experiences of Jesus after his death by his followers in a new mode
of existence: As resurrected from the dead and exalted to God’s
presence, Jesus is “Lord” and “Christ.”• Paul’s letters provide evidence for the claims made by the first
believers, which are all the more startling because they were at odds
with believers’ empirical circumstances.
o First, believers claimed to have been saved; this salvation is
not, in the New Testament, a future or a hoped-for state but a
present reality.
o Further, they claimed to be saved from negative conditions,
such as slavery, law, sin, and death itself.o They believed they had been established in conditions of right-
relatedness to God and other humans that could be described in
terms of peace, joy, righteousness, and freedom.o They claimed new capacities of speech and action, both
external (the working of powerful deeds) and internal (in
moral dispositions).o At root, they claimed an experience of ultimate power that
came from another and that transformed them. The symbol in
the New Testament for this power is the Holy Spirit. The term
“spirit” here refers to the medium of this power, which touches
humans in their human capacities of knowing and willing. The
term “holy” refers to the fact that the power comes from God,
the Holy One.• The source for the earliest believers’ claim to empowerment—to
being in possession of the Holy Spirit—was the conviction that
Christ himself had been empowered by the very power of God.
This is the Resurrection (exaltation) of Jesus. This combination—
that Jesus had been raised and that believers possessed the Holy
Spirit—was the fundamental conviction and experience of the
earliest believers and the birth of the Christian religion.