From Tabor here – Three of our New Testament gospels record Jesus’ Last Supper in which he tells his disciples over bread and wine: “This is my body,” and “This is my blood,” and in the gospel of John Jesus speaks of “eating my flesh” and “drinking my blood.” These writers based their accounts of Jesus’ final meal on Paul, directly quoting what he had written in his letters almost word-for-word (Mark 14:22-25; Matthew 26:26-29; Luke 22:15-20; John 6:52-56; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26). This is one of the strongest indications that the New Testament gospels are essentially Pauline documents, with underlying elements of the earlier Jesus tradition. (Emphasis mine.)
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 NRSV
23 For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for[f] you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Extracts from Tabor’s How Faith in Jesus’ Resurrection Originated and Developed: A New/Old Hypothesis, January 1, 2016
Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you. (Mark 16:6-7).
Here the line between history and theology is clearly drawn. That the tomb was empty fits what we know of the circumstances of Jesus’ temporary “burial” by Joseph of Arimathea, but that the women were told that Jesus would meet his disciples in Galilee is clearly a theological embellishment. It is Mark’s attempt to connect the empty tomb with subsequent appearances of Jesus. The link is quite weak since Mark knows of no specifics of any appearances of the risen Jesus to the disciples in Galilee or he surely would have related them to round out the ending to his gospel. I think we have to assume that Mark tells us all he knows but what Mark knows he gets from Paul! Mark is obviously following Paul here, since it is Paul who reports that Jesus first appears to Peter and the disciples, and in Mark’s account the young man sitting in the tomb specifies Peter by name (1 Corinthians 15:5).
Paul and the Anachronistic Origins of Early Christianity – Part 1 and Part 2 by Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh
Two paragraphs from Part 1:
If we are to treat the gospel authors like any other ancient writers, I suggest that it is necessary to simplify our understanding of how this literature was produced. Putting aside the overly elaborate (and theologically loaded) scenario of eyewitness, itinerant preachers, scribes, sayings-sources, oral traditions, translations, redactors, communities, speculations about how many years it took for a gospel to get from point A to point B, I propose there is a much simpler way to approach these writings: the letters of Paul.
It is perplexing that we have largely excluded Paul as a source for the gospels. His letters are our earliest extant evidence for the Jesus movement— as inchoate as that movement appears to have been at that time. Nonetheless, he offers evidence for Peter and James. He speaks of other Christ followers. He also proposes practices for those “in Christ,” including baptism, fellowship meals, and pneumatic (or “spiritual”) demonstrations. Perhaps not coincidentally, these are the same activities later attributed to Jesus in the gospels.
Four paragraphs from Part 2:
Paul makes sense as a “source” for the gospel writers for several reasons.
The first relates to literary practices and social context: given what we know about the processes of ancient authors, it is likely that the gospel writers would have sought out any available material about the Christ movement as they created their works. And the only available writings that we know existed before the gospels are Paul’s letters; that some of these letters even survive to the degree that we have them suggests they were circulated and/or known in some measure.
The ahistorical nature of this model is evident in scholarly discussions about Paul’s quoting of Jesus. Two of Paul’s letters contain references to the “commands of the Lord”—1 Corinthians (7:10, 9:14, and 11:23-25) and 1 Thessalonians (4:15). In the case of 1 Cor 7:10 (“To the married I give this commandment—not I but the Lord—that the wife should not separate from her husband…”), similar prohibitions against divorce are found in Mark 10:2-10, Matthew 19:3-12 and Luke 16:18. In 1 Cor 9:14 Paul states that “the Lord commanded” that those who “proclaim the gospel” should get paid for it, which mirrors Luke 10:7. Traditionally the explanation for these shared sayings—that is, sayings cited by both Paul and at least one of the gospels—is that there must have been a common oral tradition that pre-dated Paul and the gospels that they happened to share. But why not allow for the possibility the writers simply got this information from Paul?
The gospels are privileged as history, even though we know letters like 1 Corinthians were in circulation decades before the gospels were written. In this respect, scholars have been highly selective in their recognition of Paul as a “source” for the gospels. We have favored assumptions about “liturgical tradition” or oral tradition to get at the historical Jesus, rather than considering that the Jesus of the gospels was also a reflection of the reported divination experiences of the historical Paul.
