the miracle-working Jesus of the gospels was not known in Paul's time,
that is to say, the earliest Jesus known to the churches was a person
altogether different from his namesake in the four evangelists. If
Paul knew of a miracle-working Jesus, one who could feed the multitude
with a few loaves and fishes--who could command the grave to open, who
could cast out devils, and cleanse the land of the foulest disease of
leprosy, who could, and did, perform many other wonderful works to
convince the unbelieving generation of his divinity,--is it
conceivable that either intentionally or inadvertently he would have
never once referred to them in all his preaching? Is it not almost
certain that, if the earliest Christians knew of the miracles of
Jesus, they would have been greatly surprised at the failure of Paul
to refer to them a single time? And would not Paul have told them of
the promise of Jesus to give them power to work even greater miracles
than his own, had he known of such a promise. Could Paul really have
left out of his ministry so essential a chapter from the life of
Jesus, had he been acquainted with it? The miraculous fills up the
greater portion of the four gospels, and if these documents were
dictated by the Holy Ghost, it means that they were too important to
be left out. Why, then, does not Paul speak of them at all? There is
only one reasonable answer: A miracle-working Jesus was unknown to
Paul.

What would we say of a disciple of Tolstoi, for example, who came to
America to make converts to Count Tolstoi and never once quoted
anything that Tolstoi had said? Or what would we think of the
Christian missionaries who go to India, China, Japan and Africa to
preach the gospel, if they never mentioned to the people of these
countries the Sermon on the Mount, the Parable of the Prodigal Son,
the Lord's Prayer--nor quoted a single text from the gospels? Yet