-Louis also describes other
traditions of an ‘angelomorphic Israel’ who ‘could see itself embodying, and recapitulating
the identity of Adam’, traditions that seem to date to the first century (Fletcher-Louis, Luke-
Acts, pp. 165–72 [171]).
37 Marcel Krusche, ‘A Collective Anointed? David and the People in Psalm 89’, JBL 139 (2020),
pp. 87–105 (104, 104 n. 78). Krusche reviews substantial German scholarship on the psalm.
38 Origen, Cels. 1.55.
39 Richard B. Hays cites Gal. 4.21–31 as evidence that Paul’s interpretation of Scripture is
‘ecclesiocentric’: see Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), pp. 84–87. Paul also portrays the corporate child-heir as no different
from a slave (δούλου) at Gal. 4.1, which hints that the form of a slave (δούλου) that Christ
takes at Phil. 2.7 is similarly corporate.

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approach has been recently developed and defended to some degree by

J. Thomas Hewitt and Matthew V. Novenson.40 James D. G. Dunn also empha-
sizes the importance of these themes for Paul.41 As Wright explains, in Paul,
‘The usage of Χριστός is incorporative, that is, Paul regularly uses the word
to connote, and sometimes even to denote, the whole people of whom the
Messiah is the representative’.42 Wright has written that in intertestamental
literature,
The concept of Israel as God’s son occurs frequently, sometimes explictly

[sic] linked with the divine ‘sonship’ of the Davidic king. Some references
to the king are actually reinterpreted as referring to the ‘true Israel’, which
can be narrowed down to the elect and righteous within the nation, and
which points forward to the hope of the Messianic ‘son of God’.43
Russell Phillip Shedd mentioned various scriptural passages ‘which describe

the “Anointed”, but apply the title almost without distinction to the people.
The representation of the king is realistic enough for “anointed” and “people”
to be synonymous.’44 Shedd notes that Paul seems to identify both Christ and
the church with the Son of Man figure from Dan. 7, and writes:
If Paul actually sees the Church as the fulfillment of Daniel’s corporate

figure, an obvious link is closed between the Old Testament conception
of the ‘righteous remnant’ identified with the Messiah and the Church as
40 See for example N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Paul and the Law in Pauline
Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), pp. 18–55; J. Thomas Hewitt and Matthew V.
Novenson, ‘Participationism and Messiah Christology in Paul’, in Christoph Heilig, J.
Thomas Hewitt, and Michael Bird (eds.), God and the Faithfulness of Paul (wunt, 2/413;
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), pp. 393–415. Fletcher-Louis earlier disputed Wright’s claim
that ‘royal messiah language’ was representative, but now finds his own support for it
(Fletcher-Louis, Christological Origins, p. 238; Crispin Fletcher-Louis, ‘King Solomon, a New
Adam and Incorporate Representative of God’s People [1 Kings 3–4]: A Text That Supports
N. T. Wright on Paul and the Messiah’, in John Anthony Dunne, Eric Lewellen [eds.], One
God, One People, One Future [Festschrift N. T. Wright; London: spck, 2018], pp. 126–47).
41 Dunn, Theology, pp. 390–412, 533–61.
42 Wright, Climax, p. 46. See also N. T. Wright, ‘Messiahship in Galatians?’, in Pauline
Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978–2013 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), pp. 510–46, especially
529–44, although Wright still points to the historical Nazarene.
43 N. T. Wright, ‘Messiah and the People of God: A Study in Pauline Theology with Particular
Reference to the Argument of the Epistle to the Romans’, Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford,
1980, p. 13.
44 Russell Philip Shedd, Man in Community: A Study of St. Paul’s Application of Old Testament
and Early Jewish Conceptions of Human Solidarity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), p. 30.

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226 zeddies
the True Israel constituted through Christ. Thus, the saints which form
the corporate personality of the Messiah before His death (i.e. of Jesus)
are reconstituted after His resurrection as the reincarnation of the per-
sonality of Christ, which is His Body.45
Shedd’s term ‘corporate personality’ has been criticized, and I will avoid it
except in quotation, but it remains meaningful when used carefully.46 In the
above passage, Shedd describes a corporate, messianic figure, composed of the
righteous of Israel, that exists both prior to Christ’s death, and following it.
Later, Shedd argues that Paul identifies Christ with the Suffering Servant of
Deutero-Isaiah, and adds:
Although Paul individualizes the figure of the Servant of the Lord as do

the Songs of the Servant, there is another side to the issue. He in no way
emasculates the corporate character of the Old Testament figure but
gives it new meaning in the identification of Christ with the Church. The
conception oscillates between the individual and the collective in the
mind of Paul so that he does not distinguish between the experience of
the Servant and that of the Community which He incorporates.47
If an earthly community can represent messianic figures for Paul and his audi-
ences, and if it can do so both before the figure’s death and after, neither Paul
nor his audiences would have needed to supplement that representation with
reference to an individual person. The suffering pre-Christian, Jewish commu-
nity included the historical Nazarene, of course, but Paul would have needed
to refer only to that community, and to its shared history, to describe Χριστός,
‘Christ’, or even Ἰησοῦς, ‘Joshua’ or ‘Jesus’.
45 Shedd, Man in Community, pp. 139–41 (140). See also Hewitt and Novenson,
‘Participationism’, pp. 406–409.
46 S. Aaron Son, Corporate Elements in Pauline Anthropology: A Study of Selected terms, Idioms,
and Concepts in the Light of Paul’s Usage and Background (AnBib, 145; Rome: Editrice
Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 2001), pp. 75–79. Wright says although it ‘must now be used
carefully’, it ‘is certainly not to be abandoned altogether’ (Wright, Climax, p. 46 n. 17). See
also Hewitt and Novenson, ‘Participationism’, pp. 398–99. Dunn is more critical at Dunn,
Theology, p. 549.
47 Shedd, Man in Community, p. 144; see also pp. 144–46, 147; and see Hays, Echoes, p. 63.
Harmon discusses references to Isaiah in Galatians extensively (Harmon, She Must,
especially pp. 71–74, 117 n. 250, 119–20 n. 257; see also pp. 11–15, 106–110, 110–111, on references
in other letters). Harmon especially mentions Florian Wilk, Die Bedeutung des Jesajesbuches
für Paulus (frlant, 179; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), at Harmon, She Must,
pp. 12–13, 108, 254–55. On Christ as the Servant in Paul see Harmon, She Must, pp. 115–17.

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Wright still assumes that Ἰησοῦς in Paul refers to the individual, human
Nazarene, as an earthly and raised figure.48 However, as natural as that assump-
tion might seem, Wright provides no textual basis for it from Paul’s works. In
his dissertation, Wright introduced the Gospels’ Jesus as a ‘representative’ fig-
ure, to provide a background for Paul’s own corporate perspective, but that
does not establish that Paul’s Ἰησοῦς was the Nazarene, especially since Paul’s
letters chronologically preceded the Gospels.49 Instead, we might consider the
tantalizing evidence that late Second Temple Judaism already connected the
name Ἰησοῦς with a messianic figure.50 The best evidence for this, perhaps, is
the Sexta version of Hab. 3.13, which speaks of the salvation of God’s people
‘through Jesus your anointed’ (διὰ Ἰησοῦν τὸν χριστόν σου).51 Although some
see a Christian influence here, Robert Kraft explains that for various reasons,
‘a “Jewish” origin of the “Sexta” version of Hab 3.13 seems entirely possible’.52
This suggests an alternative reference for Paul’s Jesus, and the Sexta verse even
describes the figure as ‘anointed’, χριστόν.
Wright himself declares that ‘Israel according to the flesh is the son of God’;
yet so is Paul’s Jesus (Rom. 1.3; 8.3; Gal. 4.4).53 That suggests that Ἰησοῦς, like
Χριστός, is a corporate term in Paul. Wright does note that Paul treats these
terms differently, and perhaps the latter is used more incorporatively than the
former.54 However, in the authentic Paul, Ἰησοῦς is typically found in combi-
nation with Χριστός: 57 times as Ἰησοῦς Χριστός and 49 times as Χριστός Ἰησοῦς,
but only fifteen times alone.55 Thus, Ἰησοῦς and Χριστός seem to denote the
same figure, even if their connotations may differ.56 And since that figure is
corporate, the connotations of Ἰησοῦς and Χριστός, even if different, do share a
corporate sense. Wright himself points to Rom. 16.10–11 and 1 Cor. 1.11 as exam-
ples of identifying corporate groups with individual figures, writing that ‘a “cor-
porate” (i.e. “family” or “household”) solidarity could thus be linked even with a
48 Wright, Climax, pp. 45–46; Wright, ‘Messiah’, p. 20.

49 Wright, ‘Messiah’, pp. 14–15.
50 Martha Himmelfarb, Jewish Messiahs in a Christian Empire: A History of the Book of
Zerubbabel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 107–108; Robert A. Kraft, ‘Was
There a “Messiah-Joshua” Tradition at the Turn of the Era?’, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/
gopher/other/journals/kraftpub/Christianity/Joshua [accessed May 19 2020].
51 Robert A. Kraft, Exploring the Scripturesque: Jewish Texts and their Christian Contexts
(Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 68.
52 Kraft, Scripturesque, pp. 68–69.
53 Wright, ‘Messiah’, pp. 17–18 (18).
54 Wright, Climax, pp. 44–45.
55 Dunn, Theology, p. 196 (counting sixteen uses of Ἰησοῦς alone, including Eph. 4.21);
Novenson, Christ, p. 99, and see also pp. 99–102 for some discussion).
56 Novenson, Christ, pp. 117–19, especially 119. See also Wright, ‘Messiah’, p. 19.

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proper name’.57 This suggests that the name Ἰησοῦς, closely connected in Paul
to the corporate Χριστός, may likewise refer somehow to a community.
I will therefore re-evaluate Gathercole’s evidence from the perspective of
corporate, communal incarnation. Although that evidence demonstrates that
Paul’s Jesus was earthly and human, I will show that it does not refer to an
individual person, but rather to a corporate figure, addressed as an individual
by Paul, but who was embodied corporately, by the community to which the
Nazarene belonged, the ‘remnant’ (λεῖμμα) of Israel.58 I will treat that evidence
in full, addressing each of the Gathercole article’s sections in order (but some-
times two at a time). Following Gathercole’s method as much as possible, I will
primarily consider New Testament evidence from Paul’s undisputed letters,
although I will at times introduce other relevant sources to help contextual-
ize Paul’s thought and language. In a substantial excursus, I will devote some
attention to Paul’s derivation of the name ‘Jesus’. I hope to not only demon-
strate the plausibility of my thesis, but also to persuade the reader that it is the
best understanding of Paul’s Jesus, given all the evidence from Paul, in light of
his social, religious, and literary background. I will also briefly suggest some
directions for further study.
Humanity: Anarthrous Terms and Adam Christology
The passages Gathercole cites often emphasize shared or collective character-

istics when describing Paul’s historical, human Christ Jesus. Although these
include seemingly biographical references to Jesus’ birth and human nature,
the sense that Paul is referring to an individual is only found in the translations
Gathercole uses: the original Greek does not have that sense. The first verse
Gathercole cites is Gal. 4.4, which describes the birth of Christ, and Gathercole
translates γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός there as ‘born from a woman’.59 Various English
versions of the Bible also use that phrasing.60 However, other versions omit
the article, using ‘born of woman’.61 As Gathercole himself notes, the Greek
phrase seems related to a family of idioms simply meaning ‘human being’.62
Furthermore, γυναικός lacks an article here, i.e. is anarthrous or non-specific,
57 Wright, ‘Messiah’, p. 272 n. 61 (τοὺς ἐκ τῶν Ἀριστοβούλου, τοὺς ἐκ τῶν Ναρκίσσου in Rom., ὑπὸ
τῶν Χλόης in 1 Cor.).
58 Rom. 11.5, 7.
60 Examples include the nrsv, nabre, niv, nasb, and net.
61 See for example the rsv and esv.

