Since he is not
focused: In one of the later New Testament letters attributed to Paul, the author
laments Jewish groups that occupy themselves with “endless genealogies” rather
than relying upon their “faith” to connect them to Abraham (1 Timothy 1:4;
Galatians 3:29). Such a protest is not made in a vacuum. It is clearly directed
against other followers of Jesus, most likely those who were connected to the
Jewish origins of the emerging Christian faith—followers of James the brother
of Jesus in particular, who did consider such matters of pedigree essential to
the core idea of messianism. Paul refers to James in a dismissive way, although
he is clearly the most authoritative figure in the early church—even above
Peter and John. We must remember that Paul never met Jesus. He was a latecomer
to the movement. Paul plainly says that he values his own visionary and clairvoyant
revelations above the one-on-one experiences of those original followers
directly with Jesus (Galatians 1:11-17). Paul refers to them as the “so-called
Pillars of the Church,” but then adds, “what they are means nothing to me”
(Galatians 2:9).
While Paul
grudging grants that Jesus was descended from King David “according to the flesh,”
he was not interested in the human Jesus, but rather in the heavenly Christ
(Romans 1:3). He states unequivocally that he no longer regards Jesus “according
to the flesh,” as having any importance (2 Corinthians 5:16). The phrase in Greek
might be paraphrased as: “We no longer look at Jesus as a human being, born of
a woman, but as the heavenly glorified Christ.”
In Paul’s view,
pedigree and matters of ancestry became meaningless. Paul would no doubt have
had the same attitude toward Mary: While she might be the mortal mother
of Jesus, he writes that the heavenly Jerusalem now is the “mother of us all”
(Galatians 5:26). Paul is interested in a new spiritual family that is determined
not by what he calls “flesh and blood,” but by the new birth of the Spirit. (James
D. Tabor, The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus: A New Historical
Investigation of the Most Powerful Woman in the World [New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2025], 187-88 n. 103)
