If you think about it the Apostle Paul was and remains a really strange yet powerful set of paradoxes. To begin with, he was the son of a racially mixed marriage, which in turn entailed some sort of religiously mixed parentage as well. It seems that his mother was Jewish while his father was a Roman gentile. We know next to nothing about this family, except that Paul at an early age seems to have migrated to Jerusalem where he became a devout and serious follower of the Jewish religion. In his letter to the Christians at Galatia Paul, whose Jewish name was Saul, he insisted that he was trained by the scholarly Jewish scholar Gamaliel, and in the book of Acts of the Apostles we see him set out to persecute the early Christians.
However, as is also mentioned in the book of Acts, he is converted to Christianity by a vision in which he claimed that Jesus spoke to him and called him to become a follower. Because of this experience Paul eventually became the number one spokesperson for Christianity, organizing churches all over what is now Turkey and Greece, and eventually preaching in Rome itself. Along the way he wrote numerous letters to these churches and claimed his Roman citizenship. We know next to nothing for sure about when, where, and how he died. Moreover, he seems never to have had any family of his own. Many copies of his letters eventually came to comprise the majority of the New Testament.
Perhaps the most important and amazing thing about Paul was that in his missionary efforts he claimed that there should no longer be a difference between Gentiles and Christians. Thus, the early Christian churches sought to integrate Gentiles and Jews, not without a certain amount of serious difficulty. So, in the end Paul and Peter became the traditional co-founders of Christianity. Paul devoted his entire adult life to spreading the Christian faith, both personally and by means of his many letters to various early churches. He quite literally actually “invented” what became Christian theology by means of teachings and letters.
It remains a central puzzle in trying to understand Paul and his theological thought just why he came to see the Christian faith as he did. Not only did he teach that there should not be any differences between Christians and Jews but he also tried to overcome the differences between males and females, as well as those between slaves and free persons. He does not claim to have received any visions or teachings from others about such matters, nor does he claim to have received any direct revelations concerning them. Somehow he seems to have discerned that Jesus Christ, as he understood his teachings, would not have allowed such discriminations.
The biggest puzzle for me is his almost complete ignoring of anything having to do with what we would call the “Jesus of History.” His interest focused on what we call “The Christ of Faith”, on who and what Jesus was from a strictly theological perspective. He almost exclusively writes of “Christ” rather than ever saying anything about the person of Jesus. I find this extremely puzzling. He makes almost no references to Jesus’ teachings and next to none about his various activities. It is almost as if for Paul the Second Person of the Trinity, not the Jesus who taught, healed, and walked with the people of Palestine, was the person who mattered.
I must confess that not only do I find this perspective puzzling, I find it very disturbing. There is something wrong with a “divided Christ”, one who is of theological interest and value, but who is not humanly and historically of interest and value. Indeed, I fear that much of the history and theological thought of the Christian Church down through the ages has been lopsidedly “Christo-centric” at the expense of being short-sighted with respect to the implications of the idea of the Incarnation. Paul sacrificed the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith.