Speaking of his gospel, Paul mentions a certain "writing" that speaks of Christ's death and His resurrection. Judging by this mention, at the time when he wrote his letter to the Corinthian church, certain specifically Christian texts already existed in the Christian community...
Speaking of his gospel, Paul mentions a certain "writing" that speaks of Christ's death and His resurrection. Judging by this mention, at the time when he wrote his letter to the Corinthian church, certain specifically Christian texts already existed in the Christian community. Perhaps this is not a reference to the Gospels known to us, but to some records that formed their basis. And to what was central in them: the testimonies about the Messiah's death and His resurrection. And yet no texts could replace living testimony.
Especially the testimony of a person who had not been with Jesus during His earthly life, as the other apostles had, and in general had not been planning to become His disciple or follower. A person who, on the contrary, had been an enemy of Christians and had persecuted them as much as he could. The testimony of precisely such a person best demonstrates what the Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior is, and how it affects a person.
Paul, who at that time was not yet Paul or an apostle, but Saul, a disciple of Gamaliel, was never approached by anyone trying to convince him of the truth of Christianity. He had never heard anything at all about what today we would call Christian teaching. For him Christianity was not a teaching, but a meeting. A meeting with a power far greater than his own, in which he recognized the power of God. And behind that power, to the great astonishment of the future apostle, stood the One whose followers he had intended to persecute as enemies of God.
That is how Paul became acquainted with the King of the Kingdom whose breath and power he felt there on the Damascus road. And he became an apostle not in order to preach a new teaching, but in order to tell everyone ready to hear about his meeting with the Risen One and about the Kingdom that He had revealed to him. About the meeting that became the center and meaning of his life and his testimony.
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15:10 I laboured more than they all - That is, more than any of them, from a deep sense of the peculiar love God had shown me. Yet, to speak more properly, it is not I, but the grace of God that is with me - This it is which at first qualified me for the work, and still excites me to zeal and diligence in it.