The Apostle’s Sources
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 NASB
Received – Who told Paul that Yeshua died for our sins, was buried, and rose from the dead in accordance with the Scripture? Did he learn the story from the disciples? Or was it revealed to him while he spent time alone in the desert? And what about the claim “according to the Scriptures”? What Scriptures? Where are the verses in the Tanakh that clearly say the Messiah will die for our sins, or that he will rise again on the third day? We want to believe that Paul is telling us something “of first importance,” but he wasn’t an eye-witness to any of this and we frankly can’t find Bible verses that claim the Messiah will die, so where does he get his information?
Christian exegetes cite passage like Psalm 16:10, Genesis 3:15 and Daniel 9:24 as attempts to show the “Scriptural” sources of Paul’s statement, but any ordinary reading of these texts makes it very difficult to find explicit references to the death, burial and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins. At best they might be post-facto Messianic, but they do not include the specific points Paul emphasizes.
Other commentators provide intra-textual assessments:
From a comment by Gary Habemas:
“Paul is clear that this material was not his own but that he had passed on to others what he had received earlier, as the center of his message (15:3). There are many textual indications that the material pre-dates Paul. Most directly, the apostle employs paredoka and parelabon, the equivalent Greek terms for delivering and receiving rabbinic tradition (cf. 1 Cor. 11:23). Indirect indications of a traditional text(s) include the sentence structure and verbal parallelism, diction, and the triple sequence of kai hoti Further, several non-Pauline words, the proper names of Cephas (cf. Lk. 24:34) and James, and the possibility of an Aramaic original are all significant. Fuller attests to the unanimity of scholarship here: ‘It is almost universally agreed today that Paul is here citing tradition.’ Critical scholars agree that Paul received the material well before this book was written.”[1]
There is little doubt that Paul would have needed to hear the story from someone else, and his visit with the disciples in Jerusalem may have been the occasion when this story was given to him. But that doesn’t quite answer the full question. It’s the phrase “according to the Scripture” that makes this so difficult. There are two possibilities: 1) Paul is really writing about the way early Messianic believer understood the Scripture, that is, even though there are no explicit verifications of these events, the community read the events into previous (now) prophetic verses, or 2) “Scripture” is not the same as “Bible” or “Tanakh.” This is Craig Allert’s argument, although his purpose is to understand the formation of the New Testament canon. Allert demonstrates that “Scripture” was a much larger collection of material than ended up in the Bible, either Christian or Hebrew. If this is true, then perhaps there were other sacred writings, in the category of “Scripture” in circulation during Paul’s career and he could refer to those. We know historically that many other documents were used during this time and it seems entirely reasonable that some of them dealt with the believing community’s assessment of the Messiah’s fulfillment of prophecy. These would be called graphas (writings), not as the official category of the Tanakh but as sacred documents used by believers, in the same way that writings of the rabbis were treated as sacred.
The bottom line is this: We will probably never know Paul’s sources. We can make educated guesses, but when it comes to identifying the exact transmission, we are in the dark, especially with the phrase “according to the Scriptures,” which, of course, was not a capitalized word in his Greek letter and certainly could not have referred to any of our subsequent New Testament material. With this in mind, we should understand that Paul is communicating a second-hand story. Its truth depends on the veracity of its transmission to him, not something he witnessed. But that is good enough as long as we recognize there are a few minor difficulties to deal with.
Topical Index: transmission, Scripture, Messiah, prophecy, 1 Corinthians 15:3-4
[1] https://winteryknight.com/2018/08/01/1-corinthians-15-the-earliest-source-for-the-basic-facts-about-the-life-of-jesus-4/
