Steven Carr

As a Pharisee who persecuted Christians, why does Paul imply that he never persecuted Jesus himself?

Surely the pre-resurrection Christian movement would be something Paul, as Saul, would have attacked.

Perhaps there wasn't anything for Saul to persecute.

Amaleq13

What do you imagine would have been the focus of such an attack?

SaintCog

I think if he had persecuted Jesus personally, he would have included that detail in his autobiographical sketch at the beginning of Galatians. The converted love to gush about how morally deplorable their pre-conversion life was, often in glorious exaggerated detail. It adds to the miracle of the conversion story. For Paul to have persectued Jesus personally would have made for a splendid conversion story.

Steven Carr

So what exactly was Jesus doing to stir up so little attention from a Pharisee like Paul, when the Gospels are riddled with Pharisees going out of their way to balk Jesus at every opportunity?

SaintCog

I don't know exactly what you mean by "a Pharisee like Paul." Do you mean something like one such as Paul who was renowned for persecuting Christians? I often wonder how much Paul exaggerated his role as a persecutor in order to make his conversion seem that much more impressive. Exaggerating the depravity of one's pre-conversion life is typical of enthusiastic converts.

Also, I see no reason to believe that Jesus gained any widespread attention during his ministry. I hold the gospel accounts of Jesus' controversies with the Pharisees to be indicative of the conflicts that post-70 Christians were having with non-Christian Jews.

Steven Carr

So why did Christianity gain so much attention after Jesus was out of the way?


Peter 'Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead'.

Assorted Jews. 'Who's he?'

Perhaps the reason Paul never persecuted a Christianity led by Jesus is that there was no Christianity led by Jesus.

Amaleq13

I asked this before but it seems an important enough point to ask again. What do you think would have been persecutable about the pre-Christian "Jesus movement"?

seven8s

Because he was Jesus.

Unless he was Jesus. Working from the inside out.

His faith having done the job for him, he’s dead (Jesus). What does a prosecutor do but prosecute that which is guilty of a crime against humanity. But is his faith a crime against humanity, or did he just separate the chafe from the grain, distinguish good from evil, becoming his own ‘appointed one’. We draw our own conclusions from the story. From my perspective that is the purpose of the story. Besides there is so much darn name changing, going on, not to mention repetitive names, who know who is who? Anybody can be any one, and perhaps that is what is true, one.

andrewcriddle

There are several not incompatible answers.

a/ Quite possibly (though utterly hypothetically) Paul did have some very limited confrontation with Jesus.

b/ Jesus was mostly in Galilee and occasionally in Jerusalem. Paul was in Jerusalem not Galilee and IMO probably only part-time in Jerusalem which was not his birthplace. Until there was a full time Christian group in Jerusalem Paul would have had limited contact with Jesus and his followers.

c/ Paul probably wasn't bothered much by what ignorant Galileans believed. Only when educated diaspora Jews ilke Stephen started taking Christianity seriously would Paul have been concerned.

d/ Christians like Stephen may have developed Jesus' teachings so as to make their challenge to Paul's beliefs more overt.

Andrew Criddle

motorhead

Because he never persecuted Jesus. He persecuted the movement that formed in Jesus name after he died. Paul probably didn't know much about Jesus and his followers when Jesus was alive. What if Paul just happened to hear about this movement one day when he was in Jerusalem? Maybe he found out things about it, concluded it was an abomination and decided to put down the movement as much as he could.

Why do you doubt that Jesus had a following when he was alive and preaching?