The Mystery of the Apostle Paul — and What Was He Reading? Follow-Up | by Graham Pemberton

15 min readSep 27, 2024

The Mystery of the Apostle Paul — and What Was He Reading? Follow-Up

Health warning: this article will probably be interesting only for those who have an obsessive interest in the origins of Christianity, and the arguments surrounding it. Even though I could have made it a private reply to a response I received, I’m publishing it as a full article. This is because I believe that the apostle Paul’s statement that, following his conversion, he went immediately to Arabia is the most significant verse in the New Testament, given the prominence of his ideas in the development of Christian theology.

I recently wrote an article with the same title as the one above. I received this detailed response from Rodney Scott, which I quote in full in what follows, although I have separated it into sections so that the discussion will be easier for readers to follow.

He made various objections and raised points which are worthy of further discussion. Obviously, his comments will make sense only if you are familiar with the contents of the original article.

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Rodney Scott

I have some challenges to your post, as well as some agreement.

Me

Thanks very much for your thoughtful and detailed response.

As I’ve written in various articles, I consider the origins of what became Christianity to be an impenetrable mystery. I write in order to explore the various avenues, and never claim to have found the truth; it may appear that way, but I’m really only trying to make the best case for any particular theory, thus playing Devil’s Advocate. I thus hope to provoke debate, and become better informed by knowledgeable responses such as yours here.

I confess that one of my motives is to stir things up, and hopefully shake some conventional Christians out of their complacency. So far I have had limited success on that score, but I have made a lot of fruitful contact on Medium with like-minded people.

Different Traditions

Rodney Scott

I find your argument for “an entirely different tradition” unconvincing. In my experience people are often more vehement in rejecting traditions close to their own. Traditions that are entirely different are often taken to be obviously wrong, and so require little effort to combat. It is conditions closer to our own that are more vehemently denounced, as they are potentially more deceptive and/or enticing.

Of course it is still important to try to understand into what tradition Paul was being converted.

Perhaps ‘entirely different’ was an overstatement. I agree with what you say about the rejection of traditions close to their own. As the article makes clear, I think, the hypothesis is that there was one original tradition, from which the Jews separated, following Ezra, and the Old Testament is primarily the product of the latter. That fits with your observation. However, they were different enough by the time of the first century to induce Paul’s hatred.

Jesus’ Conflict with the Pharisees, and Jesus and the Samaritans

Rodney Scott

Jesus is indeed focused on inner transformation, as you state. This focus goes back a long time in the Hebrew bible, such as 1 Samuel 16:7 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

It is also a focus of Jesus and early Christian preaching on repentance: Luke 13:1–5, Acts 17:30, Acts 26:20).

Jesus saw himself as Messiah for both the Jews and the Samaritans (John 4:26), but he regarded the Hebrew tradition as superior: “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” (John 4:22).

I think therefore John 8:48 is used as a degrading insult towards Jesus, rather than as an accurate assessment of his tradition. This insult can tell us a lot about relationships between Jews and Samaritans, but very little about Jesus’ actual teachings. The biblical evidence suggests there were at least 4 “traditions” present, and probably more: Pharisaic, Sadduceen, Samaritan, and Jesus/Christian.

Regarding Jesus and the Samaritans, you seem to be in agreement with ‘Whose mind is stayed on Thee’ regarding the insult and the quote from John 4.22. I’ve just written a response to that here:

https://medium.com/@graham-pemberton/jesus-and-the-woman-from-samaria-7e5d82b56add

The question would be, why did the Jews here consider Samaritan to be a insult, unless Jesus actually sounded like one? Other insults are possible. I think you may be trying to avoid the issue.

The biblical evidence indeed suggests there were at least four traditions — those you list, but strangely no mention of the Essenes. That may well be the Jesus/Christian one. Its relationship to the Samaritans is an open question, but a case could be made that they are at least similar, if not the same.

Paul and Arabia

Rodney Scott

I am not sure what translation of the bible you are using. The ESV (a recent “literal” translation) has Galatians 1:16–17 saying “… my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.” This statement does not exclude talking with other people, just with consulting them concerning the gospel. It therefore has no conflict with the road-to-Damascus events.

It is inconceivable that Paul did not already have more than a basic knowledge of what Christians taught. He had multiple opportunities to question Christians, and may have tortured them. Knowing what they thought and taught would have made him more effective as an interrogator and in his efforts to get them to recant. Paul the fanatic would not have missed these opportunities.

