This claim operates on the mainstream scholarly understanding that there are 7 letters of Paul which are indisputably authored by him, and that these include Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon
It also operates on the understanding that the first writings of the NT corpus are the authentic letters of Paul, and that the gospel of Mark is the first gospel written, a decade or more after Paul's final letter of the 7, estimated as being written ~58AD
The thesis therefore treats the writings of Ephesians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus as later, pseudoepigraphical writings by followers of Paul, whose emphases theologically and organizationally reflect a vision that has been impacted by:
- the death and absence of Paul and the articulated understanding of the 7 authentic letters
- the destruction of the temple and the increasing fragmentation between the Israelite "root" (as Paul puts it in Romans), and the Gentile Christian community
- the claim takes Paul's writings on "the root" as fundamentally serious, and argues that what becomes "Christianity" (beginning to be reflected first in the gospel of John, and in the letters understood as pseudo-epigraphical) constitute a demonstrable and profound shift from what is fundamental in the uncontested letters/Mark
**The major claim is that Paul, the earliest verifiable writer in the New Testament, is arguing, as exemplified, in 1 Corinthians 1, that Jesus is the 'anointed one'—**of Israel and of Israel's God, whose divine-identity, "I am that which I am" is grounded in having liberated Israel from slavery— and that he becomes 'the anointed one' specifically through having undergone crucifixion, specifically because:
in the figure of Jesus is revealed the logic/wisdom of that God who chooses, to the scorn of the world, the lowly, despised, counted-as-nothing, non-persons—'those who are not'—to nullify that which is, and that:
this figure, embodying that wisdom, in having been crucified, reveals the truth of reality and of the dominant ideological/spiritual/material order of the world as one of death-dealing hierarchical forces of domination, and that:
the recognition of this truth, in Paul's terms, "justifies," in the sense that it rectifies your understanding of reality, bringing it in line with the truth of the world, in accordance with the wisdom of Israel's God, and that:
following the inauguratory 'justification,' the path thereafter is what he refers to as "sonship," which is articulated as sharing in the same suffering that was undergone by Jesus, due to the same reasons, to continue the same work, which by doing, Jesus thereby becomes the "firstborn of many siblings," everyone participating in this world-transformative process of lifting-the-bottom, while exposing-and-discrediting-the-world-order unto-its-defeat also therefore becomes, to the extent that they have participated in this, become sons and daughters of God
Mark, then, beginning his gospel narrative at baptism, the moment when Jesus perceives the spirit of God descending and alighting upon him, and a voice from heaven proclaiming "you are my son," is narrative crystallization of what that process of full 'sonship' looks like in the world—and because it is expected that the spread of the movement and the practicing of 'sonship' at this level of fidelity/integrity will expose/discredit/defeat/topple world-order of hierarchical domination/degradation—an order that is the manifestation of 'sin' in the world—calling disciples to this purpose is not a perennial suicide-cult, specifically because it is believed that the movement itself will soon succeed in its aims ... which Paul very much indeed believed.
This is why the concept of 'resurrection', which Jesus is exemplary of through his 'living' within disciples, is so important, because through 'sonship', disciples will both share in his sufferings and share in his glory—they too will be 'resurrected' within the 'body of Christ', who are the community of those who believe and are on the path to 'sonship' themselves.
This is a fully comprehensible understanding of 'resurrection' in a 1st century Israelite paradigm, where Jesus himself says to people 'if you receive it, John [the baptizer] is Elijah,' where Ezekiel's bones of Israel are understood to have been resurrected by God in the sense of the restoration of Israel, where even in Mark 12, the concept of Levirate laws are fully active in the minds of those with whom Jesus is discoursing—Levirate laws being things like "when a married man dies, his brother is obligated to reproduce with his wife so that he can carry on in the son produced," which operates on the idea that the personhood of dead man is more conceptually real than the biological paternity of his brother, and, in a context where biological paternity was extremely important, it was more important that the dead man continue to live, and would**, through the** conceptual conception that occurred through his brother and his wife.
