What did Paul know about Jesus? Gregory C. Jenks The formative period of earliest Christianity falls between the execution of Jesus in 30 CE and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies in 70 CE. The New Testament would suggest that during those forty years there was no more influential figure than Saul of Tarsus, best known in later Christian tradition as Paul the Apostle. But what did Paul actually know about Jesus? What part did such information play in his personal understanding of the post-Easter Jesus? Does the historical Paul provide any help for contemporary people wondering to what extent information about the pre-Easter Jesus is relevant to the project of discipleship and faith? The ‘problem’ of Paul’s knowledge of Jesus One of the first problems to be faced concerns the definition of Pauline material. Is our inquiry to focus on the historical Paul or the canonical Paul? By canonical Paul, I mean the identikit picture of Paul that is created when all the biblical traditions associated with Paul are simply put together uncritically. Of the twenty-seven books that finally came to comprise the New Testament, 16 are attributed to Paul or his admirers: The Pauline corpus includes the seven letters widely accepted as authentic by New Testament scholars: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Not surprisingly, these seven letters were all voted Red in the Spring 1997 Westar meeting. Then there are the disputed letters of 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus. Their claim to authenticity is widely challenged in New Testament scholarship. Again the Westar voting results reflect the wider consensus of scholarship in these questions. In addition, there is the Letter to the Hebrews, long ascribed to Paul in popular tradition even though it is actually anonymous. Finally, we have the two volumes of Luke-Acts. This influential account of the life of Jesus and of the early church is usually considered to have been written by someone wishing to affirm the validity and the providential character of the Pauline mission. It is possible that authentic Pauline material has been preserved in some of the disputed letters. However, for our purposes it is better to limit the discussion to the Pauline data that is earliest and has the widest critical acceptance as genuine. The question of Paul’s access to and influence upon the earliest Jesus traditions has been debated for nearly two hundred years. Was Paul drawing upon a primitive Jesus tradition inherited from the first disciples in Jerusalem, or was he contributing to the formation of an