The Man Who Never Met Me

He was good at being a Pharisee. He says so himself, unprompted: he was ahead of his own age group, more zealous for the traditions of his ancestors than any of his peers (Galatians 1:14). That is not something his enemies would have said about him.

Acts adds a detail worth noticing: he was not wandering; he was carrying letters, heading for a city up north with its own Jewish community, on his way to a job (Acts 9:1–2).

He never describes what happened to him there, in any letter. He says only that God was pleased to reveal his Son in me (Galatians 1:15–16), and elsewhere, briefly, that he had seen me (1 Corinthians 9:1). The version most people know, with the falling and the blindness, was written decades later by somebody else, and the three tellings in Acts do not even agree about what his companions saw and heard.

In his own handwriting, he goes further: the gospel I preached is not of human origin (Galatians 1:11–12). His authority rests on the very fact that no one who had actually walked with me handed it to him.

He said as much to their faces. Describing a visit to the leadership, he calls them those who were supposed to be leaders and says what they actually were makes no difference to him (Galatians 2:6).

Some details fill out why. Circumcision was not a rite a grown man volunteered for himself; it was a cut made to a boy eight days after his birth, the sign marking him into the covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17:9–14). The food rules went beyond a general kosher standard: no pork, no blood, and nothing that had first been offered to another people's god on its way to the market stall.

Paul carried the movement into specific cities: Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus. Circumcising a forty-year-old Greek man there meant surgery with no anesthetic and a real risk of infection, in a world where men exercised naked together at the gymnasium and regarded the circumcised body as mutilated.

And at the table, on top of meat that had come from the temple market, even the wine was a problem, since it was poured out to a god before anyone drank it.

He says the leaders added nothing to his message when they shook hands on it (Galatians 2:6–10).

Then it broke anyway, over a table in Antioch. Peter had been eating with the non-Jewish believers there. When some men arrived from James, he got up and withdrew, and Paul confronted him about it in public (Galatians 2:11–14). The disagreement that split my movement in half was two men arguing over who was allowed to sit at the same table.

Paul’s distance from me was not for lack of witnesses: there were people alive, easy to find, who had heard every word I ever said in public. He knew who they were. He met them.

And he came away certain that the men who had actually been there had less to say about me than he did.

For a full generation, the only Christian writing that existed was his, copied and carried and read aloud from congregation to congregation. By the time anyone wrote a gospel, those letters had already been read out on Sundays for thirty years in the cities where the gospels were written.

You can see it in the shape of what got written. Mark is a short book, and the last week of my life takes up the final third of it, not the teaching, but the arrest, the trial and the execution. Somebody once called the gospels passion stories with long introductions, and that is exactly the shape Paul's framework hands you: my life becomes the run-up, my death becomes the point.

Nobody had handed him a notebook of what I said.

And much of what I said would not have worked on his people anyway. I taught villagers in Galilee: landlords, harvests, debt, fishing, the Temple tax, a man walking the road to Jericho. Paul was writing to dockworkers and dyers and slaves in Greek port cities who had never seen a vineyard or owed a landlord a harvest. But lord and savior were already words their world used, for their gods and for the emperor, and a man who died and was raised was a shape they recognized the moment they heard it.

What I asked for could not be shipped: sit down with the woman a town has thrown out, cancel a debt, feed a man. It only exists where a body does it. But believe this happened fits in a letter. It works in a language I never spoke, in a city I never saw, two thousand years after everyone who knew my face is dust.

The kingdom, the table, the last and the first: all of it becomes background to one event at the end, and a question about belief can be answered lying down, at no cost, by anybody, forever.

I did not merely name six categories; I asked six actual questions. Was somebody hungry, and did you feed them? Was somebody thirsty, and did you give them a drink? Was somebody a stranger, and did you welcome them? Was somebody naked, and did you clothe them? Was somebody sick, and did you visit them? Was somebody in prison, and did you come?

And the people who had done it did not even know they had been doing it for me. They ask when it happened. They are the surprised ones.

He wrote that because people in Corinth had started saying there is no resurrection of the dead, and he was reminding them what he had told them from the start (1 Corinthians 15:12).

Notice his own first word about it. He says he received it. He did not compose that summary himself; somebody handed it to him, which means it is older than his letter, and probably older than his conversion. People were already reciting it within a few years of my death.

He never mentions Nazareth. He never mentions a single healing, and nothing from the sermon your children memorize survives into his letters.