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and so, based on the context, it can be understood and translated without one,
to describe womankind generally, rather than a specific woman.63 Richard
N. Longenecker confirms that ἐκ γυναικός can be an ‘idiom simply for being
human’.64 Dunn explains that ‘the reference is simply to Jesus’ ordinary
humanness, not to his birth’, that ‘Jesus was sent as man (born of woman, not
born of a woman)’, and that ‘the phrase “born of woman” is chosen to express
a primarily soteriological point…rather than a particular event in the life of
Christ’.65 Paul uses the singular ἐκ γυναικός, without an article, at 1 Cor. 11.8,
where it refers generally to human birth from womankind, not to an individual
birth from an individual woman, and most English Bible translations use ‘from
woman’ there, not ‘from a woman’. Translating γυναικός in Gal. 4.4 as ‘a woman’
assumes it refers to an individual human’s mother from the outset, and should
be avoided. The verse does not describe an individual human and his mother:
it merely depicts Christ as human, in a qualitative sense that a community
might bear corporately.
A similar issue is found at 1 Cor. 15.21. Gathercole cites this verse as describing Jesus
as ‘a human being’, translating ἀνθρώπου here as ‘a man’.66 However, the substantives
(i.e. the nouns) in 1 Cor. 15.21 are likewise anarthrous (δι᾽ ἀνθρώπου…δι᾽ ἀνθρώπου).67
Although many modern English Bible versions translate δι᾽ ἀνθρώπου as ‘by a man’ or
‘by a human being’, the English translation that prevailed until the twentieth century
was simply ‘by man’, a rendering still often used.68 Paul seems to use δι᾽ ἀνθρώπου in
just that sense at Gal. 1.1.69 The term ἄνθρωπος in 1 Cor. 15.21 can thus refer to a general,
63 As Stanley Porter explains, ‘When the article is not used, the substantive may refer to the non-
particular or qualitative character of an item, or it may refer an individual item…Matters of
particularity and individuality are established not on the basis of whether the article is
present, but on the basis of the wider context’: see Porter, Idioms of the Greek New Testament
(Biblical Languages: Greek 2; London: jsot Press, 2nd edn, 1994), p. 104 (emphasis original).
In that wider context, there is certainly no reference in Galatians to a historical woman of
Galilee.
64 Richard N. Longenecker, Galatians (wbc, 41; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990), pp. 170–71,
citing most of the texts that Gathercole does: lxx Job 14.1; 15.14; 25.4, and Mt. 11.11//Lk. 7.28.
65 James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the
Doctrine of the Incarnation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980), pp. 40, 41 (41). Dunn also uses
the phrase at Dunn, Theology, pp. 203, 210, 222.
68 The av/kjv uses this rendering, as does its modern update the mev, and the asv and its
own modern update the web. In commentaries, see for example Richard A. Horsley, 1
Corinthians (antc; Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), p. 204, translating 1 Cor. 15.21–22 somewhat
tersely as ‘For since through man death, also through man resurrection of the dead.’
69 Variously as ‘through man’ (rsv, esv, and web), ‘through the agency of man’ (nasb), ‘by
human agency’ (net), and ‘from human authorities’ (nrsv). Related phrases like κατὰ

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non-specific sense of humanity or human nature, rather than to an individual human

being. Such a non-specific reading would be compatible with the adjoining verse that
Gathercole cites, 1 Cor. 15.22, which describes a collective death ‘in Adam’ (ἐν τῷ Ἀδὰμ)
and collective resurrection ‘in Christ’ (ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ).
A corporate sense of Paul’s human Christ seems to emerge here. As Anthony
C. Thiselton summarizes, citing F. F. Bruce,
Adam is, for Paul, both an individual and a corporate entity: “he was what
his Hebrew name signifies – ‘mankind’. The whole of mankind is viewed
as originally existing in Adam.” … In continuity with the promises of the
ot Paul thinks of Adam and of humankind both in structural-corporate
and individual terms, just as the language concerning the righteous Suf-
fering Servant in Isaiah 40–55 oscillates between depicting the Servant as
an individual and as a corporate people.70
Wright argues it is specifically Israel whom Adam represents, but still empha-
sizes the figure’s association with a community.71 If death ‘in Adam’ in 1 Cor.
15.22 bears a collective sense here, so, it seems, does life ‘in Christ’.72 If Adam is
represented by a community, so also is Christ.
To be sure, Thiselton also points to an individual sense of Adam and Christ,
and Gathercole explains that the argument of 1 Cor. 15.21–22 echoes that of
Rom. 5.15, where Paul first calls Adam ‘one’ (ἑνὸς), referring to the ‘one man’ (ἑνὸς
ἀνθρώπου) of Rom. 5.12, whose sin causes the death of many (πολλοὶ).73 Paul then
calls Jesus Christ one man (ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ), and gives him a parallel
role, as a giver of grace to the many (πολλοὺς). This seems to refer to two indi-
vidual human persons, Adam and Jesus. Yet, as Gathercole notes, at 1 Cor. 15.47,
Paul calls Adam the first man, of earth (ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ἐκ γῆς χοϊκός), and
Jesus the second man, of heaven (ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ). When Paul
compares Christ’s individuality to that of Adam, he is not referring to Christ’s
ἄνθρωπον at Gal. 1.11 and Rom. 3.5, or παρὰ ἀνθρώπου at Gal. 1.12, seem to bear a similarly
abstract or non-specific sense, and are generally given one in translations.
70 Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (nigtc; Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2000), p. 1225; F. F. Bruce, 1 and 2 Corinthians (NCB; London: Oliphants, 1971),
pp. 145–46. Ben Witherington iii writes of 1 Cor. 15.22 that ‘Unless you understand the
idea of collective personality, this will make little sense’: see Witherington, Paul’s Narrative
Thought World: The Tapestry of Tragedy and Triumph (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
1994), p. 142.
71 Wright, Climax, pp. 20–26.
72 See also Wright, ‘Messiah’, pp. 24–27.

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earthly existence, but to his heavenly post-resurrection state.74 Paul apparently

envisions the resurrected Jesus as an individual figure: indeed, as one man.75 But
that is compatible with a corporate existence on earth. In his heavenly existence,
Jesus Christ is an individual figure; in his earthly existence, he is a corporate one.
In both, he is still ‘one man’, one figure, albeit embodied in different ways.
That corporate sense of Paul’s Adam-Christ comparison is brought out by
the Adam christology that Gathercole alludes to, i.e. the portrayal in Rom.
5.12–21 and 1 Cor. 15.21–47 of Christ as another Adam, a ‘last Adam’ (ὁ ἔσχατος
Ἀδὰμ).76 Gathercole points out that Paul seems to treat Adam as a historical
figure.77 But, as Dunn explains, ‘Adam is widely used throughout the Hebrew
scriptures in the sense “humankind, human being,” ’ and Paul uses the name
in much the same way: ‘When Paul speaks of or alludes to “Adam” he speaks
of humankind as a whole.’78 At Rom. 5.12–21, Dunn describes ‘Paul’s awareness
that Adam (adam) denotes humankind’.79 Dunn is less certain than Gathercole
that Paul treats Adam as a historical person, and even suggests we may under-
stand the name in Paul as an ‘archetype of “everyman” ’.80 Dunn writes later
that at 1 Cor. 15.21–22, ‘Adam is clearly understood in some sort of representa-
tive capacity’.81 Wright similarly points to a collective understanding of Paul’s
‘last Adam’, writing that ‘the last Adam is the eschatological Israel’, and that
Paul’s Adam christology must be understood against ‘the apocalyptic belief
that Israel is the last Adam’.82 Thus, when Paul calls Jesus an Adam or compares
74 Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, rev. edn, 2014),
p. 877. See also Dunn, Christology, pp. 107–108; Dunn, Theology, pp. 260, 289. I leave aside
the complex question of Christ’s preexistence, since it is not important for my proposal.
Larry Hurtado includes 1 Cor. 15.47 among references to some form of preexistence for
Christ: see Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 119. However, that remains compatible with my proposal, since
a preexistent Christ may still become incarnate communally.
75 1 Thess. 4.16–17; Rom. 8.34. Union with the risen, individual figure is apparently a future
event for Paul (see also Phil. 1.23–24, 1 Cor. 15.22–23, 48–49; 2 Cor. 5.1–10).
76 1 Cor. 15.45; Dunn, Theology, pp. 199–204, 208–212, 241–42.
78 Dunn, Theology, pp. 82, 83.
79 Dunn, Theology, p. 94.
81 Dunn, Theology, p. 200. (Dunn mis-numbers the verses when quoting them.)
82 Wright, Climax, pp. 35, 39. C. F. D. Moule writes that Paul ‘finds in Christ not only true
Israel but renewed mankind’: see Moule, The Origins of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), p. 94. Similarly, Wright, although he identifies Paul’s Jesus with the
Nazarene, emphasizes that the people of Christ form the eschatological Israel, saying Paul
has ‘substituted Jesus and his people for Israel’, and that ‘Christ, and his people, form the
true humanity which Israel was called to be’ (Wright, Climax, pp. 28, 36).

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the two figures, he likewise refers in some sense to a community or collective.

As S. Aaron Son has put it, both Adam and Christ ‘are corporate persons who
include their respective followers’.83
This corporate perspective also helps explain the terms ‘likeness’ (ὁμοιώματι)
and ‘in appearance’ (σχήματι) at Phil. 2.7–8.84 Gathercole explains that these
attribute a real humanity to Jesus, and not some imitation of it. Nevertheless,
they do not describe the incarnation of Jesus as an individual person. Jesus does
not come in the likeness of a man, but rather in the likeness of men, ἀνθρώπων,
suggesting that he resembles them collectively, in their corporate aspect. He
bears human likeness, because he is constituted by humans. Similarly, Jesus
was found in appearance not as a man, but as man, ὡς ἄνθρωπος, another anar-
throus term. The emphasis here is not on Jesus’ individuality, but on his human-
ity.85 And although Rom. 8.3 describes him as sent in the ‘likeness’ (ὁμοιώματι)
of flesh, that term does not obviously describe an individual’s body.86 Rather,
it evokes the plural likeness of men in Phil. 2.7, and thus refers to their shared
flesh, suggesting that Jesus’ flesh was shared or corporate. Whenever Paul
describes Jesus’ humanity, his language encourages a corporate understanding
of it. Logically, that understanding should include Jesus’ historical humanity.
These readings also seem exegetically helpful, which should help persuade
the reader that they portray Paul’s intent. For example, in Gal. 4.4–5, Paul writes
that the divine Son is sent and born of woman, becoming human, so that (ἵνα)
83 Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 27–30 (27); see also pp. 61–65. Son explains that this
understanding has a Jewish background (Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 66, 70–72, 75–79).
Of the ἐν Χριστῷ formula, Son explains that ‘the locative meaning of the formula may
imply that Paul understands Christ as a corporate person in whom believers are included’
(Son, Corporate Elements, p. 30; see also pp. 8–17). Son does regard Adam and Christ as
‘individuals in human history’, but can only demonstrate their historicity and humanity
(citing the same passages as Gathercole does), not that they were both individual human
beings (Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 59–60 [60]).
84 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, pp. 188–91 (Gathercole’s translation, also nabre).
85 Unlike ‘man’, the English word ‘human’ has no non-specific form: as a noun, it always
carries an article. Therefore, if ‘human’ is preferred to ‘man’ here, it must be used as an
adjective, e.g. ‘in human form’ (rsv, nrsv, esv, web), but that obscures the Greek. Some
commentaries and studies use ‘as man’: see for example Moisés Silva, Philippians (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2nd edn, 2005), pp. 93, 99, although Silva unexpectedly uses ‘as
a man’ at p. 106. Dunn emphasizes ‘not “as a man”, but as man’ at Dunn, Christology, p. 118,
albeit as a reading of Phil. 2.5–11 as Adam-christology, which remains a controversial view.
86 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 191. Brendan Byrne writes of ὁμοιώματι that ‘here, as in Phil 2:7,
the meaning most applicable would be that of the concrete form or pattern in which a
reality (sometimes a transcendent reality) manifests itself’, adding that ‘ “flesh” for Paul
implies existence within a sphere or realm of human weakness’: see Byrne, Romans (sp, 6;
Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), p. 243.

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the community might receive sonship (τὴν υἱοθεσίαν ἀπολάβωμεν). The logic
here seems more direct if we assume a corporate identity for the Son: the
human community, whether Jewish or Gentile, receives sonship, because the
Son was born communally, as humanity is. As a related example, Longenecker
defends reading these verses as a chiasm, with (A) the divine Son’s sending and
(B) his birth under law, reflected by (B´) the community’s redemption under
law and (A´) the community’s reception of sonship; yet despite the distinc-
tiveness of Paul’s phrase γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός, Longenecker leaves it out of
the chiasm entirely, claiming that the letter never discusses it, which not only
seems implausible, but leaves Longenecker’s chiasm somewhat undersup-
ported.87 However, a chiasm can be made more clear here by reading γενόμενον
ἐκ γυναικός as a corporate or communal expression of shared humanity, and
linking it to the Son’s sending. One can then see that (A) the Son was sent and
born communally, (A´) so that the whole community might receive sonship.88
Again, this logic also helps demonstrate how the Galatians or Gentiles receive
sonship: as humans, they too are corporately born of woman, and so, like the
Jews, they receive what the Son’s corporate human birth made possible.89
Even if a chiasm like Longenecker’s is not strictly at work here, the corporate
reading of γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός strengthens the logic of Gal. 4.4–5 overall. A
corporate understanding of the Son’s birth and humanity also suggests a fresh
reading of the following verses, 4.6–7, and even helps make some sense of their
grammar: because the Galatians, as Gentiles, are also now plural sons (Ὅτι δέ
ἐστε υἱοί), God has sent (ἐξαπέστειλεν) them the Son’s spirit, as he previously
sent (ἐξαπέστειλεν) the corporate Son directly, which transforms the Galatians/
Gentiles into a singular, i.e. corporate, son and heir (ὥστε οὐκέτι εἶ δοῦλος ἀλλʼ
87 Longenecker, Galatians, p. 166.

