When Paul Met Jesus, Bilingual edition How an Idea Got Lost in History

Did Paul ever meet Jesus and hear him teach? A century ago, a curious assortment of scholars - William Ramsay, Johannes Weiss, and James Hope Moulton - thought that he had. Since then, their idea has virtually disappeared from New Testament scholarship, to be revived in this monograph. When Paul Met Jesus is an exercise in both biblical exegesis and intellectual history. After examining the positive arguments raised, it considers the negative influence of Ferdinand Christian Baur, William Wrede, and Rudolf Bultmann on such an idea, as they drove a growing wedge between Jesus and Paul. In response, Stanley E. Porter analyzes three passages in the New Testament - Acts 9:1-9 and its parallels, 1 Corinthians 9:1, and 2 Corinthians 5:16 - to confirm that there is New Testament evidence that Paul encountered Jesus. The implications of this discovery are then explored in important Pauline passages that draw Jesus and Paul back together again.

Introduction; 1. What scholars have said in the past about Paul and Jesus; 2. What scholars now say about Paul and Jesus; 3. What the New Testament does and does not say about Paul and Jesus; 4. The implications of Paul having met Jesus; Conclusion.

Stanley E. Porter is President, Dean, Professor of New Testament, and Roy A. Hope Chair in Christian Worldview at McMaster Divinity College, Ontario. He has written and edited numerous books, and his recent publications include Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament: Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice and Paul and Ancient Rhetoric: Theory and Practice in the Hellenistic Context (with Bryan R. Dyer, Cambridge, forthcoming).