In Galatians 1, from the context, Paul is discussing the source of his authority and gospel. The fact that he makes no mention of a gospel source in Arabia means it is most unlikely that he found one there. If he had found one, wouldn’t he have mentioned it? Instead he has mentioned Arabia only because it is NOT Jerusalem. It is also possible from the record that Jesus’ time in Arabia was quite short. If it were an extended visit then there would be lesser need to add his time in Damascus that was also NOT Jerusalem.

In my opinion Paul went to Arabia to get his head straight, away from anyone who knew him. He has tried to preach the gospel in Damascus, and the Jews there have made a conspiracy to kill him (Acts 9:23). This is the first attempt on his life, and is made by the very people he would have felt closest to, and would have thought most likely to listen to him (Acts 22:19–20). With so many shocks in quick succession it would be little wonder if he needed a break.

There is no requirement for Arabia to be a source of information and no evidence that Paul came across anything there. At best this would be unsupported speculation.

I use the NRSV translation of the Bible, which I find very helpful. I don’t see how you can arrive at your conclusion even from the quote from your version. It says: “my immediate response was not to consult any human being”. So what about Ananias then?

Why does this statement not exclude talking with other people, since that is what it says? There is no mention of the gospel.

You say that Paul’s account in Galatians “has no conflict with the road-to-Damascus events”. I find this somewhat extraordinary. It is in complete conflict with the road-to-Damascus account. See, for example, this article by Religion and Politics at the Dinner Table, where he makes it clear that there are contradictions, which he attempts to reconcile, to see if that is possible, and also to explain how they arose. He doesn’t mention Ananias, only what follows. I pick out one sentence: “As far as Paul saying he didn’t associate with any other believers early after his conversion, I don’t see any way around that contradiction”.

Also, I recently consulted Evan LeBlanc, whom I consider to be the most knowledgeable and thoughtful Christian currently writing on Medium. I put to him my understanding of the issue based on the texts:

“Paul nowhere in his epistles refers to the road-to-Damascus incident (he talks only about his conversion). This occurs only in Acts, most notably in chapter 9, but in two, I think, other places where the author puts the words into his mouth. Since Paul categorically denies the truth of this account from v10 onwards, it is reasonable to assume that the first part might also be untrue.

Acts nowhere refers to Paul’s visit to Arabia, so I assume the author/authors want to cover this up”. (Continues but that is the essential part.)

He replied: “Yeah I think the part about Acts is correct given that Acts had a copy of Paul’s letters when it was written so they were definitely trying to create something. Agree also about the road to Damascus”.

I don’t wish to appear rude, but you seem to be unwilling to see something that is in plain sight in the texts. (Interestingly, LeBlanc also said that he is preparing an article about Paul to be published soon. That will definitely be worth a look.)

You quote Acts as if it were a reliable, infallible source of information. This is far from certain. It seems that there is more than one author, so that the text as we have it is a compilation. The authors may have had separate agendas. This seems likely to me, especially since one of them creates a narrative that Paul rejects.

You say that there is “no evidence that Paul came across anything there”. Of course there isn’t, because in Galatians he says nothing at all about what happened in Arabia. Since he is being deliberately secretive, it’s impossible to know one way or the other what happened. By far the best guess, however, is that it was there that he learned about the religion to which he had been converted. That makes the most sense from the context. If any gospel he was shown was meant to be a secret document of the movement, it’s obvious why he wouldn’t have mentioned it.

So we just don’t know. It was merely a speculation in my article that he might have been shown some scriptures there, just as what you say happened there is your speculation. You may have been referring merely to the ‘scriptures’, but something important certainly happened there, otherwise why would he swear as if on oath that he went there, thus contradicting another story being circulated about him?

I agree with you that Paul probably or must have had some knowledge of what the Jesus movement was all about. (I think the term ‘Christians’ would be an anachronism at that time.) That doesn’t mean that he didn’t still have lots to learn once he had been initiated into the movement.

Your next paragraph seems to me merely an attempt to try to fit everything within an acceptable Christian framework. You say “he has mentioned Arabia only because it is NOT Jerusalem”. Why bother to insist on Arabia at all? Why not just say “I needed to get away for a while”? Since Paul doesn’t specify how long he spent in Arabia, there’s no reason to believe it was either short or long. One will choose the one that fits with what one wants to believe.