88 Bruce W. Longenecker does include the phrase in his version of the ‘A’ clause, but does
not discuss it, at Bruce W. Longenecker, Triumph of Abraham’s God: The Transformation of
Identity in Galatians (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 92–93.
89 This sense is suggested at Susan G. Eastman, Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue: Language
and Theology in Galatians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 46–47. Eastman mentions
the work of Morna Hooker on Pauline ‘interchange’, which Hooker explains variously
as the idea that ‘Christ became what we are, in order that we might become what he is’,
‘Christ is identified with us in order that – in him – we might share in what he is’, ‘Christ
is so identified with humanity, that he is able to act as our representative’, and similarly
elsewhere, even calling Gal. 4.4–5 ‘one of Paul’s interchange formulae’: see Morna Hooker,
From Adam to Christ: Essays on Paul (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), pp. 16, 27, 42, 59.
It is at least worth pointing out that the concept of communal incarnation I describe
would render this interchange between Christ and the faithful even more vivid and direct.
However, there is not space here to fully explore this thought, or do justice to Hooker’s
work.

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234 zeddies
υἱός, εἰ δὲ υἱός, καὶ κληρονόμος).90 Rather than ignore the phrase γενόμενον ἐκ
γυναικός, Paul seems to rely on a corporate understanding of it. Given more
space, this exegesis could use some further development, especially in relation
to Gal. 3 and the remainder of Gal. 4, but the fact that a corporate understand-
ing of Paul’s language about Jesus and Christ renders his arguments more clear
should encourage the reader that this understanding is correct, and was Paul’s
intent.
Birth, Coming, and Family: Communal Identity
Corporate traits of Jewish-Christian communities also explain the other

verses Gathercole cites to describe seemingly biographical details of Jesus’ life.
Romans 9.5 may state that Christ is from (ἐξ) the Israelites, ‘according to the
flesh’ (κατὰ σάρκα), but again, there is no obvious reason, using the evidence
from Paul, to interpret this language as a reference to an individual, earthly
Jesus.91 A corporate figure can just as easily be said to be from, or of, the phys-
ical, earthly Israel, i.e. Israel κατὰ σάρκα.92 Likewise, although Gal. 3.16 states
that Christ descends from Abraham, as one seed, this expresses a corporate
descent. In Shedd’s words,
The ‘seed’ of Abraham is not merely an individual but a corporate figure

including in Himself all of the true sons of Abraham even as Isaac had
incorporated ethnic Israel in himself…It is this corporate figure to which
Paul is referring in the Epistle to the Galatians [Gal 3.28]…Christ is here
viewed as a corporate personality who includes in Himself all of the true
sons of Abraham thus annulling the age-old cleavage between Jew and
Gentile, slave and freeman, male and female.93
This helps explain Paul’s insistence that the collective noun σπέρματί (‘seed’)
is to be understood as a singular one: his point is that the corporate Christ is
to be regarded as a single figure, to whom the prophecies of Scripture may still
90 Richard N. Longenecker suggests that with εἶ, Paul is addressing each Galatian individually
at Gal. 4.7, citing 6.1 as an example (Longenecker, Galatians, p. 175). However, at Gal. 6.1,
Paul uses ‘yourself’ (σεαυτόν) to make it clear that he is addressing Galatian individuals,
and we see nothing like that at 4.7.
92 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 191. See also the phrase in 1 Cor. 10.18.
93 Shedd, Man in Community, p. 137; see also p. 144 n. 80; and see Harmon, She Must, p. 124 n.
3, 151–55, 192.

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apply.94 Thus, Christ Jesus was born of woman, insofar as the Jewish pre-Chris-
tian communities were. Similarly, he was also born under the law (Gal. 4.4),
insofar as they were.
Paul’s use of forms of the verb γίνομαι at Gal. 4.4, as well as at Rom. 1.3 (and
perhaps also Phil. 2.7), to describe Jesus’ birth, also suggests that he is referring
to something besides the birth of an individual. As Longenecker notes, γίνομαι
can indeed mean ‘born’ in these verses, since there are examples of that usage
in ancient Jewish literature.95 However, not only is the usage atypical in gen-
eral, but Paul applies it only to Jesus, suggesting that he regards Jesus’ human
birth as unusual in some way. Longenecker’s own examples of the usage help
explain Paul’s intention here. Four of Longenecker’s examples are found in the
Septuagint, and two of these, 1 Esd. 4.16 and Tob. 8.6, seem especially inter-
esting, since there is some direct evidence that Paul knew or alluded to those
works.96 The example from 1 Esdras describes the collective birth of human-
kind, from women, and seems particularly relevant to Paul’s usage at Gal. 4.4.97
For Paul and his audience, γενόμενον at Gal. 4.4 would apparently have already
carried a collective sense, reinforcing the collective sense of ἐκ γυναικός at Gal.
4.4 described above. Thus, the verb in Gal. 4.4 evokes a corporate birth from
woman or womankind, by echoing the language of 1 Esd. 4:15–16 (which admit-
tedly uses plural γυναῖκες, rather than singular γυναικός). A corporate sense of
γίνομαι would have been further reinforced by the use at Tob. 8.6 of another
form of the verb, describing how the collective, singular seed (σπέρμα) of
humankind is born or has come (ἐγενήθη) from the union of Adam and Eve.98
Thus, both 1 Esd. 4.15–16 and Tob. 8.6 use γίνομαι to describe, in different but
related ways, a collective or general birth of humankind, suggesting that when
Paul used the same distinctive verb at Rom. 1.3, he intended to depict Christ
94 Gathercole’s translation (‘Historical’, p. 191). See Wright, Climax, pp. 162–68, although he still
believes Paul’s Christ also refers to ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ (p. 165). See also Wright, ‘Messiahship
in Galatians?’, pp. 530–33.
95 Longenecker, Galatians, p. 171. Longenecker cites Rom. 1.3 itself, asserting that it is an
example of pre-Pauline usage, but even if it had been, that use would still require an
explanation.
96 John Paul Heil, The Rhetorical Role of Scripture in 1 Corinthians (SBLStBL; Atlanta: sbl,
2005), pp. 174, 175; James G. Sigountos, ‘The Genre of 1 Corinthians 13’, NTS 40 (1994), pp.
246–260 (249–51); Alexander A. Di Lella, ‘Tobit 4,19 and Romans 9,18: An Intertextual
Study’, Bib 90 (2009), pp. 260–63. Longenecker’s other two examples are Sir. 44.9, which
describes the forgetting of the dead as though they had not been born (καὶ ἐγένοντο ὡς οὐ
γεγονότες), and Wis. 7.3, which describes the author’s birth (καὶ ἐγὼ δὲ γενόμενος).
97 1 Esd. 4:15–16, αἱ γυναῖκες ἐγέννησαν τὸν βασιλέα καὶ πάντα τὸν λαὸν…καὶ ἐξ αὐτῶν ἐγένοντο.
98 σὺ ἐποίησας Ἀδάμ, καὶ ἔδωκας αὐτῷ βοηθὸν Εὕαν στήριγμα τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ. ἐκ τούτων
ἐγενήθη τὸ ἀνθρώπων σπέρμα.

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Jesus’ birth in a similarly corporate manner. Tobit 8.6 seems to especially sug-
gest this since, like Rom. 1.3, which describes Jesus’ birth ‘of the seed of David’
(γενόμενου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ), it connects γίνομαι to both a collective σπέρμα
and an ancestral figure (although it does not depict a birth from the seed). For
readers of the Septuagint, it seems that Paul’s use of forms of γίνομαι at Gal. 4.4
and Rom. 1.3 would have conveyed a corporate understanding of the human
birth these verses describe, not an individual birth.99
Jesus’ birth specifically ‘of the seed of David’ (ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ) in Rom.
1.3, is also explained by a corporate interpretation of that birth.100 We know
from Eusebius that the disciple Jude, and therefore his brother James, was
said to be a Davidide.101 Precisely because these members of the community
were collectively born of David’s seed, so also was the corporate Christ. That
Davidide ancestry also explains how these community members could be
called Christ’s brother, in kinship terms that do not derive from Paul. Since
Scripture, both Tanakh and intertestamental, at times spoke of the messiah
specifically as David’s Son (2 Sam. 7.12–14; Pss. Sol. 17), any Davidide was there-
fore also Christ’s figurative kin, allowing them to bear the pre-Pauline, special
appellation ‘the Lord’s brother/brothers of the Lord’ (Gal. 1.19 and 1 Cor. 9.5).102
That is different from Paul’s own vocabulary of siblingship, which is more uni-
versal.103 Thus the Davidides did not merely participate as spiritual Pauline
siblings in the corporate embodiment of Jesus: they were also, in a different
way, figuratively related to him.104
99 Gathercole suggests that γενομένου bears a ‘genealogical sense’ here, since Jesus is not born
directly of David (Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 191 n. 32). That may be true, but it does not
establish that the genealogical sense is applied to an individual, rather than to a collective.
100 Gathercole’s translation (Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 192).
101 Hist. Eccl. 3.19(.1), 3.20.1–2; see also 3.32.3–4 and 1.7.14. Gathercole notes that Davidic
ancestry was traceable at the time (Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 191 n. 31).
102 On the brothers of the Lord, Larry Hurtado writes that ‘Paul seems to be referring to these
figures in formulaic expressions by which they were honorifically designated in their own
circles’ (Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ, p. 111). On the son of David in Pss. Sol. and elsewhere,
see for example Michael E. Fuller, The Restoration of Israel: Israel’s Re-Gathering and the
Fate of the Nations in Early Jewish Literature and Luke-Acts (bznw, 138; Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 2006), pp. 162–84. The targums often describe the messiah as a son of David: Tg.
Hos. 3.5; Tg. Jer. 30.9. See also Rev. 22.16. Paul and his audiences probably also knew Pss.
Sol.: see František Ábel, The Psalms of Solomon and the Messianic Ethics of Paul (wunt,
2/416; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), pp. 1–4, 256–84, 279 n. 71.
103 See for example Reidar Aasgaard, “My Beloved Brothers and Sisters!” Christian Siblingship in
Paul (JSNTSup, 265; London: T&T Clark, 2004); Phlm. 16. Davidide brotherhood is also to
be distinguished from the kinship of Israel (Rom. 9.3–4).
104 The targums also describe the messiah as arising from or associated with Judah, as Heb.
7.14 does: see Tg. Onq. Gen. 49.9–10; Tg. Ps.-J. Gen. 49.11; Tg. Neof. Gen. 49.11. To be sure, there

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Just as these early communities were born in historical time, so also was
Paul’s corporate Jesus, in the ‘fullness of time’ (Gal. 4.4). As they and their faith
came into the world, so also did he.105 Perhaps Jesus’ second coming (1 Cor.
11.26) will be as an individual (1 Thess. 4.16–17). His first, however, was as a
community.
Excursus, Part A: the Name ‘Jesus’ as Joshua Typology
Again, the New Testament is organized to imply that the name ‘Jesus’ in Paul
and the other epistles refers to the Gospels’ Jesus. However, the name was also
used by early Christians in the practice of Scriptural interpretation known
as ‘Joshua typology’. As Gathercole points out, the name ‘Jesus’ is simply the
name Ἰησοῦς, ‘Joshua’.106 Gathercole, rightly, dismisses Carrier’s proposal that
this was the name of a Philonic angel whom early Christians worshipped.
But Gathercole implies we are to then assume that Paul must be speaking of
a human individual named Jesus. The Joshua passages that Gathercole dis-
cusses, from Zechariah, suggest an alternative. Zechariah 6.12–13, commonly
understood as prophetic, speak of what Gathercole describes as a ‘ “Rising”
or…“Sprout” figure’, or ‘Anatolē’ (ἀνατολή), a messianic persona.107 Gathercole
points out that for various reasons, this figure ‘is either Zerubbabel or an
eschatological figure, but cannot be Joshua’.108 That seems, on balance, cor-
rect. Nevertheless, early Christians seem to have given their own messianic,
eschatological figure of Christ the name of Joshua, Ἰησοῦς, by way of typology.
Typology is a method of Scriptural interpretation, that reads elements of
Scripture as representations of different or later events and figures, and was
used by Paul and other New Testament authors.109 As Andrew E. Hill explains,
‘By means of typology, a method of biblical interpretation that establishes
is no obviously corporate interpretation in those texts, and they may be somewhat late.
See also 4Q252 (Commentary on Genesis A) I 1–4.
105 Gal. 3.19, 23, 25.
107 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 193 n. 35.
108 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, pp. 192–93, n. 35.
109 See for example Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of The Old
Testament in the New (trans. Donald H. Madvig; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), pp. 127–
60; Hays, Echoes, pp. 86–87, 95–102, 161–62; Richard Ounsworth, Joshua Typology in the
New Testament (wunt, 2/328; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), pp. 32–40. Scripture itself
contained typology, i.e. inner-biblical exegesis: see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation
in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 350–79; Hays, Echoes, p. 164. Hays
connects Pauline typology with the broader concept of intertextuality (Hays, Echoes,

