Paul and Jesus

Scholars are sharply divided on these complex questions, and the positions they take resist neat and easy categorization.⁵ Some see Paul as extending and universalizing the essential teachings of Jesus and his early followers, so that differences are recognized but understood to be cultural and developmental. In this view Paul would be neither the apostle who betrayed the historical Jesus, nor the apostate who betrayed Judaism, but one who skillfully fashioned a version of Jesus’ message for the wider non-Jewish world. Others recognize the sharp dichotomy between Jesus’ proclamation that the kingdom of God was soon to be established on earth and Paul’s message of a heavenly Christ, but nonetheless they imagine a practical functional harmony between Paul and the original apostles. In other words, Paul and the apostles agreed to disagree, recognizing that there was more that united them than divided them, particularly since Paul, in preaching to Gentiles, would have to tailor his message to fit the non-Jewish culture.

I go much further. Not only do I believe Paul should be seen as the “founder” of the Christianity that we know today, rather than Jesus and his original apostles, but I argue he made a decisive bitter break with those first apostles, promoting and preaching views they found to be utterly reprehensible. And conversely, I think the evidence shows that James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, as well as Peter and the other apostles, held to a Jewish version of the Christian faith that faded away and was forgotten due to the total triumph of Paul’s version of Christianity. Paul’s own letters contain bitterly sarcastic language directed even against the Jerusalem apostles. He puts forth a starkly different understanding of the message of Jesus—including a complete break from Judaism.

This viewpoint changes our understanding of early Christianity. But linking Peter and Paul in Christian tradition, history, and art is one of the bedrock foundations of the Christian Church in the past nineteen hundred years. How did this view come to prevail?

The answer seems as clear as it is surprising. Paul’s triumph is almost wholly a literary victory, reinforced by an emerging theological orthodoxy backed by Roman political power after the time of the emperor Constantine (A.D. 306–37). This consolidation was not achieved in Paul’s lifetime but it emerged by the dominance of pro-Pauline writings within the New Testament canon that became the standard of Christian orthodoxy. Even the order and arrangement of the New Testament books reflects the dominance of Paul’s perspectives. Gradually alternative visions and voices faded, particularly those belonging to James and the early Jerusalem church. “Judaism” became a heresy, an obsolete religion replaced by a new covenant. Heresy became not simply an alternative opinion but a crime. We find the beginnings of this process in the letters of Paul and, surprisingly, even in the New Testament gospels that most people assume have little to do with Paul.

Paul’s literary victory rested upon three pillars: 1) the gospel of Mark, our earliest narrative of the career and death of Jesus, is heavily Pauline in its theological content; 2) the two-volume work Luke-Acts vastly expanded Mark’s story to culminate with a final scene of Paul preaching his gospel in Rome; and, 3) the six later letters written in Paul’s name, but after Paul’s lifetime offered a more domesticated Paul, which pleased the church and ensured the muting of his more radical message. (These six letters are Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.)

The master narrative of Paul’s literary triumph was the book of Acts. The author purposely hides his name and publishes his work anonymously—giving us our first signal that he wants us to think his work dates to an earlier time. He ends his story with Paul under house arrest in Rome. By not relating the story of Paul’s death, which he surely knew, he leaves the impression that his book dates to the time of the emperor Nero, when Paul was executed. All this is a purposeful ploy.