Why I Trust My Bible - Lesson 7

1. Challenge 

In this session, I want to talk about the relationship of Paul to Jesus, and ask the question: Did Paul fundamentally change the message of Jesus? Did he change our understanding of who Jesus is? Did he change our understanding of what Jesus taught? What’s the relationship between Jesus and Paul? There’s multiple challenges on this issue. One comes from ‘critical scholarship.’ And in critical scholarship they say that Jesus was a simple Galilean prophet, a good man, but nothing more than that. And Paul comes along and turns him into a Gentile god. Okay, did Paul change who Jesus is? 

There’s another challenge, more on the popular side of things, and it says that Jesus and Paul are so different that they are incompatible. Their messages are incompatible with each other. So, for example, Jesus is…you kind of fill in the blank. Jesus is love; Jesus is accepting. Jesus is kind; Jesus is a friend of the downtrodden. You go through, fill in the blank. But rather, Paul is…fill in the blank. Paul is dictatorial, he’s harsh; he’s overly theological. He’s full of himself; he’s proud and arrogant. How ever you want to fill in those lines. Jesus was about loving people into the Kingdom of God. Paul was about justification by faith and judgment if you don’t believe. That’s a popular kind of challenge of this whole issue is: are the teachings of Jesus and Paul incompatible?

Thirdly, there’s another popular challenge, and it’s a challenge that’s not actually directly connected to it, but if it’s true, then this whole issue is...there’s no reason even to talk about it. And the challenge is this: I believe that Jesus is God, and so what he says matters to me. I’ll believe that. But Paul isn’t Jesus. Paul isn’t God, and so I don’t need to believe anything that Paul says. And again, so if you hold that position, basically this whole discussion is irrelevant.

2. Jesus, I believe. I don’t have to believe Paul.

What I’d like to do is to answer these questions, but I want to answer them in reverse. I’m going to start with the second popular challenge first. And that is, “Jesus I believe, but I don’t have to believe Paul because he’s not Jesus.” And I thought through kind of a sequencing of a dialogue, of questions in a dialogue, to kind of help us think through this. I’ll begin by asking a person who believes this question, “Well, why do you believe Jesus? Why do you believe that he’s God? Why do you believe what he taught about the Kingdom of God? Why do you believe that he’s gone to make a place for us, he’s going to bring us home to Heaven eventually when we die?” I mean, “Why do you believe any of that?” Well, my guess is most people would say, “Well, I read it in the Gospels, and I believe it.” And they may add a personal element that, “It’s true in my experience; Jesus lives in my heart.” That’s a different issue, and I can’t deal with that here. But I want to deal with the answer that I think most people would give, “Well, the Bible teaches it; the Gospels teach it; and I believe it.” Okay. 

Then the second question, the follow-up question is, “Well, who wrote the Gospels, and why do you think they got it right?” Who wrote the Gospels? Well, the writers of the Gospels, someone might say, “They were eyewitnesses. They were there, they saw it; they heard it; and in fact some of them were apostles.” And someone who’s kind of theologically aware of what the word ‘apostle’ means, they might say, “Well, that means these people were sent by God with his authority.” But primarily these were eyewitnesses of Jesus. My follow up question then would be, “Okay, but who is Paul, who is Paul?” Well, according to Luke (who wrote Acts as well as the Gospel of Luke), Paul was an eyewitness, right? He saw Jesus on the Damascus Road. He had later visions of God where God taught him things. He had visions of what it was going to be like in heaven. God showed Paul what he was going to have to suffer, at least according to Luke, the things he was going to have to suffer for the Gospel. Paul was an eyewitness. Did he walk with Jesus for three and a half years? No, but he still was an eyewitness. Who’s Paul? He’s an apostle, and as an apostle he has exactly the same authority that all the other apostles have. And you can see that this is affirmed. 

