Pistisism and the Gospels

N.T. Wright argues rather persuasively in his What Saint Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1997) that the Apostle to the Gentiles was not the ambitious and creative "founder" of Christianity, eclipsing and misinterpreting what Jesus had originally intended to be little more than vague moral guidelines. Rather, Paul was more so a faithful "herald of the king," bearing a message in remarkable continuity with the Jesus tradition.

Well, the light of truth continues to shine upon me as it now seems quite clear that Paul's great teaching of "Justification by Faith Over Christ" was not created by Paul out of thin air, but was rather a teaching Jesus Himself seems to have taught; recorded for us in the theologies of the canonical Gospels.

As we learn from Paul, "Faith" (pistis) is not an attribute or an activity "of" people, but (like Sin) is a cosmic, elemental, transpersonal force. Except unlike Sin and Death, it establishes humanity in the proper covenant relationship with God. In the Gospels, when faith is mentioned, we see that Jesus' relationship to it is radically different from what we normally hear.

The agency of miraculous saving acts is actually attributed to Faith, not Jesus:

Matt 9:22: But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy FAITH hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.

This same pattern occurs in Matthew 9:29 and 15:28, Mark 5:34, 10:52, Luke 7:9-10, 7:50, 8:48, 17:19, 18:48. Mark 2:5 (Luke 5:20) reads:

When Jesus saw their FAITH, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.

As is clear from this passage and its parallels, the only thing that Christ "does" is see that Faith is already healing the sick man. He is just a remarkably observant guy, and his amazing sensitivity to the mysterious saving action of Faith is often mistaken as a sign that he is the agent. However the message of the Gospel is clearly different: Jesus is simply more aware than everyone else of what's really going on, and his attempts to point this out seem constantly to end in misunderstanding. Scholars have been scratching their unkempt heads for decades and decades about Mark's motif of the "Messianic Secret": why is it that Jesus seems to discourage people from proclaiming him as Messiah? NOW it is all so clear!!!

Jesus is more like a really good spectator than an athlete: he is most often described as "seeing" faith, not causing it or doing things because of it. Note the passages in which he is said to either "find" or "not find" Faith:

Matthew 8:10: When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.

See also Luke 18:8.

One might notice that it sure seems as though Jesus is ascribing agency to Faith, but specifically to the individual's faith: "your faith has made you whole." This would seem to imply that faith is, after all, a kind of quality or action "of" individual people. However, as in Paul's letters, the truth is revealed when we realize that the evangelists did not use the pronoun sou ("your") here as a Possessive Genitive, but rather as a Genitive of Subordination! Hence, the REAL translation of a passage like Luke 18:42 (and its parallels) reads:

And Jesus said to him, "Receive your sight; Faith OVER/HAVING DOMINION OVER YOU has made you well."

Salvation is a result of the cosmic power of Faith man-handling the believer into slave-like submission, dominating the sin out of him or her. The 1st century Judeo-Christian world was all about apocalyptic cosmic struggle, and here it is evident that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet: attempting to unveil to the world the saving action of Faith, even Faith over him.

Pax Christi,