Paul of the New Testament letters was not a philosopher, but more than a century of scholarship has shown that he nevertheless knew and used philosophical terms and concepts. The letters possess a philosophical element, but how to construe both the philosophical affinities of those features and the degree of coherence among them remains a matter of debate. Troels Engberg-Pedersen has made a brilliant case for a substantial and coherent Stoic element. Others, including myself, have argued for significant Platonic features also and an appropriation that is more piecemeal and adapted to Paul's particular interests. The bulk of scholarship on Paul and philosophy has focused on moral psychology, ethics and educational-psychagogic elements in the letters. Very recent work has meanwhile taken up features that we can rightly think of as involving physics and ontology.

Paul ranks by broad scholarly agreement as a thinker centrally informed by Judean apocalyptic beliefs and he interprets Jesus Christ according to these beliefs. My own thesis about the genesis and sense of the major physical ideas in Paul's thought is as follows. Sometime in the 30s ce Paul came into contact with people who organized themselves around the belief that the executed Judean teacher, Jesus, had returned to life and had become a god serving the Judean high god. His resurrection was the beginning of a crisis in history that would eventuate in a resurrection of the righteous dead. Paul came to accept these beliefs and claimed that he had a vision in which Christ commanded him to teach about this scenario to non-Jews. After so many centuries of Christian culture in the West, this may not seem a striking idea, but the very notion of a “salvation” movement of Judeans for non-Judeans based on ideas about a Jew who became a god should be odd for the critical historian and in need of explanation. I would argue that central to this puzzle is Paul's conviction that when God brought Jesus Christ back to life he had been remade of a particular substance, a very special kind or quality of πνϵύμα (hereafter pneuma).