The standard “Sunday school” or catechetical view of Christian origins goes something like the following: Jesus came to preach a new covenant gospel that superseded the Jewish understanding of God and his plan for the salvation of humankind. Jesus passed on the fundamentals of this new message to his chosen twelve apostles, who came to understand its full implications only after his death. Paul, who at first bitterly opposed the newly formed Christian Church, arresting Christians to be delivered up for execution, became the “Thirteenth Apostle,” last but not least, chosen directly by Jesus Christ, who had ascended to heaven. Paul’s mission was to preach the gospel message of salvation to the non-Jewish, or Gentile, world, while Peter, leader of the twelve apostles, led the mission to the Jews. Both Jew and Gentile were united in the one Christian Church, with one single unified gospel message. According to this mythology, despite a few initial issues that had to be worked out, Peter and Paul worked in supportive harmony. They were together in life and in death and they laid the foundations for a universal Christian faith that has continued through the centuries.
Historians of early Christianity question such a harmonizing view linking Jesus, his first apostles, and Paul. It serves theological dogma more than historical truth. To defend such a portrait requires one to ignore, downplay, or deny altogether the sharp tensions and the radically irreconcilable differences reflected within our New Testament documents, particularly in Paul’s own letters.
“Christian origins,” as an academic field of study, has been largely concerned with three issues: a quest for the historical Jesus; comparing him as he most likely was with what his first followers might have made of him in the interest of their own emerging Christian faith; and, finally, exploring the question of whether and to what degree Paul, who is a relative latecomer to the movement, operates in continuity or discontinuity with either the intentions of Jesus or those of his original apostles. There is also the related issue of whether Paul’s “Gospel” represents the establishment of a new religion, wholly separate and apart from Judaism.
It is generally agreed that Jesus, who lived and died as a Jew, as well as his earliest followers, nearly all of whom were Jewish, continued to consider themselves as Jews, even with their conviction that Jesus was the promised Messiah. To identify someone as the Messiah was not uncommon in first-century Jewish-Roman Palestine. Josephus, the Jewish historian of that period, names half a dozen others, before and after Jesus, who made such a claim and gathered followers behind them.4 Like Jesus, they all, without exception, were executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.
What about Paul? Did he merely adapt his Jewish faith to his new faith in Christ or did he leave Judaism behind for what he saw as an entirely new revelation, given to him alone, that made the Torah of Moses obsolete?
Scholars are sharply divided on these complex questions, and the positions they take resist neat and easy categorization.5 Some see Paul as extending and universalizing the essential teachings of Jesus and his early followers, so that differences are recognized but understood to be cultural and developmental. In this view Paul would be neither the apostle who betrayed the historical Jesus, nor the apostate who betrayed Judaism, but one who skillfully fashioned a version of Jesus’ message for the wider non-Jewish world. Others recognize the sharp dichotomy between Jesus’ proclamation that the kingdom of God was soon to be established on earth and Paul’s message of a heavenly Christ, but nonetheless they imagine a practical functional harmony between Paul and the original apostles. In other words, Paul and the apostles agreed to disagree, recognizing that there was more that united them than divided them, particularly since Paul, in preaching to Gentiles, would have to tailor his message to fit the non-Jewish culture.
I go much further. Not only do I believe Paul should be seen as the “founder” of the Christianity that we know today, rather than Jesus and his original apostles, but I argue he made a decisive bitter break with those first apostles, promoting and preaching views they found to be utterly reprehensible. And conversely, I think the evidence shows that James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, as well as Peter and the other apostles, held to a Jewish version of the Christian faith that faded away and was forgotten due to the total triumph of Paul’s version of Christianity. Paul’s own letters contain bitterly sarcastic language directed even against the Jerusalem apostles. He puts forth a starkly different understanding of the message of Jesus—including a complete break from Judaism.
This viewpoint changes our understanding of early Christianity. But linking Peter and Paul in Christian tradition, history, and art is one of the bedrock foundations of the Christian Church in the past nineteen hundred years. How did this view come to prevail?
The answer seems as clear as it is surprising. Paul’s triumph is almost wholly a literary victory, reinforced by an emerging theological orthodoxy backed by Roman political power after the time of the emperor Constantine (A.D. 306–37). This consolidation was not achieved in Paul’s lifetime but it emerged by the dominance of pro-Pauline writings within the New Testament canon that became the standard of Christian orthodoxy. Even the order and arrangement of the New Testament books reflects the dominance of Paul’s perspectives. Gradually alternative visions and voices faded, particularly those belonging to James and the early Jerusalem church. “Judaism” became a heresy, an obsolete religion replaced by a new covenant. Heresy became not simply an alternative opinion but a crime. We find the beginnings of this process in the letters of Paul and, surprisingly, even in the New Testament gospels that most people assume have little to do with Paul.
Paul’s literary victory rested upon three pillars: 1) the gospel of Mark, our earliest narrative of the career and death of Jesus, is heavily Pauline in its theological content; 2) the two-volume work Luke-Acts vastly expanded Mark’s story to culminate with a final scene of Paul preaching his gospel in Rome; and, 3) the six later letters written in Paul’s name, but after Paul’s lifetime offered a more domesticated Paul, which pleased the church and ensured the muting of his more radical message. (These six letters are Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus.)
The master narrative of Paul’s literary triumph was the book of Acts. The author purposely hides his name and publishes his work anonymously—giving us our first signal that he wants us to think his work dates to an earlier time. He ends his story with Paul under house arrest in Rome. By not relating the story of Paul’s death, which he surely knew, he leaves the impression that his book dates to the time of the emperor Nero, when Paul was executed. All this is a purposeful ploy.
Traditionally, the work was attributed to Luke, a companion of Paul as well as a purported eyewitness to some of its main events. Paul mentions a certain Luke once in passing in a list of his fellow workers or assistants (Philemon 24). Presumably the same Luke, “the beloved physician,” is named two additional times in later letters attributed to Paul but not written by him (Colossians 4:14; 2 Timothy 4:11). The final editors of the New Testament, in trying to support the tradition that Luke wrote both the gospel that bears his name and the book of Acts, likely added these references. The writer of 2 Timothy says that Luke was with Paul in prison and has Paul ask Timothy to “get Mark” and also bring his “books, and especially the parchments.” The author’s clear implication is that these purported gospel writers, Mark and Luke, were companions of Paul, eyewitnesses to many of the events in Acts, with access to documents they got from Paul.