In Acts 15 there’s an early debate in the churches: do you have to become a Jew first to become a Christian? And Paul and Peter both kind of recounted their experiences with Gentiles, with non-Jews. And, of all the people, James, who’s the head of the Jerusalem church, and was Jesus’ brother, accept Paul’s witness and Peter’s witness; accept Paul’s authority as an apostle; and agrees with him. In fact, the whole church agreed with him. In fact, the churches always viewed Paul as having the full authority as any other apostle. Yeah, there’s some people here and there that were fighting him in the churches that said he really wasn’t an apostle, but the church as a whole certainly said that Paul was an apostle; which means that if a person doesn’t accept the witness of Paul but may accept the witness of Jesus, they’re disagreeing with the entire church of 2000 years. So again, we come back to the question is: why would you believe Matthew’s account of Jesus but not accept Paul? Eyewitnesses, apostles, accepted by the church as a whole. You see the problem? What I am trying to say is that it’s not really consistent to believe Matthew, but not believe Paul. 

Let me ask even a more basic question: if a person says that he or she believes the Gospels, well, who were Mark and Luke? Who were Mark and Luke? Sure, Matthew and John were two of the twelve disciples, certainly apostles, but set them aside for a second. Who’s Mark and Luke? Well, Mark wasn’t one of the twelve. He wasn’t an apostle. He doesn’t even occur in the Gospels, at least by name he doesn’t. He’s not even mentioned until Acts 12. So why would you believe Mark? Why would somebody believe Mark? What about Luke? Luke wasn’t an eyewitness. He wasn’t an apostle. He says it right up front in Luke 1:1-4. He said, “I wasn’t an eyewitness, but I’ve heard from people who were eyewitnesses, and I’ve researched, and I’m writing this for Theophilus so you can know the certainty of the things that you have believed.” But he wasn’t an eyewitness. He was a friend of an apostle (he was part of Paul’s inner-travel circle), but he wasn’t an apostle himself. And yet, Luke wrote, I don’t know, a third to half of the New Testament, because he wrote the Gospel of Luke, and then the second half of the story is the Book of Acts. See the problem? Why believe what Mark says? Why believe what Luke says when they weren’t eyewitnesses, and they weren’t apostles? Just like Matthew and John, Paul was an eyewitness, and he was an apostle, He carried the uppermost authority in the church as did all the other apostles. It’s a little inconsistent, I think, to say I believe what the Gospels teach about Jesus but not Paul because Paul wasn’t an eyewitness.

There’s a related issue. I just want to mention that. I know when you go to a Bible bookstore, and you can get a Bible, some of the Bibles are red-letter editions, and what the red letters mean are the actual words of Jesus are in red and everything else is in black. And I think today we kind of do that as a spiritual kind of thing. It actually isn’t. It’s actually a very bad thing. The red letters started back when people started questioning whether what we have in the Bible is really true. I mean, they said, “Well, the words of Jesus were true, so we’re going to put those in red. But the other words that may be questionable we’re going to leave in black.” And that’s actually how red-letter editions of the Bible can be misused. “I’m going to believe the red letters, but I’m not going to necessarily believe the black.” Here’s the question: if the Gospel writers couldn’t get the black letters right, why do you think they got the red letters right? Well, I mean if you’re a careful exegete, historian, you were there, you studied, you’re under the influence of the Holy Spirit, you’re inspired, why would the red letters (the words of Jesus), be right, and the black letters (the other things), not necessarily be right? 

The overall point that I’m trying to make is that there’s a real danger in picking and in choosing what parts of the Bible you’re going to believe and what parts you’re not going to believe. There’s a real danger in that. There is something wrong with saying, “I’m going to sit in authority over Scripture; I am going to choose which passages I think are true and remove the ones that I think are not false, and then (this is the inconsistency), then I’m going to submit myself to the authority of those passages that I’ve already believed are true (I’ve decided are true).” Well, that didn’t make any sense! It really doesn’t if you stop and think about it. I suggest that if you believe what the Gospels say about Jesus, you have to believe all of what they say, and you have to believe what all the apostles say about Jesus and anything else, and that includes Paul. So, I think that’s an issue that’s really worth thinking through.

