The Historical Paul
The Acts of the Apostles tells us that Paul was a Diaspora Jew born in the city of Tarsus in Cilicia (today a part of modern Turkey).
Acts 22:3 (Also Acts 21:39) – Then Paul said: “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia”
His given name was Saul (Hebrew: Shaul) which he eventually latinized to Paul (Latin: Paulus) . A near contemporary of Jesus [see note (a)], Paul was a devout Jew before his conversion to Christianity, as he himself tells us:
Philippians 3:5-6 - I was born of the race of Israel and the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrew parents, and I was circumcised when I was eight days old. As for the law, I was a Pharisee…as far as the law can make you perfect I was faultless.
Paul was tent-maker by profession:
Acts 18:2-3 - Paul went to see them, and because he was a tent-maker as they were, he stayed and worked with them.
He was a Roman citizen:
Acts 22:27 - The [Roman] commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” “Yes, I am.” he answered.
This Tarsos Jewish tent-maker, a Roman citizen and a Pharisee initially persecuted the followers of Jesus as he himself admits:
Philippians 3:6 - I was a persecutor of the church.
Acts 8:2-3 - On that day a great persecution broke out against the church of Jerusalem…Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison.
According to Acts, he even consented to the stoning to death of Stephen [see note (b)], ostensibly the first martyr of the new religion:
Acts 7:59-8:1 - While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord do not hold this against them.” When he had said this he fell asleep. And Saul was there, giving approval to his death.
It is also important to note that we have no evidence, neither in the Acts of the Apostles nor in his epistles, that Paul ever met the human Jesus. Indeed, in his epistles as we will show letter, he did not consider meeting or having known the earthly Jesus of any great importance. The mark of Apostleship is, for him, having seen the risen Jesus. Paul was converted by his own experience of the risen Jesus. The account is given three times in Acts:
Acts 9:1-9 (Also 22:6-16; 26:12-18) - Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus the Lord whom you are persecuting.” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.” The men travelling with Paul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.
he account above continued with the story of his conversion and baptism by a follower of the Way (as the early followers of Jesus seemed to have been called) who was in Damascus, a man called Ananias (Acts 9:10-19). Just as he has zealously persecuted the followers of the Way earlier, now with equal zeal Paul preached the new religion; but with a twist not found in it before.
Paul, together with his followers went on three missionary journeys throughout the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. He also wrote epistles to the various places that he had visited to guide his newfound converts. It was Paul who first started preaching the Christian message to the Gentiles. He had problems with the leaders of the religion, Peter and James because of this Gentile conversions, something we will look into more detail later.
The final phase of Paul’s life started with his visit to Jerusalem around 58 CE. There he was accused of being a transgressor of the law was beaten up by the Jewish mob and rescued by the Roman soldiers. Being a Roman citizen Paul appealed his case to Caesar and he was sent to Rome around CE 60 for his trial. He remained under house arrest in Rome for two years (from CE 61-62). The book of Acts ends at this point:
Acts 28:30-31 - For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.
Tradition placed Paul’s death in Rome during the Neronian persecution of 64 CE .
Paul Conversion to Christianity
We see from the account in Acts that Paul’s vision of Jesus was a purely personal experience. There is a contradiction here in what his companions actually experienced. Acts 9:7 said that the man heard the “sound” but saw nothing. However “Acts” 22:9 said the complete opposite; his companions saw the light but did not hear the voice! Whatever the case may be, it was obvious that the companions’ experience in no way vindicated Paul’s vision. In fact Paul’s own description of the event conveys clearly its intense personal nature:
2 Corinthians 12:2-4 - I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.
There is nothing special about Paul’s experience. Muhammad, the founder of Islam was said to have experienced a similar kind of heavenly rapture where he was transported miraculously to the site of the Jerusalem Temple and lifted up into heaven where he spoke to both Moses and Jesus . As Karen Armstrong pointed out:
Paul’s vision is not unique; nor is its transcendental experience limited to Christianity. Throughout history men and women have had similar visions and been impelled by them to acts of supreme courage and endurance . Armstrong, The First Christian: p.52
Obviously we cannot rule out simple and natural physiological explanations. It could have been sunstroke that made him unconscious for three days . After all, the road from Jerusalem to Damascus was a long one (about 200 km) and Paul was travelling trough a hot desert area. Or it could have been an epileptic fit . For we do know that Paul had some kind of unsightly illness which could have been epilepsy. Paul said as much in his epistle to the Galatians:
Galatians 4:13-14 - [Y]ou know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first; and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus.