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correspondence between ot events, persons, objects, ideas and similar nt

items, the nt identifies an ot “type” fulfilled in the nt “antitype”’.110 S. Aaron
Son explains that New Testament authors like Paul ‘viewed certain Old
Testament persons, institutions, and events as shadows, types, or promises for
the New Testament realities…The “type” always has its own historical value,
although its real significance is typologically revealed in the “anti-type” or
fulfillment.’111 For example, Paul’s Adam christology is also an Adam typology,
or an Adam-Christ typology.112 Adam is the type or promise, of which Christ is
the antitype or fulfillment.113
Paul not only gives the antitype (Christ) the type’s name (Adam), but he also
understands that name in a corporate sense, as describing an eschatological
or end-times figure. As Ben Witherington iii explains, ‘Jesus is called the last
Adam, which does not mean the last human being. Rather, it is an eschatologi-
cal claim…Jesus is the “second” human being, in the corporate sense.’114 In fact
Paul never uses the name ‘Jesus’ alone in Rom. 5 or 1 Cor. 15: rather, he speaks
of ‘Christ’, ‘Christ Jesus’, or ‘Jesus Christ’. Son therefore expresses Witherington’s
observation more carefully, when he writes that ‘Adam and Christ stand in cor-
respondence as corporate figures’, despite the contrast between their actions.115
In other words, Paul calls the eschatological Christ ‘Adam’, in the corporate,
typological sense. Thus, Paul’s Christ can bear the name of corporate, typolog-
ical figures.
One such name was ‘Jesus’. The letter to the Hebrews also uses typology, to
associate Christ with Old Testament figures: specifically, with figures named
Ἰησοῦς. Paul did not write Hebrews, but it seems in close contact with Pauline
theology, and Gathercole himself describes it as ‘Paulinist’.116 The typology
of Hebrews regards the name Ἰησοῦς as messianic, and understands Old
Testament Ἰησοῦς figures as representative of Christ. Bryan J. Whitfield shows
that Hebrews uses the name not only to present Joshua son of Nun as a type of
Christ, but also to allude to the heavenly high priest Joshua, son of Jehozadak,
pp. 14–21, 33, 93, 173–78; the reader should bear in mind that the ‘typology’ of poetic
imitation which Hays describes on pp. 173–74 refers to a classification, not to exegetical
typology).
110 Andrew E. Hill, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), p. 115.
111 Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 40–41.
112 Ben Witherington iii, ‘Christology’, DPL pp. 100–115, especially 110–112; Goppelt, Typos, pp.
129–30, 134. See also Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 39–55.
113 Rom. 5.14; Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 39, 43; Witherington, ‘Christology’, pp. 110–111.
114 Witherington, ‘Christology’, p. 111.
115 Son, Corporate Elements, p. 54.

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of the related visions in Zech. 6.9–15 and 3.1–10, portraying him as a symbolic
figure who prefigures the high-priestly Christ.117 Daniel Stökl ben Ezra made
a similar argument, and Whitfield cites earlier thoughts by James Rendel
Harris.118 Whitfield argues that Hebrews draws three comparisons between
Christ and the Old Testament Joshuas, the first two with the son of Nun, but
the third with the son of Jehozadak, writing: ‘In the third comparison, the type
is no longer to the Joshua of the Pentateuch but to the Joshua of Zechariah. As
this Joshua, son of Jehozadak, is the Great High Priest of a restored priesthood
after the exile (Zech. 3), so Jesus is the Great High Priest.’119 Harris pointed out
that the comparison is found among the earliest patristic authors.120 Thus in
Hebrews, we have a Joshua-Jesus typology or, more simply, a Joshua typology,
for Christ.121
Stökl ben Ezra argues that Zech. 3 was used typologically before Hebrews, as
early as the 30s or 40s, as a ‘high-priestly Christological prooftext’ for the high
priesthood of Christ.122 That suggests that both Paul and his audiences were
familiar with that typology. As Whitfield explains, for readers of Scripture in
Greek, ‘texts about Joshua are texts about Jesus’, i.e. they are texts about Jesus
Christ.123 Paul and his audiences read Scripture in Greek, so they would have
made the same associations. Hebrews was likely written to Roman Christians
during the 60s, so they must have understood Joshua typology before that
117 Scot McKnight and Nijay K. Gupta (eds.), New Testament Studies: A Survey of Recent
Research (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), p. 403; Bryan J. Whitfield, Joshua
Traditions and the Argument of Hebrews 3 and 4 (bznw, 194; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), pp.
1–3, 39–42, 41–42, 127–204, 247, 257–64. Whitfield does not emphasize typology, but clearly
has it in mind: see for example Whitfield, Joshua Traditions, pp. 75–77, 245, 247–48. The
Hebrews author may have used a collection of testimonia that included Zech. 6.12 (Martin
C. Albl, “And Scripture Cannot Be Broken”: The Form and Function of the Early Christian
Testimonia Collections [Boston: Brill, 1999], pp. 212–213). Ounsworth, in Joshua Typology,
presented Hebrews as Joshua typology, but did not claim it was written as such.
118 Daniel Stökl ben Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: The Day of
Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century (wunt, 163; Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2003), pp. 159–61, 195–97; James Rendel Harris, ‘The Sinless High Priest’, ET 33
(1921–22), pp. 217–18; Harris, ‘Jesus and the Exodus’, Expositor, 8th series, 18 (1919), pp.
64–72.
119 Whitfield, Joshua Traditions, pp. 39–40, citing Harris, ‘Sinless’, p. 217; James Rendel Harris,
Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916/1920), 2:51–57. Zev Farber
agrees that a typology based on Joshua son of Jehozadak seems likely, but does not see any
reference to the son of Nun: see Farber, Images of Joshua, pp. 277–83, especially 282.
120 Whitfield, Joshua Traditions, p. 40; Harris, ‘The Sinless High Priest’, pp. 217–18.
121 This term more often describes the typology of Joshua son of Nun, but Farber also uses it
to describe Whitfield’s typology of Joshua ben Jehozadak (Farber, Images, p. 282).
122 Stökl ben Ezra, Impact of Yom Kippur, p. 195.
123 Whitfield, Joshua Traditions, p. 247.

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time.124 Paul wrote them only a few years before, and seems to have had
detailed knowledge of their situation.125 Therefore, he likely knew that they
understood Joshua typology. It is true that Paul never cites Zechariah directly,
but he echoes and alludes to Zech. 4.6–10 at 1 Cor. 2.3–5 and 3.10–16, in meta-
phors of weakness, temple construction, and spiritual presence.126 The vision
of Zech. 4 does not mention Joshua, but it is closely related to and continues
Zech. 3, and shares terminology and formulae with Zech. 3 and 6.9–15, reflect-
ing the messianic language of their Joshua-related prophecies.127 Paul, at least,
would have been aware of these allusions, and so would at least some of his
listeners.128 Paul uses typology at 1 Cor. 10.1–22, so it is plausible that he is using
it at 1 Cor. 2–3 as well.129 This evidence puts Paul and his audiences in dialogue
with early Christian Joshua typology, and implies that when Paul uses the
name Jesus for Christ, he, too, is performing Joshua typology. Christ, the anti-
type, bears the name of Joshua, the type. Because Paul writes that he received
his gospel ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’, his corporate messiah figure,
when regarded typologically, appears to be the direct referent of ‘Jesus’ in his
letters, and therefore would also have been the referent of the name ‘Jesus’ for
the early church in general. Again, for reasons of historical methodology, this
explanation must be preferred to the later accounts in the Gospels and Acts,
that the original reference of ‘Jesus’ in the church’s first generation was to the
individual Nazarene. Those accounts are interpretations of the past from the
generation that succeeded Paul, and hence are secondary to his.
Excursus, Part B: ‘Jesus’ as a Messianic Name
One might object that surely, the Hebrews author connects the Old Testament
Joshuas to Christ because he already shared the name Ἰησοῦς. However, it is not
124 Alan C. Mitchell, Hebrews (sp, 13; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), pp. 6–8. Some
propose a date in the early 70s (Mitchell, Hebrews, pp. 8–11).
125 Byrne, Romans, pp. 8–9; A. Andrew Das, Solving the Romans Debate (Minneapolis: Fortress,
2009), pp. 41–42.
126 H. H. Drake Williams, The Wisdom of the Wise: The Presence and Function of Scripture within
1 Cor 1:18–3:23 (agaju, 49; Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 133–38, 141, 151–56. Allusions to Zech.
4 are found in other Jewish and Christian literature of Paul’s day, including Revelation,
where we also find Zech. 4 connected with messianism (even if the Revelation author
does not explicitly portray a Joshua typology) (Williams, Wisdom, pp. 138–49).
127 See e.g. Mark J. Boda, The Book of Zechariah (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), pp. 17–23,
86–90, 104–105, 225, 269–71, 283–84, 299–301, 380–83, 385–86, 397, 413; Williams, Wisdom,
p. 141.
128 Heil, Rhetorical Role of Scripture, pp. 5–9.
129 Hays, Echoes, pp. 95–102; Williams, Wisdom, p. 43.

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obvious that when Christ bears that name in Hebrews, it is anything besides
typology. F. C. Synge noted that ‘It is rarely that [the author of] Hebrews men-
tions the name Jesus without the thought of the Old Testament Jesuses being in
the forefront of his mind’.130 In fact the author may always have them in mind:
the name Ἰησοῦς refers to Joshua son of Nun at Heb. 4.8 without distinction or
qualification, yet it is used in the same way, i.e. without qualification, through-
out the letter. This implies that the author is consistently using the name
typologically, in which case it would have been understood that way by the
letter’s audience. It seems that the typology is not applied to Christ because he
is named Ἰησοῦς; rather, Christ is called Ἰησοῦς because the typology is applied
to him. That typology seems to predate Hebrews by decades, as Stökl ben Ezra
shows, so Christ would have been given that name by the earliest members
of the Christian community. That community turned to Zechariah’s Joshua to
describe Christ, because the Joshua passages in Zechariah were already under-
stood in a messianic and eschatological sense, as Christ was.
Zechariah presents Joshua, and his companions, as a symbol of the future,
messianic Sprout figure.131 As Mark Boda writes, in the same Zechariah com-
mentary which Gathercole cites, at Zech. 3.8, ‘Joshua and his priestly associates
are not Sprout (ṣemaḥ), but somehow symbolic of this other figure. The same
symbolic logic is in play here in 6.12.’132 But if Joshua is symbolic of the Sprout
figure, then his name itself also symbolizes that figure. As Hill writes, ‘The high
priest Joshua is presented as the Branch’, and describes the ‘typological relation-
ship between Joshua and the Branch’ that Zech. 3.1–10 also describes.133 That is
to say, Joshua is not himself the Branch or Sprout, but is the type for the future,
messianic figure. That figure may therefore be called, typologically, a Joshua, or
Jesus. In this manner, ‘Jesus’ becomes a messianic, eschatological name, that
may be applied to the messianic, eschatological Christ. The Qumran commu-
nity, for example, interpreted Zech. 4.14 as a messianic text, so it would not
be unprecedented for early Christians, like the Hebrews author and Paul, to
130 Whitfield, Joshua Traditions, p. 41; F. C. Synge, Hebrews and the Scriptures (London: spck,
1959), p. 19.
131 See for example Whitfield, Joshua Traditions, pp. 155–58, 166–67, writing of the ‘messianic
associations of “Branch” ’ at p. 167. Of Zech. 3, Whitfield writes that ‘Joshua stands as a
representative of the future hope of Israel’ (Whitfield, Joshua Traditions, p. 139). On the
connection, in late Second Temple Judaism, of Zechariah’s Branch/Sprout (or ‘Shoot’)
figure with a messianic, eschatological Son of David, see Jiří Dvořáček, The Son of David in
Matthew’s Gospel in the Light of the Solomon as Exorcist Tradition (wunt, 2/415; Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2016), pp. 100–101, 103–105.
132 Boda, Zechariah (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), p. 397.
133 Hill, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, p. 177. See also Eugene H. Merrill, Haggai, Zechariah,
Malachi: An Exegetical Commentary (Chicago: Moody, 1994), p. 127.