3. Are Jesus and Paul Incompatible

The second challenge, again going in reverse order, the second challenge is: are the teachings of Jesus and Paul incompatible? Now, if Jesus and Paul taught things that were mutually exclusive, contradictory, okay, then you have a real issue, right? Then you’ve got to decide who you’re going to believe, Jesus or Paul. I’m not talking about teachings that are different but compatible. I’m talking about are there teachings in Jesus and Paul that are incompatible; that they are mutually exclusive. Again, the challenge would go something like this: Jesus taught…fill in the blank, okay. He taught about the Kingdom of God; he taught kindness; he taught about love. Paul…fill in the blank, talked about justification by faith; he talked about the law; things like that. Are those teachings incompatible? And I need to say up front, they do feel a bit incompatible, don’t they? And when you read Jesus and read Paul, they are different, and it doesn’t do any good to deny that. 

One of the more interesting experiences in my own life is that I went to Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary to teach. I requested ‘New Testament Survey,’ and they gave it to me (which I was very happy to have). And I said, “You know, I’m going to teach the first half of this class as if Paul didn’t exist. I’m going to let Jesus be Jesus.” I think I was always kind of trying to read justification by faith into Jesus. And I said, “I’m just going to ignore Paul, for the first half of class, and then I’m just going to teach Jesus.” And when I did that, it was the first time I think I ever really understood Jesus, or at least to some degree, because they’re really different in how they express themselves, and to some degree, how they think. So, it doesn’t do any good to deny the difference. There is a difference. There’s a difference in feel. Okay, the question is: is it compatible or incompatible? And I think that a lot of this conflict, if you have in some people’s minds, is because they’ve misunderstood Jesus, and they’ve misunderstood Paul; that they’ve seen how they express themselves, and it makes it feel like they’re incompatible. But a lot of this has to do with misunderstanding.

Let me give a couple of examples. Some people feel that Paul was harsh; Jesus never was harsh; he was loving. Oh really? Go read Matthew 23 if you don’t think Jesus was harsh. An entire chapter of condemning the most religious, externally religious people there were, the Scribes and the Pharisees. He calls them whitewashed tombs. They’re walking defilements, in other words! Anything they touch is unclean before God. He makes a whip, and he drives people out of the temple. Yeah! Paul doesn’t have a corner on harshness; Jesus had his moments. It was almost always with the superficially religious people. But there was a harshness about that. What do you think about the whole idea of judgment? Oh, Paul is a judgmental person. Well, I don’t think he has anything on Jesus. I mean, Matthew 5:20 says, “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the Teachers of the Law, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom of God.” He just said, in a very judgmental way, that the most religious people of his day aren’t even in the Kingdom of God! They haven’t even gotten in the door. They don’t have a toe in the Kingdom of God! Well, that’s pretty harsh. That’s pretty judgmental. Or in Matthew 7, he says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ is going to enter the Kingdom of God.” Oh, but people are going to say, “‘But we did miracles in your name; we did exorcisms in your name, and all this stuff,’ and Jesus says, ‘Depart from me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you.’” Wow! That’s interesting, isn’t it? That’s interesting. 

Or about demanding (I’m just picking up some of the caricatures of Paul here); just very demanding, a demanding kind of person. Well, look at Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Wow, that’s, that’s pretty demanding, isn’t it? I mean, you could, you could go down the stereotype of Paul, and you can find, I would argue, examples of exactly the same thing all the way through Jesus. So, the point is it’s really hard to find a characteristic of Paul that’s not shared with Jesus, and a characteristic of Jesus that’s not shared with Paul. There really isn’t.

