DID PAUL MAKE UP HIS OWN JESUS AND HIJACK THE CHRISTIAN FAITH?

QUESTION: 

If Paul didn’t write a gospel and he didn’t know Jesus, why should we trust what he said about him? Maybe Paul made up his own Jesus. I’ve heard he hijacked the faith away from what Jesus wanted it to be. Maybe it should be called Paulianity instead of Christianity?

ANWER: 

 PAUL WROTE LETTERS, NOT A GOSPEL

Just because Paul never wrote an official "Gospel" doesn't mean he doesn't offer a historical or trustworthy account of Jesus. It's not Paul's intent to give a Gospel in his letters. The Gospels are a very specific genre of literature in the Roman world.  They follow the basic Roman format for biography.  Roman biographers cared less about the exact sequence of political events and more about the subject's virtues. The gospels follow this format, but Paul's writings do not because they serve a different purpose than biography. They are theological treatises on subjects of particular concern to different Christian communities.  

So while they are not gospels, they are "follow-ups" to people who had already received and knew the "Gospel" (mostly in oral form during Paul's ministry, 40-65 AD). 

All scholars agree 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 was written in the 50's by Paul, and it says: "What I received, I also passed on to you." So we note that his audience had already received the story about Jesus' life, death, and mission. And already it was very creedal in formulation, poetic, easy to memorize and pass on. In fact the hymn in Philippians 2 is the same type: an earlier creed which Paul is quoting. Therefore, these summaries of Jesus life and identity predate Paul. 

PAUL KNEW THE GOSPEL MATERIAL

This means that Paul is building his view of Jesus on the gospel story, not the other way around.  To prove this, we just have to look for evidence that Paul knew the gospels.  The following examples show that, far from making up his own Jesus, Paul is transmitting the same Jesus the Gospels know. 

PAUL PREDATES THE GOSPELS

Now, even though this proves that Paul was dependent on the same story as the Gospels for his view of Jesus, his letters nevertheless predate the Gospels' time of writing. Paul's letters are simply the oldest material that exists about who Jesus was and what he did.

To prove the case that Paul hijacked the story of Jesus and yanked it out of history, you have to prove that his account is lless accurate.  But if it's older, it is closer to the events of Jesus' life than the Gospels; therefore on what basis would we not prefer Paul's take to the Gospels?  This question assumes that the Gospels contradict Paul on Jesus.  But we've already shown the depth of harmony between them.

You can believe Paul's view of Jesus was a renegade, unhistorical one, but you can’t deny that it is the best attested, earliest vision of Jesus we have on record. Some might question Paul's integrity, but his Jesus has to be put alongside every other picture of Jesus and compared on its own merits.  Whether it's a "gospel" or not is irrelevant. Paul’s ideas about Jesus are a decade older than the writing of Mark's gospel – and a hundred years older than most Gnostic texts.

PAUL DIDN'T KNOW JESUS BUT HE KNEW HIS FOLLOWERS

To say "Paul didn't know Jesus" is misleading. He was about the same age and was clearly alive during Jesus' lifetime.  He was a high-ranking Pharisee tutored by a major player in Jerusalem, Gamaliel, which indicates he was likely in and around Jerusalem when Jesus was making waves.  

And of course, after his conversion, his whole preaching was based on a personal meeting with Jesus on the Damascus road.  Some might write off that meeting as a subjective vision, but it's important to note that Paul's vision was an "extra-mental" encounter.  That is, it was not a hallucination or a private subjective experience in his own mind.  It was a physical manifestation, parts of which his co-travelers also experienced. 

While Paul bases his authority on that personal meeting with Jesus, it's important to note that he sought out endorsement from people who had known and lived with Jesus for years. He connects himself to those people in many places.  In telling people he was passing down what he was given, he names the names (1 Cor 15:5ff) of disciples. He would never name-drop like this (in the 50's, while the disciples were still alive) if he didn't really have the endorsement of Peter and the other apostles for what he was preaching about Jesus.  In Galatians 1 and 2, which all scholars agree is early and authentically Pauline, Paul notes (Gal 2:2) that he sought to know if he was "running his race in vain."  A clear reference to see what the original apostles would say about the way he taught about Jesus.  

After that all important check-in, Paul was satisfied that (Gal 2:6) they had "nothing to add" to his message.  To imagine that Paul hijacked Christianity from its original character, built on Jesus himself, you have to imagine that he made up this story about meeting with "the Pillars" of the Church.  Then you have to imagine that the rest of the nascent Jesus-Community wouldn't have pushed back on it to refute his claim of being in fundamental agreement.  Or, to maintain the theory that Paul hijacked Christianity you have to imagine that Paul was in cahoots with the first Apostles, like Peter, to distort Jesus from cynic sage into Son of God.  

This strains credulity, to say the least.

