Paul and Jesus

5. Some of the major treatments of Paul that deal particularly with this issue of continuity and discontinuity with Jesus are: Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Barrie Wilson, How Jesus Became Christian (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008); Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, translated by William F. Stinespring (Boston: Beacon Press, 1943); Hugh J. Schonfield, Those Incredible Christians (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1968); Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostasy and Apostolate of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Gerd Lüdemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001); L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries and Storytellers Created the New Testament and the Christian Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004); and N. T. Wright, What Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997); John Gager, Reinventing Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004); and Garry Wills, What Paul Meant (New York: Penguin, 2006).

6. See in particular Richard I. Pervo, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2006), which convincingly demonstrates that the author of Acts is writing in the early second century, much later than the traditional date of A.D. 80–85. Either way, early or later, the anonymous work is not written by Paul’s otherwise obscure companion but shows every evidence of being a pseudonymous literary production typical of the times. See A. J. Droge, “Did ‘Luke’ Write Anonymously? Lingering at the Threshold,” Die Apostelgeschichte im Kontext antiker und frühchristlicher Historiographie, edited by J. Frey, C. K. Rothschild, and J. Schröter, BZNW 162 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 495–518.

7. See Wilson, How Jesus Became Christian, and Maccoby, The Mythmaker.

8. Paul’s first seven letters, in chronological order, are most likely: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. The other six, 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and certainly 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are thought by most scholars to be either heavily interpolated or written decades after his death, making them less reliable for reconstructing an authentic “historical” Paul. See Bart Ehrman, “In the Wake of the Apostle: the Deutero-Pauline and Pastoral Epistles,” chap. 23 in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 272–394.

9. It is possible that Paul was once married since he says he advanced within Judaism beyond his peers. Jewish men his age would normally marry; not to marry would be considered abnormal. In his letters he speaks of the “loss of all things” and also refers to a situation where an “unbelieving wife” might leave one who has joined his movement, so it is possible he is alluding to his own personal situation. He says the brother or sister, so abandoned, should not feel obligated to heed Jesus’ teaching that there can be no divorce for any cause (Philippians 3:7; 1 Corinthians 7:12–16).

10. The thirteen letters attributed to Paul make up approximately 32,500 of 138,000 total words. See Steve Mason, “Methods and Categories,” at http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/mason3.shtml.

CHAPTER 1: CHRISTIANITY BEFORE PAUL