4. Are they Theologically Incompatible

But what about incompatible theologies, incompatible theologies? Again, concepts that are mutually exclusive. And what I want to do is I want to pick two topics. I want to talk about justification by faith, and the whole concept of clean and unclean. I could have picked, there’s many other topics I could have picked. I could have picked, they’re talking about sacrifice, or the law, or the Temple, and things like that. I think the key here is to understand that Jesus and Paul are in two almost totally different contexts. And when you speak to people, you have to speak to them in their context. You have to meet them where they are. For Jesus is an almost purely Jewish context. And, for example, he’s going to talk about concepts that will make sense to them, like the Kingdom of God. Paul is in a totally different context. He’s largely Gentile context, although remember, Paul was a Jew. He was trained as a Jew. And he does deal with Jewish issues even in Gentile cities. But his context is primarily Gentile. Jesus is dealing with people who think that because they’re born Jewish, and they keep a few of the commands of the law, circumcision, Sabbath, that they’re going to automatically get into Heaven. Okay? Paul is dealing with a different context. Okay, so you’ve got to see that up front. 

But let’s look at these two concepts. The first is justification. Justification is the doctrine of how do you and I become right, righteous, before God. How do we move into that relationship, and also, I would say, how do we live in that relationship, because how you enter the relationship with God is how you live in relationship with God. Justification is how do you become, and how do you be, right with God. 

Well, for Paul, I mean this is one of his most obvious doctrines, it is justification by faith; it’s not by works of the law. It’s not by things that you do. You cannot earn your way into Heaven. And so, this was the historical context that Paul was in. He had to deal with what was being taught around him, and he had to use language that would make sense to the people that he was talking about. And so, he talks about justification by faith. But he also emphasizes, for example, to the Galatians, that if you’re going to start by faith (and I should say it’s justification by faith) by believing that God is–that Jesus is who he says he is, and that he’s done what he says he was going to do; so, justification is by faith. We become right with God by believing that and living like that. But to the Galatians who started with faith, they wanted to switch over to works of the law. So, for example, in 3:3 he says, “Are you so foolish after beginning by means of the Spirit? Are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?” See, how you enter into the relationship is how you live in the relationship. And Paul understands that. 

Paul is just as concerned, (I think if you look at the totality of his teaching), he’s just as concerned with how you live in right relationship with God as how you move into a right relationship with God. I mean, part of the stereotype of Paul, I think, is all the emphasis is on the beginning, and it’s not. I mean, if you read his stuff, you know he has a ton to say about how do you live in a right relationship with God. 

Well, let’s go to Jesus, and Jesus uses different language; he talks about the Kingdom of God, but he makes the same points, compatible theology. Matthew 5:20, a powerful verse on the Sermon on the Mount, said “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” So what does that mean? Well, it means that doing a bunch of external religious actions is not how you move into a relationship or live within a relationship with God. In the first Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” The reason that’s such an important statement is that he makes the key point in the first Beatitude. He unpacks it in the next seven Beatitudes. And then he uses the entire Sermon on the Mount to unpack all of those Beatitudes. 

So, it all starts and is summarized in the first Beatitude. “Blessed are the poor in spirit;” that’s exact opposite of the Pharisees. Well, what does that mean? It means that, “Nothing in my hands I bring (the old song has it), but to thy Cross I cling.” See, nothing in my hands I bring. Being poor in spirit is to recognize your spiritual bankruptcy, to understand that you have nothing to offer God. Well, isn’t that part of what justification by faith is? Understanding that we get right with God, not by what we do because we are spiritual bankrupt. And the Beatitudes continue, in verse 6, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled.” See, the Beatitude is saying when you come to a point of recognizing your spiritual brokenness, in your spiritual bankruptcy, to understand what Jesus elsewhere says, “What can someone give in exchange for his or her soul; nothing!” So, once you come to understand that you are spiritually bankrupt, that you have nothing to offer in exchange for your soul, that you have no righteousness of your own, what do you do? You hunger and thirst for righteousness from the only source of righteousness; you hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness.

