A while back I wrote a column entitled “Paul is not Jesus.” Since then I’ve stumbled across several online lectures and magazine articles giving Paul credit for creating the Christian religion. The articles implied that Jesus was a charismatic prophet whose legacy endures only because of Paul. I feel I need to write about this subject again.
As is commonly known, Paul was an enemy of those who followed Jesus, even to abetting in murder. Several years after Jesus’ death and resurrection Paul recorded his own conversion after being confronted with a vision of Jesus so brilliant it blinded him for several days. His discipleship began then as an ignorant new “believer.” It took him several years to learn the basics of “The Way of Jesus” from others with more intimate knowledge and experience, and the rest of his life to mature into deeper understanding. Along with partners and assistants he established new worshipping congregations among the pagans of what is now Turkey, Greece and Macedonia. He trained and guided his own disciples to establishing other congregations. Letters to the congregations he founded, to congregations founded by others, and letters attributed to him, speak to the difficulties new Christians had living into their faith, and testifying to his own developing understanding in which he frequently changed direction.
The letters were and still are included in the canon of the New Testament mostly because they were the only apostolic writings we had, and because they tell one story of a part of the early church. It’s regrettable that some Christians take the letters to be the inerrant word of God. They certainly testify to God’s truth, and to the way one late comer apostle taught others about Jesus Christ in far off lands. Divinely inspired as they are we can learn much from them, but they are not the inerrant word of God.
There was a vibrant Christian movement in the Levant by the time of Paul’s conversion. By the time of his execution, around 65 a.d., there were centers of Christian learning in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, none of which owed their establishment to Paul.
With all of that said, the importance of the Pauline texts remains important and worthy of study. They help us understand the troubles of early congregations that were often like our own troubles. They illuminate and reveal God’s word even if they are not themselves God’s word. They tell us of the courage and perseverance demanded of the Christian life, regardless of conditions and happenstance. For all these reasons and more, they carry great authority for modern Christians, but they are not the authority of Jesus Christ. It is the gospel record that bears the full authority of God’s word.
For Christians it is Jesus who fulfills all the law and prophets, both past and to the end of time. Everything must be understood from that center. It’s true that the gospels were written by different people at different times from multiple sources during the last half of the first century, after Paul had died. They cannot be harmonized, but each writer did the best he/she could to get the essential truths down right. Some historical scholars try to bracket divine inspiration, or anything supernatural, but Christian truth is supernaturally spiritual; it cannot be bracketed out. To accuse gospel writers of fabrication is arrogant cynicism. To claim their inherency in every word is to manipulate their message into idols of one’s own making. To trust in them is to follow in God’s way of love, proclaiming the good news of the world’s salvation through Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. None of us are up to the task, but we can do the best we can with what we have, just as Paul did, to continue spreading the good news by word and deed.
© Steven E. Woolley