Paul and Jesus

The ultimate irony with regard to what Christianity became is the possibility that these voices that no longer speak might well represent something closer to the message of Jesus than do the teachings of Paul or Christianity itself. What one ultimately concludes regarding that issue still rests today, as it did in the first centuries of the Christian era, on what value one places on Paul’s visionary experiences and his resulting claims to be directly communicating with Jesus. Trying to recover as best we can by historical methods what we can know about the life and teachings of Jesus and his earliest followers is one thing, whereas entering the world of Paul’s theological interpretation of the cosmic heavenly “Christ” is quite another. The task of a historian is to offer as clear a view of Paul’s own testimony in this regard as is possible from his own letters, while recovering to whatever extent possible those now silent voices who represented an earlier and alternative “Christianity before Paul.”

APPENDIX

THE QUEST FOR THE

HISTORICAL PAUL

What can we reliably know about Paul and how can we know it? As is the case with Jesus, this is not an easy question. Historians have been involved in what has been called the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” for the past 175 years, evaluating and sifting through our sources, trying to determine what we can reliably say about him.¹ As it happens the quest for the historical Paul began almost simultaneously, inaugurated by the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur.² Baur put his finger squarely on the problem: There are four different “Pauls” in the New Testament, not one, and each is quite distinct from the other. New Testament scholars today are generally agreed on this point.³

Thirteen of the New Testament’s twenty-seven documents are letters with Paul’s name as the author, and a fourteenth, the book of Acts, is mainly devoted to the story of Paul’s life and career—making up over half the total.⁴ The problem is, these fourteen texts fall into four distinct chronological tiers, giving us our four Pauls:

1. Authentic or Early Paul: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon (A.D. 50s–60s)

2. Disputed Paul or Deutero-Pauline: 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians (A.D. 80–100)

3. Pseudo-Paul or the Pastorals: 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus (A.D. 80–100)

4. Tendentious or Legendary Paul: Acts of the Apostles (A.D. 90–130)

Though scholars differ about what historical use one might properly make of tiers 2, 3, or 4, there is almost universal agreement that a proper historical study of Paul should begin with the seven genuine letters, restricting one’s analysis to what is most certainly coming from Paul’s own hand. This approach might sound restrictive but it is really the only proper way to begin. The Deutero-Pauline letters and the Pastorals reflect a vocabulary, a development of ideas, and a social setting that belong to a later time.⁵ We are not getting Paul as he was, but Paul’s name used to lend authority to the ideas of later authors who intended for readers to believe their ideas come from Paul. In modern parlance we call such writings forgeries, but a more polite academic term is pseudonymous, meaning “falsely named.”

Those more inclined to view this activity in a positive light point to a group of followers of Paul, some decades after his death, who wanted to honor him by continuing his legacy and using his name to defend views with which they assumed he would have surely agreed. A less charitable judgment is that these letters represent an attempt to deceive gullible readers by authors intent on passing on their own views as having the authority of Paul. Either way, this enterprise of writing letters in Paul’s name has been enormously influential because Paul became such a towering figure of authority in the church.

The Pastorals (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) are not included in our earliest extant collection of Paul’s letters, the so-called Chester Beatty papyrus, which dates to the third century A.D.⁶ Paul’s apocalyptic urgency, so dominant in the earlier letters, is almost wholly absent in these later writings. Among the Deutero-Pauline tier, 2 Thessalonians was specifically written to calm those who were claiming that the day of judgment was imminent—the very thing Paul constantly proclaimed (2 Thessalonians 2:1–3).