Now, you put those two Beatitudes together, and you have justification by faith. Justification, being right with God, is not through what you do, but by believing that Christ did on the Cross for us what we could not do for ourselves (to give more specifics to it). In Jesus’ language, we enter the Kingdom of God when we understand that we have nothing to offer God. We’re spiritually bankrupt, and we hunger and thirst for what he can do for us, for his righteousness that he can impute (Paul’s language), impute to us. See, those two Beatitudes are Jesus’ way of saying almost exactly the same thing as Paul is: they are justification by faith. Different terminology, looking at things differently, but not contradicting each other; filling each other out; taking the same message into a different context. 

Alright. What about the other concept, clean and unclean? The idea of clean and unclean is initially an idea of ritual purity. And a clean person is presentable to God, acceptable to God. An unclean person is not acceptable to God. And first of all, you see the concept of clean and unclean in the dietary laws. Do Paul and Jesus disagree on dietary laws? No, they are in absolute agreement. Jesus says, “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them?” Wow, nothing from the outside can defile. “For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” And then, parenthetically, in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. Then Jesus goes on, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him because it comes out of the heart.” So, all kosher laws just were swept away, because what is clean and unclean is now determined by our relationship to Jesus Christ, and it’s Jesus who makes us clean (not the kosher laws). Paul obviously agrees with the same thing: Romans 14:14, “I’m convinced being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself (no food).” But the concept of clean and unclean also moves out of dietary laws to people groups. Are Jews clean in and of themselves, and Gentiles unclean in and of themselves? Well, both agree that distinction’s all done away with. 

There’s a fascinating story in Luke, chapter 4. Jesus has gone to Nazareth. They had initially a very good reception of him. And typical Jesus, he loves conflict, he creates conflict where there isn’t any. And he talks about that there are many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time (that’s Luke 4), and yet Elijah only went to a Gentile. And then there were many people with leprosy in the time of Elisha, but he also only went to a Gentile. In other words, Jesus is saying there is a ministry outside of Judaism that, “My (meaning Jesus) ministry must extend to all people, Jew and Gentile alike.” In verse 28, “All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of a hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.” They were so angry with him that he saw that there was a ministry to the Gentiles, that they tried to kill him.

Jesus saying, “No, they’re not unclean in and of themselves, and they are equal recipients of the Gospel message.” Especially in Luke, there’s ten chapters or so of a very long travel ministry, most of which is outside of Israel. Jesus traveling among the Gentiles, ministering to the Gentiles, healing the Gentiles, and preaching to them. The Great Commission: go everywhere, baptize and teach. Jesus very clearly was breaking down, as Paul says, “the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile,” and Paul obviously didn’t have trouble with the Gentiles at all. He was to be called the apostle to the Gentiles. He was validated in Acts 15 of the Jerusalem Council. Galatians 2, that interesting story where even Peter kind of drew back from being with Gentiles under Jewish pressure, and Paul reprimanded him. I mean, Paul obviously had no trouble with the Gentiles, and he understood that they were not any different than the Jews in terms of being clean or unclean. 

So, whether it’s justification by faith, or the concepts of clean and unclean, Jesus and Paul may express things differently, but completely in compatible ways. Yes, they seem to be a little different at first glance, but they’re in different contexts, and they perhaps think a little differently. Although I want to be careful because Paul was a Jew, he was trained as a Jew, he was trained as a Pharisee. I mean, Jesus’ world was his world, for the first, you know, growing up. What I would encourage you to do is if you’re talking to someone who feels that Paul and Jesus are incompatible in their teachings, get an example. Say, “Okay, what does Paul teach that contradicts what Jesus teaches, or vice versa?” And then look in the other person’s teachings, and you will find that they’re not incompatible at all.

5. Critical Scholarship

Okay, finally, I want to address what that first challenge was, and that is from critical scholarship. And I need to be a little careful because some of this discussion can get very, very technical, and I want to keep it kind of simple here. The challenge of Critical Scholarship has to do with what’s called Christology. And Christology is the fancy word we use for the study of Christ; who is Christ? And again, I mentioned it at the beginning, in critical scholarship, they view Jesus as some kind of simple Galilean prophet, a good man, but nothing more than that. Paul comes along and turns Jesus into God. Jesus never said he was God, never claimed to be God; wasn’t God. Paul comes along and changes the message. It certainly is true that Paul believed that Jesus was God. There was no question about that (Titus 2:13), but the real question is what did Jesus think of himself? And is Paul making up something new, or is there a trajectory in Jesus’ teaching that he does things and teach things that could only lead to the conclusion that Jesus was, in fact, God? 

