What is the earliest account of Christian belief and proclamation, in the opinion of all experts? Well, it’s actually not the one in the Gospels, it’s in a letter of Paul. Paul’s letters were written in the middle of the first century, approximately 20 to 40 years after Jesus. That is a relatively small time gap by ancient standards, remember I said earlier that Tacitus wrote his account of Tiberius almost 80 years after the emperor.

Yet one passage from Paul takes us much closer, to within just a few years of the crucifixion itself. In his letter to the Corinthians, which we know was penned around AD 55, Paul stops to remind his readers of the core message he’d already preached to them when he was with them in Corinth five years earlier, so AD 50. He does this in the common ancient style of a pithy, memorable summary, what scholars call a creed, which the Corinthians had learnt by heart when Paul was with them. 

This is part of the ancient world that we know quite well. Primary schools in Paul’s day used these same mnemonic devices to remember and learn the basics of, say, speech writing. The philosophical schools for adults used the same techniques. The School of the Epicureans, for example, employed memorable summaries to lock into the minds of his disciples the central arguments of Epicurus. I happen to be writing an academic book on that very topic, I won’t bore you with the details. 

Jewish Rabbis did the same thing. They made their disciples learn key summary statements by rote. It was a way of safeguarding the most important ideas. Josephus, for example, in the first century tells us “the Pharisees had passed on, paradidomi,” this is technical language, “to the people certain regulations handed down by former generations and not recorded in the laws of Moses.” He‘s talking about oral tradition, memorised. The key terminology here, which was also used in philosophical schools, was pass on, ‘paradidomi,’ and receive, ‘paralambano.’ One was the duty of the teacher to pass on, the other was the duty of the student to receive.  

Now why am I telling you all of this? Paul was himself a former Pharisee. He employed the same practice to good effect among his non-Jewish hearers. And what’s fascinating in the paragraph I’m about to quote to you, promise, is that Paul admits he’s not the source of the oral summary, or creed, that he passed on to his converts. Just as Paul paradidomi, passed on, this creed to the Corinthians when he was with them in AD 50, so Paul says he paralambano, received it, from others when he first learned about Christ. 

That’s 1 Corinthians 15:3-5.

Scholars debate exactly when Paul received this pithy creed, some dated to the year of his conversion, 31-32, when he was in Damascus. And others dated to AD 33-34, when he spent fifteen days in Jerusalem in conversation with the apostle Peter and Jesus’ brother James, an event we know of from Galatians chapter 1. But whichever date you accept, 31-32/33-34, I don’t care! James Dunn, of the University of Durham, speaks for many when he says, and I quote, “this tradition, 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, we can be entirely confident was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus death.”

This is as close to the events as a historian could ever hope for. The significance of it is obvious. It establishes beyond reasonable doubt that at least six elements of the narrative of Jesus arose immediately after his death and can’t have been part of some developing legend. Already, by let’s say AD 35 at the latest, the following was part of formal Christian education and proclamation:

1. Jesus’ status as ‘ho Christos,’ the Messiah,
2. His death for sins,
3. His burial in a tomb,
4. His resurrection after three days,
5. His multiple appearances, and
6. His appointment of a special Twelve Apostles, a key leader of which was Cephas, or Peter.

All of this was sufficiently well known. To have become part of a formal summary of Christianity, which was passed on to converts far and wide. This proves, in the historian’s sense of the word, true. That what was later written down in detail in the Gospels, and hinted at throughout Paul’s letters, was already being proclaimed by missionaries and committed to memory by disciples within months of the events themselves.

By John Dickson

Want to hear the rest of the episode?
Check out episode 126: “Jesus’ Biography”

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