The War of the Heavenly Christs: John’s Sacrificed Lamb versus Paul’s Crucified God (Couchoud continued)

Continuing here my series of outlining Paul Louis Couchoud’s work The Creation of Christ (English translation 1939), with all posts in the series archived, in reverse chronological order, here.

The previous post in this series presented Couchoud’s argument that Paul’s Christ was a God crucified in heaven, the result of a combination of feverish interpretations of the Psalms and other Jewish scriptures and a projection of Paul’s own experiences of suffering.

In the chapter I outline in this, post Couchoud begins by narrating the departure of Paul and all the original Jerusalem pillars bar one. Paul, he says, with the demonstration of the converted gentile Titus before the Jerusalem elders, and the Jerusalem elders themselves, were moving towards a reconciliation at long last that culminated in the decree we read of Acts 15 — that gentiles need only follow a few principles ordained originally for Noah’s descendants plus one or two:

• avoid eating meat offered to idols
• avoid eating blood
• avoid eating things strangled
• avoid fornication (that is, marriages between Christians and pagans)

Couchoud does not know if Paul ever went so far as submitting to this Jerusalem edict, but he does declare that the communities Paul founded in Asia and others influenced by him did ignore it. These were “scornfully called” Nicolaitanes. They continued to live as they had always lived in the faith: buying meat in the market without asking if it had been sacrificed to an idol and tolerating marriages between Christians and pagans.

The authorities at Jerusalem scornfully called them Nicolaitanes, treated them as rebels worse than heathen, excommunicated them, and vowed them to early extermination by the sword of Jesus. (p. 79)

Then came the next turning point in church history:

In the meantime the haughty Mother Church was struck by an earthly sword. In the stormy year which preceded the Jewish insurrection, three “pillars” were taken from Jerusalem. About 62, after the death of the prosecutor Festus and before the arrival of his successor, James, the “brother of the Lord,” the camel of piety, was, together with others, accused by the high priest Ananos as a law-breaker, condemned, and stoned. Kephas-Peter, the first to behold Jesus, perished at Rome, probably in the massacre of the Christians after the fire of Rome in 64. At Rome, too, died his adversary who had in former days impeached and mocked him so vigorously, Paul. Nothing is known of their deaths, save perhaps that jealousy and discord among the Christians brought them about. (p. 80)

In footnotes Couchoud adds

1. with reference to our evidence for the death of James that the phrase in Josephus appended to the name of James, “brother of Jesus called the Christ” have been added later by a Christian hand;
2. with reference to Christian sectarian jealousy being ultimately responsible for the death of Peter and Paul he cites both Clemens Romanus V (Clement of Rome) and O. Cullmann, “Rev. d’Hist. et de Philosophie relig., 1930, pp. 294-300, as decisive evidence that there was jealousy and discord.

So this left John

As for John, the third pillar, he quitted Jerusalem, as it had become impossible for Christians to live there, and went soon after 64 to Patmos, an isle of exile, not far from Ephesus, where he fulminated against Rome, the harlot, the murderess of the prophets and saints. The rest of the glorious community of Jerusalem was warned by a revelation given to its last prophets to leave the city before the war. They hid in Perea in the Greek commune of Pella (Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., iii. 5.3) and later on established in Basanitide the Ebionite sect which fanatically kept the traditions of James.

So by about 65 all those who had individually seen the Lord — James, Peter and Paul — were dead.

Of those who had beheld him as one of a group, John alone survived. He is the Great Witness, the supreme warrant of the advent of the Lord. It was firmly believed that he would not die until Jesus should come. [John 21:23] He is then the prophet whose authority outweighs all other authority. In him is concentrated the hope and the ground for hope of that body of elect in which Jesus was revealed. He appears as the high priest of the Christians, and, like the high priest of the Jews, he wore a golden pectoral. [Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., v. 24, 3; c.f. Epiphanius, Haer, xxx] He it was who moved the seat of the new religion to Asia Minor and rallied around him the Asiatic churches which forgot the teaching of Paul.

The churches John rallied were ones where Paul had never really gained a foothold — not even in Ephesus. Ephesus was the major one, but then followed (along the road joining them all) Smyrna, Pergamus, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. John strengthened their faith and consoled them that those anti-Jerusalemite Nicolaitanes would be devoured by the fiery sword of Jesus in the last day of judgement — which was imminent.

Couchoud bases his claim that John the Apostle was the same John as the author of Revelation upon the evidence (“among others”) of Justin who lived at Ephesus about 135 (Dialogue 81).

Thirty years earlier this John had, in the company of his brother James, a vision of Jesus. All the Twelve had shared this vision. But now, on the island of Patmos, the vision appeared to John while he was alone just as Peter and James had seen him, and as Paul also said he had seen him.

John described this vision in prophetic style in the Revelation of St. John the Divine. John thus placed himself in the line of the great prophets of the past. After Paul he becomes the greatest of the Christian prophets.

His prophecy is called rightly an Apocalypse, for its object is to reveal the imminent coming of the Son of Man and the drama of the Day of Doom. These mysteries, which in Paul occupy small space, form the whole of the message of John. (p. 81)

John’s Religious Genius

Couchoud is a poet even in translation of his prose so I cannot resist quoting the following in full from pages 81 and 82:

John’s religious genius is not as profound as that of Paul, nor is his prophetic style so varied, so supple, or so near the heart. Nor in his invention is there anything so startling and affecting as the Cross of Jesus. He creates little that is new, but re-creates with greater intensity the grandiose images of the old Hebrews; for, though he wrote Greek, he thought Hebrew, and his language has a harsh, unyielding stiffness which is foreign to Hellas. On the other hand, his is a Hebrew majesty, compactness, and brilliance of word, a splendour which is over-long-drawn and over-remote, but quick with energy and of concentrated effect. Not his the pity which moves the bowels, but the starkness which grips the imagination. The gifts of a great poet are to be found in this work, where the blast of the trumpet is mingled with the soft notes of the cithara. As an eagle, he soars and pierces with his eye the infinite abyss, heaven and earth open before him in the final cataclysm.

The Jesus poem of which Paul had made a brief but surprising divine tragedy, in which the abysmal dejection precedes supreme exaltation, in John’s hands becomes a pageant of glory, moving to successive triumphs. 

Death is the Christ’s first victory. Nothing here of ignominy or tormented agony; a ritual sacrifice made before the beginning of the world, a celestial prototype of the Easter offering, the primordial sacrifice of the male lamb.

This started me thinking. It certainly is the fact that even the Gospel of John does not depict a suffering or humiliated Jesus as we find in Paul. Even in the Gospel of John Jesus is in total control and above all pain and trickery inflicted by mortals.

The Sacrificial Lamb and the Sacrificing Priest

So the sacrifice of the Lamb Jesus before the ages redeems through its expiatory virtue and purifies the redeemed — just like that of the Mithraic bull.

So the blood of the Lamb frees the elect from their sins and whitens their garments. But just as Jesus is a sacrifice so, too, are the brethren, and they, too, must therefore become spotless. Thus they will become the everlasting companions of the Lamb — Rev. 1:3, 7:14, 14:-5. (The notes in square brackets are taken from C’s footnotes.)

Behind the whole of John’s poem is an array of sacerdotal notions. Jesus is at one and the same time the Sacrifice and the Sacrificing Priest, and the holy priest and the hallowed victim are united in a single divine entity. That is why he appears to John as a heavenly priest, wearing the long robe of the Jewish high priest and the gold pectoral such as John wore, the High Priest of New Israel (Rev. i: 10-18):–

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