From Paul to Mark- Reading Workshop Lecture series

FOTCM From Paul to Mark- Reading Workshop Lecture series 2025-06-12

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This resource has been extracted from our Reading Workshop discussion on Laura Knight-Jadczyk's From Paul to Mark.

In her magnum opus, Laura untangles the origins of early Christianity. The premise of the book began as a deep need to discover the truth about Christianity and evidence of an actual historical Jesus of Nazareth. As Laura states, "Of utmost importance is the implication that knowing or inferring something about ultimate reality can help an individual to live a better life, in harmony with the way things actually are." This book explores the topic from many seemingly tangential angles, which is then brought together to give us an understanding of the context of the times from which Christianity arose.

From very early on, Christianity was two different things- Jewish messianism (Zealots) & Pauline Christianity. According to Laura, the Apostle Paul was a mystic and seer, and he was the true bringer of the gospel of Christ. However, what we know of this gospel today is distorted and hidden by two thousand years of materialism, the very thing that Paul’s gospel was intended to refute.

Only in recent years of Bible scholarship, has the distinctly Roman influence on the early Christian texts & imagery been noticed. Julius Caesar, the son of Venus, symbolised by the dove, was elevated to status of an imperial god after his violent death at the hands of those he had loved and forgiven. Caesar who believed in mercy, forgiveness, equality was much loved by the people. The cult that had surrounded Caesar dissolved gradually as Christianity developed. Laura discusses Paul's imagery of Christ's triumphal procession & the similarities between the cross & the tropaeum. We come to see that there is an actual historical figure (Caesar) missing his cult, while a major religion is missing its actual historical figure (Jesus of Nazareth). The Gospel of Mark was written as apology for the Roman Christians in Rome after the Jerusalem War. It was in Mark that the Pauline Christ was superimposed on a Galilean figure, & the Christ theology was modeled on the life and experiences of Paul.

The aim of this resource is to help the reader situate themselves in the context of those times and examine the history as proposed by Laura, compared to the accepted traditional chronology based on the gospels.

A huge thanks to @placematt for editing and putting these slides together with the audio, and to @987baz for creating the music!

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