There’s a passage in one of Saint Paul’s earliest letters that always strikes me as both weird and sad. "If for this life only, we have hoped in Christ,” he says, “we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Cor. 15:19). 

He’s talking about the future resurrection of the dead—and more generally, life after death for the Christian believer. And he’s saying that if there is no such thing as an afterlife, believers like him are objects of pity, are losers; that without the promise of heaven, their lives are wasted, a bitter joke.

I’ll put it a different way. If this present life ends in death, and more particularly, if there’s no heavenly reward for all our efforts, then there’s no point believing in Christ, or God. 

That’s what he’s saying. And he hammers home his point a few verses later (15:32), and makes it personal, as part of his own story: “If with merely human hopes I fought with wild animals at Ephesus, what would I have gained from it? If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'”

He’s saying that, minus the promise of a heavenly life after this one, it would be better for him to live a hedonistic life and merely enjoy himself; that if you take away the promise of heaven, all his immense personal efforts—criss-crossing the known world, mostly on foot; a couple of shipwrecks; trials and jail, beatings, mob attacks, to say nothing of the repeated humiliation of rejection by his own people—are acts of folly, pathetic ones at that. He would have been better off settling down in peaceful domesticity with Timothy as his lover, sipping a glass of wine and enjoying the sunset from a pleasant garden terrace.

I don’t agree with that view, and neither, in my reading, does Jesus. The Jesus of the gospels announces a kingdom of God that is here, right now, for anyone who chooses to discover it. Further, that kingdom means healing, peace, joy, and abundance of blessing—right now, in this life. He also speaks of trials and sufferings, along with the fullness of a future kingdom: it’s both now, and not yet. But never does he even come close to suggesting that the only reason for enduring this life is the promise of rewards after death. Yet that’s what Paul is saying here.

Further, the rhetorical dialectic that Paul sets up is obviously false, and, as a highly educated Greek, he should know better. The alternative to belief in an afterlife is not shallow hedonism, as he here suggests. The alternatives may take many ethical forms but they all involve deep and enduring commitment to a Good beyond ourselves. Some examples—just to name a few: the philosophic search for the good life, in the Socratic tradition; Stoicism; Epicureanism; various forms of Buddhism; societal engagement for justice and peace under a secular banner. In these days, I think particularly of the heroic and indeed Christ-like martyrdom of Alexei Navalny at the hands of Russia’s tyrant in perpetuum, Vladimir Putin. 

Not exactly “Eat drink and be merry.”

The more I meditate on the scriptures, the more problematic the teachings of Paul become. And that’s not a small thing. Some scholars consider him to be the true founder and creator of the Christian religion. And whether you accept that view or not (I don’t), it’s indisputable that for centuries we have perceived Jesus through the filter of Paul. 

That filter works in two ways. 

There’s the obvious and almost daily interpretative power that successive generations of authorities have given to Paul, since his letters are part of canonical scripture, and are given a liturgical and moral weight that is close to, although not quite, that of the gospels themselves. Indeed, I suspect that the more evangelical brands of Christianity really prefer Paul; certainly he is the principal source of their relentless toxicity.

And then there’s the unseen and ultimately indefinable filter. That comes from the fact that Jesus himself wrote nothing, and the earliest Christian texts—composed approximately twenty years after Jesus’ death—are the letters of Paul. The earliest gospel (Mark’s) appeared around the year CE 70—fully forty years after the death of Christ, and twenty years after Paul’s first letter. We don’t know for sure who wrote the various gospels; but tradition identifies Mark with one of the companions of Paul (and later, Peter); and Luke, the author of both the next one and the Acts, self-identifies as Paul’s travel companion and disciple. Matthew, the latest of the three synoptic gospels, like Luke, uses Mark’s account as a major source; other sources are lost. (The very different gospel of John was written even later, from a source or sources that remain unknown.)

So we have four writers telling the story of Christ’s life, long after his death, none of whom knew him personally. In literary terms, that makes them unreliable narrators in the extreme; they are, in effect, writing fiction. And all of them were, one way or another, under the influence of Paul.

Those gospels are fascinating documents. For me, the most amazing thing about them is how potent their portrait of Jesus is. And one of the outstanding things about the Jesus who emerges from them is how different he is from Paul, who never met him, belonged to a different class and culture, and with two exceptions—both problematic—never refers to his teachings, his life, or his miracles. 

"If for this life only, we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." 

The sadness of Saint Paul.