The Qu’ran

Rodney Scott

The Qu’ran seems a most curious place to go for evidence, since it was written 600 years after Jesus’ time. We know that in his earlier days Mohammed had exposure to Christian merchants, and therefore presumably to Christian writings. The simpler explanation for similarities between New Testament writings and the Qu’ran is that Mohammed copied them. There is no need to speculate on a pre-existing Issa. Issa was simply reverse transliterated from the Greek stories of Jesus that Mohammed had access to.

This covers also similarities between the stories of John the Baptist/Zechariah and Yahya/Zechariah, without the puzzle of why Luke should displace Zechariah several centuries in time. Luke is not taking anything from a lost gospel of Issa. He is taking it from current events. Then Mohammed is borrowing from Luke.

There is nothing in the Qu’ran that cannot be better explained as above, than by hypothesising the existence of an earlier Issa.

Regarding the Qu’ran, I agree that “the simpler explanation for similarities between New Testament writings and the Qu’ran is that Mohammed copied them”. But the simpler explanation isn’t necessarily the correct one; we may have to dig deeper to get to the truth. You refer to Christian merchants and Christian writings. This is a reasonable assumption, but remains vague as to the precise details. A more specific assertion/speculation by the primary source for my article, the scholar Kamal Salibi, is that a copy of the Gospel of Issa was in the possession of Waraqah Ibn Nawfal, a Christian who was a mentor to Muhammad. I quote him: “Christian scholars have tended to view what the Koran says about the person and mission of Issa as a garbled version of canonical or apocryphal Gospel accounts. In fact, most of the material it presents is highly original. It is therefore reasonable, at least tentatively, to proceed on the assumption that the Koranic story of Issa preserves an independent tradition concerning the origins of Christianity — a tradition which was still current in Arabia in the seventh century, when Islam was born”.

I note that you don’t mention some of the evidence (albeit circumstantial) I provided, namely “that Luke begins his gospel in fluent Greek. Then quite suddenly the fluency ends and a more fumbling style begins as Luke starts to relate his Christmas story, which continues to the end of the Christmas narrative when the fluency of the introduction is resumed. Judging solely by the change of style, some scholars have suggested that the Christmas story in Luke must be a translation from a written source which was probably in Aramaic”. As I noted the Aramaic Gospel of Issa would have been a possible source, although there were perhaps others.

If that claim is true, then that would be reasonably convincing evidence. Unfortunately I have no knowledge of Greek, so am not qualified to judge. Comments from anyone who is qualified and has knowledge of Luke’s text would be welcome.

Religion and Politics at the Dinner Table wrote an article about Jesus and Issa in the Qu’ran — he was exploring whether they were the same person, thus not whether there was a pre-existing Issa. On my theme, however, there was one especially interesting passage: “We can see that, obviously there are differences in the wording and details, but we see differences between the gospel accounts as well. Matthew mentions calling Jesus ‘Immanuel’, meaning ‘God with us’, while Luke just says he will be the ‘Son of God’. There is also the mention of Mary becoming pregnant through the Holy Ghost in Luke’s account. Now notably neither of these facts are mentioned in the Quran account, they hold that the story is true and occurred, but that additions were made and ‘corrupted’ in the Biblical version of the story”. If that is true, then there must have been an earlier text to which the corrupt additions were made.

Regarding the similarities between the stories of John the Baptist/ Zechariah and Yahya/Zechariah, Luke is presumably referring to some text, since he was not an eye-witness to what you call “current events”. How would he know? None of the other gospel writers do. Even if we accept your version, that Mohammed was copying Luke, Luke still had to get his version from some written source. Whatever that was, it is now unknown.

Mary the Mother of Jesus

Rodney Scott

The ESV renders John 19:25 as: Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. The introduction of a comma makes this an unambiguous list of 4 women, and Jesus’ aunt is not named Mary (the only one there, apparently, who isn’t). Biblical Greek does not use commas, so in the original the sentence is ambiguous.

Given the content of the other gospels, inserting the comma is quite likely to be the correct approach. If you would argue otherwise, then you would be betting on the basis of a missing comma in a language that does not even have commas — a truly long shot.

