Reflection for Tuesday August 16th 2011

The letters Paul wrote precede the four Gospels by at least twenty years. When Paul was writing, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John had not yet been written. And by the time the Gospels appeared, we already had Paul’s letters to the Romans, Galatians, Corinthians (first and second), Philemon, and Philippians. This is why Paul never quotes the Gospels. He himself is the first one to put his Jesus experience into writing. He did not know Jesus in the flesh, but he claims that his authority comes from a personal experience on the road to Damascus.

From textual and time analysis most have concluded that Ephesians, Colossians, the letters to Timothy, Titus, and perhaps the letters to the Thessalonians were not written by Paul. These letters reflect a different mind and period of development on many levels. This is part of the liberation of Paul for us, since some passages from these letters contain messages that many people hold against Paul personally (e.g., Ephesians 5:22-6:9). Yet the canon still accepts them as inspired—as indeed they are in so many ways.

The wonder is that Paul trusts his own experience of the risen Christ to such an amazing degree. If you or I did this, we would be called arrogant, individualistic, rebellious, or even heretical. The Christ he met was not the historical Jesus in the flesh, but the risen and eternal Christ that had exploded into history for him—and for us. He experiences and describes this Christ as a new force field inhabiting space and time that he calls the “body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:4-30). His most common single phrase in all his letters is “en Cristo,” his code word for a life and energy field that fills and surrounds everything (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:22-28). This cosmic Christ is a “knowing” that you only come to by personal experience. You cannot prove it to anybody who is not there herself (see 1 Corinthians 2:6-16).