10/29/2026 – The italicized text below was extracted from Jim Palmer’s Substack post of Sept. 04, 2026 here. The post in PDF format is also in his directory in DropBox. All emphasis is mine.
Communities preserve important figures by interpreting them. Memories become stories, stories become traditions, traditions become doctrines, and doctrines eventually become institutions. What begins as an encounter with a person becomes an explanation of what that person means.
But the explanation is not the person.
The distinction matters because Christianity eventually became extraordinarily interested in questions Jesus himself does not appear to have made central. What precisely was his metaphysical relationship to God? How did his death alter humanity’s standing before God? What must someone believe about him to receive salvation? What substances or natures constituted his identity? How should his death be fitted into a cosmic system of sin, judgment, sacrifice, and redemption?
These became defining Christian questions. They were not necessarily the defining questions of Jesus.
Paul was not sitting at a desk inventing Christianity from nothing. He inherited traditions already circulating among followers of Jesus, encountered communities already trying to understand what had happened, drew upon Jewish scripture and religious imagination, and responded to concrete problems confronting small and often fragile assemblies. His letters are not systematic theology textbooks. They are correspondence written into disputes about belonging, ethics, ritual, sexuality, community, suffering, authority, resurrection, and how Jews and Gentiles could inhabit the same emerging movement.
Paul was interpreting.
That is the category I now find most useful. Paul does not need to be either demonized or deified. He was a brilliant, complicated first-century religious thinker attempting to make sense of Jesus and the communities forming around his memory. Like every human interpreter, he worked with the intellectual, religious, cultural, and personal materials available to him.
The cross gradually moved from historical event to theological necessity.
This is where I have significant difficulty. When Christianity teaches that violence is somehow required before reconciliation becomes possible, we should examine what kind of picture of God is being constructed. When the suffering of an innocent person becomes the mechanism through which guilt is resolved, we should ask what moral imagination is being formed. When bloodshed becomes salvific, we should be willing to investigate how that idea has shaped Christian attitudes toward punishment, suffering, power, and violence.
Christian art offers a fascinating window into this development because communities reveal what they believe not only through propositions but through the images they place before themselves.
Early Christian visual culture was not dominated by the tortured body of Jesus familiar from later Western Christianity. Christians represented Jesus through images of the shepherd, teacher, healer, miracle worker, and victorious or living Christ. Their visual world also drew heavily upon biblical scenes, gardens, vines, water, animals, abundance, and resurrection.
The contrast with later medieval Christianity is striking.
Over time, increasingly graphic representations of the crucified Christ became prominent. The suffering body moved toward the center of Christian imagination. Wounds mattered. Blood mattered. Agony mattered. The instrument of Roman execution became Christianity’s most recognizable symbol.
The theological Jesus could be believed in. The human Jesus has to be reckoned with. It is easier to affirm a doctrine about his divine nature than to take seriously his teachings about wealth, enemies, power, forgiveness, exclusion, and mercy. It is easier to worship Jesus than to allow his vision of human life to interrogate the arrangements by which we live.
Christianity sometimes solved the problem of Jesus by making him an object of devotion.
Once Jesus becomes infinitely different from us, his life no longer has to be taken as seriously as his identity. We worship what he uniquely was rather than confronting what he invited human beings to become. The radical teacher becomes the cosmic exception.
The distance protects us.
Every generation is tempted to manufacture Jesus in its own image.
The task is not to find a Jesus untouched by interpretation. It is to become conscious of the interpretations through which we encounter him. This means learning enough history to recognize the layers, enough humility to resist certainty where certainty is unavailable, and enough intellectual independence to distinguish inherited doctrine from historical evidence.
I think of Christianity less as a finished revelation now and more as an accumulated human tradition. Within it are extraordinary insights and terrible failures, profound mystical experiences and institutional abuses, acts of radical compassion and justifications for violence, exquisite art and destructive theology.
That complexity does not diminish the tradition. It makes Christianity human.
Consider the Source
One of the simplest principles I learned in the long process of questioning my religious inheritance was also one of the most liberating: consider the source.
We apply this principle everywhere else. We ask who wrote something, when they wrote it, what they knew, what they wanted, what pressures surrounded them, what assumptions shaped them, and what interests were at stake. Historical consciousness requires this kind of curiosity.
Religion should not receive an exemption.
Paul had a history. The Gospel writers had histories. Augustine had a history. Anselm had a history. Luther and Calvin had histories. Church councils operated within political and cultural worlds. Missionaries carried the assumptions of their civilizations. American evangelicalism emerged from particular social, racial, economic, and political conditions.
Recognizing these influences does not mean their ideas are worthless. It means ideas have biographies.
Recovering Jesus Without Inventing Another One
There is a danger in everything I am proposing. Once we begin removing theological layers from Jesus, we are tempted to create another Jesus who conveniently validates whatever we already believe.
Then Rome kills him.
Everything that follows is interpretation.
Some of that interpretation is beautiful. Some of it is brilliant. Some of it has inspired people to lives of extraordinary courage and compassion. Some of it has sanctioned conquest, exclusion, shame, violence, and fear. Much of it tells us as much about the human beings interpreting Jesus as it does about Jesus himself.
This is why I no longer feel the need to choose between rejecting Christianity and defending it. I would rather understand it. I want to know how a Jewish teacher became the Christ of Christian theology, how memory became scripture, how interpretation became doctrine, how doctrine became institution, and how institution sometimes obscured the life it was created to preserve.
There is no journey backward to an untouched Jesus waiting beneath two thousand years of history. But there is a more honest way of looking through those layers.
And sometimes, through the cracks in the theology, I still catch sight of the man walking those dusty roads.
