Jesus vs. Paul? The Myth of a Divided New Testament

Today, we're talking about the question, I suppose the more serious version is, is there a difference between the Christianity of Jesus and the Christianity of Paul? This comes up in both academic, like in both like university lecture settings, especially I've heard it firsthand when it came to talking about manuscript dating and the content of Christianity.

So it comes up there.

It comes up in like liberal Christianity, progressive Christianity in America by looking at sort of the, there's been like the red letter or what Montgomery coined as like the actual version of gospel reductionism.

So pinning, say that there's things in Paul that make the church uncomfortable today.

Maybe that's where your arguments against women's ordination come from or a harsh stances against homosexuality.

And if you actually just follow the words of Jesus, you would learn to love everybody.

That's one of those.

And then there's a third version, which is essentially that Paul had a Gentile-focused religion, Jesus and his writings, and then the development of the church de-emphasize the Jewish influence on Christianity there as well.

So that's... actually rising in sort of online popularity again today, which is that Paul made a shift away from the Jewish context and now Christianity has lost all these other Jewish sources that Jesus was pulling from.

And the one thing all three groups seem to agree on is that Paul is radically different than Jesus and invents essentially what we would call Christianity today.

So we're going to deal with this.

I know that Bruce has thoughts on this.

I know that Adam has even older context with potentially some Islam connection to this.

But I don't know where to start because there's a lot here besides the general question.

Did Paul invent what we call Christianity and it's just totally different than what you see

in the Gospels? No.

Is that the whole episode? Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

I would say that there's a – the problem is that there is a difference between Jesus and Paul in that Paul is doing theology and Jesus' stuff, the proclamation of the gospel, the ethical teachings and stuff that Jesus is doing, the social stuff that all the liberal people like.

is not properly speaking, like doing theology, like he's doing ministry, which is theological, but Paul's actually like functionally doing theology.

So of course, if you read the two and you don't know the difference between the two, you're going to say, well, wait a minute, this sounds really different than what Jesus was.

Jesus was all about love and like caring for people and doing the, but Paul's not writing about how to do a social gospel or how to do something like that.

He's actually teaching the church how the church is different from Israel and also how it fulfills all the Old Testament and what has happened in Israel through the gospel and giving that real clarity of the gospel and how it's universal, how it's gone to Gentiles.

And this whole thing, which by the way, people who are listening, this is still pretty big debate in academic theology today.