An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part VI (So, Just When IS The End of The World Scheduled?)

A quick look at the New Testament and we see that it starts with the four Gospels, followed by The Acts of The Apostles, then the Epistles of Paul, a few other epistles and the big scary Book of Revelation. It's more or less chronological - Gospels, Acts, Epistles. But the books were not written in the same order as the events that they chronicle. The first book written was I Thessalonians, dated 15-20 years after Jesus' ministry. Galatians, I & II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians were all written before the very first Gospel was written, 35-40 years after Jesus' time. (But do not appear in the Bible in the order in which they are believed to be written) All this information from Paul was being passed around before anyone thought that anything resembling a biography of Jesus would be a good idea.  

In a previous post I mentioned that I thought that it was likely that Jesus existed, not that everything said about him was true, but that a person on whom the Gospels was based existed. I believe that the existence of Paul is even more of an historical certainty - unlike Jesus we have contemporary documents - actually written (or at least dictated) by Paul. At some point I'll discuss the conclusion by many Biblical scholars that not everything attributed to Paul was written by him. 

I Thessalonians, a letter from Paul to the church in Thessalonica that he had founded some time previously, was mainly concerned with details of Jesus' future return. People among his followers had died and there as concern that maybe Jesus wasn't coming back as promised. Paul tells them not to worry about it, when the resurrection takes place, the dead will rise first. What is interesting is that in this epistle, as in all the others, there is little to no mention of any details of Jesus' life or of his actual teachings. Presumably the Christians of Thessalonica already knew those details (or some version of the oral traditions). Galatians, written around the same time, is a little different. He's arguing against a group whose views we don't know for sure, and is making the case that non-Jews are just as able to become Christians as are Jews. No details about Jesus' life there either. For some reason, in the approximately 20 years between Jesus' death and Paul's epistles, the emphasis had changed from the works-based teachings of Jesus to the "believing" that Paul wrote about. 

As discussed previously, it is my view that Jesus was an Apocalyptic Prophet, i.e. he was preaching that the world as we knew it was soon to end, brought about by God's intervention. God would then establish his kingdom in which Jesus believed that he would be a key figure. Jesus believed that this would happen soon. He preached that to "enter the kingdom" one had to completely reject the things of the world, including riches, personal attachments and even family. But that didn't happen. By Paul's time Christians were reaching the end of their lives and passing away; the survivors were concerned that they would miss out on the establishment of the kingdom of God if they weren't alive when it came about. At this time it was not at  all a consensus view that there was a life after death and believers were getting concerned that they would miss the boat if the died before the divine intervention. Christians were well aware that one of Jesus' central doctrines was that "The End" very literally "Was Near", and like hundreds of prophets through the next two millennia, he was wrong. I Thessalonians is the first attempt in canon to explain away the discrepancy between what Jesus said and what was happening (or not happening). 

Part VII