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242 zeddies
interpret related passages in Zechariah as messianic.134 Again, when perform-

ing Adam typology, Paul calls Christ ‘Adam’; it is therefore logical that when
performing Joshua typology, he would call Christ ‘Joshua’, or ‘Jesus’. The name
‘Jesus’ can thus enter Paul’s messianic thought entirely through Scripture, by
way of typology, without any reference to a specific historical person. ‘Jesus’,
for Paul and other Christians, is already a messianic name, that derives typo-
logically from Zechariah. Just as Paul’s Adam typology was also an Adam chris-
tology, so may we call his Joshua typology messianic, i.e. a Joshua christology.
Targumic traditions would also have encouraged the typological deriva-
tion of the messianic name Ἰεσοῦς from Scripture. In the Aramaic versions of
Scripture known as targums, the name Joshua becomes yšwʿ, ‘Jesus’, and Paul
shows distinct knowledge of targumic traditions.135 The Targum Zechariah,
which bears evidence of a first-century date, also directly replaces the term
‘Sprout’ or ‘Branch’, associated with Joshua/Jesus, with mšyḥʾ, ‘Messiah’, at
Zech. 3.8 and 6.12, and also uses the term at 4.7 and 10.4.136 Thus, even if Paul
did not have a text like Targum Zechariah before him, he seems to have been in
134 Craig A. Evans, ‘ “The Two Sons of Oil”: Early Evidence of Messianic Interpretation of
Zechariah 4.14 in 4Q254 4 2’, in Donald W. Parry and Eugene Ulrich (eds.), The Provo
International Conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls: Technological Innovations, New Texts, and
Reformulated Issues (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 568–75.
135 See for example Delio DelRio, ‘The Targums and the Apostle Paul’, in Avery-Peck, Evans,
and Neusner, Earliest Christianity, pp. 151–67. Goppelt notes that at 1 Cor. 15.45, Paul
paraphrases Gen. 2.7 ‘in the manner of the targums’ (Goppelt, Typos, p. 134).
136 Williams, Wisdom, pp. 147–48; Evans, ‘ “Two Sons,” ’ p. 567 n. 3; Kevin J. Cathcart and Robert
P. Jordan, The Targum of the Minor Prophets: Translated, With a Critical Introduction,
Apparatus, and Notes (ArBib, 14; Wilmington, DE: Glazer, 1989), pp. 192, 194, 198, 209, and
see also pp. 218–19 n. 28; Alberdina Houtman, ‘He Will Reveal His Messiah: Messianism
in Targum Jonathan to the Twelve’, in Heinz-Josef Fabry (ed.), The Books of the Twelve
Prophets: Minor Prophets – Major Theologies (betl, 295; Leuven: Peeters, 2018), pp. 243–58,
especially 250–51, 252–53, and see also 254–55. Houtman notes that the same association
is found at Jer. 23.5 and 33.15, and in Qumran literature (Houtman, ‘He Will Reveal’, p. 253).
See also Martin McNamara, Targum and Testament Revisited: Aramaic Paraphrases of the
Hebrew Bible: A Light on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, rev. edn, 2010),
pp. 135, 249; Paul V. M. Flesher and Bruce Chilton, The Targums: A Critical Introduction
(Studies in Aramaic Interpretation 12; Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 220–21. Some elements of
Tg. Zech. suggest a first-century origin: see Cathcart and Gordon, Minor Prophets, pp.
16, 224–25 n. 30; Chilton, The Glory of Israel: The Theology and Provenience of the Isaiah
Targum (Sheffield: jsot, 1982), p. 71. Flesher and Chilton admittedly portray Tg. Zech. as
composed between 70 and 135 ce (Flesher and Chilton, The Targums, p. 226). However,
Chilton elsewhere argues that some targums include traditions that the Nazarene and
his community used: see Bruce Chilton, A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible: Jesus’ Use of the
Interpreted Scriptures of His Time (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), pp. 44, 107–133, 137–
47; see also Flesher and Chilton, Targums, pp. 172, 386–88, 404–408.

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contact with targumic or proto-targumic traditions regarding messianic names

and typologies.137 In Greek, of course, the Aramaic terms become Ἰησοῦς and
Χριστός.138 Early Christians, and even Paul, needed only targumic readings of
Zechariah, read typologically, to derive from Scripture the name ‘Jesus Christ’
for a messianic figure.
Excursus, Part C: ‘Jesus’ as a Corporate Name
It might also be objected that the language of Hebrews, at least, depicts Jesus as
a historical, human individual, who now functions as an individual high priest
in heaven. But as high priest, the Jesus of Hebrews inherently bears a corporate
or representative character.139 Furthermore, the references to a historical and
human Jesus in Hebrews can all bear a corporate sense, as they do in Paul.140
Although the Jesus of Hebrews is placed ‘lower than the angels’, in the ‘last
days’ (Heb. 2.9; 1.2), these terms, like their equivalents in Paul, can describe
the pre-Christian community, which was collectively born of woman, under
Jewish law, in the fullness of time (Gal. 4.4). Jesus’ partaking of flesh and blood,
to become like his brethren, even in temptation (Heb. 2.14, 17–18; 4.15), can
describe the same likeness of humans and flesh that Paul attributes to his cor-
porate Christ (Phil. 2.7–8; Rom. 8.3).141 His arising from Judah (Heb. 7.14) seems
equivalent to his corporate descent from David (Rom. 1.3), and, perhaps, also to
his corporate incarnation among the churches of Judea (Gal. 1.22). Other ref-
erences to a historical and human Christ in Hebrews will be addressed below,
137 Paul may also have used testimonia, which could have provided alternate readings of
Scripture (Albl, “Scripture”, pp. 159–79; Harmon, She Must, pp. 23–26).
138 Tg. Zech. 12.10 in Codex Reuchlin describes a ‘pierced’ messiah, echoing Paul’s gospel of a
crucified Christ (Houtman, ‘He Will Reveal’, p. 254; Cathcart and Gordon, Minor Prophets,
p. 218 n. 28); at 14.4, it describes a trumpet that raises the dead, similar to 1 Cor. 15.52 and
1 Thess. 4.16 (Houtman, ‘He Will Reveal’, p. 248; Cathcart and Gordon, Minor Prophets,
p. 223 n. 7).
139 Shedd, Man in Community, pp. 31–32; Fletcher-Louis, Luke-Acts, p. 172; Philo, Spec. Leg.
3.131; Philo, Somn. 2.187–89.
140 The supposed testimonies in Hebrews to the Nazarene that I discuss rely largely on
Ehrman’s listing of such in Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for
Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne, 2012), pp. 116–17. Ehrman was previously much
more pessimistic about the evidence for the historical Nazarene outside the Gospels:
see Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), pp. 78–79.
141 This point also applies to the argument at Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 190.

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but in terms of Jesus’ earthly incarnation at least, the Hebrews author seems to
describe a corporate figure.
As for Paul, 1 Corinthians includes both his Adam typology and his allusions
to the Joshua traditions in Zechariah, suggesting that the latter bear the same
corporate character as the former.142 A Pauline Joshua typology is, therefore,
also a corporate typology, that applies the name ‘Joshua’ or ‘Jesus’ to the cor-
porate figure of Christ. A Joshua typology that is both corporate and messianic
fits not only with Paul’s other uses of typology, but also fits with Second Temple
traditions of interpreting Zechariah.143 As Eugene H. Merrill puts it, ‘Vision
four [Zech 3.1–10] describes a day of redemption in which Joshua the high
priest, typical or representative of Israel as a priestly people, will be cleansed
of his impurities and reinstalled in his capacity as high priest’.144
By Paul’s day, Second Temple interpretive traditions had also connected the
messianic, eschatological Sprout figure to hopes or expectations for the Davidic
royal lineage.145 One way to understand those expectations is that they even-
tually came to be ‘democratized’, that is, the hopes for Davidic leadership were
eventually placed in the people.146 Related messianic passages in Zechariah,
like 9.9 and 10.4–5, were similarly understood, in later prophetic tradition, to
refer to a community, e.g. to the people of Judah.147 A similar reading also was
applied to Zech. 12.8, likewise taken as messianic: ‘On that day the Lord will
shield the inhabitants of Jerusalem so that the feeblest among them on that
day shall be like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the angel
of the Lord, at their head.’ As David L. Petersen explains,
The author is suggesting that the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who may be

symbolized by David or the house of David, will achieve the sort of divine
status associated with the king in Israelite royal ideology…The author
continues to democratize the Davidic covenant, as the author of Isa 55:3
142 Williams, Wisdom, p. 43.

143 Hays writes that ‘Paul’s typological linkages center on the people of God as the culmination
of God’s redemptive activity rather than on Jesus as the antitypical fulfillment of scriptural
figures’, adding that ‘this does not mean that Jesus was of secondary importance to Paul’
(Hays, Echoes of Scripture, pp. 161–62). I am proposing, essentially, that centering typology
on the people of God is equivalent to centering them on Jesus.
144 Merrill, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, p. 129.
145 Anthony R. Petterson, Behold Your King: The Hope for the House of David in the Book
of Zechariah (lhbots, 513; New York: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 1, 4–6, 13, especially the
bibliographies at pp. 4–6, nn. 13–15.
146 Petterson, Behold Your King, pp. 18–19, 21.
147 Adrian M. Leske, ‘Context and Meaning of Zechariah 9:9’, CBQ 62 (2000), pp. 663–78.

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had done. The people…are, according to the author of Zech 12:8, to be

viewed as having the same semidivine status as the royal house.148
Petersen adds that the people ‘witness to one another as they express their
special status as divinely protected folk’.149 As we can see, there were existing
traditions in Paul’s day of interpreting the messianic passages of Zechariah in
a corporate manner.
We also encounter Zechariah’s Branch figure in Qumran texts, where the
community is given a messianic character.150 Gerbern S. Oegema writes that
in 4Q252 (Commentary on Genesis A), the Branch ‘is not portrayed as the one
and only “latter-day liberator” or “messiah”; he is part of a collective’.151 Michael
E. Fuller writes that the author of 4Q174 (Florilegium) interprets the messianic
term ‘anointed’ in Ps. 2.2 ‘in terms of an anointed community’.152 A Pauline cor-
porate Joshua typology seems at home in this milieu. The names ‘Jesus’ and
‘Jesus Christ’ seem to operate in Paul, as in Hebrews, as a corporate, messianic
typology. Christ, the messianic antitype, is a heavenly, risen individual, but a
corporate figure in earthly, historical terms, embodied by the Jewish pre-Chris-
tian community.153
It might finally be objected that the authentic Paul never uses the participa-
tory phrase ‘in Jesus’ (ἐν [τῷ] Ἰησοῦ), which we might expect, if the name bore
an inclusive aspect.154 However, again, the name ‘Jesus’ rarely appears alone
in the Pauline corpus, so it may simply be unsurprising that we never happen
to encounter it with the preposition ἐν.155 Wright, Hewitt, and Novenson also
argue that Paul’s use of the ‘in Christ’ formula is specifically messianic, and
perhaps it is, far more so than ‘in Jesus’.156 Paul may also have wanted to avoid
ambiguity: as Gathercole points out, ‘Jesus’ was a common personal name in
Paul’s day, but as I have explained, Paul is not trying to refer to an individual
148 David L. Petersen, Zechariah 9–14 and Malachi: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox, 1995), pp. 118–19 (119). Wright connects democratization with Dan. 7 and Isa. 55
(Wright, Climax, p. 23).
149 Petersen, Zechariah, p. 120.
150 Oegema, Anointed, pp. 115–16; Fuller, Restoration, pp. 172–180.
151 Oegema, Anointed, p. 116
152 Fuller, Restoration, p. 178 (emphasis original).
153 Wright also describes ‘Jesus’ fleshly identification with the Jews’ (Wright, Messiah, p. 16).
154 Novenson, Christ, p. 118; Hewitt and Novenson, ‘Participationism’, p. 401.
155 Eph. 4.21 aside, Wright shows that Ιησοῦς is used alone in prepositional phrases only five
times: four with διά, and once with σύν (Wright, Climax, pp. 44–45). Hewitt and Novenson
point out that χριστός always follows ἐν when both are used with Ιησοῦς, except for a
handful of variants of Gal. 3.14 (Hewitt and Novenson, ‘Participationism’, p. 401 n. 22).
156 Hewitt and Novenson, ‘Participationism’, pp. 401–409; Wright, Climax, pp. 46–49.