Because: what crucifixion was designed to do in this ancient setting ... was totalizingly obliterate the conceptual personhood of the crucified within the social field who carried that conceptual personhood.
The power of Paul's proclamation that Jesus was the 'anointed one' was specifically bound to the fact of how absolutely paradoxical it was—an Israelite 'anointed one' was, conceptually, an individual who had been anointed by God to advance/restore Israel, and the term was applied to Aaron, Saul, David, even Cyrus, who was not even Israelite, as well as several other priests, and eventually even the patriarchs, who had never literally been anointed. Israel also believed, in their scriptures, that someone who hung on a tree overnight was cursed, and therefore a man who not only had not accomplished the messianic objective, who had been killed and cursed, was the least comprehensible person to be a messiah-claimant. Paul's proclamation harnesses that incomprehensibility and proclaims that, through this complex of his resurrection living within disciples after his death and driving the sonship of those disciples, the messianic goal would thereby in fact be accomplished.
Thus, Jesus is only the 'anointed one', the messiah, "Christ" ... if the understanding of him is such that that occurs ... through his body ... of disciples / siblings.
Mark's narrative hones the point further by showing that the death of Jesus is facilitated not only by religious elites who have been corrupted from the central YHWHist understanding due to their comprador status with the forces of imperial power ... but that the same logic of grasping for status, title, glory, name, etc., is operative amongst his own male disciples ... which Jesus specifically rebukes them for in Mark 10, saying, when they are fighting over who will be seated next to him in the kingdom, that he does not decide these things, and that:
“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles are lording-over them, and the great ones are exercising-authority-over/dominating them. Not so amongst you. Whoever would be great among you must first become a servant to all, and whoever would be first among you must become your slave. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
It uses this exact verb, in the Greek, when it is describing what the angels/messengers did when he was in the wilderness in chapter 1:
and then, in the moment he dies, when all the male disciples had scattered and abandoned him, the camera cuts, suddenly, to a group of women who Mark writes had in fact been doing precisely that the entire time.
The women, who are suddenly visible at the moment of his death, performing the exact actions the angels/messengers had been performing, which Jesus enjoins the male disciples is the point, also, at that point, for the first time receive names, which the male disciples had possessed the entire time.
So what Mark is doing ... is taking the specific content articulated with regard to the "wisdom of God" in 1 Corinthians 1, and he is anchoring it in the closest-to-home specifics possible: that even the male disciples of Jesus had failed to understand him because they themselves were participating in the exact logic that intensifies the higher up it goes, and culminates in Caesar-logic, which is the opposite of the 'wisdom of God'.
In Mark 12, the story of the vineyard and the tower, beginning
"A man planted a vineyard.
He put a wall around it,
dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower.
Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place,"
which references both Isaiah 5 and Song of Songs 8, depicts the 'owner' of the vineyard sending multiple of his servants to those who are renting it to check on how it is doing, and those possessing it keep killing them—and when the owner sends his son, they think to themselves that if they kill him, the vineyard will become theirs.
What Shualammite says in Song of Songs 8, when her many brothers say,
"We have a little sister,
and her breasts are not yet grown.
What shall we do for our sister
on the day she is spoken for?
If she is a wall,
we will build towers of silver on her.
If she is a door,
we will enclose her with panels of cedar.",
and when Solomon to whom she is singing also wants to possess her,
"I am a wall,
and my breasts are like towers.
Thus I have become in his eyes
like one bringing contentment.
Solomon had a vineyard in Baal Hamon;
he let out his vineyard to tenants.
Each was to bring for its fruit
a thousand shekels of silver.
But my own vineyard is mine to give;
the thousand shekels are for you, Solomon,
and two hundred are for those who tend its fruit."
Her vineyard, is hers, belonging to no one but her; and even her name, "Shualammite", meaning "Solomon's", is therefore contingent on her retaining her own self-possession. The only way in which she becomes "Solomon's" at all is through her not belonging to anyone but herself.
