Paul and Jesus

What this evidence appears to indicate is that up until around A.D. 50, during the first decade of Paul’s missionary work in the cities of Asia Minor, when he was working with Barnabas, he was not expressing, at least publicly, the full implications of his views about the Torah of Moses being invalidated by the new covenant he was preaching. It is possible that Paul only gradually came to this view. In his earliest letter to his congregation at Thessalonica, probably around A.D. 51, he says nothing controversial about the Jewish Torah and seems to be expounding a fairly simple standard of ethics appropriate to the God-fearer status of his followers. It is not until around A.D. 56, with his letters to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, that we begin to get a glimpse of Paul’s full views about the implications of “his” gospel—as we have seen in previous chapters.

What apparently has changed in this time period is that delegates have visited Paul’s congregations from James, including Peter himself, and they have begun to raise questions about some of the things they are hearing. We pick up these tensions particularly in Galatians and running through the Corinthian correspondence. There is an explicit challenge to Paul’s apostleship; his emotional outburst against Peter and Barnabas at Antioch are our first hint at just how serious things could become.

One point that is extremely important but seldom noted is that although Paul calls himself an apostle, there is no indication that the Jerusalem leadership had ever given him that status. By authorizing his preaching to the Gentiles they were not thereby conferring on him any special apostolic authority. The book of Acts intends to imply that Paul and Barnabas were “apostles,” simply because they were “sent out” as missionaries, but it is more likely that this designation, at least as used by the Jerusalem church, was reserved for the Twelve. The book of Acts indicates the same when Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed Jesus and killed himself, is formally replaced by the casting of lots by the Eleven, with a disciple named Matthias chosen (Acts 1:21–26). One of the requirements of such an apostle was that he had been with the group from the beginning—starting with the preaching of John the Baptizer and all through Jesus’ lifetime. Paul clearly did not qualify. But as we have seen, in Paul’s mind he was overqualified in this regard, since he was hearing directly from the heavenly Christ, while Peter and the others were relying on what they had learned from the “earthly” Jesus during his lifetime.

Things came to a confrontation sometime around A.D. 55–56. Our first evidence of the tension is in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, but the full extent of Paul’s break with the Jerusalem leadership comes out in 2 Corinthians 10–13, a section of the letter that seems to have been written independently of the whole as the situation Paul was dealing with at Corinth deteriorated and he came to feel he had lost all power with his followers.

Scholars agree that Paul is facing a group of outside opponents who have come to Corinth in his absence and tried to take over his congregation. They have been characterized in at least a dozen different ways, though most commonly they are thought to be some kind of Palestinian Jewish-Christian “Gnostics” who were boasting about their visions and revelations and their superior credentials as “apostles” while questioning Paul’s legitimacy, power, and status.⁷

In the early nineteenth century, the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, who is the “father” of critical studies of Paul, had proposed that Paul’s opponents in 2 Corinthians 10–13 were none other than James, Peter, and the Jerusalem Twelve. His view has generally been abandoned since, though some would agree that whatever group was at Corinth claimed its authorization from the Jerusalem apostles. I believe that Baur was essentially correct.⁸ What we find in these chapters is Paul’s complete repudiation of the Jerusalem apostles and his determination to operate independently in the future, without regard to their approval or directives.

Paul is livid that these delegates from Jerusalem, including Peter, would dare to extend themselves into his territory and interfere with the community he had “fathered” by his own labor. As he tells the Corinthians, “even if I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you; for you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 9:2). His language clearly shows that others are questioning his apostolic claims. We can put together a sketch of Paul’s opposition by collecting the responses and countercharges that he makes to defend himself and his apostleship.