Paul’s failure to use Mary’s name in Galatians 4:4 suits his purpose. He is emphasising similarities between Jesus and the rest of us “… born of a woman, born under the law, …”. Stating that Jesus was born of Mary would lessen the identification between Jesus and ourselves. It has the hallmarks of a deliberate choice, not evidence that Paul did not know her name.

What you say about the comma in John is very interesting (I was unaware of that) and, as you say, makes the text ambiguous. I also agree with what you say about Paul; there was no obvious need to mention the name in that context. I mentioned it as a possible example of where the name could have been used.

Paul’s “Scriptures”

Rodney Scott

A very quick scan would suggest to me that Isaiah 53:1–8 would adequately cover Paul’s first “according to the Scriptures”. I know that Religion & Politics at the Dinner Table disputes this application, but we are considering here Paul’s likely interpretation of the passage, not anyone else’s. I have no immediate suggestions for the second time this expression is used.

I do note that the testimony of the early church fathers is that Matthew was the first gospel written and that it was written in Hebrew or perhaps Aramaic. Our gospel of Matthew would then be a Greek translation either by Matthew or some other writer. This would allow an early version of Matthew that Paul may have had access to. I acknowledge that there are problems with this hypothesis.

I was very surprised that you referenced the suffering servant passage in Isaiah as relating to Jesus. I know that many Christians have been persuaded that it does, since they want to believe that the Old Testament is replete with prophecies of Jesus, but do they understand the context in which it was written? Surely Paul with all his Pharisaic training and knowledge of his culture would know the true meaning.

Some Medium writers haven’t fallen for this suggestion. The best is Evan LeBlanc:

https://medium.com/backyard-theology/isaiah-53-part-i-daf9340447af

Conclusion

Rodney Scott

I do not have a conclusive answer to your initial question.

While I appreciated the scope of your research (even if you give most of the credit to another) I do find your hypothesis to be unnecessarily complicated and based on evidence that is at times misguided, and unconvincing.

Me

I’ll let readers decide for themselves.

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APPENDIX

A friend of mine who read the original article wrote to me as follows:

“ Have just reread your email with the paper on the mystery of ‘Issa’. Do you think Paul and Luke were using source material about Issa to make sense of Jesus? And what about the encounter of Paul with the risen Christ? I can see how the account could be a literal interpretation of the event and so a construct to fit an early narrative. I don’t know, not being versed in this argument. I remember Don Cupitt pointing to the fact of how little we know about the historical Jesus. He goes on to say that ‘something’ happened around this time which created a shift in consciousness, which, through irony, led to the emergence of critical thinking. If that follows we are now in full receipt of this way of thinking. I’m not at all sure where this places us with regard to the existence or other of Jesus. For now I hold fast to a simple faith based understanding which continues to work for me.

Hope this is more or less in line with what you are saying. I could be well off message. If so please tolerate my reasoning”.

This was my reply:

“I think we need to separate Paul from Luke. Paul’s ideas and teachings are derived from his visions, whereas Luke in his gospel is actually writing, or attempting to write, a ‘historical’ account, based as he says on his sources. We can put either a negative or positive slant on that. If Luke consciously knew that he was using earlier material and applying it to John the Baptist and Jesus, then he could be accused of deliberately misleading the reader. We might even ask then whether Jesus really existed, if Luke is actually talking about Issa. If we put a positive slant on it, then we could say that Luke recognised that Issa prefigured Jesus, that they were from the same tradition, and sought to link them together, although this would not be clear to the reader.

You say ‘risen Christ’. This could be taken to mean the physical, resurrected Jesus. The account in Acts tells us, however, that at the time of Paul’s conversion, Jesus had ascended to heaven. No one has said that he returned to Earth after that, so that Paul could only have had an encounter with the ascended Christ. The text does not even mention seeing Jesus: “Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He… heard a voice saying to him… The men who were travelling with him… heard the voice but saw no one”. So there was no actual ‘encounter’ with any figure of Jesus; this is more in the nature of a paranormal event.

Don Cupitt makes a very good point. As I say frequently, the origins of what became Christianity are an impenetrable mystery. I call that ‘something’ that he refers to the Jesus/Christ phenomenon; there is no doubt at all that this happened, however little we know about the historical Jesus. We are now in the process of examining this critically and attempting to understand what it all meant. I’m trying to play a small part in that process”.

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Rodney Scott

Religion and Politics at The Dinner Table

Marcus aka Gregory Maidman

Jack Preston King

Quran Insights

Nupur Saxena