When Paul Met Jesus: How an Idea Got Lost in History by Stanley E. Porter

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Paul Met Jesus: How an Idea Got Lost in History by Stanley E. Porter Glen J. Fairen stanley e. porter, When Paul Met Jesus: How an Idea Got Lost in History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Pp. xiii + 212. $99.99. When Paul Met Jesus: How an Idea Got Lost in History is a strange book. Although the author, Stanley E. Porter, claims that it is an exercise in biblical exegesis of the evidence for—and also a historiography of the scholarship regarding—the idea that "Paul had met Jesus before their encounter on the road to Damascus" (p. 2), the main thrust of the book is a critique of why modern scholarship has rejected this theory. According to P., this is not due to lack of evidence but is rather a consequence of scholarly conditioning by "the reigning paradigm regarding the relationship of Paul to Jesus … a history of prejudice against a Jewish Jesus and the desire to exalt a Gentile Paul" (p. 4). This is truly a surprising claim. Considering that NT scholarship has, since the 1970s, been dominated not only by the idea of a "Jewish Jesus" but also by the view that the earliest Christians, including Paul, were also "Jewish" or in continuity with Judaisms, it appears that P. is addressing a problem that no longer exists in scholarship. But it is this incongruity at the heart of this book that provides insight into the agenda the author wishes to address. After a brief contextual setup of the lives of Paul and Jesus, P. summarizes the work of William Ramsay (1851–1939), Johannes Weiss (1863–1914), and James Hope Moulten (1863–1917), who all argued that Paul must have met Jesus before he encountered the resurrected Christ. In chap. 2, P. then takes to task Ferdinand Christian Baur, William Wrede, and in particular Rudolf Bultmann, not just for their rejection of this theory but for how that has served as the paradigm for the modern wedge that has supposedly been driven between the teachings of an "earthly" Jesus and Paul in modern scholarship. In chap. 3, P. examines Acts 9:1-9; 1 Cor 9:1; and 2 Cor 5:16 for possible traces of Paul having met the pre-resurrection Jesus and, in the final chapter, speculates on the implications this could have for NT studies. As an examination of intellectual history, P.'s book sheds light on an interesting idea that was considered a serious scholarly model more than a century ago. It also, perhaps unintentionally, provides insight into how NT studies have fundamentally changed since the late 1800s. As a piece of modern critical NT scholarship, however, it fails. For example, in taking literally the historical accuracy of Luke-Acts—that it must have been written by Paul's companion Luke around 63 CE (p. 79), that Jesus must have been able to tell the future (p. 77), or that Jesus in fact actually rose from the dead (p. 91)—P. ignores not just vast amounts of critical methodology in scholarly interpretation of the NT but provides little counterevidence beyond the apparent accuracy of the text's mythical claims (p. 79 [End Page 152] n. 18). This is why the book fails as a piece of critical scholarship. Scholars should, and do, wildly disagree. But disagreements are generally based on evidence or rigorous methodological work, not simply buttressing the truth claims of our sources. Although this may have been adequate during the time of Ramsay, Weiss, and Moulton, it is simply not up to the scholarly standards of today. This seems particularly clear when one also takes into account P.'s distress with the disjunction between a "Jewish" Jesus and a "gentile" Paul, but this is simply not an issue in modern NT studies. The disharmony between Paul's and the Synoptics' constructions of the various Jesuses is not only due to the fact that they are in fact different but, more importantly, because scholars do not require a fictive unifying narrative to account for the multiplicity within the NT. This is the bailiwick not of modern NT studies but of theology and is a clear example of...