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person, but rather to a corporate figure, by way of typology.157 Having said that,
perhaps the principal reason we never see Paul using the term ‘in Jesus’ is that
for Paul, Jesus is a specifically Jewish figure, embodied by the pre-Christian
communities of Judea, whereas it is ‘in Christ Jesus’ (ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ) that
the gentiles receive the blessing given to Abraham, and Paul’s audiences were
mostly Gentiles.158 Although Christ was of Israel ‘according to the flesh’ (κατὰ
σάρκα, Rom. 9.3–5), Christians no longer know or regard him in that manner
(2 Cor. 15).159 The Pauline figure of Jesus, a historical, communal incarnation
among the Jews, did not include the gentiles; but as Jesus Christ, he does.160
Bodily Existence: Community and Participation
The body of Paul’s Jesus also seems to be a corporate one.161 It is well-estab-

lished that Paul’s Christ has a corporate dimension, closely connected to Paul’s
concept of Christ’s body, as S. Aaron Son explains.162 Son, who assumes that
Christ had an individual, earthly body, writes that Christians ‘are identified
with the individual body of Christ in his death’, meaning that ‘they are really
and ontologically the body of Christ’.163 But if Christians really are Christ’s

158 Again, a few manuscripts use ‘in Jesus Christ’.
159 Wright proposes that ‘the church is the “body” of Christ in the same sense as the Jews are
his “flesh” ’ (Wright, ‘Messiah’, p. 27). Christ’s body, of course, includes Israel.
160 Leander E. Keck argues that Paul’s Jesus is likewise ‘a reality into which one can be
inserted’: see Keck, ‘ “Jesus” in Romans’, JBL 108 (2008), pp. 443–460 (452). This helpful, but
on the other hand Keck also points out that Paul never uses ἐν Ἰησοῦ, concluding that for
Paul, ‘Χριστός and Ἰησοῦς are not simply interchangeable’ (Keck, ‘ “Jesus” in Romans’, 447).
My thesis accounts for both perspectives: Paul’s Jesus was a corporate, Jewish figure, who
is now raised and incorporates the Gentiles as Christ. Wright tries to argue that Paul uses
‘Christ’ when he wants to ‘speak incorporatively’, and points out in an endnote that ‘Paul
never speaks of “the body of Jesus” or “of the Lord” ’ (Wright, ‘Messiah’, pp. 21, 272 n. 67).
However, my thesis explains this, too: because Paul’s audiences are Gentile, he emphasizes
the corporate sense of ‘Christ’, not ‘Jesus’, even though the latter also bears a corporate
sense.
162 Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 83–93, 102–111. A good review of early German work on Paul’s
theology of the body of Christ is in Peter Orr, Christ Present and Absent: A Study in Pauline
Christology (wunt, 2/354; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), pp. 6–41, principally reviewing
Albert Schweitzer, Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1930) and
Ernst Käsemann, Leib und Leib Christi: Eine Untersuchung zur paulinischen Begrifflichkeit
(bht, 9; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1933).
163 Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 108–109. Son considers evidence from all thirteen Pauline
letters, but notes that his arguments do not rely on those whose Pauline authorship is
doubtful (Son, Corporate Elements, pp. 5–6).

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earthly body in Paul, there is no need to assume Christ ever had an individual
earthly body, and no evidence from Paul that he did. Dunn links the concept
of Christ’s body to the participatory language of Pauline phrases like ‘in Christ’,
explaining that in Paul’s thought, Christians are ‘part of a larger whole, as it
were, limbs and organs of a single body’, and that ‘the body is compared with
Christ, or even identified as Christ’.164 Dunn connects this Pauline participa-
tion and embodiment with Paul’s Adam christology, adding that ‘participa-
tion in Christ is irreducibly corporate’.165 Son is unsure how Paul derived his
concept of Christ’s body, and suggests it is unique to him, but admits there is
some merit to arguments that his Rabbinic and Jewish background supplied
it.166 Various ancient authors described nations, peoples, or even the cosmos
as a single body, and Dunn suggests that the concept was readily available to
Paul.167 Nevertheless, Dunn asks, rhetorically, ‘How can we speak of Christ
as a body consisting of human beings…and still envisage him as a person in
recognizable human form who will return on clouds?’, and others, too, have
struggled to understand Paul here.168 Yet Dunn’s question provides the very
language we need: Paul depicts Christ’s risen body as an individual’s body, and
his earthly body as a corporate one.
The verses which Gathercole cites as depictions of Christ’s earthly embod-
iment support this corporate concept.169 At Rom. 7.4, Paul’s audience under-
goes death ‘through [διὰ] the body of Christ’ collectively.170 At 1 Cor. 10.16,
Paul describes a ‘communal participation’ (κοινωνία) in the body and blood of
Christ, among earthly Christian communities.171 Again, although Paul regards

166 See Shedd, Man in Community, pp. 164–65; W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some
Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 4th edn, 1980), pp. 53–57.
167 See for example Moule, Origins of Christology, pp. 83–85; Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian
Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 92–94; David Horrell, Solidarity and
Difference: A Contemporary Reading of Paul’s Ethics (London: T&T Clark, 2nd edn, 2016),
pp. 134–35; Dunn, Theology, pp. 550–51.
168 Dunn, Theology, p. 409; E. P. Sanders, interpreting Paul, writes that ‘Christians really are
one body and Spirit with Christ’, yet asks ‘How are we to understand it?…I must confess
that I do not have a new category of perception to propose here’: see Sanders, Paul and
Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), pp.
522–23. See also the recent essays in Thate, Vanhoozer, and Campbell, “In Christ” in Paul,
mentioned above.
170 Byrne, Romans, pp. 210–211. Wright explains that ‘ “Through the body of Christ” is a
shorthand way of saying “through membership in the body of Christ” ’ (Wright, ‘Messiah’,
p. 31).
171 Thiselton, First Corinthians, pp. 762–64 (Thiselton’s translation); see also pp. 103–105.

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the risen, heavenly Christ as an individual, he views Christ’s earthly body from
a corporate perspective.172 Romans 8.3 more directly describes Jesus’ earthly
incarnation, but depicts an incarnation among Israel’s physical, embodied,
human community.173 Although Christ Jesus’ earthly, corporate body now
extends to include the Gentiles, it was, before his death and resurrection, cor-
porately incarnate within Israel. Their flesh and blood corporately constituted
his own.
Gathercole also points to Paul’s description of the Last Supper at 1 Cor.
11.23–26 (a ‘Lordly meal’ in Gathercole’s translation), interpreting it as a depic-
tion of a historical, physical event, carried out by an individually embodied
Jesus.174 But this, too, depicts a corporate act, since participation in Christ’s
body and blood was communal (1 Cor. 10.16). At Gal. 4.6 and Rom. 8.15, Paul’s
Jesus speaks in the voice of the community (Αββα ὁ πατήρ, ‘Abba! Father!’),
suggesting that the words of the historical supper were spoken in the same
manner. It was, for example, at such communal meals that Christian proph-
ets were permitted to speak freely.175 Qumran documents, like 1Q28a (Rule of
the Congregation [appendix a to 1qs]), describe communal meals, in multiple
locations, in which all participants recited a blessing over bread and wine, that
anticipated a future messianic banquet, with intriguing parallels to the Lordly
meal tradition.176 Paul seems to be describing a past performance of similarly
communal meals, at which real bread was taken, real thanks were given, and
172 See also Byrne, Romans, p. 214.

173 Wright remarks that ‘the Church is the body of Christ in the same way that the Jews
are the flesh of Christ’: see N. T. Wright, ‘The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith’, in
Wright, Pauline Perspectives, pp. 3–20 (13).
175 Larry W. Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000),
pp. 41–42; Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish
Monotheism (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 3rd edn, 2015), p. 116; Aaron Milavec, The
Didache: Faith, Hope, & Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50–70 C.E. (Mahwah, NJ:
Newman, 2003), pp. 428–35.
176 Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn, ‘The Qumran Meal and the Lord’s Supper in Paul in the Context
of the Graeco-Roman World’, in Alf Christopherson, Carsten Claussen, Jörg Frey,
and Bruce Longenecker (eds.), Paul, Luke and the Graeco-Roman World (Festschrift
Alexander J. M. Wedderburn; JSNTSupp, 217; London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 221–248,
especially 223, 224, 236, 237–38; Charlotte Hempel, ‘Community Structures in the Dead
Sea Scrolls: Admission, Organization, Disciplinary Procedures’, in Peter W. Flint and
James C. Vanderkam (eds.), The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years, ii, A Comprehensive
Assessment (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2019), pp. 67–92 (84); Schiffman, Eschatological
Community, pp. 56–57, 64; James H. Charlesworth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, ‘Rule
of the Congregation (1QSa)’, in Charlesworth, Rule of the Community, p. 108, 116–17;
Stegemann, ‘Some Remarks’, pp. 492, 494.

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real words of institution were spoken, but by many members of the pre-Chris-
tian community, not just one.177 Some propose that the role of a messiah in
the Qumran meals was filled by community leaders, or else that a messiah’s
presence at them was invoked by prayer.178 Similarly, Paul writes at Gal. 4.14
that the Galatians received him ‘as Christ Jesus’ (ὡς Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν), indicat-
ing that Christian communities did at times regard individual Christians as
temporary representations of Paul’s messianic Jesus figure, for limited pur-
poses. Representations of this sort could therefore have taken place at previ-
ous Lordly meals. Finally, we should also not rule out a poetic element in Paul’s
depiction of Jesus’ words: the author of Hebrews, for example, presents Jesus
as speaking the words of Psalm 40 to God, entering heaven, and sitting down
at God’s right hand (Heb. 9.11; 10.5–7, 12), but none of this depicts historical
events. Rather, it poetically depicts spiritual realities, that were nevertheless
embodied by the real lives of those living in the Jewish pre-Christian commu-
nities. There is no reason why 1 Cor. 11.23–26 should not bear a similar charac-
ter. These texts from Paul’s religious environment, prior to and contemporary
with his career, as well as from Paul himself, indicate that we cannot assume
Paul is trying to describe an event in the life of an individual human at 1 Cor. 11.
Only later documents like the Gospels and Acts try to connect Paul’s language
specifically to the Nazarene. Instead, the texts above imply that Paul is portray-
ing a communal experience or enactment, of a messianic presence at one or
more past Lordly meals. A corporate understanding of Jesus’ actions at these
past meals would also help link 1 Cor. 11 to the discussion Paul just provided in
1 Cor. 10 regarding the community’s κοινωνία, or participation, at the breaking
of bread. If Jesus had already been corporately present when the Lordly meal
of 1 Cor. 11 began, then Paul’s claim, at 1 Cor. 10.16, that a κοινωνία is experienced
at the breaking of bread, seems much more obvious and direct. Again, a cor-
porate interpretation of Paul’s Jesus-language seems to improve exegesis of the
surrounding text.
Gathercole does identify a real difference in Paul between Christ’s physical
presence prior to some night, and his physical absence afterwards.179 However,
recall that Shedd described ‘the saints which form the corporate personality of
the Messiah before His death (i.e. of Jesus)’.180 Just so, we have seen how Christ
177 Of course, on the evidence of the Gospels (e.g. Mk 14.22–25), the Nazarene was among
those who presided at such meals.
178 Frank Moore Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran (Minneapolis: Fortress, 3rd edn, 1995),
p. 77. n. 5; Stegemann, ‘Some Remarks’, pp. 499–500.
180 Shedd, Man in Community, p. 140.

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can be understood to have been physically yet corporately present among the
community at a specific, historical time. After some trauma shared by that
community, he apparently became absent, but this absence would also have
been experienced corporately. He was then no longer spiritually present to the
community, who longed to remember his presence: rather, he became heav-
enly, with an individual resurrection body. Gathercole does note that Christ’s
resurrected body is of the same sort that Christians hope to attain, and claims
that this ‘suggests strongly’ that his pre-resurrection body must have been
‘like those other humans’.181 But this points just as easily to a communal incar-
nation. The community’s bodies constituted Jesus; therefore, his body was
human, like theirs. His earthly body was not an individual body like theirs, but
they may still attain an individual, resurrection body, as he did.
Ministry and Teaching: Community Traditions
There is seemingly no reference in Paul to a historical ministry of an individual

Jesus. Although Gathercole argues that Rom. 15.8 refers to such a ministry, he
himself cites a ‘dissenting view’ that it instead refers to a figurative ministry,
by the resurrected Christ.182 Longenecker takes a similar view, noting that a
textual issue at Rom. 15.8 suggests Paul means it is the exalted Christ, and not
the historical Jesus, who became a διάκονον to the circumcised.183 Gathercole
argues that the early Jewish Christians to whom the risen Christ appeared
must have recognized him somehow.184 But if they had personally experi-
enced Christ’s corporate, earthly incarnation, then they would still recognize
the same figure in his risen, heavenly state. Paul’s reference to ‘the twelve’ (τοῖς
δώδεκα) at 1 Cor. 15.5 does seem to refer to a special group within the commu-
nity, that had somehow been formed before Christ’s death and resurrection.185
But there is no evidence in Paul that a human individual selected them. Rather,
their existence testifies to the existence of a community, that shared Christ’s
corporate presence.

182 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 196 n. 46, citing Joshua D. Garroway, ‘The Circumcision of Christ:
Romans 15.7– 13’, JSNT 34 (2012): pp. 303–322. Garroway argues that Rom. 15.8 portrays the
exalted Christ as a (figurative) minister of circumcision.
183 Richard N. Longenecker, The Epistle to the Romans: A Commentary on the Greek Text
(nigtc; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), p. 993.

