1111. Furnish has rightly pointed out ...

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Furnish has rightly pointed out that "[s]ubsequent investigations into the origins of Christianity have shown how naive it was to label Paul the founder of Christianity as we know it; Paul was converted by and into a Christian movement that already had a rich theological tradition and that had already been nurtured by various religious and cultural sources. Paul made his own theological contributions, to be sure, but the church before him had received its initial and decisive momentum from the recognition by the earliest community that the Jesus who had been crucified lived among them still, as its risen Lord" (The Moral Teaching of Paul: 12).

How much more naive is it, then, to argue -- as in "From Jesus to Christ" -- that Jesus became Christ only with Constantine's establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire!

24 July 1998