Paul and Jesus

Although he calls himself the least and the last, he is keen to make the point that his own revelations directly from the heavenly Christ are more significant than anything Jesus taught in his earthly life, and thus supersede the experiences of the other apostles (1 Corinthians 15:9–11; 2 Corinthians 5:16; 11:5). The force of this point has profound implications for our investigation of Paul and the gospel message he preached. He also boasts that he has “worked harder than any of them,” referring to the other apostles who had known Jesus face-to-face (1 Corinthians 15:10). He refers to the period when people knew Jesus as “Jesus according to the flesh,” and contrasts it with his own spiritual experiences, including the message he received from the heavenly Christ, which he asserts is far superior (2 Corinthians 5:16; Philippians 3:3).

Most readers of the New Testament have the impression that references to “the Gospel” are generally and evenly distributed throughout the various books. After all, Christians came to understand “the Gospel” as the singular message of Christianity—the Good News of salvation brought by Christ. In fact there are seventy-two occurrences of the term “the gospel” (to euangelion) in the entire New Testament, but they are not proportionately distributed. The letters of Paul account for sixty of the total, and Mark, who was heavily influenced by Paul, contains eight.² Paul refers to his message as “my Gospel,” and it is clear that his usage is proprietary and exclusive (Romans 2:16; 16:25; Galatians 1:11–12). Rather than a generic term meaning “good news,” Paul uses the term in the sense of “My Announcement”—a reference to a very specific message that he alone possessed.³ The implications of this point are quite revolutionary: it means that the entire history of early Christianity, as commonly understood, has to be reconsidered.

The standard “Sunday school” or catechetical view of Christian origins goes something like the following: Jesus came to preach a new covenant gospel that superseded the Jewish understanding of God and his plan for the salvation of humankind. Jesus passed on the fundamentals of this new message to his chosen twelve apostles, who came to understand its full implications only after his death. Paul, who at first bitterly opposed the newly formed Christian Church, arresting Christians to be delivered up for execution, became the “Thirteenth Apostle,” last but not least, chosen directly by Jesus Christ, who had ascended to heaven. Paul’s mission was to preach the gospel message of salvation to the non-Jewish, or Gentile, world, while Peter, leader of the twelve apostles, led the mission to the Jews. Both Jew and Gentile were united in the one Christian Church, with one single unified gospel message. According to this mythology, despite a few initial issues that had to be worked out, Peter and Paul worked in supportive harmony. They were together in life and in death and they laid the foundations for a universal Christian faith that has continued through the centuries.

Historians of early Christianity question such a harmonizing view linking Jesus, his first apostles, and Paul. It serves theological dogma more than historical truth. To defend such a portrait requires one to ignore, downplay, or deny altogether the sharp tensions and the radically irreconcilable differences reflected within our New Testament documents, particularly in Paul’s own letters.

“Christian origins,” as an academic field of study, has been largely concerned with three issues: a quest for the historical Jesus; comparing him as he most likely was with what his first followers might have made of him in the interest of their own emerging Christian faith; and, finally, exploring the question of whether and to what degree Paul, who is a relative latecomer to the movement, operates in continuity or discontinuity with either the intentions of Jesus or those of his original apostles. There is also the related issue of whether Paul’s “Gospel” represents the establishment of a new religion, wholly separate and apart from Judaism.

It is generally agreed that Jesus, who lived and died as a Jew, as well as his earliest followers, nearly all of whom were Jewish, continued to consider themselves as Jews, even with their conviction that Jesus was the promised Messiah. To identify someone as the Messiah was not uncommon in first-century Jewish-Roman Palestine. Josephus, the Jewish historian of that period, names half a dozen others, before and after Jesus, who made such a claim and gathered followers behind them.⁴ Like Jesus, they all, without exception, were executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.

What about Paul? Did he merely adapt his Jewish faith to his new faith in Christ or did he leave Judaism behind for what he saw as an entirely new revelation, given to him alone, that made the Torah of Moses obsolete?