And it’s very Interesting, there’s circular argument that happens in scholarship. And this is Craig Blomberg’s book, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament. If the critical issue is the reliability of the Bible as a whole, but certainly on this one, this book is really worth getting and reading. He has a whole chapter on this whole question of ‘Did Paul create the Gospel?’ But on page 452 he’s talking about the circular argument that happens in critical scholarship where they say, “Jesus was just a man, Paul made him into God.” 

Let me just read it, it’s a short paragraph, “Why do we know that Paul contradicts Jesus? Well, we know because Paul’s Christology (his understanding that Christ was God), we know because of Paul’s Christology is so much loftier (makes Jesus divine), but how do we explain the high Christology of the Gospels? The answer is, well, it’s a redactional addition (Craig’s fancy term for ‘Well, we know that the church changed the message of the Gospels’). In other words, every place that the Gospels present a picture of Jesus as being divine, (well, that really wasn’t in the Gospels; it was added later by the church), it’s a redactional addition. Well, how do we know this? Well, because we know the historical Jesus did not hold such a high view of himself. How do we know that? Because Paul exalted and deified him later?” Anyway, what Craig is pointing out is that what happens in scholarship, they say, “Jesus was just a man; Paul made him into God.” Well, what about those passages in the Gospels that seem to imply that Jesus was a whole lot more than a man? “Well, those were later added.” “Well, why do we know that they were added?” “Because Paul changed them” “Why do we know Paul changed them?” “Because Jesus was just a man.” Simple version, but that’s what happens a lot of the time. 

So, let’s talk about the challenge of critical scholarship. And I think, when I talked about trajectory, I think that’s a real helpful way to talk about it. What did Jesus think about himself? What did the Gospel writers say that Jesus thought about himself? And what you'll find very quickly is that Jesus understood that he was way more than just a human being. He knew that, and you can see that in the Gospel. He forgives sins. In Mark chapter 2 the Pharisees say, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Ah, that’s the point. Jesus knows he can forgive sins. Jesus goes out and calms the sea. Who does that? Who speaks a word and the winds die down and the waves die down? God! Jesus claimed to have a unique relationship with God as his Father, and he as his son, a unique father-son relationship. And while that may not sound like Jesus claiming divinity, the Jews clearly understood that, and they tried to kill him. And they said, “You’re blaspheming. By claiming that God is your Father and you are his unique Son, you are claiming to be divine, and by law, we have to kill you.” 

So, they understood that Jesus was claiming he was divine. Jesus said he would judge the world. When he was before the Sanhedrin and they were judging him, (Matthew 26:64) he quotes the Daniel passage about the Son of Man coming with clouds, having to judge them. He’s saying, “I am the Daniel Son of Man. I am the celestial judge before whom all of you will someday stand.” He collected twelve disciples, twelve. He’s creating a new–the true Israel. Who does that? And then you have those wonderful ‘I AM’ sayings in John where Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I AM,” quoting God’s most holy name that we get from the burning bush. The Jews understood that he was claiming to be the I AM, the Yahweh, the Jehovah, the God of the burning bush. And they tried to kill him because that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone commits blasphemy, at least in Jewish law. Later on, in 10:30 Jesus says, “I and the Father are one.” I mean, as you look at the Gospel witness, then you have to see that Jesus understood himself to be a whole lot more than just a human being. He was a hundred percent human, but he was more than just human, and the Gospel writers knew this.

