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      3. Paul of Tarsus and His Knowledge of Jesus

      Scholars differ widely as to what Paul actually knew about Jesus. Remember, it was a time of anticipation, and it was the yearning for the coming of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah that aroused hopes in Paul’s time. The Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, with their emphasis on the imminence of the coming of both a priestly and a political Messiah, along with the esoteric writings preserved in Psalm of Solomon and 1 Enoch were in the air. The Baptist’s appearance, along with Jesus’, seemed to set the stage. Indeed, the time was right for the appearance of the king whom the Solomon passage hails as “the son of David . . . the Lord Messiah” (Pss. Sol. 17). In that light, it is not surprising that Paul rarely mentions the historical Jesus by name. His concerns are for the Messiah, who has come to initiate the kingdom, who will come again to fulfill it, and who is God’s Son, descended from the house of David. It is this person, this reality, this event that absorbs Paul’s interest rather than the Jesus of Nazareth, whose story had yet to be written. For Paul, the good news is about “Christ Jesus,” or “Jesus Christ our Lord,” crucified and raised from the dead, whose meaning must be seized, proclaimed, and expounded.

      Paul rarely refers to “Jesus” by name, although in 2 Corinthians he does mention the name of “Jesus” at least five times, but only in reference to his death and resurrection. Otherwise, in something of an inverse proportion, Paul refers to Jesus as the “Christ” no less than two-hundred-and-forty-one times. In contrast, the Gospels mention the name “Christ” only five times: three in John’s Gospel and twice in Mark’s. For Paul, Christ has already superseded the historical Jesus in terms of the role he plays in enabling followers to become “new creations” in the kingdom of God. This should give pause to any reader from the start, for it emphasizes Paul’s estimate of Jesus as the divinely revealed Redeemer sent from God to rescue and liberate all humankind, rather than focusing on the historical Jesus and his unique message concerning the in-breaking of God’s kingdom. Such is the role of the Universal Christ over the individual in all of his or her individuality. Paul makes it clear: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new” (2 Cor 5:16–17).

      This is not to say that Paul knew only of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Undoubtedly he gleaned significant information from a variety of encounters with Jesus’ followers. F. F. Bruce argues that Paul was familiar with a number of Jesus’ statements, which he possibly acquired while Paul was in Antioch or during his fifteen-day visit in Jerusalem with Peter. In his book Paul, Apostle of the Heart Set Free, Bruce references no less than five major subject headings echoing sayings attributed to Jesus. Paul uses these “quotes” to support the authority of his own message. Bruce catalogs these five areas as divorce and marriage, the laborer’s just wages, the approval of the eating of Gentile foods, tribute to whom tribute is due, and various forms of the Golden Rule concerning the repayment of evil with good.

      In accordance with each subject above, Bruce cites the following verses, first in Paul’s letters and then in their gospel form: (1) 1 Cor 7:10, Mark 10:11; (2) 1 Cor 9:14, Luke 10:7; (3) 1 Cor 10:27, Luke 10:8; (4) Rom 13:7, Mark 12:13; and (5) Gal 6:1–2, Rom 12:14, and 12:21, with Matt 18:15, Luke 6:27–28, and Mark 12:28f.23

      It would behoove us, however, to keep in mind that Paul’s knowledge of any of Jesus’ sayings circulated in oral form (including what he learned from his visit with Peter), or possibly in some earlier drafts of Q. Paul’s letters predate the appearance of the gospels, even Mark’s, which the early church believed was based on Peter’s sermons. In fairness to Paul, there is no way he could have known multiple sayings of Jesus’. The movement was in its infancy and, unlike Israel’s fascination with Ezra’s Torah, which its rabbis had committed to memory in the form of the Tradition of the Elders, Jesus’ sayings were still undergoing a sifting-out process regarding authentic words and deeds versus claims and truth. Q would represent just one of these collections, Paul’s references to “tradition” (1 Cor 11:23) would make up a second, and the 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas would represent a third (provided the latter were even circulating).

