Paul and Jesus

It is also from these authentic letters of Paul that we can most reliably begin to reconstruct the bare biographical outlines of Paul’s life. Paul calls himself a Hebrew or Israelite, stating that he was born a Jew and circumcised on the eighth day, of the Jewish tribe of Benjamin (Philippians 3:5; 2 Corinthians 11:22). He was once a member of the sect of the Pharisees. He states that he advanced in Judaism beyond many of his contemporaries, being extremely zealous for the traditions of his Jewish faith (Philippians 3:5; Galatians 1:14). He zealously persecuted the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6; 1 Corinthians 15:9). Sometime around A.D. 37 Paul had a visionary experience he describes as “seeing” Jesus and received from him his gospel message as well as his call to be an apostle to the non-Jewish world (1 Corinthians 9:2; Galatians 1:11–2:2). Paul was unmarried, at least during his career as an apostle (1 Corinthians 7:8, 15; 9:5; Philippians 3:8).⁹ He worked as a manual laborer to support himself on his travels (1 Corinthians 4:12; 9:6, 12, 15; 1 Thessalonians 2:9). The book of Acts supplies many more biographical details, some of which might be historically reliable while others have been questioned by critical scholars. I address these issues in the appendix, “The Quest for the Historical Paul.” In terms of method I have chosen to begin with what Paul says about himself, so that we get Paul, first and foremost, in his own words.

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Based on Paul’s authentic letters I have isolated six major elements in Paul’s Christianity that shape the central contours of his thought—and thus my presentation in this book. Before considering each in detail it will be helpful to get an overview:

1. A New Spiritual Body. For Paul the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead was a primary and essential component of the Christian faith. He states emphatically: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). His entire understanding of salvation hinged on what he understood to be a singular cosmic event, namely Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Paul’s understanding of the resurrection of Jesus, however, is not what is commonly understood today. It had nothing to do with the resuscitation of a corpse. Paul must have assumed that Jesus was peacefully laid to rest in a tomb in Jerusalem according to the Jewish burial customs of the time. He even knows some tradition about that burial, though he offers no details (1 Corinthians 15:4).

Paul understood Jesus’ resurrection as the transformation—or to use his words—the metamorphosis, of a flesh-and-blood human being into what he calls a “life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). Such a change involved “putting off” the body like clothing, but not being left “naked,” as in Greek thought, but “putting on” a new spiritual body with the old one left behind (2 Corinthians 5:1–5). So transformed, Jesus was, according to Paul, the first “Adam” of a new genus of Spirit-beings in the universe called “Children of God,” of which many others were to follow.

What is often overlooked is that Paul is our earliest witness, chronologically speaking, to claim to have “seen” Jesus after his death. And his is the only first-person claim we have. All the rest are late and secondhand. His letters were written decades earlier than Mark, the first written gospel. This means that Paul’s view of Jesus’ resurrection has profound implications for how we read the later gospel accounts—from the empty tomb to the “sightings” of Jesus reported in Matthew, Luke, and John. Most people read the New Testament “backwards,” chronologically speaking, beginning with the gospels and then moving on to Paul, but Paul actually comes decades earlier and offers critical insight into what the earliest resurrection faith entailed. Once reexamined, the entire history of what happened “after the cross” is transformed and a new understanding emerges of what James, Peter, and the rest of the original apostles experienced and believed.