The modern quest for the historical Paul, determining who the apostle Paul was and what he said, is in an important way borne out of a real peculiarity in our New Testament sources.  On the One hand, we have the authentic letters of Paul that scholars see as one of our earliest sources for the Jesus movement, and in this source we learn about the saving cross/resurrection of Jesus’ death.  On the other hand, most scholars think there was another lost source “Q” that was very early and was made up what was common to the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, but did not come from the Gospel of Mark.  Q seems to be at its earliest stage about a loving Jesus (Q1, e.g., Love of enemy), which later added contradictory material about a judging Jesus.(Q2), which Nietzsche seems to be the first to have noticed.  The problem for scholars is that Q doesn’t teach about the saving death of Jesus, and so the scandal for New Testament scholars is they have Paul as a supposedly very early source teaching Jesus’ death/resurrection as the main component of the faith, while we have another very early source Q not even bothering with Jesus’ death.

If Livesey is right and Paul’s letters post-date Acts, then everything changes. Here is my new article published by The Secular Web: https://infidels.org/library/modern/quest-for-historical-paul-b/