Jesus left no writings. His native language was Aramaic. His ambit was the villages of Galilee and Judaea. His hearers were predominately fellow Jews. The core of his message was that the Kingdom of God was at hand. The earliest evidence we have from his mission and message, however, comes out of the western Diaspora, from the letters of the apostle Paul. Paul’s first language was Greek. His ambit was the great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. His hearers were primarily Gentiles – which is to say, pagans. And a strong element of his teaching was the message that Jesus, as the Davidic messiah (Christos), was about to return to defeat pagan gods and to establish God’s kingdom. This lecture seeks to fill in the gap between Jesus’s mission and that of Paul by situating Paul’s letters and the material available in the gospels within the traditions of late Second Temple apocalyptic expectation. It is these traditions that explain why Jesus was crucified, but his followers were not; why the honorific “messiah” – Greek christos – attached to him so early; why his first followers experienced him as raised from the dead; why that community settled in Jerusalem so shortly after Jesus’s death; and why this very Jewish message – the coming resurrection of the dead and the impending establishment of God’s kingdom – so readily sponsored outreach to Gentiles. A recording of Lecture Three - From Jesus to Christ This article was published on Thursday 13 August 2026