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There are also no obvious references in Paul to the teachings of a historical

individual. Perhaps Gathercole is correct that there are at least a few Pauline
references to teachings ‘of the Lord’ which are not obviously spiritual revela-
tions from a resurrected Christ, in contrast with 2 Cor. 12.9, which Gathercole
notes is ‘clearly a heavenly revelation’.186 However, Paul never attributes teach-
ings ‘of the Lord’ to the Nazarene. As Gathercole himself admits, we cannot
conclude such sayings have their source in a historical Jesus.187 Furthermore, as
I have shown, Christians could themselves speak or write words of Christ, and
these were not always understood as literal quotations.188 Hebrews portrays
Jesus as speaking at Heb. 1.2 and 2.3, but we cannot take that language literally:
again, Heb. 10.5–9 attributes past sayings to Jesus that are not found in the
Gospels, but that are instead drawn from Scripture.189 Similarly, Paul’s Christ
seems to speak through the text of Scripture at Rom. 15.3, 9.190 Even Pauline
parallels with Gospel sayings, or at least those found in Mark’s Gospel, cannot
be taken as references to the historical Nazarene, since Mark may have used
Paul’s letters.191 Therefore, Markan Synoptic tradition, at least, cannot reliably
serve as an independent witness to the words of Paul’s Jesus. Instead of citing
the Nazarene, Paul seems to be paraphrasing teachings that the community
historically spoke, in the voice of the corporate, incarnate Christ. For example,

187 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 198. Perhaps only three, 1 Cor. 7.10–11; 9.14; and 11.23–26, are
even possible references to Jesus tradition: see for example Frans Neirynck, ‘Paul and the
Sayings of Jesus’, in Albert Vanhoye (ed.), L’Apôtre Paul. personnalité, style et conception du
ministère (betl, 73; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1986), pp. 265–321; Neirynck, ‘Sayings
of Jesus in 1 Corinthians’; Walter, ‘Jesus-tradition’; Harm W. Hollander, ‘The Words of Jesus
from Oral Traditions to Written Record in Paul and Q’, NovT 42 (2000), pp. 340–57 (344–
49). Hollander mentions other parallels, but notes that even the ‘most striking’ examples
are never attributed to Jesus, and suggests that they were originally anonymous teachings
only later attributed to him (Hollander, ‘Words of Jesus’, pp. 345–46).
188 I am not claiming Paul is confusing words attributed to the risen Christ with words
attributed to the historical, incarnate Christ. Pre-crucifixion prophecy would have been
attributed to the incarnate Christ; post-crucifixion prophecy would have been attributed
to the risen one.
189 Heb. 10.5–9 draws from Ps. 40.6–8; 1 Cor. 7.10–11 seems to draw from Mal. 2.16. God’s words
to the Son in Heb. 1.5–13 are also all quotations from Scripture.
190 Novenson, Christ, pp. 151–56.
191 See for example Michael P. Theophilos, ‘The Roman Connection: Paul and Mark’, in Oda
Wischmeyer, David C. Sim, and Ian J. Elmer (eds.), Paul and Mark: Comparative Essays,
I, Two Authors at the Beginnings of Christianity (bnzw, 198; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp.
45–72; Joel Marcus, ‘Mark – Interpreter of Paul’, NTS 46 (2000), pp. 473–87; Michael F. Bird,
‘Mark: Interpreter of Peter and Disciple of Paul’, in Michael F. Bird and Joel Willitts (eds.),
Paul and the Gospels: Christologies, Conflicts, and Convergences (London: T&T Clark, 2011),
pp. 30–61.

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1 Cor. 9.14, which Gathercole claims is a Pauline citation of Jesuine teaching,

is paralleled in Didache 13, where it is not attributed to Jesus and may simply
represent, in Matthew Draper’s terms, ‘community practice’.192 The few words
of Jesus that we encounter in Paul are not teachings of a historical individual,
but of a historical community.
Character and Suffering: Community Traits
Gathercole provides several verses from Paul that ascribe character traits to
Jesus.193 But we can understand these as corporate characteristics of a com-
munity. If Jesus was obedient to God (Rom. 5.18–19, Phil. 2.8), that is because
the members of the Jewish pre-Christian community were, and if he loved
and served others (Gal. 2.20; Rom. 15.3, 5; Phil. 2.5; 1 Cor. 10.31–11.1; Gal. 6.2),
that is because they did. The characterization of Christ in Hebrews as faithful
and obedient (Heb. 3.2; 5.8) can be understood in the same way.194 If Jesus was
meek and gentle (2 Cor. 10.1), that is because the community was, and if he
carried out an earthy ministry among the vulnerable, that is because they did.
If Paul regarded Jesus as sinless (2 Cor. 5.21), that seems related to his acknowl-
edgement that most sins lie ‘outside the body’ (1 Cor. 6.18), which we should
192 Matthew Draper, ‘First-fruits and the Support of Prophets, Teachers, and the Poor in
Didache 13 in Relation to New Testament Parallels’, in Andrew F. Gregory and Christopher
M. Tuckett (eds.), Trajectories through the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 223–243: ‘The kind of situation underlying
the instructions in the Didache on the first-fruits is presupposed by the Q tradition. It
could not have been constructed from either Matthew or Luke’s version as a source, but
rather forms essential background material, together with the information from Paul in
this case, for an understanding of that tradition. The Didache presents us with the kind
of community practice in which a Q saying originated, prior to its incorporation into the
gospel tradition, here as in many other instances’ (244). By ‘Q’, Draper here refers to double
tradition, and so his argument holds even if there was no Q document as such.
194 Gathercole understands Paul to describe Jesus’ faithfulness at 2 Cor. 1.19–20, but sidesteps
the question of a ‘faithfulness of Christ’ (πίστις Χριστοῦ; Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 200).
Incidentally, on the longstanding problem of how to read πίστις Χριστοῦ, my proposal
may suggest that objective and subjective readings (‘faith in Christ’ vs. ‘faith of Christ’)
describe the same act, from different perspectives: as members of the corporate Christ,
believers share faith ‘in Christ’, but when considering the corporate Christ as the source of
faith, that faith is also ‘of Christ’. There is, however, not room here to adequately discuss
this suggestion. I do notice some similarity between the suggestion and the thoughts
expressed at Hooker, From Adam to Christ, pp. 184–85, although my own thoughts were
formed entirely independently of those.

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understand to mean outside the corporate body of Christ: as such, sin does
not harm that body. As Dale B. Martin explains, even if two Christians were
to sin by fornication, ‘There seems to be little danger that the body of Christ
is implicated in copulation with the world’.195 And even Christian fornication
with non-Christians, as Alistair Scott May explains, ‘causes not the pollution
of Christ or his Spirit’, because it ‘necessitates the withdrawal of the Holy
Spirit and thus the destruction of the believer’s spiritual union with Christ’.196
Individual sins do not mar the corporate figure, who remains sinless. Love,
faithfulness, grace, compassion, mercy, peacefulness: these are all traits that
the Jewish pre-Christian community bore, and if Paul’s Jesus bore them histor-
ically (and not merely in his risen state), he bore them with that community,
in their embodiment of him.197 If he was poor and weak (2 Cor. 8.9; 13.4), that
likewise reflects the community’s poverty and weakness.198
Gathercole also points to suffering as a trait that the historical Jesus bore, but
admits that ‘some of the references to suffering might be confined to his exe-
cution’.199 Indeed, all of the aforementioned character traits can simply refer
either to Christ’s incarnation (discussed above), or to his crucifixion (discussed
below), the events to which Paul devotes most of his attention. Still, Gathercole
argues that other Pauline references to Christ’s suffering ‘suggest something
more broadly characteristic of Jesus’ life’.200 But that life can still be embod-
ied by a community. In the post-resurrection time, at least, Paul believed that
Christ’s suffering, as well as his crucifixion and dying, was somehow shared by
all Christians.201 Gathercole, too, points to a corporate understanding of this
suffering: he translates Rom. 8.17, συμπάσχομεν, as ‘we share in his suffering’,
explains that missionaries viewed their own sufferings as ‘reflecting’ Christ’s,
195 Martin, Corinthian Body, pp. 174–79 (179).

196 Alistair Scott May, ‘The Body for the Lord’: Sex and Identity in 1 Corinthians 5–7 (lnts;
London: T&T Clark, 2004) p. 130; see also pp. 118, 127. May attempts to correct Martin here,
since Martin does think that fornication with non-Christians endangers Christ’s body
(Martin, The Corinthian Body, p. 179; see also May, ‘The Body’, pp. 113–14).
197 These are traits Paul attributes to the risen Christ in various verses, but Gathercole
argues that they ‘might well have been regarded as reflecting his character prior to that’
(Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 201).
198 See Rom. 6.19; 8.26; 15.26; Gal. 2.10.
199 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, pp. 201–202 (201).
201 Dunn, Theology, pp. 482–87. Christ also identifies himself with the church that Paul
persecuted in Paul’s Damascus theophany, although this is not found in Paul’s letters: see
Seyoon Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1981), pp. 252–56; John
A. T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), p.
58; Acts 8.3, 9.1–5.

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254 zeddies
and notes that Paul believed he bore Christ’s wounds.202 The verses Gathercole
cites also allude to a corporate experience of Christ’s sufferings: at 2 Cor. 1.5,
those sufferings ‘overflow to us’ (περισσεύει…εἰς ἡμᾶς, nabre), and at Phil. 3.10,
one may have a communal participation (κοινωνίαν) with them.203 That lan-
guage is the language of corporate embodiment. Paul, admittedly, seems to be
describing the post-resurrection experiences of Christians, but if Christ’s con-
tinued suffering after death is to be understood corporately, there is no reason
to suppose his suffering before death was not also corporate. The reproaches
Christ bore at Rom. 15.3, and even at 1 Thess. 2.14–16 (if authentic), are there-
fore the reproaches the community bore, when Christ was corporately present
among them. The same corporate suffering is depicted in verses like Heb. 1.3;
2.9–10; 6.6; 12.2–3; and 13.12–13. Verses like Heb. 5.7, which describes Jesus ‘in the
days of his flesh’ (ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῆς σαρκὸς αὐτοῦ) praying and crying to God,
should be understood in the same manner: the days of Jesus’ flesh describe his
communal incarnation among the Jewish pre-Christian community, and their
prayers and tears were his.
Last Supper, Arrest, Death, and Burial: a Corporate Passion
Again, Paul and his audience understood the Last Supper of 1 Cor. 11.23–25 as
a historical event, taking place prior to Jesus’ death.204 Nevertheless, we have
seen that it should be understood as a communal event: a Lordly meal, attrib-
uted to Jesus, but enacted (and later reenacted) by the community. Gathercole
himself admits that the reference at 1 Cor. 11.23 to ‘the night he was handed
over’ (ἐν τῇ νυκτὶ ᾗ παρεδίδετο) may refer primarily to a ‘theological interpre-
tation’.205 If it does refer to a historical arrest, that would have been a com-
munity memory of shared persecution, resulting in the death of community
members (including, it seems, the Nazarene). Even so, the celebration of a spe-
cific Lordly meal, apparently at or near Passover, could have itself constituted,
in a spiritual, corporate manner, the night in which Paul’s Jesus was handed
over to death: his body historically broken when the real, historical bread
202 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 201; Gathercole also argues that the plural nature of Christ’s
sufferings at 2 Cor. 1.5 point to experiences beyond the crucifixion, but that could likewise
allude to corporate suffering.
203 Thiselton, Corinthians, p. 765.
205 Gathercole’s translation (Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 195), also nabre; Gathercole,
‘Historical’, p. 202 (Gathercole notes that the reference at Rom. 8.32 is certainly theological).
See also Thiselton, Corinthians, pp. 871–72.

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was broken, and his blood historically poured out when the real, historical
wine was poured out.206 The Palestinian targums, for example, describe four
nights, perhaps related to Passover, of spiritual events: creation, the promise to
Abraham, the first Passover, and the coming of the messiah.207 These represent
a spiritual chronology, not a literal one, and spiritual events during spiritual
nights, not attested nighttime events. In light of Paul’s familiarity with targu-
mic traditions, the night he describes at 1 Cor. 11.23 seems to have been this sort
of spiritually-significant night, associated with a nighttime meal. No reference
to an individual person’s death or arrest is necessary to make sense of these
verses. Perhaps Paul does describe Christ’s death as voluntary in some sense
(Gal. 1.4; 2.20), but that description seems to portray Christ’s general devotion,
in a Pauline interpretation of the Suffering Servant figure.208 Even scholars
who emphasize Christ’s own self-giving connect it to participatory and cor-
porate self-giving, by all Christians.209 The self-giving that Paul attributes to
Christ can be understood as the historical self-giving of the Jewish pre-Chris-
tian community.
Jesus’ death is certainly well-attested in Paul.210 But that death, too, could
be historically embodied by a community. Although Gathercole describes the
risen Jesus as ‘numerically identical’ to the earthly, crucified one, that could
also be said of a single risen, individual figure, and a single earthly, corporate
one.211 More definitely, we have seen how Paul already argues that Christians
embody Christ’s crucifixion.212 As Son writes, ‘They are identified with the
individual body of Christ in his death’.213 Just as with Christ’s sufferings, there
206 Thiselton discusses the Passover setting at Thiselton, Corinthians, pp. 758–60, 871–76. The
symbolism here is participatory: see Thiselton, Corinthians, pp. 766–68, 875.
207 McNamara, Targum and Testament Revisited, pp. 117, 163, 166.
208 Cole, Galatians, p. 71; Harmon, She Must, p. 102. On the connection here with Isaiah in
general, see Harmon, She Must, pp. 56–66, 100–102, 115–22. Harmon draws particular
attention to Continental scholarship (Harmon, She Must, pp. 56 n. 38, 117 n. 248, 118; in
these last two Harmon cites Wilk, Bedeutung, pp. 365, 368). See also Thiselton, Corinthians,
p. 877.
209 Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2nd edn, 2002), pp. 210–215; Harmon, She Must, pp. 119–20 n.
257. Hays also emphasizes the context of the crucifixion within a ‘story’ (Hays, Faith, p.
210).
210 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 202 n. 67.
211 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 202, citing Rom. 8.34; 1 Cor. 15.3–4; 2 Cor. 5.15; 1 Thess. 4.14.
212 See e.g. Gal. 2.20; Rom. 6.3–11; perhaps also Gal. 6.17; Dunn, Theology, pp. 482–87; Son,
Corporate Elements, pp. 30, 109, 145–46, 180, 182. Son regards Jesus as having an individual
body, but can only cite verses that depict his resurrected body as an individual one (Son,
Corporate Elements, p. 109).
213 Son, Corporate Elements, p. 109.

