Paul

Paul is credited with the authorship of thirteen letters in the New Testament. No serious scholar denies his authorship of at least seven of these. They were written between about AD 50 and his martyrdom in Rome in the mid-sixties. There is no record that Paul had met or listened to Jesus prior to his crucifixion, though he may well have been in Jerusalem at the time. However, it is certain that he would have known those who had. Jesus' brother James, and Peter, are listed among those he knew and there must have been many others. As C. H. Dodd memorably put it regarding Paul's visit to Peter recorded in Galatians 1:18, "we may presume they did not spend all the time talking about the weather."

Paul was a bigoted rabbi, violently opposed to the early Christians and to any suggestion that a condemned criminal could possibly be the promised Messiah. What was it that transformed him into one of the greatest Christian missionaries and writers of all time? Luke, one of his closest friends, tells us in Paul's own words that it was because he had met the risen Christ (Acts 26:12-18). And we have Paul's own written testimony. In his first letter to the church in Corinth, after listing some of the people known to him to whom Christ had appeared after his resurrection, he adds, "last of all he appeared to me also" (1 Corinthians 15:8).

Have we any good reason to doubt Paul's integrity? It would be hard, if not impossible, to imagine writings that bear more evidence of sincerity than Paul's. J. B. Phillips, who translated the New Testament into modern English, described his experience of translating Paul's letters as follows:

...again and again the writer felt rather like an electrician, rewiring an ancient house, without being able to turn the mains off.