I think one my favorite passages is the title of the Gospel of Mark, where Mark says, “This is the beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.” In other words, one of Mark’s purposes in writing the Gospel was to show that Jesus was the Son of God. In Jewish language, that makes him God. The interesting thing in Mark is that only twice do we hear the phrase, ‘Son of God,’ after this. The demons say, “We know who you are, the Son of God,” and the centurion says “Well, this must have been the Son of God.” But if that’s your point in writing, Mark, why don’t you say it more? And Mark’s answer is, “Well, there’s more than one way to get this point across.” And what Mark does–rather than John just says it, right? “I and the Father are one.” What Mark does is he shows Jesus, what he does and what he teaches. He heals the sick, he raises the dead, he forgives sins. He has control over nature. And the question that you’re supposed to be asking as you read through the Gospel of Mark, is who can do this? Well, only God can do this. 

So, the Gospel writers clearly understood the trajectory that Jesus started and brought to explicit conclusion in Paul by saying that he is our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. You know, one of the arguments is that Paul didn’t know Jesus, because if he knew Jesus, he would have quoted Jesus. The fact that he doesn’t quote Jesus proves that, because he doesn’t quote Jesus, he doesn’t know Jesus, and so Paul is making up everything. And that’s one way to state the argument. Chapter 9 in Craig’s book is replete with examples of quotations, and illusions, and echoes of Jesus’ teaching in Paul. It’s really obvious that Paul was very familiar with Jesus. When the Damascus Road when Paul had this discussion, and Jesus says, “I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting,” Paul didn’t say, “Who is that?” He knew exactly who he was persecuting. He knew Jesus.

But what’s really interesting on this quoting (this is more parenthetical); what’s really interesting, this whole quoting thing, is when you look at Peter and James, for example. Okay, Peter was an apostle, the head disciple, one of the inner three. And James was his brother. When you look at their writings (1st and 2nd Peter and James), they don’t quote Jesus. Why don’t they quote Jesus? An even more powerful example is John. John, probably, I think, ‘the Beloved Disciple.’ He wrote the fourth Gospel. He also wrote 1st John. So, you’d think that someone that had written a whole book about Jesus would quote Jesus in his letters, in his Epistles. The fact is that there’s only possible one citation of Jesus in 1st John, the love commandment. Other than that, John’s not quoting Jesus. So, this assumption that if you know Jesus, you would be quoting Jesus, doesn’t hold up. It’s not just Paul. It’s Peter, and James and John. I think the conclusion, and Craig argues this in some depth, that the Epistles were not the genre; they were not the form in which the church decided to retell the story of Jesus. They left that up to oral tradition, to the story telling, to eventually the writing down of the Gospels. The Epistles were for other purposes than recounting what Jesus did and said. So, there should be no surprise that we don’t get Paul quoting Jesus explicitly, a whole lot. 

The other little piece to that puzzle is that Paul understood that he had the authority of an apostle, that he was speaking and writing under divine inspiration. And because he was under divine inspiration, he had no reason to quote Jesus, that what he said was going to be true whether he quoted Jesus or not.

6. Conclusion

So, this whole issue of ‘why did not Paul quote Jesus more’ is really not that big of a deal with this whole debate. So, I know this has been a while, but this is an issue that I’ve run into quite a few times, and I wanted to make sure that you all were real comfortable with seeing that Paul did not create Christianity. He did not turn Jesus into something that he wasn’t. In critical scholarship they simply have a misunderstanding of who Jesus is. Jesus did claim to be way more than a mere human being. Their personalities, and their teachings, and their language between Jesus and Paul are a little different, but they’re certainly compatible. And if you believe what the Gospels say about Jesus, then logically I think you must believe all that is taught about Jesus. And that includes what all the apostles teach, including Paul. Jesus lays the bedrock. He ushers in the Kingdom of God. He dies on the cross for our sins. Paul goes into a different context, a Gentile context, and dealing with a different set of issues, and starts to, in some cases, repeat Jesus. In other cases to extrapolate out under divine inspiration how Jesus’ teachings would have affected people in Thessalonica, and in Ephesus, and in Colossae. So, Paul did not create Christianity, and Paul and Jesus are not at odds at all with one another; different, but compatible.