Early Church Creedal Formulas

Paul's letters are the earliest Christian documents in existence, and embedded in them are older pieces: rhythmic, formulaic units of confession that Paul quotes rather than composes. They are the church's own testimony from before the New Testament existed.

Four marks identify a pre-Pauline formula. Explicit handing-on language: "I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received" (1 Corinthians 15:3). Vocabulary Paul does not otherwise use.

Semitic name-forms and idioms rendered stiffly into Greek. And a shape — parallel clauses, matched lines, a memorable cadence — that belongs to material learned by heart rather than dictated to a secretary.

"Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve."

Cephas is the Aramaic Kepha, not Paul's habitual Greek Petros. "The Twelve" as a title appears nowhere else in his letters. The plural "sins" in this phrase is not his construction.

Joachim Jeremias argued the unit reflects an Aramaic original; Martin Hengel and James D. G. Dunn independently place its formation in the earliest Jerusalem community.

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians from Ephesus around AD 55, and the tradition is older than the letter by his own account. Galatians 1:18 puts him in Jerusalem with Cephas for fifteen days about three years after his conversion. The Greek verb there, historesai, carries the sense of going to someone to get information.

Paul's conversion is dated within one to three years of the crucifixion. That places the creed's transmission, and probably its formation, inside the first half-decade of the movement.

At 1 Corinthians 16:22 Paul drops an untranslated Aramaic prayer into a Greek letter to a Greek city: marana tha, "our Lord, come." Larry Hurtado's observation is about direction of address. The Aramaic-speaking church was already praying to Jesus, not merely about him, before the Gentile mission made Greek the language of worship.

The standard sceptical account has a human teacher gradually elevated to divine status across generations of Hellenistic retelling. The creeds sit in the wrong place for that story. The highest claims — pre-existence, lordship, the divine name, bodily resurrection — are in the oldest material, in Semitic dress, from the Jerusalem church, inside the lifetime of people who had been there.

That 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 is pre-Pauline tradition is not a conservative position but a consensus one, held by Dunn, Hengel, Hurtado, Ludemann and Ehrman alike. The disputes run on where the creed ends, how far Paul reworded it, and whether "he appeared" reports objective encounter or visionary experience.