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256 zeddies
seems no reason to assume, based on Paul’s authentic writings, that this corpo-
rate identity with the crucifixion should not extend backwards historically, to
the crucifixion event itself, at a time when all Christians or pre-Christians were
members of Jewish Israel. The crucifixion event was thus an event in the life of
the Jewish pre-Christian community, a public event in historical time, just as
Paul describes it.214
We know that the Jewish and Samaritan communities of Judea experienced
the prefecture of Pontius Pilate as a time of suffering and violent death at
the hands of the Romans, sometimes en masse during religious festivals and
events.215 Luke 13.1 suggests that the Galilean Jewish community shared these
experiences.216 Pilate’s rule included executions, which would have included
public crucifixions.217 This shared suffering and these martyr-like deaths, of
Jewish folk especially, would have been viewed as representative of the com-
munity. Shedd explains that martyrs as a group atoned for the nation: ‘Because
of the unity of Israel and the unquestionable justice of God, the unmerited
suffering of the righteous martyrs provides atonement and propitiation for
the unrighteous within the group.’218 Thus, the corporate suffering, death, and
burial of Jewish pre-Christian victims (including the Nazarene), particularly
in mass events and perhaps in a specific mass event, constituted the suffer-
ing, death, and burial of Christ Jesus. Gathercole points out that Paul’s Christ
died, bloodily and bodily, by crucifixion.219 But that is because the Jewish com-
munity’s martyrs did: as they died, so also did Paul’s Christ. Paul does speak
of the Lord’s cross.220 But that is because the martyrs’ crosses were Christ’s.
Even the Nazarene was not crucified alone.221 We read in Paul that Christ died
at the hands of the ‘rulers of this age’ (τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, 1 Cor.
2.8), because the community’s members died at the hands of the Romans.222
First Corinthians 11.23–25 do not predict Christ’s death, as Gathercole would
have it, but simply seem spoken with some awareness that Christ’s corporate
214 Gal. 4.4; Rom. 3.25–26; 5.6; Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 203.

215 Josephus, Ant. 18.55–62, 85–87; Philo, Legat. 302; Helen K. Bond, Pilate in History and
Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 36, 47–48, 52–53, 54–
55, 65–67, 70–73. Ant. 18.63–64 has lost its original wording, and is unhelpful here (Bond,
Pilate, p. 71).
216 Bond, Pontius Pilate, pp. 194–96.
217 Josephus, Ant. 18.87; Philo, Legat. 302; Bond, Pilate, p. 26; John Granger Cook, Crucifixion in
the Mediterranean World (bznw, 327; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2nd edn, 2019), pp. 4, 418.
From the evidence of the Gospels, these crucifixions included the Nazarene.
218 Shedd, Man in Community, p. 64.
220 Gal. 6.14; Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 202.
221 Mk 15.27//Mt. 27.38//Lk. 23.32–33//Jn 19.18.

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death was at hand, in (ἐν) the spiritual night he was handed over.223 Christ
was also buried, as the Jews buried their dead.224 The corporate suffering and
death within the Jewish community under Pilate is all that we need to make
sense of the historical crucifixion of Paul’s corporate Jesus. The Nazarene was
apparently one among many, whose historical suffering, death, and burial cor-
porately embodied the crucified Christ.
Chronology: from Communal to Individual Incarnation
Gathercole’s chronology of Paul’s career seems basically sound, but the exist-
ence of disciples of the corporate Jesus, and brothers of the corporate Lord,
cannot be used to directly infer any connection with the life of the individual
Nazarene.225 This must also be true of Cephas, i.e. Peter, and John, who appar-
ently shared Paul’s gospel.226 To them, the Nazarene would have been one
member of the Jewish pre-Christian community among many. Nevertheless,
their collective connections with the corporate figure of Jesus do indicate that
they and Paul alike placed the coming or incarnation of the corporate Jesus
and his death just prior to Paul’s conversion, during Pontius Pilate’s procu-
ratorship of Judea. Naturally, the life and death of the Nazarene would have
been contemporary with the corporate presence of Jesus, and there is not
much evidence from Paul to question the Gospels’ chronology. We are instead
confronted by a different matter, i.e. the chronology of the doctrine that the
Nazarene should be individually and exclusively identified as Christ.
We must now consider the evidence beyond Paul, although space per-
mits only a few comments. Again, besides Paul’s seven authentic letters, no
other New Testament writings may be securely dated before 70 ce, although
Hebrews, again, may date to the 60s.227 The earliest certain identification of
the Nazarene with Christ is found in the Gospel of Mark, which may date to
the early 70s ce.228 Mark, in turn, seems associated with Peter’s time preaching
in Rome, an association corroborated by 1 Pet. 5.13, even if that document is

224 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, pp. 205–206. Even victims of crucifixion may have been buried: see
John Granger Cook, ‘Crucifixion and Burial’, NTS 57 (2011), pp. 193–213, especially 209–213.
226 Gal. 1.18; 2.1–10.
227 Schnelle, History and Theology, pp. 288, 303, 318–19, 333–34, 367–68, 388, 403, 418, 426–27,
442–43, 448, 457–59, 476–77, 523–24, 200–202, 222, 243, 259–60; Mitchell, Hebrews, 6–8.
Again, Mitchell noted that others dated Hebrews to the 70s. Schnelle dates it to the 80s.
228 Schnelle, History and Theology, pp. 200–202.

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258 zeddies
late and apocryphal.229 In Paul’s letters, we last hear of Peter (as Cephas) in an
encounter at Antioch in the early 50s, but Paul’s portrayal of him never men-
tions the Nazarene.230 Peter’s devotion to the Nazarene’s cause, whatever its
source, must have come later, although by Mark’s account, this was a renewed
devotion, since Mark portrays Peter as the first (and only) follower of Jesus to
declare him the Christ before he died.231 Paul warns the Corinthians in the
late 50s of those who proclaim ‘another Jesus’ (ἄλλον Ἰησοῦν) different from
his (2 Cor. 11.4), so perhaps by then, Nazarene devotion was spreading abroad.
Paul knew Mark, but that association may have been early, and they may have
had some sort of falling-out.232 One of Mark’s motivations may have been to
show that the Nazarene anticipated Paul’s teachings.233 Mark did not need to
invent an earthly Jesus to represent a mythical one, as mythicists would have
it: rather, he already knew an earthly, messianic community, from which he
could identify a single member, as a unique embodiment of Paul’s Jesus. The
fact that the Nazarene seems to have borne the name ‘Jesus’ himself does not
seem very remarkable, since again, the name was common. Perhaps his name
helped encourage devotion to him. Further speculation is beyond the scope of
this article. Yet if we are to understand the rise of devotion to the Nazarene, it
seems it is to the evangelist Mark that we should first turn our attention. Paul
tells one story about Jesus, but Mark and the Gospels tell another.
Conclusion
We have seen how Paul’s language regarding Jesus, when considered in its lit-
erary and religious context, is participatory and corporate, as are his references
to Jesus’ humanity, birth and family. The name ‘Jesus’ itself is a corporate, mes-
sianic typology, based on Joshua son of Jehozadak of the book of Zechariah.
The earthly, historical body of Jesus was also a corporate one, embodied by the
229 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15–16; Schnelle, History and Theology, p. 403.
230 Gal. 2.11–14[–21].
231 Mk 8.29. Saxby notes that in Acts, it is largely Peter who identifies Jesus as the Nazarene
(Saxby, James, pp. 233, 233–34 n. 89). Of course, Peter’s speeches in Acts are likely also
invented.
232 Phlm. 24; Acts 15.37–40. The term πρεσβύτης at Phlm. 9 cannot be used to date the letter,
since this means ‘ambassador’, not ‘old man’: see N. T. Wright, Colossians and Philemon
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), p. 187; also Bonnie B. Thurston and Judith
M. Ryan, Philippians and Philemon (sp, 10; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), pp.
233–34.
233 Compare, for example, the corporate sentiment expressed by the citation of Lev. 19.18 at
Mk 12.31 vs. Rom. 13.8–10 and Gal. 5.14.

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Jewish pre-Christian community, numerically the same yet different from his
risen, individual body. His ministry, teaching, character, and suffering were all
characteristics of that community, and his passion was a shared trauma within
it. That is the most plausible interpretation of Paul’s undisputed letters, the
best available evidence for the earliest Christian faith. Eventually Christians
came to recognize the Nazarene as an individual, historical incarnation of
Christ Jesus, but that seems to have coincided with Paul’s death. Once Mark’s
Gospel began to spread the message of the Nazarene incarnation, Paul’s writ-
ings were apparently re-appropriated to support the new doctrine. This was
not too difficult, since the Nazarene, as a member of the pre-Christian com-
munity, already embodied Paul’s Jesus. And if Mark used Paul’s letters to help
construct his image of the Nazarene, it seems unsurprising that the Gospel
Jesus came to resemble Paul’s.
My thesis is not meant to be adversarial. If it has any theological or aca-
demic implications, I hope that scholars will consider them in a spirit of
charity and reconciliation. Nor do I mean to trouble anyone’s personal faith.
Indeed, I expect that the Nazarene will remain at the heart of Christian devo-
tion and theology. Nevertheless, the evidence from Paul shows that when he
describes an earthly, historical, and human Jesus, he is not describing an indi-
vidual person, like you or me. I would say that he is, instead, doing something
much more: he is describing a communal incarnation.

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Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus

Communal Incarnation: The Corporate, Collective

Jesus – Paul – incarnation – participation – christology – typology

Simon Gathercole has argued, in a ‘thought experiment’ that considers only

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/17455197-bja10001

2 John M. G. Barclay, ‘Jesus and Paul’, DPL, pp. 492–503 (498).

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11 Gathercole, ‘Historical’, p. 186.

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[W]hatever stance concerning the reliability of the Gospels as sources for

Ehrensperger goes on to treat Paul’s authentic letters as primary sources for

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doubt, and failures to even recognize his risen appearance.20 In hypothetical

Preliminaries: the Source of Paul’s Gospel

20 Mk 16.9–14; Lk. 27.11–43, 52; Jn 20.8–16, 20, 24–29; 21.1–14.

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Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

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declares that the community’s members are like a heavenly angel.34

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approach has been recently developed and defended to some degree by

The concept of Israel as God’s son occurs frequently, sometimes explictly

Russell Phillip Shedd mentioned various scriptural passages ‘which describe

If Paul actually sees the Church as the fulfillment of Daniel’s corporate

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19Downloaded

Although Paul individualizes the figure of the Servant of the Lord as do

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

48 Wright, Climax, pp. 45–46; Wright, ‘Messiah’, p. 20.

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Humanity: Anarthrous Terms and Adam Christology

The passages Gathercole cites often emphasize shared or collective character-

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

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non-specific sense of humanity or human nature, rather than to an individual human

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

earthly existence, but to his heavenly post-resurrection state.74 Paul apparently

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the two figures, he likewise refers in some sense to a community or collective.

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

87 Longenecker, Galatians, p. 166.

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Birth, Coming, and Family: Communal Identity

Corporate traits of Jewish-Christian communities also explain the other

The ‘seed’ of Abraham is not merely an individual but a corporate figure

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

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Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

Excursus, Part A: the Name ‘Jesus’ as Joshua Typology

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correspondence between ot events, persons, objects, ideas and similar nt

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19Downloaded

Excursus, Part B: ‘Jesus’ as a Messianic Name

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

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interpret related passages in Zechariah as messianic.134 Again, when perform-

Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 19 (2021) 217-259

contact with targumic or proto-targumic traditions regarding messianic names

Excursus, Part C: ‘Jesus’ as a Corporate Name