The Anti-Gospel of Jesus Christ

by Miko Bartek

Where did this idea, that Jesus died for our sins, come from? Who is responsible for this myth? I ask a lot of people. The most common response from Christians is that it came from Christ. But this is not the case.

Jesus never wrote anything. Jesus is described entirely by others. Scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was the first to be written, sometime around 70 AD. John was the last to be written, between 90 and 100 AD.¹ Jesus had died decades earlier. Any words attributed to Jesus within the gospels were imagined. Not real.

I will be generous, though, and for the sake of this thought exercise, we can assume that Jesus was real and that the words attributed to him were his words, exactly. Even if that were the case, it would be impossible to derive Christian theology from the words of Christ. And that is because Christian theology did not originate with Jesus.

Christian theology originates with Paul. Paul described Christian theology in his letters. Paul’s Letter to the Romans is the bedrock document on which the theology of salvation was built. But Paul did not invent the theology. Instead, he only described the beliefs of the community he had joined. Their beliefs had become his.

When Hadi said to me that Paul had had a greater impact on Christianity than Christ, this is what he was referring to. Paul was the first writer to shape the reputation of Christ after his death. Paul gave us the meaning of his death. Paul draped a jacket over the shoulders of Christ after he was brought down from the cross, in telling us it was for our sins.

Interestingly, Paul and Jesus were the same age. And while they both lived in the same area, they did not know each other. Paul started as an enemy of Christ.

“For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it” Galatians 1:13

If Jesus is God and he died for our sins, then why did Jesus not explain salvation himself? Why did God entrust a man who had never met Christ, and who tried to destroy God’s church, to explain God’s thinking on these matters?

1. Evolution of the Word
   The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written
   by Marcus J. Borg.
   HarperOne
   August 27, 2013 ↩︎