There is a fair answer to that. His letters are mail about problems, not biographies; you do not stop to retell a man's parables in a letter about who is sleeping with whom in Corinth, and his congregations had already heard those stories from him in person.

But watch what he does when he actually needs my authority. Arguing about marriage, he says one command is from the Lord, and a couple of lines later that the next one is from him, not the Lord (1 Corinthians 7:10; 1 Corinthians 7:12). Arguing about paying preachers, he says the Lord commanded it (1 Corinthians 9:14). Describing the meal, he says he received it from the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:23–25).

A man who had walked beside me for three years would have reached for my words on every page of every letter. He would not have been able to stop himself. There is always some afternoon you remember, something ordinary he said about a tree, and it will not let you turn him into a principle. Paul had no afternoons. He had a light on a road, a great deal of ability, and nothing whatsoever in the way.

Here is why I am less angry about it than I was. That hope was not his invention. It meant the proud brought down, the hungry filled, debts cancelled and the occupation ended, and it was already in the air of my country before he ever heard of it. My mother sang it before I could walk. I preached it in every village I entered. Paul inherited it and carried it into the empire.

His advice was that of a man in a burning building telling people not to go back upstairs for their coats.

He had told the believers at Thessalonica that those still alive would be caught up to meet me in the air. Then members of that congregation began to die: old age, fever, an accident at work. The ones left behind were frightened, not simply that their friends were gone, but that their friends had missed it, had died before the door opened and were now shut outside.

That is why 1 Thessalonians 4 exists. It is a man writing to calm a small group of terrified people who believed their own dead had been left out.

The question outsiders eventually asked is written down word for word in your Bible: Where is the promise of his coming? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on exactly as it always has (2 Peter 3:4).

Sit with that swap, because it is the hinge of everything that follows. The first one has a deadline. The second one never expires. The first one requires a movement. The second one requires an usher.

That emergency advice was given to only a few hundred people, in three or four port cities, by a frightened man who thought he was living in the world's last months. It is still in the room. You are still sitting on it.

He lists the beatings himself: five floggings of thirty-nine lashes, three beatings with rods, one stoning (2 Corinthians 11:24–25). And the beheading that tradition assigns him was what Rome did to a citizen instead of crucifying him. Your New Testament never records his death; the earliest Christian writing that mentions it is a letter sent from Rome about thirty years afterward, saying only that he bore witness in front of the rulers and departed.

Understand what sending a slave back meant in that world. A runaway was property that had stolen itself. An owner who got one back could brand the man's face, or break him, or work him to death, and the law would barely inconvenience the owner; a man caught sheltering somebody else's runaway was himself answerable to the owner. So Onesimus was in real danger going back, and Paul in danger keeping him; this was not a simple choice for either man.

Paul's letter asked the owner to receive him no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother, and hinted, without ever quite asking, that he would like the man sent back to him afterward. He spent the whole letter pointing out that he could command and would rather ask, using that standing to request a kindness and never once a manumission.

He wrote more than the summary you know. Whoever resists the authority resists God, he says, and the ruler does not carry a sword for nothing (Romans 13:1–7).

He was writing to a small group in the capital of the empire, in danger every single day simply by existing. A few years earlier Claudius had thrown the Jews out of Rome over some disturbance, and the believers in that group, most of them Jewish, had been thrown out along with them and only recently allowed back. Two of them, Prisca and Aquila, turn up in Paul's own letters as people that expulsion moved across the map (Acts 18:2; Romans 16:3).

To a Roman, that little group had no temple and no statue. It met behind closed doors in private houses, ate a meal it called a body and a blood, and took in slaves and women as full members. The sacrifices it refused to make were what a Roman believed kept the city safe, so refusing them was not a private opinion but a public danger. And the group said a kingdom was coming that would replace the present order.

It had no votes, no money, no army, no protection and almost no numbers. Rome could have ended it in a fortnight. So when Paul tells them to pay their taxes and keep their heads down, he is not writing political philosophy.

It hardened the same way his emergency advice about marriage and about slavery did. This passage has been read at slaves, read at people living under tyrants, and it is being read at somebody this Sunday.

Unlike some of the letters under his name, this one is not disputed: nobody argues Paul did not write it himself.

Before I answered, I asked them whose face was on the coin. Caesar's, they said. My answer differs from Paul's in the coldest way possible: it hands Caesar a piece of metal and leaves the far larger question wide open.

And the saying about rulers goes further than the line you already know: their great men throw their weight around, and whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant (Matthew 20:25–28; Luke 22:25–26).