PAUL AND ACTS

Also, the idea of Paul foisting his own version of Jesus onto the world, despite who the "real" Jesus was, requires that Acts be tossed out wholesale. Because Acts is very clear on this score: Paul is totally contiguous with the Jesus the first disciples believed and promulgated. (1 Cor 15:3; Acts 9:27; Gal 2:9). 

Some scholars teach that Acts can’t be counted on because it was a late document designed to bring peace between the Pauline and Petrine churches in the second century. If that was case, then the forgers missed a huge opportunity. Do we think that they would have written a book like that in say, 150 AD and not slid in some stuff about Gnosticism, or how to handle women in the church, or about what the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD would mean for Judaism? Not likely.

But the Acts we have contains no such content nor marks of late forgery.  It ends so abruptly, there's no good reason to think it wasn't finished before 65 AD. Why else doesn't it have the martyrdom of Paul, or Peter, or the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD? A forger could still seem credible even if he included these events, since Luke was surely alive at the time of those events and Luke includes other martyrdoms and is very concerned with Jewish/Gentile relations.

The simplest explanation for why these events are not in Acts is that they hadn't happened yet... ergo, the date of writing must be pre-70 AD. On top of this internal evidence, Luke is demonstrably accurate on his geography, history, and Roman titles, which show verisimilitude, whereas all 2nd-century false Christian writings show obvious signs of not knowing the 1st-century world at all.  Plus, Luke writes in the first-person plural as an eyewitness through half of the book (eg., Acts 16:10), and we have no good reason to dispute that he was there for those events.  His account of the trip to Rome has been lauded as a masterpiece of ancient maritime history and nautical accuracy.

So if you accept the authenticity of Acts for all these excellent reasons, you can’t legitimately believe that Paul hijacked Jesus with his talk of a “Son of God”, divine, risen, Jewish Messiah. These simple components to Paul’s Jesus were what constituted nascent Christian ‘orthodoxy’ from the earliest times of the church. Acts shows Paul didn’t create this orthodoxy, he merely promulgated it. 

THE "REAL" JESUS?

A final argument could be made to suggest that Paul corrupted original, "pristine" Christianity:  You could suggest that Paul's version corrupted the later gospels, which explains their fundamental agreement on core ideas.  But where then can you turn to prove there was an 'original' version that's more authoritative than either Paul or the later Gospels?  Scholars have searched for years for what they call, “first-strata” sources.  To qualify as a first-strata source, the document has to be written between A.D. 30 and 50. 

The problem with this search is that, besides Paul's letters, there's almost nothing from that window except quoted material and wild speculation.

FIRST STRATA SOURCES

For example, the Hymn of Philippians 2 is likely a first-strata source.  Scholars agree it represents a poetic summary of Christian belief about the descent and ascent of Christ, which Paul is quoting; therefore, it predates Paul.  Of course, this first-strata source is no help in proving the "Paulianity" thesis, since it affirms that very high Christology is original Christology. (You can't get higher than to describe Jesus as, "in nature, God" - Phil 2:6).  

The creed of 1 Cor 15 is also first strata, since most scholars date the creed to AD 35-40.  Again this source disproves the Paulianity thesis since it explicitly says Jesus's crucifixion was a sacrificial, atoning death and that he was raised from the dead, not a mere cynic sage.

Liberal scholar JD Crossan puts some other documents in the first-strata time frame.  Strangely, he put parts of 2nd-century documents in that time frame and assumes them to be "first strata" sources.  The problem is that his criteria for extraction is heavily flavored by his preexisting conclusion that the real Jesus was not a Jewish Prophet/Messiah figure, risen from the dead, but rather a witty country sage. Crossan's criteria for selecting chunks of text to put in the "first-strata" are remarkably subjective.  His "Jesus Seminar" famously gathers scholars together to vote on which canonical sayings of Jesus are historical and which are not.

OTHER SOURCES CONFIRM PAUL'S VISION

Other sources some scholars put in the "first-strata" are totally hypothetical.  Three examples: "Q", "the Cross Gospel", "Secret Mark".

But, ironically, all these and other purportedly first-strata sources agree, at least in some sense, with Paul's high view of Jesus! For example:

CONCLUSION

Even granting all these as legitimate early sources (a generous grant, I think), there seems to be no way around the conclusion that a man named Jesus existed and made claims for himself beyond being a mere preacher or sage.  This man, Jesus of Nazareth, saw himself as the Son of God, Savior, Jewish Messiah, one with the Father, and his disciples believed he was risen from the dead. 

Paul certainly believes this is true about Jesus.  And while he is the main promoter of this view, he is far from the only source promoting it.  Even the earliest, non-Pauline texts confirm it. So, you may call this high view of Jesus Pauline, or call it Canonical, or Orthodox, or Creedal; call it whatever you want… but perhaps the best label is simply historical. It wasn’t invented by Paul; it’s simply who Jesus said he was!