It seems quite likely that “Jesus (or Jesus Christ) is Lord” was the profession of faith made by converts at baptism—thus the first Christian “creed.” This is suggested by Rom 10:9, where Paul is speaking of saving faith and says: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” It is also suggested by 1 Cor 12:3, where Paul comments that “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit”: Paul can hardly mean that no one can utter the words except by divine inspiration, but his meaning may well be that no one can come to conversion and baptism except by the Spirit. (David Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995], 122)
Dying with Christ
Paul . . .
Our final observation about Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ death arises not from Rom 3:21-26 but from passages father on in Romans and elsewhere in Paul’s letters. For Paul, Jesus’ death was not simply something accomplished by Jesus on behalf of others—even in the place of others—but also something that believers come to share in. It has been argued that this idea of participation is even more fundamental to Paul’s thought about the death of Jesus than concepts of sacrifice, propitiation, and the like. Thus in Rom 6:3, 4 Paul comments that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” In Galatians Paul claims that he has been “crucified with Christ” (2:19). Colossians speaks similarly of sharing the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus (2:8-12). For Paul, then, the Christian does not simply receive the benefits of Christ’s work, but is also united to Christ and comes to share in his life and death. The Christian is “in Christ” and dies “with Christ,” both in baptism and in an ongoing experience of suffering for the Lord’s sake (e.g., Rom 8:17; Phil 3:10).
. . . and Jesus
The idea of participation is a distinctive Pauline emphasis, but the idea of sharing in the death of Jesus is not without precedent in the Jesus-tradition. First, there is the call of Jesus to his disciples to “take up your cross and follow me,” which is represented in both the Markan and “Q” tradition (in different versions). The context of the Mark tradition is quite explicitly a prediction of Jesus’ own death, and so the call to the disciples to take up the cross is very nearly, if not quite, a challenge to the disciples to join Jesus in his crucifixion and sufferings (Matt 16:24-26//Mark 8:34-37//Luke 9:23-26; Matt 10:38//Luke 14:27). Second, there is the dialogue between Jesus and the sons of Zebedee, recorded in Matthew and Mark, in which Jesus speaks of the disciples drinking “the cup that I drink” and (Mark only) being baptized “with the baptism with which I am baptized” (Mark 10:38, 39//Matt 20:22, 23). This is not the Pauline baptismal understanding of suffering with Christ, but it is a significant and strong tradition in which Jesus’ and death are seen as an experience in which his followers will share. (Ibid., 154-55)