We find throughout history many famous religious personalities had had intense mystical experiences that are today recognized to be symptoms of mental disorder. The voices heard by Saint Joan of Arc, which compelled her to save France, are known symptoms of schizophrenia. Saint Teresa of Avila’s three day vision of hell was very likely an epileptic seizure, as the experience was accompanied by a powerful stench, a common experience that is normally present with the attack . In fact we have already concluded earlier that Paul’s vision was probably due to a combination of his illness and his “Christ complex“. What did Paul do after his conversion? We would expect a rational person to seek out the original followers of Jesus in order to verify his vision and to learn as much as possible from them about the Galilean prophet. After all Paul never met the human Jesus, how could he be completely sure that the voice he heard was Jesus’? But this was not what he did, he withdrew into Arabia and did not care to meet the apostles until three years later:
Galatians 1:16-19 - I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia; and again I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [Peter], and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother.
Paul’s behavior here is unexplainable and borders on the irrational. How is Paul to preach a belief when he does not even take the initiative to first learn about it? As Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), the famous defender of Darwin’s theory of evolution puts it:
This strange man, because he has a vision one day, at once and with equally headlong zeal, flies to the opposite pole of opinion. And he is most careful to tell us that he abstained from any reexamination of the facts [Galatians 1:16-17-see above]…I do not presume to quarrel with Paul’s procedure. If it satisfied him, that was his affair; and if it satisfies anyone else, I am not called upon to dispute the right of that person to be satisfied. But I certainly have the right to say that it would not satisfy me in like case; that I should be very much ashamed to pretend that it could, or ought to, satisfy me; and that I can entertain but a very low estimate of the value of the evidence of the people who are satisfied in this fashion, when the questions of objective fact, in which their faith is interested, is concerned . Huxley Thomas, Agnosticism, a Rejoinder (1889) quoted in Knight, Humanist Anthology: p89-90
Paul, in fact, has no interest whatsoever in the historical Jesus as he himself admits :
2 Corinthians 5:16 - If we did know Christ according to the flesh, that is not how we know about him any longer.
With such disregard for the historical Jesus and his apostles, Paul’s preaching did not come from them; it came from his own mind but he called it revelation.
Galatians 1:11 - The good news I preach is not a human message that I was given by men, it is something I learnt only through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
As the famous French theologian Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) pointed out in his book The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (1930) , Paul did not develop his theology from the historical Jesus. He created the Christian idea. Paul, not Jesus, is the true founder of Christianity, as we know it. Theologians normally try to defend the idea that Paul was not the innovator by pointing to several passages found in 1 Corinthians:
1 Corinthians 7:10 - To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord)…
1 Corinthians 7:12 - To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord)…
1 Corinthians 7:25 – Now about virgins: I have no commands from the Lord, but give a judgement as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.
If these passages are interpreted the way the theologians want it to, their complete contradiction to the passages from 2 Corinthians and Galatians quoted above cannot be reconciled. Furthermore, Paul did not seem to have learnt much from the apostles who would have been the person to consult about the teachings of the earthly Jesus. The passages above can only mean that he was able to distinguish, in his mind, his own thoughts and the revelations he received (see Galatians 1:11). In this respect, Paul is very similar to the other founder of a great (in the sense of having many adherents) religion, Muhammad. Muhammad too was able to distinguish in his mind revelations from God (which eventually became transcribed into the Koran) and his own thoughts. As far as we can tell about the only thing which Paul acquired from early tradition was that Jesus was crucified and was seen by his disciples subsequent to that. He had no use for the apostles. The fact is that the apostles of Jesus never accepted Paul as one of them.
Notes list
Note (a) - Karen Armstrong estimated his date of birth to be around 5 to 10 CE. – Armstrong, The First Christian: p180
Note (b) - While I think Stephen’s martyrdom is in all probability historical, the linking of Paul to the events surrounding his death is almost certainly not. It contradicts Paul’s own assertion (In Galatians 1:22) that he was still unknown by sight to the church in Jerusalem when he visited there three years after his conversion. This statement would have been impossible had he been in Jerusalem taking part in the death of Stephen before his conversion. Some members of the Jerusalem Church would almost certainly have seen him.