Paul and Jesus

Paul never met Jesus. This book is an exploration of the startling implications of those four words. The chronological facts are undisputed. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor or prefect of Judea, in April, A.D. 30. As best we can determine it was not until seven years after Jesus’ death, around A.D. 37, that Paul reported his initial apparition of “Christ,” whom he identified with Jesus raised from the dead.¹ When challenged for his credentials he asks his followers: “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” equating his visionary experience with that of those who had known Jesus face-to-face (1 Corinthians 9:1). What this means is that Paul’s claim to have “seen” Jesus, as well as the teachings he says he received directly from Jesus, came a significant number of years after Jesus’ lifetime, and can be categorized as subjective visionary experiences (Galatians 1:12, 16; 2:2; 2 Corinthians 12:1–10). These “revelations” were not a one-time experience of “conversion,” but a phenomenon that continued over the course of Paul’s life, involving verbal exchanges with Jesus as well as extraordinary revelations of a nature Paul was convinced no other human in history had received. Paul confesses that he does not comprehend the nature of these ecstatic spiritual experiences, whether they were “in the body, or out of the body,” but he believed that the voice he heard, the figure he saw, and the messages he received, were encounters with the heavenly Christ (2 Corinthians 12:2–3).

It was a full decade after Jesus’ death that Paul first met Peter in Jerusalem (he calls Peter Cephas, his Aramaic name) and had a brief audience with James the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:18–23). Paul subsequently operated independently of the original apostles, preaching and teaching what he calls his “Gospel,” in Asia Minor for another ten years before making a return trip to Jerusalem around A.D. 50. It was only then, twenty years after Jesus’ death, that he encountered James and Peter again in Jerusalem and met for the first time the rest of the original apostles of Jesus (Galatians 2:1–9). This rather extraordinary chronological gap is a surprise to many. It is one of the key factors in understanding Paul and his message.

What this chronology means is that we must imagine a “Christianity before Paul,” which existed independently of his influence or ideas for over twenty years, as well as a Christianity preached and developed by Paul, which developed independently of Jesus’ original apostles and followers and with minimal contact with anyone who had known Jesus.

Many of the most important clues are hiding in plain sight. This is as true for a historian as it is for a detective, and I have experienced this numerous times in the course of working on this book, whether researching obscure texts in libraries, visiting the places connected to Paul, or just rereading Paul’s letters in my Greek New Testament. So much depends on one’s assumptions as to what is seen or unseen, what is noted or simply overlooked. This book is about the historical figure of Paul, but at the same time it uncovers a form of Christianity before Paul that has largely escaped our notice. The differences between these two “Christianities” are considerable and we shall explore both in some detail in the following chapters. When Paul is properly placed in this context, and within this world, a completely new and fascinating picture emerges. We are able to understand Paul in his own time and comprehend, for the first time, the passions that drove him.

The obvious place to begin is with Paul himself. His early letters are the first Christian documents of any kind in existence, written in the decade of the 50s A.D., and they are firsthand accounts. They are our best witnesses to the true state of affairs between Paul and the original apostles chosen by Jesus. For Paul this separation and independence, both from the “earthly” Jesus, as he calls him, and the apostles, was a point of pride and authenticity. He boasts that he has not derived the message he preaches “from men or through men,” referring to James and the original apostles Jesus had directly chosen and instructed. Paul claimed that his access to Jesus has come through a revelation of the heavenly Christ (Galatians 1:11–12). He insisted that his second trip to Jerusalem, around A.D. 50, was not a summons from the leaders in Jerusalem, as if he were their inferior as some of his opponents had obviously claimed. He says he went there “by revelation,” which is his way of saying Jesus told him to go. He refers to the three leaders of the Jerusalem church, James, Peter, and John, sarcastically as the “so-called pillars of the church” and “those of repute,” but adds “what they are means nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6, 9).