      What makes it difficult to reconstruct what Paul knew of the Jesus movement or of the historical Jesus is due in part to present-day historians’ doubts concerning the veracity of Luke’s Acts. Nowhere does Luke mention any of Paul’s letters, nor does he call into question the significant rift that was widening between the Hellenistic followers of Christ and Jerusalem’s more staid Hebraic disciples. Luke knew about the rift, but he chose not to dramatize it. Today’s consensus wagers that although Luke knew of the pending break, he smoothed it over since it had faded into history, at least by the point in time from which Luke was writing (somewhere close to 80–90 CE, by contemporary assessment). Thus, it is problematic and subjective to recreate Paul’s firsthand knowledge of the Jesus movement, its historical trajectory, events, “miracles,” or Jesus’ actual words. Contrary to Bruce, Bornkamm focuses more on Paul’s role as an interpreter of Christ as Redeemer than as an expounder of Jesus’ actual words or message.24

      Nevertheless, one can reconstruct Paul’s tentative biography and something of his bustling itinerary. Summarizing contemporary scholarship on the subject, Stephen Harris pieces together what rudimentary facts the New Testament preserves concerning Paul’s life and journeys.25 He warns that any evidence from Acts must be viewed with caution. For, as we have indicated, the latter warning is a guiding norm for almost all Pauline scholarship today. What major information, then, does Paul’s principal letters (Galatians, 1–2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans) provide?

      Harris lists the following: Paul was born of a Hellenistic Jewish family (of Tarsus, according to Acts). The date is uncertain, but it was likely around 13 CE. Concerning Paul’s family, the Catholic scholar Jerome Murphy-O’Connor emphasizes what Paul himself states: that he was extremely proud of his Jewish heritage, circumcised as he was on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, as a Hebrew born of Hebrews and, as to the Law, a Pharisee (Phil 3:4–5). Based on Murphy-O’Connor’s research, Paul’s parents were originally from Galilee and were sold into slavery following Rome’s destruction of Sepphoris—a major city in Upper Galilee that rebelled against the Jerusalem government following Herod’s death. Taken as booty, they were sold to wealthy clients in Tarsus, where they later received freedom and became Roman citizens. Murphy-O’Connor speculates that Paul’s parents were something of elitists, inasmuch as Paul tends to look down on common labor, exhibiting “a snobbish leisured class attitude towards manual labour” and regarding it “slavish” and “demeaning” (1 Cor 9:19; 2 Cor 11:7).26 O’Connor further speculates that Paul likely attended the “University of Tarsus,” where he engaged in a curriculum devoted to rhetoric, language, syntax, and philosophy.

      After arriving in Palestine (ostensibly to study under Gamaliel), Paul engaged in harassing members of the early Jesus movement. Passages in both 1 Corinthians and Galatians attest as much. At some point during this period (32–34 CE), Paul experienced a “revelation” involving the risen Jesus (Gal 1:12, 16; 1 Cor 15:9–10) while somewhere in the vicinity of Damascus. Whether Luke’s account in Acts 9:1–9 describes it accurately cannot be verified. Paul refers to the experience as a “revelation” (apokalypsis) whose impact changed his life, but whether it was a “mystical” or “cognitive” revelation is uncertain, at least in the Galatians passage. In the Corinthians passage, the revelation is described as a mystico-visual phenomenon. Paul calls it an “appearance,” capturing the “event” using the word ophthé, a term from which our words “optical” and “ophthalmology” and others having to do with “sight” or “seeing” are derived. Just as Christ “appeared” (optically or cognitively) to Peter and James, so he “appeared” to Paul. Whether an optical revelation or a spiritual one, it “dawned” on Paul that the crucified Jesus was clearly the Messiah, the One his nation had been awaiting for centuries.

      Following this “revelation,” Paul traveled to Arabia (likely Petra), then returned to Damascus. Three years later, Paul visited Jerusalem to meet Peter and James, Jesus’ brother (Gal 1:18–19). Afterwards, Paul

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