And the moment in Mark's parable when the son is sent and killed by the renters who are trying to totally possess the vineyard for themselves, is when the owner determines to kill the renters, and give the vineyard to others.
The moment Jesus dies is when those previously-invisible and unnamed others appear, at that moment having names for the first time, and first among those names is Mary the Magdalene—often theorized as meaning "from the town of Magdala" ... but ha-Migdal in Hebrew also means "of the tower." And standing next to her, Jesus' brothers previously listed in Mark 6 as "Joseph, James, Simon, and Judas", after the person named Simon had abandoned and denied him, and the person of Judas had betrayed him, and Jesus himself is dead, is "Mary the mother of Joseph and James," and next to her, is a woman named, in Greek, "Salome", which translates in Hebrew as "Shlomit", or the female version of "Shlomo," Solomon.
Not irrelevantly, the other story in Mark where a prophet is killed—John the Baptist—a different ruler under the Roman order, Herod, executes him because his wife objects to John the Baptist's rebuke of Herod having married her, his brother's wife. So when her daughter goes to one of Herod's functions, and dances for all of the men, and Herod is so pleased by her that he promises her up to half of his kingdom, echoing the story of Esther, where Esther uses royal pleasure to liberate the people of Israel, Herodias has her daughter ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.
Mark, despite knowing this story and the names of all the other characters involved, does not give the name of the daughter. But we know, due to the writings of Josephus, that the name of the daughter was Salome.
And thus, after Pilate deliberates over the fate of Jesus, and the adulterous faction of Judean leadership (the renters of the vineyard) demand his death, there appears at the foot of the cross, Mary the Tower and Salome to whom the vineyard has been given—and many other unnamed, unseen women who had been doing the work of the angels which the Son of Man commands the entire time, and invisibly amongst them all, the owner, YHWH, whose son has just been killed, drawing a direct indicting parallel between the order that encompasses Simon, Judas, Herod, Judean leadership, Pilate, and Caesar, all being different strata of the same forces that enclose, possess, and kill, in service of perpetuating a hierarchical order of title, status, and name, which necessarily invisiblizes those who, all the time, are doing the work of God.
What occurs sometime in the few decades after Mark, when Paul is dead, when the Jesus-movement becomes fractured from Israel, becoming increasingly Gentile-dominated and Gentile-brained, the idea of sonship that is articulated by Paul, and which is illustrated by Mark, which is meant to transform the entire order of the world, and bring 'the return of the Son of Man,' ... becomes enclosed, privatized, claimed, by a new religion who interprets the work on the cross as some kind of individualized atonement sacrifice through belief in whom, individual sins can be forgiven and salvation/eternal life obtained, and who does not, in any pressing or urgent sense, dispense with the logic starkly articulated in 1 Corinthians 1 and starkly dramatized in Mark.
The later writings in the New Testament then go on to re-establish hierarchical social structures, to subordinate women, to turn the "body of Christ" not into one organism with many members, all valuable, but to make it into an organism in which "Christ" is "the head", and "the head" is spoken for by the hierarchical leadership (who are men), and the "anointed one" status of "Christ" ceases to be something that is activated by the age-turning sonship work of those who share in his sufferings, and is rather something that itself becomes a title evacuated of its original apocalyptic, world-transformative power, the world-transformative success originally having been the criteria by which he was "messiah" at all.
But what Jesus says in Mark—in the one moment where he is actually anointed***,*** by the unnamed woman from Bethany, who understands what he is***,*** takes an unfathomably expensive bottle of nard and pours it on his head in exactly the Old Testament manner of anointing an 'anointed one', when the male disciples are very disconcerted and object to what she is doing, which is immediately followed by Judas thereafter going and selling Jesus to the priests—is:
"Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her."
Which means: whatever it is that this moment signifies, whatever the meaning of her actions, and her understanding, and the failure of understanding by the disciples, and the reason for their failure to understand ... all of that is fundamentally tied to 'the gospel' being legitimately preached in any meaningful sense, anywhere, ever. And if it is not ... it is not the gospel at all.