What Do You Think About Paul?

Last updated on: January 10, 2011 at 12:29 pm by James F. McGrath

What Do You Think About Paul? 2011-01-10T12:29:00-05:00 James F. McGrath

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In an off-topic comment on a recent post, I was asked what I think about Paul. That is such a broad question that I’m not sure how to begin to answer it, but I think that it is certainly a good question. And I suspect that most people who are not committed to Paul’s inerrancy in his New Testament writings, but are well acquainted with them and with his legacy, would have both positive and negative things to say about him.

Let me share a few thoughts about Paul, inspired by seeing the way mythicists appeal to him, usually reading Paul in a manner that may have seemed plausible in the 19th century but does not to most scholars in the 21st, who have a much better understanding of first-century Judaism and realize that Paul actually makes more sense in that context and against that background.

It was once common to treat Paul either as the inventor of Christianity (for all intents and purposes), or at very least the person responsible for transforming it from a Jewish Messianic movement into a Hellenistic cult.

Often accompanying this is the assumption that Paul had no contact with or direct knowledge of the historical figure of Jesus.

It is worth pointing out, however, that that is an argument from silence. What we know about Paul is that he opposed the Christian movement. We don’t know how early he began to do so, nor precisely where, from Paul’s own writings. But we do know that Paul had knowledge of the Christian movement prior to becoming a Christian himself. Not only did he persecute it, which requires awareness, but he mentions relatives who were Christians before he was.

There’s a Romanian pastor, Iosif Ţon, who (if I remember correctly) was a skeptic before he became a Christian, and wrote a book during that period with a title something like “Jesus the Charlatan.” It is not a subject that he brings up often in his writings and sermons these days. It seems that Paul too had a negative view of Christianity from his very earliest encounter with it, and it is not impossible that Paul had some encounter with the emerging movement, or at least awareness of it, during the pre-crucifixion period. Would Paul not have been reticent to talk about his encounters with Christianity prior to his becoming a Christian himself, presumably due to embarrassment about his opposition to it? He could not pretend it didn’t happen, but he certainly would not want to dwell on it, and that in fact is what we get in his letters.

Approached from this perspective, might not this give us a way of making sense of Paul’s famous statement, the subject of so much discussion, speculation and unpersuasive interpretation, εἰ καὶ ἐγνώκαμεν κατὰ σάρκα Χριστόν, ἀλλὰ νῦν οὐκέτι γινώσκομεν (“Even if we have known Jesus according to the flesh, but now we know no longer” 2 Corinthians 5:16)? Paul had in some sense known Jesus according to the flesh, whether in terms of direct experience of a human life that seemed unimpressive and un-messianic to Paul, or in terms of Paul viewing him “according to the flesh” in the sense of evaluating Jesus from a stance that Paul later came to view as misled by his “sinful nature.”

And so another point that makes mythicism problematic is that it assumes that we know Paul did not encounter Jesus (in a non-spiritual/psychological sense) nor know about his activities even if never actually meeting him. That is not at all certain. What we do know is that Paul persecuted the church, had relatives who were Christians before he was, and was as well poised to hear about Jesus and the early Christian movement as early as anyone in Jerusalem – and if Paul distances himself from the Jerusalem apostles in Galatians for polemical reasons, elsewhere Paul associates the start of his missionary activity with Jerusalem (Romans 15:19). Paul tells us absolutely nothing about his opposition to Christianity apart from the mere fact of it.

At any rate, the main thing to keep in mind is that there are plenty of uncertainties related to the apostle Paul, which are relevant to how we use his writings in connection with the historical figure of Jesus. And so if mythicists tend towards hyper-skepticism with respect to the Gospels, there is a converse danger of being too credulous and taking too much for granted with respect to Paul. We have no evidence for Pharisees outside of Judaea in the pre-70 period, unless one accepts the Gospels themselves as evidence for Pharisees in Galilee. And so Paul’s own brief mention of his Pharisaic affiliation (Philippians 3:5) actually situates him to have been directly aware of the emergence of Christianity, as well as making it extremely unlikely that Paul would have participated in putting together a patchwork, decidedly un-Jewish “messiah” from disperate sources.

But even if Paul may have had reasons to avoid discussing subjects that involved recalling his early opposition to Christianity, Paul’s relative silence about the life of Jesus is best explained in terms of the genre of the epistle. Paul is not writing lives of Jesus, he is corresponding with Christians who have already been introduced to the basics of Christianity. This point is so obvious that it boggles the mind that there are people who still complain about Paul’s supposed lack of interest in the life of Jesus. Once again, the selectivity of mythicists becomes apparent, since one will find that the Greco-Roman epistolary corpus does not generally reproduce the stories we find in bioi.

What about you? What do you think about Paul – either in terms of your overall impression of him, or in terms of specific things that you are currently pondering that have to do with Paul?

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